profile

Literary As F**k

Behind-the-scenes book talk with a bestselling author and his unicorn. Join 6000+ readers of my 150 books as I share stories behind the stories, unbox the creative process, and lead a disobedient "artisan author" movement to treat readers like rockstars and make the book world suck less.

Featured Post

This is how I write a book (Behind the scenes with JBT)

Why hello there! You're getting this message because you clicked a link in an earlier email indicating that you'd like to "skip ahead" and receive some behind-the-scenes stuff I'm writing about my Kickstarter for Gore Point. If you've changed your mind and would like to undo the whole "skip ahead" thing, just click here. (NOTE: This will NOT remove you from my email list - just the "skip ahead" part.) --------------- TRIGGER WARNING: If you're freaked out by things like demons, scroll...

I have some good news for you audiophiles out there! (Or at least the kind of audiophiles who are into audiobooks.) I finally got tired of being asked "Are your books available in audio?" and decided to do something about it. For a long time, I've had to lower my head and admit, "Um, only Fat Vampire is available in audio. Sorry." Now, though, I've done two audiobook-related things that I think you'll like: FIRST, I've put all of the great audiobooks I've had from the past up on my direct...

Last month, I sent you something called "Why most of my books have two authors." It was all about my creative relationship with my constant co-author, Sean Platt. I got a lot of responses to that one. (Something I encourage, by the way. I don't get a lot of replies to these, so sometimes I wonder if anyone is reading.) I must never have explained the way Sean and I co-author to a lot of you ... or maybe I just didn't go into as much detail. Readers seemed to think it was interesting, hearing...

Hey and happy Saturday! I just wanted to remind you that my signed books sale ends tomorrow. Click here to check it out. I've never offered signed books online before, but over the past week, a lot of you have been ordering signed copies of your favorites: everything from Fat Vampire to The Beam, from the "Dark Tower on LSD" epic of Unicorn Western to the first book I ever wrote, The Bialy Pimps. But at some point, I need to close the sale, order the books, sign them, and ship them back out....

I sometimes forget there are two names on most of the books I sell. In fact, it's so normal for me to see "Sean Platt" beside my name that I never realize the idea of a two-author book is unusual for readers. I wasn't always so accepting of co-authorship. I'm a huge Stephen King fan, but until I became a writer myself, I regarded The Talisman with suspicion because "Peter Straub" was on its cover with him. What was I to make of that? How could two authors write a book? I thought book-writing...

I'm totally distracted right now, so it would make sense if trying to write my current project, called The Ephemera, was harder than normal. (You know: distracted because I've got that Kickstarter campaign going right now, for special signed editions of Plague of Demons and my complete Gore Point trilogy. Running a Kickstarter turns all of life into an ADHD fugue.) But as I think I've mentioned before, I underwent a weird sort of "writer's reboot" last year. As a result, I've been consciously...

** Quick PSA: My next Kickstarter launches on Tuesday! ** Yeah, yeah, I know. Some of you have been with me for a decade or more. I published Fat Vampire in 2012, for crap's sake. So you're probably thinking, "Dude. What do you mean with a subject line like, 'I finally feel like a real author'? You've been an author for a long time." True. But for all that time, I've dealt mainly with ebooks. And don't get me wrong; ebooks are great. They're great for a lot of readers. They're also great for...

It's funny. Sometimes people tell me about something they liked in one of my books, but I won't remember it. I can usually be goaded into some degree of recall, but not always. And then people will say, "How can you not remember your own books?" Okay. So, first of all, I totally understand why people wonder. I understand why people don't understand it at all. There are two answers to this particular weird question, and they are: I write a lot of books, and the cognitive load of keeping them...

City of Fire book cover

I've got another new book out today ... this one HOT after the COLD of Winter Break. Today's new release is City of Fire -- sequel to my "horror procedural" Gore Point. (Which, in case you missed it, I've pitched as "Backdraft with demons.") A lot of my most ardent readers already have this book, having snapped it up during its Kickstarter campaign last fall. But if you weren't one of those readers -- if you're more of an "I just want the book" kind of reader -- now's your chance to get it at...

I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. and I'm all out of bubble gum.

Hey there, and Happy New Year! I always like the week between Christmas and New Year's. It's a pleasant "dead zone": halfway on vacation (my kids are home, and that means slacking off to do stuff with them) and halfway working (because I love what I do and don't like to be away from it for long). Writing-wise, I've been playing with a brand new book over the past half-and-half week. Or, rather: an existing new book. If you're a die-hard, you might remember that earlier this year, I tried to...

That's the last line of the first chapter of my new claustrophobic thriller Winter Break: "And the floorboards are covered in blood." I've dropped the complete first chapter below for you: a sample of the ill tidings to come in my heroine's snowbound week from Hell. Enjoy. /// THURSDAY AFTERNOON My phone dings with a new text just as I hit my first patch of black ice. The sound is like a warning: a scream announcing danger. The little car’s wheels spin for half a second — not even long enough...