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[Publisher] Black Bed Sheet Books

Topaz044

Topaz044

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Agreed. A web designer needs to do an overhaul of this website. First and foremost, the buttons are not very user-friendly.

Also the idea of 'fan fiction' that is not actually fan fiction is a little misleading.
 
nkkingston

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It takes an age to load all those videos and slideshows, I can't get any of the buttons to work*, all the images are warped because I'm on a widescreen netbook and yet the site still doesn't fit without scrolling, and I can't believe it actually says "Best viewed in Internet Explorer". As a reader, I wouldn't buy anything from that site; I'm not sure I could work out how!

Could someone link me to the fanfic page? I'm really curious what they mean by that. It's kinda hard to form an opinion as a writer without being able to access anything.

*NoScript is already working overtime as it is, and there's no way I'm allowing the site to run that many scripts. My poor netbook's RAM is struggling as it is!
 
nkkingston

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So it's authors they're fans of? I'm sure they've been using the term fanfiction for ten years, but I'm also fairly sure the fanzines were using it before the internet came into being. I think a fair few people are going to assume they mean derivative works.

I'm on firefox, though like I said, it's hard to tell what's Firefox and what's NoScript, since I don't really have enough RAM to allow all those scripts and videos to run at once.
 

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Hello from BBS

Just thought I'd comment on your comments here, hopefully to shed some light...

Downwarden.com is my author's site, for which the official website for Black Bed Sheet Books is a subsite of that one. The "fan fiction" page was started around 1999 or 2000, if I remember right. It started off only for fans of my works to submit related stuff, but I received a multitude of good stories from authors big and small and decided to make it so virtually anyone can submit anything and I'll showcase their work for them and accompany it with a little advertisement for free. It still has a few works of "fan fiction" by definition in the form of the few Michael Myers-related fan screenplays (I'm known among Myers buffs for writing the Halloween IV novel).

Be back in sec...my son's crawling all over me......

---Nicholas Grabowsky
 
Maryn

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Just don't let him get you too sticky to come back to your keyboard, Nicholas.

Maryn, who rarely writes horror but is nevertheless pleased to meet you
 

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Back again...more about BBS

I wrote this nice few paragraphs about Black Bed Sheet Books just a half hour after my last post, but when I clicked "post" I found I timed out, the site redirected me to sign in, and I lost it all. :rant:That's a cool smiley for it, by the way.

Oh, and hi Maryn, pleased to meet you too!

Sorry folks for your frustrations with the site. I started it around 1999...just an author site for me: Downwarden.com. The site evolved over the years with just me doing it on Microsoft Frontpage, and because my annual hosting fee gave me a vast amount of webspace I made Black Bed Sheet Books a kind of subsite (www.downwarden.com/blackbedsheet), and last year (2009) I opened a completely separate site, the Black Bed Sheet Book Store (blackbedsheet.goshopper.net), because I needed a secure site for ecommerce and it's much more user-friendly than our official site.

I try to keep my radar up for feedback about my site, and every once in a blue moon I come across someone who has difficulty browsing, but most people have no complaints. Every time I update the site, there are a couple of dozen people I go to to ask “does this look okay?” One day though I hope that we can sell enough books so I can get a real pro to do an overhaul to the site, but the site hasn’t been a big enough problem to warrant it. We have over 550 people visit the site in the last few years click on the “subscribe to our newsletter” image, BBS receives over 200 submissions a year since I opened it in 2008, and we’ve had just under 50 authors sign contracts with us. We have a partner in FOX to the extent that one of Blogtalk Radio’s #1 shows, Francy & Friends, is affiliated with them and is run by my better half, and as a result we have a Hell’s Kitchen cook book coming out next year. We also have a Michael Myers antho in the works with some of the best horror authors in the industry.

I myself have been around since 1988 and have had bestselling mass market paperbacks in horror and have been acclaimed by Stephen King, Clive Barker, Dean Koontz, Wes Craven, Brian Keene, Joe Dante….even the guy who conspiracy theorists say was hired by Courtney Love to kill Kurt Cobain was a big fan of mine before he stepped in front of an Amtrak train.
My works have sprouted into comic and graphic novel adaptations, and I’m always well-received at genre conventions.

I’ve been around the block in the industry more than a time or two, but my passion has always been to help other writers…case in point Black Bed Sheet Books, where it takes an incredible amount of time to focus on other people rather than my own stuff. I’ve gone around the continent doing writing lectures, have been a counselor for foster youth homes where I’ve professed that writing (particularly horror writing) is therapy (and it works!), and I’ve had standing ovations. BBS was top ten publisher in 2009 on the Preditors & Editors poll, a member of the Speculative Literature Foundation, Chase Business Advisory Board, listed in Dun & Bradstreet, and had an overwhelming response at our meet & greet and hotel party at Horrorfind 2010 in September (and sold out at our table the prior year for our newbie authors). We are, to date, one of the top publishers in indy horror in the world.

I run it mostly by myself. I edit, design the covers, do the marketing. I advise my authors that it’s a group effort, and for all of us BBS authors to support each other in a climate where horror, overall, doesn’t sell much. This is my passion, and I’m constantly learning, overcoming, and although I’m not there yet, I’m pushing BBS as a real force in the industry….not just in publishing, but in film too.
 
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