New Book Week coming: Halloween Book Week 2012

It’s been a while – over a year, in fact – since the last Book Week, so I thought it was about time we had another one. This time, it’s going to be a Halloween Book Week and here is the rough schedule for you:

Monday 29 October: Ghosts and ghouls

This could include reviews of ghost stories, memories of telling ghost stories around the campfire, and hopefully even some ghost stories written by you.

Tuesday 30 October: Children’s scary and suspenseful books

Tuesday is for the kids. This might include round-ups of your favourite scary children’s stories, reviews of the children’s books that scared or thrilled you most as a child (my top one would have to be The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, for example), maybe something the illustrators who do scary picture books best, and maybe some of your children’s scary stories, if any of them feel like writing some.

Wednesday 31 October: Horror

Halloween itself, has to be about the horror. Reviews of horror books. Who are your favourite horror writers – are you a Stephen King and James Herbert person, or Lovecraft? Are you all about the vampires or are you a zombie fan? I’m happy to take short stories here, too.

Thursday 1 November: Thrills and chills

Thursday is about thrillers and chilling stories and books that might not fit into ghost or horror. Nicci French titles would fit perfectly in here, for example. Stories that give you goosebumps and white knuckles, but have no paranormal in there. Evil people. Scary situations. Again, short stories are welcome, as well as reviews, round-ups or general discussions about your history of reading thrillers and chillers.

Friday 2 November: Writing suspense and fear

Friday is for the writers. While, I’m taking stories in the other categories, this is more about technique and experience writing suspense and fear. Tips and tricks. Where do your scary ideas come from? Does your writing have to scare you as well as your readers, to work?

Saturday 3 November: Halloween Book Week Carnival

Saturday will just be one carnival post – where I will round up and link to all your posts on your own blogs that fit into any of the categories above. They can be old existing posts, or you can write new ones specially for this Halloween Book Week 2012 (if you do write news ones, I’d love it if you’d link up, but you don’t have to).

Sunday 4 November: Reading day

Sunday 4 November will be a reading day and will just round up the whole week and highlight my favourites. And hopefully you’ll have a chance to read through all the bits that interest you and have a good catch-up.

Twitter hashtag will be #HBW2012 (we’ve used #BookWeek in the past, but that tends to conflict with other events around the world, which can be confusing).

Please share this with your networks – I’ll take submissions from book bloggers, parenting bloggers, illustration bloggers and non-bloggers, too.

If you’d like to write something, then send me an email to codingmamma@gmail.com with the subject line Halloween Book Week 2012. I’d like to have guest post titles/topics by 30 August and actual submissions by 30 September. For carnival submissions, you have until 31 October, but if you’re linking to old posts, I’d really like them by 30 September, too, so I can have the bulk of the carnival post prepared in advance and just add in the new ones at the end of the week.

I’m considering pulling some of the posts and guest posts for Halloween Book Week 2012 into an eBook, or eBooks (depending on levels of submissions – it might be all of them, just the stories, or everything from a particular day) so, if you’re submitting something please state whether or not you’re happy for it to be published in eBook format (I will work out some kind of royalty share, if I do this, of course, though I wouldn’t expect it to make you or me rich!), though I will also double-check again before publishing.

Publishers, authors, illustrators: I would really love to have guest posts from authors and illustrators that fit into any of the themes. If you have new books coming out for Halloween and would like them reviewed, then you can send them out (email me for the postal address, if you don’t have it already). I can’t guarantee to read and review every single one of them, but any that I don’t have time to read and review, I can do a round-up of new titles coming out, with a cover images and your publicity blurb. Please email me as above.

Self-published authors: I’m happy to link to your books (either on theme days, or in the Reading Day round-up), but probably won’t have time to review many, if any. If you supply a cover image and publicity blurb, I’m happy to link to your book and, if there are reviews of the title on blogs or other sites, I’m happy to link to them, too.