A confession: I’ve needed help for a long time. Anyone could see it — anyone, that is, who exposed him- or herself to my pitiful efforts at maintaining a website, blogging, tweeting, navigating Facebook (never mind actually responding to questions and comments), and generally becoming even a tiny part of the whole social media scene. I’ve been about as hip to the blogosphere as your average Belle Epoque Apache. (Go ahead, kids, look it up. It’s easy with Google. I’ll wait.)
At the same time, a whole slew of far more savvy people were telling me that I needed to have some sort of internet presence in this day and age if I wanted to continue selling books, which I’ve long seen as a keen idea, although it’s usually worked better for me in theory than in practice.
Time was, you wrote something, you or your agent tried to get a publisher to bite on it, and then you got a check for an advance against your royalties and, if you were lucky, earned back those royalties and continued to get a little mailbox money now and again. As much as I’d like it to still be that way, it’s not, and I finally realized I’d better just suck it up and join the 21st Century.
But how was I going to do that? Hopelessly clueless, I realized I’d have to turn it over to someone I trusted, someone who knew what I (along with what I laughingly refer to as my career) was all about, someone whose own work I admired.
So let me introduce to you my new social media director, Joey Hambrick.
I’ve known Joey for almost two decades now, and in fact, I may have been partially responsible for his interest in filmmaking by showing him the shot-in-Tulsa feature Vigilante Blood during his formative years. He and my son Jonathan went on to do several projects together, notably the Witch Cop shorts, which took top honors in the first VCI Entertainment Short Film Contest, fantasy category, and second place at the Oklahoma State University Reel Film Festival. On his own, Joey’s done some pretty outstanding music-video work and continues to explore motion-picture opportunities.
He and I also delight in visiting together the twilight world of ultra-obscure movies and forgotten B-pictures, which of course makes him perfect for this particular gig.
As of this writing, Joey is running all my social media — Facebook, Twitter, this website, the Reverse Karma Press website, etc. He’s also producing the Forgotten Horrors podcast, which Michael H. Price and I do on a regular basis. And he’s managing to navigate me into at least a rudimentary understanding of what the hell’s going on out there on the Web, which is a little like teaching a chimp to tie-dye.
So if you get a tweet or some other response from me, and it’s in the third person, please don’t think I’ve gone around the bend. (As the old saw goes, referring to yourself in the third person is a sure sign of insanity.) Just know that Joey Hambrick’s on the job.
I couldn’t ask for anyone better