Copyright © 2016 by Ralph Robert Moore.

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Return to lately 2016.

I've just published my sixth book through SENTENCE Publishing, You Can Never Spit It All Out. Ten horror novelettes. 400 pages, 120,000 words.

I was resistant to self-publishing at first, because it did have a stigma attached to it. The uplifted nose was that if you had to self-publish a book, it couldn't be very good.

But that attitude has changed over the years, and the nose is finally lowering.

I first self-published in 2009, with my short story collection, Remove the Eyes. It was a struggle to get the text formatting correct, and come up with an interesting cover, but it was also kind of exciting. I'm on my own. Off in the woods, wandering down the winding dirt paths of word processing programs, photo editing software. Red birds, blue birds tucking their yellow beaks under the armpits of their wings on the high branches, hard to lure down. A number of critics were kind enough to find merit in the collection, and it sold well.

In 2011 I followed up that first collection with I Smell Blood, which sold even better. I was starting to learn even more about putting a book together, and marketing.

After having success with those first two collections, I tried a novel, As Dead As Me, in 2013. And it was quite successful. More so than I thought would happen.

I had originally planned on publishing one book every two years, but based on how well the books were doing, and the size of my backlog, I decided to double down and put out one new book each year.

In 2014 I published Ghosters, and in 2015, a reissue of Father Figure.

And now, this year, we have You Can Never Spit It All Out.

You Can Never Spit It All Out features 3 novelettes from Black Static, "Dirt Land", "Kebab Bob" and "Drown Town"; 3 novelettes from Midnight Street, "They Hide in Tomatoes", "Nobody I Knew", and "Suddenly the Sun Appeared"; 1 novelette from Hellfire Crossroads, "She Has Maids", and 3 novelettes never before published, "During the Time I Was Out", "Imperfect Boy", and "Boyfriend".

Children born with four feet. A man physically attached to three other men. A pushy waitress. A woman who dresses up as Santa Claus on Halloween. An off-campus NYC apartment overrun with tiny, crawling faces. A tomato with spikes sticking out of its red skin. A third rate stand-up comic who insists he isn't gay. A lonely woman who constructs a tabletop village of miniature buildings wherever she moves. A widow who's visited by God in a dream, singing instructions to her about the structure He wants her to build. A psychiatry student who has to convince a handcuffed serial rapist to sit on a toilet seat to reconnect with his childhood.

If you like my fiction, you're going to love You Can Never Spit It All Out.

We live in a great age, where artists can control their own output. We don't have to wait to convince a publisher to release our work. We can throw its flapping wings up into the sky ourselves, palms scratched by talons, like off-off-Broadway playwrights do, garage bands, independent filmmakers, strumming subway musicians. "We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical."

Next year I plan to publish another short story collection, "Behind You", which will probably feature 20 stories and again be in excess of 100,000 words. In 2018, my novel "The Angry Red Planet." In 2019, my collection of connected short stories, "Breathing Through My Nose". And on and on.

My fat books are winging towards you. All you have to do is reach up, allow them to land on your hands, and pet their feathery heads.

I hope you'll buy this collection. I hope you'll review it favorably. I hope you'll generate word of mouth.

And thank all of you, and there are so many of you, who have been so kind in your support of my writings.

To buy You Can Never Spit It All Out in America, go here.

$18.00 for the trade paperback; $2.99 for the Kindle edition.

To buy You Can Never Spit It All Out in the UK, go here.

£14.61 for the trade paperback; £2.45 for the Kindle edition.