Cover Reveal & Giveaway for Halloween Season by Lucy A. Snyder. Trick-or-Treat with Us for Cool Gifts! RT pls. #halloween #halloweenseason #RDSP

Every Day is Halloween

Halloween decor is in select stores, and though we are still “enjoying” summer, October is just around the corner. Today I have a cool cover reveal of a new Halloween story collection and giveaway as part of Trick-or-Treating adventure, which means some of you may be dropping by from social media or another site, but let me give a little background for my subscribers as well.

Raw Dog Screaming Press (RDSP) is an award-winning indie press of horror, fantasy, sci-fi, crime, and more that I’ve worked with in regards to PR and publicity for several years via my business Hook of a Book. One of the exciting authors I get to work with published by them is a fellow Ohio author, the multi award-winning Lucy A. Snyder. On Oct. 5, 2020 we are excited to say that RDSP is releasing a collection of stories by Snyder for Halloween called…. you guessed it, Halloween Season!

Whether Halloween in person festivities are canceled this year due to Covid (so do your duty so we can all have fun this Fall, will you?) or not, you can always partake in some online escapades. For instance, let’s start a bit early with RDSP in a digital rounds of trick-or- treating to celebrate the reveal of the seasonal cover created by artist Lynne Hansen of Halloween Season!

How Trick-or-Treating Works – 

There are five houses to visit on this block: author Lucy A. Snyder, cover designer Lynne Hansen, mine here at Hook of a Book, co-owner of RDSP and author John Edward Lawson, and Raw Dog Screaming Press. Visit any of them first and feast your eyes on the amazing cover created by Hansen, then pick up a different “treat” (or giveaway) from each post also featuring the cover reveal. Keep reading to check out my giveaway and the other stops below…. after we meet the artist and see the cool cover.

But first….

Meet the artist, Lynne Hansen – 

RDSP was looking for a cover that captured all things Halloween and turned to artist Lynne Hansen. “I have over fifteen years of experience in marketing and promotions including art and design,” Hansen said. “I started creating book covers when my husband Jeff Strand decided to make his humorous horror novel The Sinister Mr. Corpse available as an e-book. Once people saw Jeff’s next e-book Wolf Hunt, I started to receive requests to design covers for other authors. Now I get to tell other people’s stories through the art of the book cover and I love every minute of it.” For more info about Lynne head over to LynneHansenArt.com and make sure to browse her gallery.

So without further ado, here’s the cover!

Cool and festive, right? Excited as much as I am now?

Halloween Season launches October 5th but you can preorder now!

Order from RDSP • Order from Barnes & Noble • Order from Amazon

Media Requests – 

If you are a member of the media or reviewer, I’m also happy to put you on the list for e-arcs or print copies, just let me know! I’ll also be sending requests, but do feel free to let me know also either in the comments or to my e-mail. Also, I’m scheduling Lucy for select interviews as well.

Now look at this FULL SPREAD! 

About Halloween Season – 

Halloween is the most wonderful part of the year for many of us. For dedicated fans, the season begins when the leaves start turning autumn colors and doesn’t finish until Hallowtide ends in November. With it comes a whole lot of fun: scary movies and stories, haunted houses, seasonal sweets, spooky decorations, costume parties, and of course trick or treat. But Halloween is also a deeply spiritual time for some; it’s an opportunity to remember and honor loved ones who have passed on.

Master storyteller Lucy A. Snyder has filled her cauldron with everything that Halloween means to her and distilled it into a spell-binding volume of stories. Within these pages you’ll find thrills and chills, hilarity and horrors, the sweet and the naughty.

One of the best things about Halloween is you don’t have to be yourself. So go ahead and try on a new mask or two … you may discover hidden talents as a witch, a pirate, a space voyager, a zombie fighter, or even an elf. This is the perfect collection to celebrate the season of the dead or to summon those heady autumn vibes whenever you like. You may even find a couple of tales that evoke a certain winter holiday that keeps trying to crowd in on the fun.

In the worlds within this book, every day is Halloween!

Trick or Treat Giveaways – 

Now for the goodies! Thanks for participating in our trick-or-treat cover reveal!

My Giveaway –

1) I’m offering to one (1) US winner a copy of one of my favorite autumn poems I’ve written, previously published online at Spillwords Press, BUT this would be a hand-lettered original, probably with a little original art on the border to follow the theme. It will be signed. This is one of a kind! Please leave a comment below or e-mail me (hookofabook at hotmail dot com) to be entered.

2) For both US and international, if you e-mail me, I will send all who contact me a .pdf for you to download that you can print of the original mentioned above. It will have my digital signature.

This giveaway I open from July 23 to July 31, 2020. Entries after that won’t be considered but feel free to comment anytime.

Head to ALL the Stops –

Visit all the houses on the block to collect all the treats. Here are the current stops and treats:

• Stop #1 Lucy A. Snyder (excerpt from Halloween Season)
• Stop #2 Cover artist Lynne Hansen (printable bookmark)
• Stop #3 Raw Dog Screaming Press (postcard promo pack)
• Stop #4 Hook of Book publicist Erin Sweet Al Mehairi (that’s me! You’re here. See above about a signed, hand-lettered Halloween poem)
• Stop #5 John Edward Lawson (Halloween card and story)

Lucy A. Snyder, Biography –

Lucy A. Snyder is the five-time Bram Stoker Award-winning and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of over 100 published short stories and 14 books. Chaosium will release her novel The Girl With the Star-Stained Soulsometime in 2021. She also wrote the novels Spellbent, Shotgun Sorceress, and Switchblade Goddess, the nonfiction book Shooting Yourself in the Head for Fun and Profit: A Writer’s Survival Guide, and the collections Garden of Eldritch Delights, While the Black Stars Burn, Soft Apocalypses, Orchid Carousals, Sparks and Shadows, Chimeric Machines, and Installing Linux on a Dead Badger. Her writing has been translated into French, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Czech, and Japanese editions and has appeared in publications such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Apex Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Pseudopod, Strange Horizons, and Best Horror of the Year.

With Michael Bailey, Lucy also co-edited the critically-acclaimed collaborative dark fiction anthology Chiral Mad 4. When she’s not writing, she’s faculty in Seton Hill University’s MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction and also works as a freelance developmental editor in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. You can learn more about her at www.lucysnyder.com and you can follow her on Twitter at @LucyASnyder.

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Thanks for stopping! Did you say TRICK-OR-TREAT!? Don’t forget to enter to win.

SLUSH, a Collection of Works by Glenn Rolfe, and Edited by Me, Releases Today!

It’s almost Halloween! But, for now it’s LAUNCH DAY for SLUSH, the collection of horror works by Glenn Rolfe  for which I had the honor of serving as EDITOR! Glenn and I had sooooo much fun working on this together. Late nights, early mornings, evenings, weekends, and we pulled it all together in just a month!!

It’s a collection that will make you cry, cringe, and maybe freak out, but it’s so worth reading. Some of the short stories have been previously published, but updated, some are short pieces such as a poem or a micro-work, but most share a similar theme. Many either take you back in time to teenage years or deal with death and grieving, but all truly make you feel something. I was so pleased that I got to write the foreword to kick off the collection, so you’ll read all my thoughts there….

Oh, also just in time for Halloween, there is a cool new story never before published towards the back with a nod to the season, it’s creepy enough for late night ghoulish reading.

We hope you consider purchasing and let us know if you liked it by leaving an honest review! The cool cover is by graphic artist Jason Lynch.  So psyched, check it out!

Amazon Purchase Link

ANNNNDDDDDD……..

Also, get Glenn Rolfe’s The Haunted Halls, his debut novel, on sale!

Amazon Purchase Link

Glenn Rolfe, Biography~

Glenn Rolfe is an author, singer, songwriter and all around fun loving guy from the haunted woods of New England. He studied Creative Writing at Southern New Hampshire University, and continues his education in the world of horror by devouring the novels of Stephen King and Richard Laymon. He and his wife, Meghan, have three children, Ruby, Ramona, and Axl. He is grateful to be loved despite his weirdness.

His first collection, SLUSH, will be available for Halloween 2014.

His novellas, ABRAM’S BRIDGE and BOOM TOWN, will be published by Samhain Publishing in 2015.

His debut novel, THE HAUNTED HALLS, available now from James Ward Kirk Publishing.

Look for his punk rock band, The Never Nudes, on Amazon and Facebook.

Top Children’s Halloween/Harvest Books in Our House for 2011

My Halloween post this year will be a listing of our Top Children’s Halloween and Harvest books, compiled by my children and I!  At our house, we love books this time of year that have to do with pumpkins, apples, Autumn, leaves, and spooky Halloween stories!  Autumn is a GREAT time to learn about the outdoors by coupling reading books with outdoor field trips to pumpkin patches, apple orchards, and leaf picking. I love to couple seasonal and holiday traditions with reading so my kids get the most out of each experience.

My little one really likes the spooky children’s stories (of course, they aren’t too spooky really), and lots of fun Scooby-Doo, and I have fun laughing at author’s imaginations and speaking in scary Phantom voices.

Hope your All Hallow’s Eve and Harvest season was as memorable and fun as ours. We’re a Christian family, but we still enjoy the creative mind of those writing spooky stories, hilarious witches and we love to learn about traditions and why people do them. 

Here is our Top Ten list for the Harvest/Halloween Season (the book cover is first, then its title):

1.)   Pumpkin Day by Nancy Elizabeth Wallace~
This one has some fun recipes and her 3-D art creation that was used for the illustrations is unique and creative. The cute bunnies were a hit with my four-year-old.

2.) The Perfect Pumpkin Pie, by Denys Cazet~
Hilarious story about a grumpy ghost who likes his pie perfect. Uses poetry and repetition and I loved reading this one out loud and using various voices.

3.) Scaredy-Cat, Splat, by Rob Scotton~
Of the Splat the Cat series, this is another fun adventure by this rotund black cat that will make your little ones laugh.

4.) Leaves, by David Ezra Stein~
Beautifully illustrated book about a bear who discovers the seasons by the falling of the leaves and his own hibernation.

5.) The Story of the Jack O’Lantern~by Katherine Tegen
Exciting story relating to the legend of how Jack O’Lanterns came to be tradition. The imagery is vibrant.

6.) Halloween by Harry Behn~
Gorgeously illustrated in moonlight aura, this book tells the story through whimsical art and poetic prose. An artfully crafted picture book about the adventures in Trick-or-Treating and how things can look different at dusk.

 

7.) Duck and Goose Find a Pumpkin by Tad Hills~
The cutest board book, this holiday pumpkin hunting book is part of the Duck and Goose series. Perfect for little hands. My four-year-old loves it because she is OBSESSED with ducks and geese.

8.) Skippyjon Jones in Mummy Trouble by Judy Schachner~
What’s not to love about Skippyjon Jones and talking in a mexican cat voice while you are reading?

9.) Trixie and the Halloween Fairy by Daisy Meadows~
A favorite of my eight-year-old, who loves this fairy series of books, but especially says she loves Halloween due to the color orange being involved.

10.) Halloween with Morris and Boris by Bernard Wiseman~
I had this book as a kid, and so did Tim. My brought a box of all my old children’s books in a few years back and this one was included. Tim and I both were so nostalgic about reading it as a kid. Our four-year-old latched on to it and we have to read it all year-long!

Happy Halloween, from Our House to Yours!
**And thanks to my wonderful Tim, who plugged in the photos for me while I made our spooky dinner with the kids!