In 1996, STRAIGHT TO YOUDavid Moody‘s first novel was released. He expected great things. They didn’t happen.

When it came to releasing his second novel, AUTUMN, Moody decided to take a different approach. In 2001 he published the book himself, something which was frowned upon back in the day (and still is, to an extent). More than that, to drum up publicity for the book, he gave it away as a free download from his website. Again, back in the day, this was pretty radical. More than half a million downloads, a series of sequels and a movie adaptation of the first book later, and Moody’s name was well entrenched in survival horror circles.

“For me, self-publishing wasn’t a case of taking the easy option,” Moody explains. “I saw it as a viable, and in some ways preferable, alternative to mainstream publication. But I was aware that it also carries with it a lot of very negative connotations. People hear the phrase self-published and immediately assume they’re going to get something that’s badly written, barely edited, and with an embarrassingly amateur Photoshopped cover. I wanted to prove them wrong. I stopped saying self-published and started saying independently-published. Infected Books was a logical next step.”

Moody formed Infected Books in 2005 and, as well as releasing his AUTUMN sequels, he used it to launch a little book called HATER. Guillermo del Toro (director of Pan’s Labyrinth, Pacific Rim, Hellboy and others) and Mark Johnson (Oscar-winning producer of Breaking Bad) bought the film rights, Thomas Dunne Books of New York bought the worldwide rights to Moody’s back catalogue, and the rest was history. Moody went from giving away free ebooks to selling hundreds of thousands of books in many languages in a spectacularly short period of time.

But he wasn’t finished with Infected Books.

Fast-forward to 2012, and after working with some of the biggest publishers in the UK, US and elsewhere, Moody returned to his independent roots to launch a completely re-written version of his anti-science-fiction novel, TRUST. “Publishing independently again was a liberating experience,” Moody recalls. “The marketplace and technology had changed so much, and the possibilities now seemed limitless. Once I’d started, I didn’t want to stop.”

So he didn’t.

In 2013, a hugely expanded version of his AUTUMN companion book – AUTUMN: THE HUMAN CONDITION – was released to great acclaim and in early 2014, twenty years since he began writing the original, a new edition of STRAIGHT TO YOU was published.

2014 also saw the release of THE COST OF LIVING – an ebook-only novella which took Moody back to his zombified roots – followed by another equally blood-soaked read, ISOLATION (both stories have subsequently been published together as LAST OF THE LIVING). Moody also released STRANGERS – a ‘dark and dirty’ tribute to his pulp horror heroes.

Moody’s long time co-conspirator WAYNE SIMMONS officially joined the Infected Books family in summer 2014, first as an author (of the brilliant survival horror novella, GIRL IN THE BASEMENT), then as the company’s PR and marketing chief.

This is just the beginning. There’s plenty more to come from Infected Books (and, in the not too distant future, Infected Films). IB is here to stay. The infection is still spreading…

 

Click here for our privacy policy.