Eric Wilson's Blog, page 3

The Depths of Success

As I edited my 7th book, Haunt of Jackals, two unique events converged in December of 2008.

One was a lifelong dream.

The other was a nightmare.

To my surprise, my sixth book, Fireproof, hit the NY Times bestseller list and stayed there for the next three or four months. This was a dream come true. What writer doesn't hope to be called a bestselling author?

During the same period, though, my mom suffered a heart attack while at a friend's home in Germany. She was put into an induced coma to keep her alive. I flew over from the States. She came out of the coma. But after I had spent many sleepless nights in the hospital with her, she passed away on December 15. She was only 59 years old.

I was crushed. The thought of living the next 30 or 40 years without my mom seemed unthinkable!

Dream.

Nightmare.

I am forever grateful she got to hear about my bestseller success, considering all the years she encouraged and challenged me in the process. I will miss her till the day I die and am able to join her on the other side. Her absence made the newfound success seem empty and vain. It certainly put things in perspective.

Thanks to royalty checks, I was able to take my wife, two daughters, and mother-in-law on a two-week trip to Holland, Israel, and Jordan. We scattered my mom's ashes at Masada, Petra, and Jerusalem, honoring her life and her love for the Jewish messiah, the Nazarene.

Yes, I finished my edits on Haunt of Jackals, despite an emotional fog. Released in 2009, it is still one of my favorite books, a story of a mother and a son on the run, a fast-paced tale mixed with sorrow and wonder.

Eric Wilson

WilsonWriter.com

My Dumbest Career Move

I had just signed a contract to write my Jerusalem's Undead Trilogy. I had four novels under my belt, all pushing the envelope in my market. I was also still working full-time at FedEx Office.

Out of the blue, I got a call from my agent while on my lunch break one day. My publisher wanted me to write the novelization of the screenplay, Facing the Giants, which was a grassroots hit film. The catch: I had five weeks to write it. The carrot: I would receive six months worth of pay.

Thanks to a supportive boss, I took an extended leave from work to complete the 280-pg book, writing 75 hours a week for the next five weeks.

The dumbest move of my career: I chose to write an overtly Christian story with a lighter mood and more pedantic style than anything I had done before, all under the same name of Eric Wilson.

I am not a market-minded person. I didn't realize I was muddying my brand, making it difficult for readers to know what to expect from me. Suddenly, fans of my darker fiction thought I had sold out. Fans of this lighter fare bought previous books of mine and felt blindsided by fiction which raised questions instead of offering answers.

I would spend the next fifteen years caught in this marketing nightmare of Light or Dark. It was an issue in every interview, every reader interaction. My publisher wanted to brand me as completely Light, "the Christian Nicholas Sparks." "Absolutely not," I told them. When I later wrote books meant to appeal to both, they often failed to find either group.

I loved writing Facing the Giants, for creative, personal, and financial reasons. It paid for both my daughters' braces. I also loved collaborating with the Kendrick Brothers, and would do so for my next two books.

But I should have done it all under a pen name, creating two separate paths for my fiction. If I could go back and correct my dumbest move, I would've written my Dark fiction under Wil Ericson, and my Light fiction under Eric Wilson.

My website, WilsonWriter.com now provides signposts for both types of books. Feel free to explore one or both.

And keep your eyes open. Wil Ericson might yet appear.

Eric Wilson

Power in the Blood

In late 2004, I came across an article from Jerusalem about bulldozers accidentally breaking into old tombs. These tombs were eerie not only because they were in the Field of Blood, where Judas died after betraying Christ, but because of the surprising number of empty ossuaries.

Where had all the bones gone?

An idea was sparked. I imagined a group of evil undead rising up to confront a small group of righteous ones still wandering the earth. I would call it the Jerusalem's Undead Trilogy.

I traveled to Romania in 2005, to Israel in 2007, and collected reams of research. Thanks to a bold publisher and editor, the first in this epic tale, Field of Blood, was released in 2008. It was deeply researched, dark, and biblical. It explored the power in the Nazarene Blood like nothing I have ever read, hearkening back to The Screwtape Letters andThis Present Darkness, but with an ultramodern twist.

I was still working 30 hours a week at Kinko's, trying to write 30 hours a week on the side. Even with four previous books published, my career was far from established.

A vampire trilogy? Stuck in the Christian market? This was hardly a good career move.

I was about to get a call, though, which would change everything--more details in my next blog. In some odd way, a tale of the undead would be the very thing which revived my career.

I was also about to make my dumbest career move yet.

Eric Wilson

Truth and Lies

"Where do you get your story ideas?" This is a question I am regularly asked.

Every two weeks, I have been posting a new blog to partially answer this question regarding each of my twenty books. You can go back and read the last three blogs, but I am now up to the fourth.

When I wrote A Shred of Truth, book two in the Aramis Black series, urban myths were a big part of pop culture. YouTube and social media were taking hold, allowing any Joe Blow to come up with a "truth" and blast it across the internet. Sometimes these myths sounded plausible. Sometimes they were downright crazy--yet people still believed them. I wanted to explore this concept of truth and lies. What makes us believe one thing and not another? Why do we reject some common-sense ideas and then embrace a farfetched notion? What part do fear and anger play in lowering our BS filters, making us prone to accept things we might otherwise challenge?

Aramis Black is faced with a number of lies and deceptions in A Shred of Truth. Each leads further into his past until he is confronted with the truth about his own mother's demise. This journey is one of the most thrilling and satisfying I have ever written. A Shred of Truth is still a personal favorite of mine.

In both Aramis Black stories, The Best of Evil and A Shred of Truth, I hid a secret message in plain sight. Most readers never catch the clues stated plainly on the last page of each book. Go back and see for yourself. I tell you how to piece the messages together. In The Best of Evil, the message is a clue for Aramis Black. In A Shred of Truth, the message is a clue for all of us--a steadfast truth in a world built on shifting sand.

Eric Wilson

Eric Wilson on Steroids

Sometimes it takes a specific thing to unlock the magic of a story as I write. It can be a title, a hair-raising scene, a great "what if" question. In the case of my third book, The Best of Evil, two keys appeared in my hand--or my imagination.

The first was a passage of scripture. I read in Romans 12:21, "Don't let evil get the best of you; get the best of evil by doing good." The best of evil. What a title. Now, it may have implied something even darker than the scope of this book, but it cornered the theme I wanted to explore. How could one man with a sordid, violent past turn things around and choose good over evil?

The door was cracked. This book was about to reveal itself to me in the writing.

The second key was the name of my main character.

There are so many instantly identifiable names in fiction, from Miss Marple to Jack Reacher to Harry Potter. I wanted something unique, which also gave readers a feel for the character. I thumbed through nonfiction books for a name, tried old phonebooks, even discarded magazines. I was on the hunt for that perfect name.

One day I picked up The Three Musketeers. As a writer and reader, I reread passages from favorite books the way some people look through old family photographs. They mean something special to me. In this classic novel, I came across the name Aramis, one of the original musketeers.

Aramis. I liked that a lot. I just needed something else to capture his dark side and his attempts to escape the past by opening his own espresso shop.

Aramis Black? Perfect. Just add in some ground coffee beans.

I took these two keys, ran them up on a string like ole Ben Franklin, and lightning struck. I knew I had the beginning of a great new series.

To this day, I get more emails about this series than any other. Oddly, the second book called A Shred of Truth, a personal favorite of mine, is one of my lowest selling books despite the passionate readers. Did they all borrow it from the library? I don't know. As a result, the third book was never commissioned or published.

Someday, perhaps. You can find out more about this on my website, www.WilsonWriter.com, under the title Three Fatal Blows.

In the meantime, go check out the first two books in the Aramis Black series and see if they stir any magic for you. They certainly did for me. As my editor said at the time, Aramis Black is Eric Wilson on steroids.

Blame It on the Milk and Tea

My first novel, Dark to Mortal Eyes, was almost complete. Though I didn't yet have an agent or publisher, I was afraid of the sophomore slump. With my mind hunting for ideas, my eyes and ears were on constant alert.

This was the year 2000, and my wife and I were still running our own espresso business in Junction City, Oregon. We loved our customers, so many salt-of-the-earth people. One elderly man came every day to shake my hand, surrender a pair of dollar bills, and buy his bride a fresh-brewed iced tea. She always waited in the car as he trudged back and forth.

One afternoon, his wife showed up alone and ordered her drink.

"Where's your husband?" I asked.

She gazed up through thick glasses. "He passed last night."

As I heard the details and expressed my sympathy, my gaze swept past the gallon of milk on the counter. Near the top was stamped the expiration date. What if I had discerned the previous day, by the simple shaking of hands, that my elderly customer would die within hours? Was there anything I could've done to stop it? Would I have spent an extra minute to hear about his day?

Just like that, I had the idea for my second novel!

A year later, I found an agent and he spent another year pitching my debut novel. It was presented to the publication committee at Random House, and my agent called later that morning to give me their verdict. Which did I want first, the good news or bad?

"The bad," I said.

"They don't want a book," he told me.

I gulped hard. "Okay."

"They want two! They love your idea for Hands of Time."

When my second novel was published in 2005, it's title had changed to Expiration Date. It is still a special book to me, and I believe I avoided the sophomore slump. Of course, none of us know the date others might die. But what if we did? Could we intervene?

It's something I ponder anytime I order a fresh-brewed iced tea.

Eric Wilson

The Cops Kept an Eye on Me

I was writing my debut novel, tentatively titled Games of Chance, and I wanted to get things right.

I had no idea I was putting myself squarely in the sites of local law enforcement.

My wife and I owned an espresso business at that time, in Junction City, Oregon. Officer Larson was a regular customer who later became chief of police in a nearby city. Since my book included a missing wife and a suspicious husband, I wanted to understand proper police procedure in such matters. I explained my plot to Officer Larson and asked him numerous questions.

During this same period, my wife was experiencing night terrors. She had suffered abuse as a young girl and those memories began surfacing in the early years of our marriage. She felt safe enough with me to let them out, a counselor told me. I should consider it a compliment.

It didn't feel like a compliment. It was scary.

My wife regularly screamed, hurled herself out of bed, and locked herself in the bathroom or closet until coming back to awareness. She once called 911 in her sleep and said, "He's in the house right now," as I stumbled down the hall to see what she was going on. The 911 operator grilled me over the phone before deciding not to send squad cars to our address in the middle of the night. Another time, my wife ran out the front door, across the lawn, and knocked on a neighbor's door past 2 a.m. Only as the wet grass and cold night took hold did she become aware of her location. She apologized to the neighbors, then wandered back home.

Officer Larson caught wind of all this through various calls to Junction City Police. There was something suspicious happening at the Wilson home. My favorite local cop stopped by the next morning on a "casual" coffee run to gauge my reaction to his probing questions. He was still not sure what to think.

His suspicions were eventually eased by a conversation with my wife--without me around, of course. She explained her past, her night terrors, and my support of her throughout the process.

Thankfully, prayers and counseling led to her healing. She and I are still friends with Chief Larson. And perhaps it was his care and concern which led to my formation of a favorite character, known to many of you as Sgt. Turney, who makes appearances in at least three or four of my books.

In 2004, my first novel was published, Dark to Mortal Eyes. I am glad to say, I did not do my first book-signing from a prison cell.

Welcome ... I Write for You

Writing a book is a job. And an adventure. It's a self-imposed exile into the imagination. And a dance full of twists, dips, and turns for my readers.I write for you. Which means I work, explore, self-exile, and join in life's dance all because of you.You have a role to play as well. You engage with my characters, choosing to love or hate them. Maybe you think Aramis Black is a bad-ass, but Asgoth and Lord Natira are scary, evil dudes. Maybe you relate to Natalie Flynn. Or to Gina Lazarescu. You might even have a literary crush on Josee Walker.You walk through the settings in my stories. You wrestle with the themes. You stumble through my sometimes clunky info-dumps. I am getting better, I hope.Thank you for visiting my website, https://www.wilsonwriter.com. Thanks for buying, borrowing, downloading, and stealing my books. Thanks for being a part of my story.Without you, my 20 books and 2,000,000 published words are just dust in the wind. You make it real. You bring these words to life.

Eric Wilson

The Financial Realities of Being an Author

We’ve all heard about authors paid seven-figure advances. We’ve seen debut books that sell millions and attract huge movie deals. Such stories make the headlines precisely because they are so uncommon.

In recent years, I released a vampire trilogy (a biblically-based tale of spiritual warfare), and certain people accused me of selling out for money, “fleecing the sheep,” and cashing in on the vampire craze generated by Twilight--although I started pitching my own series in 2005 before I’d ever heard of Stephenie Meyer. I’m not concerned with unbiased accusations. I am, however, intent on helping new authors as they step into the fray. As a budding novelist myself, I would’ve loved an honest representation of how the finances worked. So here goes . . .

I signed my first fiction contract in 2002. I committed to writing two novels for the publisher, Dark to Mortal Eyes and Expiration Date. My advance was $12,500 per book, with 15% going to my agent and another 20% going to Uncle Sam--meaning, I brought home around $9,000 per book Of course, I received only half up front, the other half upon publication. So I planted my butt in my chair and started writing. I turned in book one and book two. They hit the shelves in ’04 and ’05. They never sold enough to earn back my advance, and so the publisher had no obligation to ever pay me a dime in royalties. In the meantime, a film company optioned my second novel for a movie, paying $500 for that right. No screenplay was ever approved by investors, no movie was made, and my publisher kept the $500 toward the money still unearned on my advance.

I signed my second contract in 2004. Same terms. Same basic advance. Same results. The Best of Evil and A Shred of Truth came out in ’06 and ’07, and neither book earned me a cent in royalties.

Yep, you guessed it. My next three novels, Field of Blood, Haunt of Jackals, and Valley of Bones, all sold to a different publisher for the same advances I had earned on my earlier books. I pushed for more, I really did. But my agent said I had little bargaining power, based on my previous sales. Those books came out in ’08, ’09, and ’10. Slightly better sales, but still nothing close to earning any royalties.

In between publishing my own novels, I had the opportunity to write three novelizations based on original screenplays for the movies Flywheel, Facing the Giants, and Fireproof. Each book sold in accordance with the success of its matching film, and the third book earned good royalties--a first for me! It hit the lower end of the NY Times bestseller list, in the trade paperback category, and stayed there for 17 weeks. Many of my friends and family thought I must be set for life. I have to admit, I wondered how lucrative these types of sales numbers would be.

The reality? With eighteen books published, I have brought home $450,000 since 2002. That’s $22,500 a year, before taxes and agents. Personally, I believe in giving from my income to various ministries, so that money also came out of there. I’m not complaining about the published books, or the bestsellers, or the approximate $200,000 net earned. No sir! But I could’ve made that amount of money in five to ten years instead of twenty if I had stayed at my corporate job. And my family would’ve had health insurance. And 401(k). Unfortunately, those are not things publishers are in a position to offer, and most contracted writers and musicians have limited ability to obtain them.

I will never regret the road I’ve chosen. My wife has walked hand-in-hand with me on this journey, and we have seen provision in unexpected, often last-minute, ways. It’s a struggle some days, a joy many others, and yet I have the satisfaction of pursuing what God has put in my heart.

If you want to write, be aware of the financial realities. If you’re married, be sure you are committed to this path as a couple. Then, I say, do it with all your heart, soul, and mind. As a creator created in the image of the Creator, I find life’s truest riches on the path that leads to Him.

Eric Wilson