Interview

Interview With A Successful Writer: Rebecca O’Connor, Award-Winning Memoirist

December 13, 2011, by TC 10 comments

Rebecca O’Connor wrote a critically acclaimed memoir that… didn’t sell. Now she’s taking charge of her own future.

After publishing a novel and a handful of informational books about birds, Rebecca O’Connor wrote an award-winning falconry memoir titled Lift, which married jaw-dropping honesty to a soaring narrative about falconry.

Despite excellent reviews and critical acclaim, Lift didn’t sell very well, suggesting it represents the classic “lost” book; it crossed several genres (memoir, falconry, chick lit), defies easy classification, and as a result, sales suffered.
Rebecca O’Connor wrote an eye-opening blog post detailing her difficult path to publication — and her book’s relatively low sales.

After that post, you could see the gears changing; O’Connor — already active on social media — ramped up her online presence and started self-publishing her own stories, even using Kickstarter to secure funding for an audio version of Lift.

Rebecca O'Connor and friend

Her “What We Lost When We Lost Barbara Jean” story remains one of the best I’ve read this year, and her “Home For Thanksgiving” essay was selected for inclusion in the New California Writing 2012 anthology.

She is currently writing a new novel, works at Ducks Unlimited, holds a BA and MFA, and has also worked as an ice cream slinger, professional animal trainer (helpful when dealing with editors) and a process server.

With a background like that, asking a writer for an interview is a foregone conclusion. And I did.

The Memoir & Road to Publication

Q: Lift received critical acclaim and a lot of positive reviews, yet in this blog post you revealed some fairly distressing sales numbers:

The publisher was very excited about their “woman warrior” book. Galleys went out, some even hand delivered by the hardworking small press. LIFT got a starred review in Publishers Weekly (a starred review!!), a nice write up in Library Journal and glowing reviews almost across the board. It was happening! So the hard working writer invests the money and the time making appearance, doing readings, talking on radio shows and sends out galleys to many bloggers. Every free moment, every spare dime into this project she believes in with all her heart. The publicity is all great and the reviews continue to be stellar and here’s what happens…

A year later LIFT has sold 411 copies.

It’s been almost a year since you wrote the above; have sales of Lift gone up in the face of the positive reviews and growing online presence?

That post was really meant to be a moment to whine and get over it. Then it got a surprising amount of attention for my quiet little blog. It was a bit shocking, honestly and maybe a little embarrassing. I’ve only seen the royalty statement for the six months following that post and about another 100 copies sold, which is lovely.

A year after being published, my book could just as well have slipped off into the great void and it is very possible that its audience will snowball. Lift won’t go out of print, so who knows what the future holds for it…

Q: Was Lift a difficult book to write, or did it all spill out on paper once you started? Read more →

Interview With A Successful Writer: Outdoor Book Award Winner Anders Halverson

October 10, 2011, by TC 2 comments

Halverson Wins A National Outdoor Book Award First Time Out…

I adpated this short interview with Anders Halverson from a longer interview we posted on the California Trout blog.

Author Anders Halverson

Halverson is the author of An Entirely Synthetic Fish — a National Outdoor Book Award Winner and a riveting read about fisheries management.

It’s a subject I thought would be as dry as dust, but Halverson — a biologist who has also worked as a journalist — crafted a series of riveting narratives about fisheries management in the USA using the rainbow trout.

In addition to winning the 2010 National Outdoor Book Award, An Entirely Synthetic Fish has generated uniformly positive reviews.

The writing-related portions presented here are regrettably short, but if you want to read the whole thing, go here.

The Anders Halverson Interview

Q: Your book was something of a surprise; I expected a dry-to-the-taste-buds science book, and instead found myself reading a series of riveting stories.

That was my goal. When I decided to write the book,I was finishing a PhD in aquatic ecology. But I’d been a reporter before becoming a biologist, and I wanted to write a popular book about the history of freshwater fisheries management in this country. Somehow I convinced the National Science Foundation to give me a grant to do it.

I decided to write about rainbow trout to provide narrative focus. But ultimately, the book turned is really about people and how we’ve related to the natural world over the last 150 years.

Take the title. I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from people about that.

Q: It threw me too.

I want to state for the record that the title is meant to say more about us than the fish. It’s a quote from the director of the federal fish hatchery program who was moved to declare in 1939 that his agency was now capable of creating “an entirely synthetic fish.”

Q: Got it. Besides the title, what parts of the book do people react to most strongly?

The thing I hear the most about is the Green River “rehabilitation.” In 1962 we poisoned all the fish in a 15,000 square mile watershed so that it would be safe to introduce rainbow trout. It was such a massive project and nobody has really heard about it. But it was also a turning point in how we relate to native species and wilderness. In fact the backlash was one of the things that led to the creation of the Endangered Species Act.

Q: You mentioned that facts about the Green River project were hard to come by; how did you write the Green River chapter?

I expected to find all sorts of stories on the front pages of the newspapers from the day. But when I started going through the microfiche, I couldn’t find a thing. Finally, I found some stories in the sports pages. That’s almost the only place the project was covered–in stories that talked about how great the fishing was going to be.

It’s hard to believe in this day and age, but there was simply no controversy about the project at the time. Imagine the US Fish and Wildlife Service killing all the fish in an area the size of Connecticut and Massachusetts combined so they could introduce a nonnative species.

Q: They were poisoning a whole watershed and nobody cared? Read more →

Interview With A Successful Writer: Essayist John Gierach

September 1, 2011, by TC 4 comments

John Gierach is a writer who sits high atop a niche market, and whose every book published since 1986 is still in print.

Simply put, his work has legs.

John Gierach, fly fishing writer His niche is the fly fishing essay, and his seminal essay book (“Trout Bum”) is credited with changing the face of the fly fishing world.

As testament to his broad appeal, every one of his 16 published essay books — dating back to the original Trout Bum in 1986 — are still in print. And in a small publishing niche — where 4,000 books is a pretty good run for an essay title — Gierach’s hardcovers and paperbacks sell upwards of 60,000-70,000 books per title.

In a useful lesson for any writer, Gierach decided what he wanted out of life and then made it happen. Gierach wanted to fly fish as much as possible, and he simply created that reality.

That’s probably a little new age-ish for his tastes, but it represents an important lesson for writers, too many of whom define “success” in terms of external validation instead of internal rewards.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Gierach’s a stunning writer, though I’d suggest he’s a misleading one; his talent has always been his ability to wander through a fishing trip, picking out the relevant pieces and enhancing the narrative with insight gained elsewhere — all of which comes together in a moment of revelation the reader never saw coming.

NOTE: I excised most of the fly fishing-geek-only content from this interview (you can read the long version on my Trout Underground fly fishing blog), hopefully leaving behind the writer-friendly bits. Enjoy!

Gierach On Writing For a Living

Q: Editors of fly fishing magazines have admitted their fees haven’t increased since the 70s, and you’re probably the only writer making a decent living in the fly fishing space. Have things gotten better or worse for writers in the fly fishing space?

The only reason I make a living is Simon & Schuster. There was a time when it possible to make a passable living freelancing [articles]. But that’s not the case any more.

This book is like my 16th; and they’re all out there making money for me.

The guys now aren’t making much money. I’m not sure I would be able to do today what I did then.

I’m frankly glad I don’t have to figure it out.

Q: What do you think about fly fishing’s online writers, the bloggers and ezine writers? Read more →

Interview With a Successful Writer: Novelist, Screenwriter Lee Goldberg

June 27, 2011, by TC 12 comments

Lee Goldberg has written everything from pulp thriller novels to feature film scripts to television shows — even the tie-in novels related to those television shows.

He’s a living counterpoint to those who contend that writers should focus exclusively on one kind of project, and to give you an idea of the range of his career, he’s even recently become an advocate for self-publishing ebooks (though he admits it’s not for everyone).

Lee Goldberg, Mr. Versatility

He clearly possesses a lively entrepreneurial mind, and serves as a good example of the writer as marketer; he just launched a multi-author series of pulp/horror/mystery books aimed at the ebook market.

He’s also written scripts for the much-missed Spenser: For Hire TV series, wrote and produced the Diagnosis Murder TV series (for which he also wrote the tie-in novels), other TV shows, a feature film and several short films (you can read his own bio page here.)

His blog is active and informative, and he refuses to answer questions about his whereabouts during the Roswell Incident, which we frankly find suspicious.

Now to the interview…

Your Career

Q: You just launched a new multi-author pulp/horror/mystery book series titled The Dead Man. In terms of workflow, it appears to be an interesting mix of individual novels and TV-style group writing; how are you organizing multiple writers around one central character–and keeping everyone on track?

We have a private google group that we use to keep writers up-to-date on what everyone else is doing, stories in development, creative issues writers are having with their DEAD MAN tales, etc.

Q: Are you using any special tools to accomplish this? Version control, cloud, etc?

Only Google Groups and Dropbox.

Q: How many writers will you ultimately involve in the series? Are you acting as an editor?

We have a dozen now, My guess is that we might add three or four others, but I think the core group is likely to do more than one book each.

Q: Four Dead Man books are out (with a fifth on the way). Assuming this series was aimed primarily at the ebook market, can you tell us about the percentage of print vs digital sales of the series?

Right now, the majority of sales are in the ebook format… easily 95% or more.

Q: You’ve written tie-in novels for several series (Diagnosis Murder, Monk, etc); how hard is it to write a character who is seen every week on TV — one who is loved and studied by most of your readers? Read more →

Interview With a Writer: Science Fiction Writer Walter Jon Williams

April 26, 2011, by TC 8 comments

Because stalking is (technically speaking) a crime, I’m channeling my interest in writers into a series of interviews, the first of which you’re reading now.

You’ll soon discover I’m covering a lot of ground; you’ll hear about life as a science fiction novelist, screenwriter, memoirists, essay writer, etc.

A mix of the serious and the irreverent, I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoy making them.

An Interview With Walter Jon Williams

Deep State by Walter Jon Williams

Walter Jon Williams is a talented science fiction writer whose work, as people sometimes put it, has trees in it.

A professional writer since 1979, he’s been nominated for (and won) science fiction’s most prestigious awards, and one of his earliest novels (Hardwired; 1986) helped launch the cyberpunk movement.

In the years since, Williams has covered a lot of literary ground within science fiction, writing everything from cyberpunk to a mystery to an award-winning short story collection to Deep State – his just-released near-future thriller about a government agency manipulating social media to foment revolution in a foreign country.

Just as Deep State released, the “social media revolutions” in Tunisia and Egypt erupted, and suddenly, Deep State read more like a “how-to” guide than science fiction novel.

It’s a remarkable story — both his career and Deep State’s giddy intersection of reality and fiction — and we’re happy to have Walter Jon Williams here to tell us more about Deep State, his career, his writing habits — and his work teaching writers at the Taos Toolbox Writer’s Workshop he founded.

/Interview On

Q: What’s it like to see Deep State — your work of fiction — playing out in real life in Egypt, Tunisia, and other locations?

I watched individual scenes from my book played out on CNN. It was all pretty startling.

But when all’s said and done, I was confident that those scenes would be played out somewhere. I just thought it would happen a few years in the future. So I was surprised, and not surprised.

[Ed: You can read Williams' own take on his book's relationship to the events in Egypt and Tunisia here and here]

Q: Has the timing affected sales of the book? (Sub-questions: did you buy lottery tickets, and will you warn me if your next book involves uprisings against bloggers? Thanks.)

I have no idea if sales were affected. All I can say is that no overstuffed sacks of fan mail have started appearing on my porch.

Q: I Googled the book, and it appears — oddly — that few media outlets beyond science fiction sites noticed that you neatly predicted the future, and even had the foresight to release your book just as things hotted up. Did you see more media attention than it appears? If not, was that disappointing?

Nobody outside the field gives a damn what science fiction writers think or do.

My publisher’s publicist tried to get the book some traction with major media outlets, but it went nowhere. I’m just a writer, I’m not qualified to have thoughts worthy of anyone’s interest.

If I were only a movie star, they’d have been all over that book.

Q: You’ve been active in Role Playing Games (RPG) for many years, and Deep State seems so carefully plotted that it really could serve as a template for an “online” revolution. How much did your game-playing experience help? Was this a case of “write what you know?”

The first book in the series, This Is Not a Game, was based in part on my experiences writing an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) some years ago.

ARGs ask theirs players to develop a certain skill set. They have to analyze evidence, use and break codes and ciphers, solve intricate puzzles, sort through raw data for crucial evidence, find hidden motivations, and sometimes go out into the real world on missions.

What I realized is that these are practical intelligence skills. And that’s how Deep State was born.

As for plotting, I just happen to have a knack for it. I create tricky plots in books, I create tricky plots in games. (And I teach this skill, by the way, at Taos Toolbox.)

Q: In Deep State, I sensed an almost paternal attitude towards Dagmar (note: the lead character is a sci-fi writer, gamer, etc — perhaps a young, female version of our interviewee). Dagmar is a richly drawn character, and is that because she’s so similar to you? Read more →