Meet the Author Podcast: Matt Youngmark, “Zombocalypse Now”
March 3, 2011 | 
Author 
This week I talked to Matt Youngmark, founder of Chooseomatic Books and the author of the choose-your-own-ending book, Zombocalpyse Now. If you liked Choose Your Own Adventure books when you were a kid, you’ll love this choose-your-own-ending book for grown-ups featuring a pink stuffed bunny protagonist battling the zombie hordes.
Not only did Matt and I talk about his book and the process of writing a book with over 100 endings, but we also had an in-depth discussion of the new realities of publishing in the ebook age. We covered a lot of ground:
Our memories of reading choose-your-own-lending books in our youth;
The premise of Zombocalypse Now and what made Matt decide to have a pink stuffed bunny protagonist;
Shawn of the Dead and our cultural preoccupation with zombies;
Whether or not the book is appropriate for older kids;
How Matt organized himself to write a book with 112 possible endings;
The book illustrations and the cover;
The next Choose-o-Matic book, Thrusts of Justice;
Matt’s experiences with ebook self-publishing;
Ebook pricing and marketing;
Changes in traditional publishing and the explosion of independent publishing;
Amanda Hocking’s success;
Crowdsourcing curation of independently-published books through social media;
Matt’s book-pricing epiphany when he dropped the price of his ebook to $2.99 in January;
The evergreen nature of ebooks versus traditional dead tree books;
Google Books;
Why Matt’s books are DRM-free;
Independent record stores and bookstores and the future of print publishing;
Where Matt thinks ebook pricing will settle;
The immediacy of social-media and word-of-mouth driven ebook sales;
E-readers;
The opportunity ebook platforms provide for authors’ formerly out-of-print books;
The growing market for authors’ services in ebook publishing;
Replacing the editor in independent publishing;
Ideas for future Choose-O-Matic books.
Related Links:
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Next week, I’ll be interviewing Kim Olver, author of The Secrets of Happy Couples: Loving Yourself, Your Partner and Your Life. I hope you’ll join me, because I’m really looking forward to talking to Kim about what she learned from her interviews of 100 happy couples.
Posted in Meet the Author Podcast