Fresh Blood in the Waters
My first novel, Bloody Waters, is getting a US release and a brand new cover.
Hey there,
I have some very exciting news in this installment. My first novel, Bloody Waters, is finally going to be published in the USA—this July! Also, as an aperitif, I have a new short story out in June.
Black and White and Red All Over
Bloody Waters is about Clarice Marnier, a guitar virtuoso who makes a deal with the devil in order to break the glass ceiling of the rock’n’roll business. Set mostly in the late 1990s/early 2000s, the book shows Clarice’s rise to the heights of rock stardom, interleaving the music business with a variety of escalating occult threats. Dodgy A&R men, busybody Wiccans, feuding divas, spellslinging DJs, the Vatican mafia, demon popstars… everyone wants a piece of the band, whether it’s a slice of their success or a piece of their souls.
I worked really hard to smash the tropes you’re expecting from an occult horror book and a salacious rock’n’roll tell-all and I think the twists and turns will surprise you. The book is not a comedy, exactly, but it’s wry, and while it is cynical about the music industry, there’s always a deep love of music in the background (and often the foreground).
Bloody Waters has had a bit of a journey to publication. It came very close to winning me representation from a New York agent, but then the turmoil of the Big 6 publishers becoming the Big 5 enveloped the book business and that went pear-shaped.
Eventually I sold Bloody Waters to a startup publisher called Possible Press. When the book came out I was too shy to talk about it, so it surprised everyone when it made the Aurealis Awards short-list a few months later. Suddenly agents and other publishers were interested in the book—but it was already published, and bootstrapping a book from the indie world into trad publishing wasn’t yet a thing that happened back then, so that was the end of that. (Another couple of years and it might have been a different story.)
The book gathered a small but loyal fan-base here in Australia, but it never went off-shore and it quickly vanished in the growing sea of indie titles. A few years later, Possible Press closed down and the rights reverted to me. That was about when Jason Fischer and I started our self-publishing co-op, Argonautica Press, to keep our backlists in print. Bloody Waters was the first book we re-published.
In the meantime, Fisch sold his post-apocalyptic fantasy epic Papa Lucy and the Boneman to Outland Entertainment, and Outland in turn became interested in our Argonautica line. This lead to a new deal, whereby Outland would publish and distribute us in North America.
The Outland edition of Bloody Waters will be out on July 11th, distributed by IPG SPU, and available anywhere in North America that good books are sold. The book has had a fresh edit and the language has been Americanized, and it has a brand new cover by the amazing Chris Yarbrough. Here’s the full wrap:
Finally, Bloody Waters is getting another shot at finding an audience, backed by an awesome new publisher, in the biggest market in the world! It’s been a circuitous path and that makes it all the sweeter for me.
This edition Bloody Waters is available for pre-order now, direct from Outland, or from Amazon. Those pre-orders really do make a difference to the launch of the book, so if you want a copy, please dont hesitate. Another great option is to ask your library to get a copy for you. Here’s the book will look like IN YOUR FILTHY HANDS:
If you’re a long-time reader of mine and you’ve already read Bloody Waters, I would very much appreciate it if you would leave an honest review for me on Goodreads or Amazon. You don’t need to write a huge book report—a sentence or two is plenty. Word of mouth is the best way to help a book become a success. Thank you in advance.
Later this year we’ll have the Outland release of my third novel, Shadowmancy, and I’m dying to show you that one as well. So hang in there!
Contract Lore
I have a short story in This Fresh Hell, a newly announced anthology from Clan-Destine Press (published in North America by Improbable Press). Edited by the excellent Narrelle Harris and Katya De Becerra, these stories are fresh takes on old tropes.
My piece, “Contract Lore”, is about a deal with the Devil: a startup founder turns to the Prince of Lies for venture capital—and he hires a music industry lawyer to negotiate for him. So you can see the thematic connection to Bloody Waters. It’s a story about big data and legacy media and the the tech industry and surveillance capitalism. This one is as much comedy as horror, and if you enjoyed my discussion about AI in last week’s post, I think you’ll enjoy this one too.
This Fresh Hell also boasts stories from a cracking set of writers, including Gillian Polack, Raymond Gates, Eugen Bacon, LJM Owen, and Tansy Rayner Roberts.
Once again, the book is available for pre-order in hardcover, paperback, and electronic formats. American readers, please use this link to order to save you shipping from Australia.
That’s it for this week. I am off on a family holiday to Japan on holiday next week and I’m unlikely to be writing a whole lot on Substack while we jet around for the next month, so I’m going to run some comics from my archives. You might also get some dorky travel photos—who knows?
When I return, I will be speaking about ChatGPT in records management at the RIMPA conference in Sydney. I’m planning another long Substack post about LLMs, the business of writing, and the WGA strike. My previous post about AI took a good 3 weeks to compose, so hang in there—it’s coming, I promise.
In the meantime, if you need more Franksly goodness in your life, you should be able to reply below, or you can email me by replying directly to this message. Or, you know, you could go read one of my books. I’m in there, too.
Franksly yours,
— Jason
Wow! I never knew that it never came to the US. Read it years ago, still have it of course, but now I need to get the new US artwork too.