School of the dead

There’s just no getting rid of those pesky zombies, is there? It seems no matter what I do, I keep gravitating back to those lovable piles of walking pus. Well, this particular batch of undead hails from Clounagh Junior High School. Regular visitors will know that each year I run a filmmaking club with pupils at the school. Two years ago we brought you the tale of an escaped panther prowling the corridors (Cat Trap). Last year it was a spooky ghost story (The Survivor). Now we turn our hand to the living dead. Imagine a television station that keeps right on broadcasting months after the end of the world, offering survival tips to anyone still left alive out there. The working title is Channel Z. We just got things off the ground yesterday and we’ll be filming once a week for the remainder of the school year. You can expect the movie’s release in June 2008, as is our custom. Meanwhile, watch our other film club projects.

The Ballycastle sea monster arrives

On Friday evening Andrew Harrison and I travelled up to Ballycastle for the premiere of The Siren, a movie we made a few weeks earlier with the town’s filmmaking club. We had a brilliant turnout - over fifty bums on seats. The film went down a treat, generating a lot of (intended) laughter, and a hearty round of applause. It’s a wonderful feeling to see people get so much enjoyment out of something you’ve toiled over. Philip Henry, the man who wrote the novel on which our movie is based, also attended the event. I’ve corresponded with Phil online for several years, and it was great to finally meet him.

Aside from a few pre-production shots, the whole movie was shot in one day over a mere five or six hours. Amazingly, it’s about thirteen minutes long. I hope you enjoy The Siren as much as our little gathering did …

Chapter 1 of 2:

Chapter 2 of 2:

The value of free ebooks - Part II

I made the decision to release Chion as a freely downloadable ebook on 13 September. In the 54 days between then and now, the novel has been downloaded 262 times. If you think that means 262 lost sales, think again. Only 28 of these downloads occured through my website. The other 234 happened over at my book reviews blog, where I decided to create a little free ebooks section. Because I was restricting my offerings to quality-guaranteed books backed up by written reviews, the page got noticed by GetFreeEbooks.com, who publicised what I was doing. As a result, a lot of people downloaded the books I had on offer, and it shows no sign of slowing down.

The reason why this is not 234 lost sales is simple: If I hadn’t offered the book for free, these 234 people would not have known anything about Chion in the first place. Refusing to make Chion free would not have resulted in a single extra sale. Of course, it has to be asked: Am I selling less copies of Chion now that it’s a free ebook, too? Well, it continues to sell on eBay with the same frequency as before. What can I say? People like their dead tree books.

So, right now I’ve got my 300-odd paperback sales of Chion, plus 262 additional readers (increasing each day). The alternative was 300-odd sales and zero additional readers. I feel completely validated in my decision to make Chion free. How many copies of, say, Cell do you think would have sold, if the book had been released without the magic words “Stephen King” on the cover? Not the millions that did, that’s for sure. I’m learning to put priority on getting known rather than making money. That latter can’t be done without the former.