I won’t bury the lede, folks:
ROOSTER ISN’T RELEASING A NEW TITLE IN 2019.
And… we are just fine with that!
This is by design. We already have titles lined up for 2020, including Sara Tantlinger’s all-women horror anthology, Not All Monsters, and Andrew James Stone’s new book, The Ultimate Dinosaur Dance Off. We’ve fielded queries from authors interested in placing titles as far out as 2021. And, going forward (I’ve mentioned this previously), Rooster Republic, et al, will release no more than four books in a calendar year. This will give us plenty of time to devote to each individual title, as well as keep us from losing our collective minds.
But, allow me some backtracking…
Don Noble and Nicholas Day agreed to take over Rooster Republic and its imprints back in 2015. We became owners, officially, in the fall of 2016, so we are just beyond our two-year anniversary as publishers. We set out to accomplish a lot, and we did.
Let’s survey Rooster and Strangehouse titles we’ve released up to this point:
1. Petroleum Precinct: Grudge Punk 2
2. Mondo Bizarro: an anthology
3. Zoonami
4. Charge Land
5. NoFace
6. Tall Tales with Short Cocks vol. 5
7. The Mortuary Monster
8. Archelon Ranch
9. Turdmummy
10. Bad Hotel
11. Liquid Status
12. 4 Rooms in a Semi-detached House
13. Sorry, Wrong Country
14. Love For Slaughter
15. And Jesus Came Back
16. John Wayne Lied to You
17. Prom Night on the River of Death
18. The Long Night of the Eternal Korean War
19. Under the Shanghai Tunnels: and Other Weird Tales
20. Flesh Made World
21. Blood
22. All Hail the House Gods
23. At Least I Get You < In My Art
24. Someone Shot the Hip Young Conductor
25. Body Building Spider Rangers: and Other Stories
26. The Devil’s Dreamland: Poetry Inspired by H.H. Holmes
27. The Full Howie: an Illustrated Screenplay
28. Rock and Roll Death Patrol
…and then, there was our little non-fiction experiment, RoosterVision:
29. Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel: a personal analysis
30. Laugier’s Martyrs: a personal analysis
31. Leder’s IT!: a personal analysis
32. Notes from the Wounded Rooms
33. What You Bring
…and, let’s not forget the experiment in weird erotica, New Kink Books:
34. Dong of Frankenstein
35. Porn Star Retirement Plan
36. Fox News Fuck Fest
37. Strange Sex 3
38. Live Action Hentai
39. Sex Bear: The Legend Continues
40. Pounded by a Pound Sign
41. Shoggoth Butt Invasion
42. Mythic Lust: The Minotaur
43. Zombie Lovers Anonymous
44. Sex Bear: The Choad Warrior
45. Sexual Avenger: Dong of Justice
46. Taken Hard at the Magical Time Travel Sex Resort
47. Mortal Kumbat
48. Crust
49. Sex Fighter Turbo
50. Nekromantic 3
That is a helluva list of books for two years and change, if I do say so, myself. And this is only what we released through Rooster and its imprints. This list does not include the numerous titles we worked on for other publishers and authors during this period of time. If we included all of those titles, the number would bounce up to ~100 pretty quickly.
All of this to say… we’ve kept busy. Too busy. But we built a nice break into our initial 5-year plan for Rooster Republic, and here we are.
2019 will also be busy, for sure, just not due to new releases. We are pushing forward with our freelance work and art projects. There are games nearing the end of development that need our attention. We have plans for video projects, in the spring. And there is still much talk and negotiation for a feature film project. This is to say nothing of our behind-the-scenes production work for Rooster, in general. And, of course, we will be working on 2020’s new titles through 2019.
So, yes, there will be no new books, but there will be a whole hell of a lot of everything else. We still plan on being pretty visible through the year, and we definitely want to spotlight titles that folks slept on. We will be making an appearance at StokerCon, in May. At least one of us will be attending Scares That Care, in August. If I were a betting man, I’d wager we show up to at least one or two more events, like BizarroCon.
Until then, January is allowing us to adjust to a lighter schedule, and to prep for the year’s oncoming workload. Don is focusing a lot of effort into freelance art, design, and layout. Nicholas has several new titles releasing between now and summer, and is still taking on art commissions. Plus, there’s a multitude of projects that we simply cannot talk about at this time.
Today is only January 6th, but the whole year has already been spoken for, in terms of work. We’ve elected to bite into some time-consuming projects. What comes of it is all that remains to be seen.
Personally, I think we have some pretty cool shit coming down the proverbial pipeline.
TTFN
(and Happy New Year)
