The book’s been out for almost a month now and it did pretty well. Relatively speaking, anyway. I haven’t seen any numbers from official sales channels, and I don’t expect to see a number very much higher than zero in the near future, but personally I was pleasantly surprised.
I expected to make, like, ten sympathy-sales, but the first twenty-five were gone in two days. So I quickly ordered another box of twenty, which was gone even before I actually received it. Figuring that the local market had dried up by now, I leaned back in my chair and proceeded to look pretty smug. Sure, I’m not gonna retire on this, but my ego-credit went through the roof– Oh, more people? Let’s order another box then.
But besides all of you, there are a few people I want to give a focused shoutout.
For example…
Bussel United
Starting out with one birthday card called “Feestverreke” they grew into a nice little webshop with all kinds of pastel toned things. Believe it or not, there are a lot of their articles in my house. I stuck one of their stickers on my laptop. Doesn’t make it suck any less, but it makes crashes look a lot better.
And one of my articles is in their house.
Friend and coworker Tommie was the first official recipient of As Far As Souls Go (there was one book that went out before that, but that was a give-away to the OG beta reader, Wendel) and that could have been that, were it not that my book has slipped into some of Tom and Kelly’s social media presence.
Now, as you know, a social media presence is important for promotion, but as you’ll see from the one acceptable photo of me on the About Me page, I have more of a… radio face. I don’t do well, visually, so any promotion somebody else does is greatly appreciated.
Not to mention how they came to the rescue when I realised that I had no clue where to start for the couple of books I had to send through snail-mail. In no-time I was provided with a couple of boxes that fit neatly around the book, labels, fancy tape, and the first few books could be sent off right away.
You can find them at their website and you should follow them on instagram.
The Sadists
Anyone who’s ever tried to upload a musically themed clip to Youtube knows the music business is full of sharks who can smell a single note a mile off. Hell, I used the opening murmur of Megadeth’s Symphony Of Destruction for my unboxing video and Youtube immediately crawled up my ass about it.
Enter The Sadists. It obviously helps if you know the artist personally, but all I had to do was ask them if I could use Chain Song for the trailer and as soon as I got the go-ahead I was good to go. I credited them at the end and that should have been that.
But as you can see, everybody in that list got a link, and the link for The Sadists leads you to a seemingly wrong page. That’s because they had already parted ways long before I even thought about writing a book, and I do believe that is a shame. The first time I saw them they were just a theatre troupe of three guys playing a show called The Sadists. I remember watching the opening scene featuring a couch, onto which they slowly appeared as if being born out of it, and I frowned. What kind of experimental bullshit did I get dragged into?
And then they proceeded to absolutely hämmer me with some brütal Motörhead based heavy metal. Grampa was sold. These guys knew their shit.
They followed that show up with what I consider to be their magnum opus, Alabama Chrome. This is where the trailer music came from, and it’s jam packed with Americana, rock ‘n’ roll, country, and the like. For a bunch of Dutch guys they’re terribly American.
You’d be doing yourself a big favor by trying to get a copy of the album of the same name, provided you can find it at all. You’ll be hard pressed to find much of anything about them these days, apart from the Alabama Chrome trailer, so let me provide you with a comprehensive list of the gentlemen’s personal linkage.
Erik van der Horst seems to be the only one with his own website.
Viktor Griffioen can still be found at Orkater’s website.
As well as Kaspar Schellingerhout.
Guys, if you happen to read this, let me know if there’s more links I can do.
Rocío Martín Osuna
I’ve been getting a lot of nice comments about the cover of As Far As Souls Go. While I’m perfectly willing to take some credit for the initial design, I would like to state once more that it was Rocío Martín Osuna at 99designs who delivered the awesome piece of work that does all of the heavy lifting in getting eyes on the book. Next to that, I also got her to do an abso-fucking-lutely awesome print for a t-shirt, and I’m planning to have her do another one soon.
And last, but not least…
There’s one person I haven’t mentioned yet, and one could argue that I don’t have to because she has a whole dedication to herself in the book. “Nay!” I say.
I say unto thee, “Behind every lazy man stands a woman who kicks his ass once in a while!”
No ifs and buts, or off-hand biblical sounding jokes about it. Fact of the fucking matter is that without Dunja this whole thing might not have been finished, and if it had been, it would have been an unreadable mess twice as thick. At least now you stand a chance of getting through it and possibly enjoying it, and you can thank her for it.
I probably just would have turned on the PlayStation after the second read through and called it a day.
She doesn’t have a website.
That I know of.