January 26, 2021
Mad World Post Two
Week 4, Day 2 – Mad World
Genre: Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction
Release Date: January 3, 2015
Cover Design: Jimmy Gibbs
Formats: ebook, audiobook, and paperback- grab the ebook for just $0.99 for a limited time!
Amazon US
Amazon UK
Universal
Audible
Goodreads
When Vivian and Hadley find themselves in a situation even more threatening than the dead walking the Earth, Axl and Angus must find a way to put the growing tension between them aside and work together to rescue their friends.
What was the writing and publishing process like for Mad World?
This was the third book in a series and I wrote them all pretty close together, so you’d think publishing would have been pretty simple, right? Wrong.
Even though I knew where I wanted the story to go, I didn’t start writing Mad World immediately after finishing Shattered World. It’s been years, so I’d actually forgotten this, but since I used to email all my books to myself so I could save them in my email just in case, I was able to look it up. It turns out, I wrote three other books before finishing the first draft of Mad World which I emailed to myself on 6/6/2013 – a full six months after writing Shattered World. Crazy, right? (To find out which books, you’ll have to keep checking my posts!) The reason for this was simple. I was actively looking for an agent at this time and since none of them wanted zombie books – and I was planning to self-publish this series – I switched gears and wrote something different that I thought they might be interested, then I wrote another book simply because my husband had an idea I thought was cool. (More on that in a later post.)
Anyway, as I’ve said before, by the time Broken World was released, the first three books in the series were already written, which meant I only had to deal with covers and editing. Shattered World came out in October of 2014 and I wanted to give myself three months, so I set the release date for January of 2015 (more specifically, January 3rd, which is my birthday). Back then, self-published authors could only put a book up for pre-order a month in advance (it later changed to three months and is now a year), so I set it up for pre-order in December and it was good to go. Or so I thought.
On December 30, 2014, just a few days from the release of Mad World, I woke up to discover I had two one star reviews for Broken World on Amazon that accused me of plagiarism. One of the reviews said nothing about which book I had supposedly plagiarized, but the other went into detail comparing my book to another zombie series written by an author I had never heard of. This reviewer, who I later learned was the author’s husband, accused me of stealing this other woman’s work because we both had a:
1) A deadly virus sweeping the country that kills most of the population and creates a zombie apocalypse.
2) Plots that follow a group of people on a cross-country trip.
3) A young mother.
4) Were set in California.
Naturally, I was very upset by the accusations and wanted to address them immediately, but since engaging reviewers is never a good idea, I instead googled the author so I could let her know that I’d no idea her book even existed before that day. Of course, that led me to her Facebook author page where I found out that she was the one who not only had accused me of plagiarism, but had also asked her readers to leave the reviews.
As the morning went on, more reviews popped up on Amazon and a couple people even left nasty comments on my Facebook page and these people – the husband was in on the harassment – even went so far as to contact my agent, and I learned what the real issue was. The title. It turned out, this author’s zombies series was called Mad World, which was what pissed her off the most. The drama went on for a while (you can read more about it here and here) with the author and her husband demanding I retitle my book (which remember was only days from release) and forcing me to meet with a lawyer and send a cease and desist letter. Thankfully, they pulled back after that, but I didn’t get an apology until about two years ago when this author contacted me from out of nowhere and apologized. I’m still not sure if she was sorry for what she did or just sorry that it hurt her more than me. My sales went up because of the drama and the entire writing community rallied around me while she got a bad name – my agent was involved and agents talk. I know she now writes under a pen name, which I can’t help thinking has a lot to do with trying to distance herself from her actions all those years ago.
So that’s the story of the crazy drama that surrounded my fourth book. It was a stressful couple days that ultimately led to me getting quite a few new fans, but it taught me the correct way to handle something like this. When faced with a professional crisis, you need to react calmly and professionally, and never react based on your emotions. And never, no matter what, post something on social media. Those things always backfire.
