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Jake Needham: Going Great Distances To Write Really Great Books

Jake Needham is the author of seven international crime novels, all bestsellers in Asia and Europe and none of which have ever been distributed in the United States.

Fortunately for his growing legion of fans, ebook editions of all his novels are now available worldwide.

Before becoming a bestselling author he worked as a screen and television writer who began writing thrillers when he realized he didn’t really like writing for movies and television.

He is a lawyer by education and has held a number of significant positions in both the public and private sectors in which he took part in a lengthy list of international operations he has absolutely no intention of telling you about.

Jake has lived and worked in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Thailand for nearly twenty-five years. He and his family now divide their time between homes in Bangkok, New York, and Virginia.

Jake Needham Interview

Scroll down for a complete transcript of the interview or click the Play button below to listen to the interview now. And don’t forget to leave a comment to let us know what you thought of this interview!

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Jack Needham Transcript

Tim Knox: Hi friends, welcome back in to Interviewing Authors. My guest today is Jake Needham and I have to say this is one of the most enjoyable interviews I’ve done, and I’ve done close to 80 of them at this point so this one must be really good.

Jake began his career as an attorney and then, somehow, got into the entertainment business. He was writing screenplays, he was writing for television. He even roomed with Larry McMurtry in college and he’s working on projects with people like James Gandolfini and many others.

Finally when he was not being satisfied writing for television and movies he became a bestselling novelist and he did it in kind of an odd way. He moved to Singapore, started writing books, found a publisher over there and became an international bestseller without selling a single book in the United States. Fortunately for us his ebooks are available worldwide.

Lots to learn from this one folks. Great entertainment; so get a cup of coffee and get ready for one of my favorite interviews so far with Jake Needham, on today’s Interviewing Authors.

Tim Knox: Jake, welcome to the program.

Jake Needham: Well thanks, Tim. I’m glad to be here. I’m glad you called.

Tim Knox: Well I’m glad you were there to answer the phone.

Jake Needham: I almost missed it. I forgot you were doing a call.

Tim Knox: Picking up on the eighth ring is as good as the first with me.

Jake Needham: Okay, I’m good.

Tim Knox: Jake, I’m proud to have you on the show. Great to have you home in the States here for a little while. Before we get started, if you will give the audience a little bit of background on you.

Jake Needham: Well let’s see, man it’s a long story. You get to be as old as I am and the story goes on and on. I really started out practicing law. I graduated from Rice University and Georgetown University and practiced law for quite a while in a bunch of different areas and somehow sort of ended up in the Pacific Rim. I lived in Sydney for a while and Hong Kong and Singapore and a bunch of places like that. And in the middle of a deal that we were working I ended up owning a kind of broken down television production company in Hollywood, which nobody else wanted in the deal so I ended up buying it out.

I think like every lawyer who ever got involved in Hollywood, I figured that these guys have just been sitting around all their lives waiting for me to come in and tell them how they could really make this thing work. I screwed around with a little company for a few years and did some stuff. That worked out pretty well but that got me into screenwriting and from screenwriting I slid into writing novels when I got sick of the movie business. That’s sort of how I got here. How about that for the Reader’s Digest version?

Tim Knox: Well that’s quite the trip. You started out as an attorney, ended up… was it a production company?

Jake Needham: Yeah, I was doing a deal in which one company acquired another one and this little broken down television production company was part of the deal and nobody wanted it. It sort of threatened to stop the whole thing so I ended up buying the damn thing to save the deal. It wasn’t as bad as it sounded because it actually had back in the great ol’ days of cable television, an output deal with a company called Wilshire Court, which in turn was supplying movies to USA and Showtime and at the time USA was doing about 28 original movies a year, which was a hell of a thing. It was like a drive-in movie business back in the old days. That was the real B movie business. These guys had an output deal. They were putting together four movies a year for Wilshire Court and USA and Showtime and that struck me as having some value. So I got involved.

Actually it’s a funny story if you want to hear it. I put together a business plan to try to get everybody on the same page. It seemed to me the problem the company had was that it was digging up scripts for films they wanted to make but then discovering they were beyond its resources really and then trying to retool the scripts into something that they could afford to make, which struck me as ass backwards.

The right way to go about it was to start out by figuring out what they could do, what resources they had not just in terms of money but who knew who, who could you get, what directors were free who might want to work with a little company and so forth, and put together a package based on what they could do well as opposed to working it from the other end.

So I brought out this business plan and sketched out the kinds of things I thought we could do and circulate it and probably forgot about it. About six weeks later one of my guys came in and he said, “I’ve got great news. That script you wrote, HBO wants to film it.” I had to say what script? I’ve never written a script.

He said, “Oh no no, that thing you wrote that you circulated.” It was a business plan. That’s not a script. He said, “Yeah I know but I showed it to HBO and they love it.” True story, absolute true story.

Tim Knox: So is that how you became a script writer?

Jake Needham: Yeah it was sort of a nutty outline I made up in 30 seconds because I thought it suited with what the little company could do and HBO bought it. So I sat down and wrote it and fiddled around and they said, “It’s fine,” and we actually shot it. Then an agent got involved and I started writing stuff for USA and Showtime.

I did mostly cable TV movies, which were really great fun because it was the B movie business back then. Nobody cared. If you delivered on budget and on time that was really all it took. We were so far beneath the radar that people didn’t screw around with us and we actually got to go out and do some stuff that was kind of fun.

Tim Knox: Yeah back in those days they were just looking for content, anything to fill the time.

Jake Needham: Yeah. The factory was out there churning it out. We were sort of the trainer of cable TV. Man, Wal-Mart called us up and we produced two tons of stuff for cable TV. That was how it worked and it was kind of fun. Being in the low end of the business everybody thought we were crap so it really didn’t make any difference. Nobody screwed around with us but it meant that we actually had what was really the greatest power in Hollywood, and that was the power to say yes. Yes, I will hire you and yes we will make this movie. Yes, we will start shooting on Thursday.

I did that for a few years and had a lot of fun with it and then decided I didn’t want to make any more movies because just got tired of the movie business and tried a novel to see if it would work and it worked out okay.

Tim Knox: Now had you always been a writer before law school or any of that?

Jake Needham: No, well I worked at NBC News for a while and I was a news producer for a bit so I had some rudimentary knowledge of how everything wrote but honestly, Tim, I never spent a second of my life sitting around saying, “Gee, I want to be a writer.”

When I was an under-grad at Rice University one of my roommates was Larry McMurtry and so I sort of lived with McMurtry through his early days. He sold his first novel which was called Horseman, Pass By, which became the movie Hud. He sold it for $2,500 and that was his first big break in Hollywood. While we were there at Rice he wrote The Last Picture Show, which I thought was Larry’s finest novel. We sat around and said things like, “Larry, baby, The Last Picture Show. What a crummy title. You can’t write a novel called The Last Picture Show. It just lies there.”

From that I got no ambition to be a novelist. It was purely accidental and so when people ask me how I became a writer, I always say it was an accident and it literally was. It was just something that I kind of fell into.

Tim Knox: I think the best thing about The Last Picture Show was Cybil Shepherd nude, if I’m being honest here.

Jake Needham: She was a lot younger then.

Tim Knox: She was a little bit younger. So let me recap here. You were an attorney who got into the production business, started writing screenplays I think because someone called your bluff.

Jake Needham: That’s actually putting it really well, yeah.

Tim Knox: So you went from that to writing novels. Talk a little bit about that transition.

Jake Needham: Well, you know, I had no idea how to do it, absolutely no idea. It only came about because honestly I just got sick of the movie business. The movie business is really no place for a grown man. It’s just not a good way to pass your life. It’s just so full of bullshit that you really get sick of it after a while. We were down in Thailand at the time for a few months and so I thought what the hell? I’ll see if I can write a novel.

Having no idea how to do it I think I wrote it sort of like a screenplay because my first novel was a book called The Big Mango, which has been optioned I think at last count 11 times without ever actually being filmed. Movie people seem to love it because I think when they read it they see a movie and that’s not because I was clever enough to write it that way; it was because I was dumb enough to write it that way. I had no idea how to write a novel so it broke out into scenes. When you write screenplays you write blocks of scenes and move them around and I wrote The Big Mango like that and the movie guys have always loved it. Who knows? One of these days it may get made.

Tim Knox: So you wrote it really like a screenplay, heavy on dialogue and blocking the scenes and that sort of thing.

Jake Needham: Yeah I think it was not so much that it was heavy on dialogue but it was that the scenes fell out like scenes in a screenplay because in a screenplay of course you don’t have transitions between the scenes. So it wasn’t sort of full of backstory and the kind of thing that you’d get in a novel. I mean it was thin to be perfectly honest, looking back on it now. It was real thin but because it was thin I think movie people saw in it what they were accustomed to reading in a script.

The guy who got most excited about it was Jim Gandolfini. Jim actually owned the rights for a while just before he died and Jim was determined way back to when he was on The Sopranos that as soon as he came off The Sopranos he was going to make The Big Mango.

I used to get summons to New York every now and then and we’d pace around The Sopranos set smoking cigars and talking about the script but HBO wanted Jim to produce it and he didn’t want to and HBO wanted me to write it and I didn’t want to so it all kind of bogged down and went around in circles and then Jim passed away and of course that was a great loss for everybody. I always can sort of see him in that role. I’m not sure I can see anybody else now.

Tim Knox: What was the storyline of The Big Mango?

Jake Needham: Essentially it was a guy, a sort of broken down lawyer in San Francisco who had never been terribly successful and therefore he wasn’t wildly happy with his life and suddenly he started getting these letters in the mail reminding him of moments when he had been a grunt back in Vietnam when Saigon had fallen.

As the storyline follows along it seems that he and a couple of other guys have been assigned to guard a warehouse, which he didn’t have any idea what was in it. It was later discovered that it had been filled with the gold that the CIA had gotten together from the Bank of Vietnam to keep it from falling into the hands of the North Vietnamese and then it disappeared.

The CIA assumed the North Vietnamese have it and they discover they didn’t. The North Vietnamese thought the CIA had it and they discovered they didn’t so everybody starts looking at Eddie Dare, who was my character, and asking him what the hell he did with the gold. He had no idea either. So that’s where the storyline developed from.

Tim Knox: Fantastic. I would like to see that on screen.

Jake Needham: I think it would be a fun movie. There’s a big time agent who’s picked it up again and was a friend of Jim’s and I was sort of determined to get it out there. I’d get hysterical calls from him every two or three days about how it’s going to be the next big movie but I think the place of the novelist in the movie business is to not have any place at all. Who is it that said… I think Harold Corbin. Somebody once said he thought the proper role of a novelist in dealing with a movie company was that somewhere out in the Mojave Desert there was a very high wall and the novelist rode up to one side, threw his book over and from the other side somebody threw money over and then they both ran like hell.

Tim Knox: That’s a really good description. It really is.

Jake Needham: I think they’re different disciplines and involve different sets of talents. Having been on both sides of the wall I’m even more convinced of that now. I have complete equanimity over the issue of anybody buying one of my books for its movie rights. If somebody shows up and hands me a check and it’s a check of a reasonable size I will kiss them on both cheeks, wish them well and ask them to send me an invitation when they make it.

Tim Knox: When you wrote The Big Mango how did you go about getting that published? Did you get an agent, go the traditional route?

Jake Needham: Yeah I did. At the time remember this was when everybody still sent typed scripts out. You sent these bloody big packages to agents and the enquiry letters. You know the whole sort of thing. I was incredibly fortunate that several agents who got the query jumped right on it and quite significant folks that I think they thought it was sort of romantic that I was mostly living in Bangkok at the time and I was barraged with a lot of phone calls.

A guy named Perry Nolton, who was really one of the huge movers and shakers back at the time, took it on but Perry got nowhere, just absolutely nowhere. What he ended up with was a whole series of, “Well it’s very interesting but Americans don’t really want to read stuff set in foreign countries,” and, “It’s too midlist. It will never be a big hit.” All the usual sort of stuff.

I just sort of shrugged. It wasn’t like I was paying my kid’s school fees and I’m still sort of hanging on the peripheral of film business and had just written it for fun. So I gave the manuscript to a decent little regional publisher that operated in Southeast Asia and just said, “Look, if you want to print it go ahead. It’s fine.” They loved it and put it out and they’re out of business now but when they were in business they sold a couple hundred thousand copies of it.

Tim Knox: Wow.

Jake Needham: It did exceptionally well.

Tim Knox: Let’s talk about that a little bit. You lived in Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand for 25 years now and you’ve written seven international crime novels, all bestsellers, and none of them have been distributed in the U.S.

Jake Needham: It is a little weird, isn’t it?

Tim Knox: Just a tad, yeah.

Jake Needham: Well I mean it started out honestly as I just said. Nobody wanted it and it didn’t bother me a lot. It wasn’t a big deal. I mean everybody wanted to be published but I was perfectly happy to be published by an Asian publisher who got good distribution and I was fine with that. Then as another couple came out I moved to a larger publisher in Hong Kong. I finally reached the point at which I didn’t want them distributed in the U.S. because I thought long-term protecting the rights here was the right thing to do.

I’ve been around the movie business for a long time. I understood the argument that most Americans were not interested in foreign set material. I had heard it constantly from HBO, from Showtime, from all sorts of movie production houses. I wasn’t really surprised when publishers said the same thing.

To be perfectly honest with you, I think there’s some truth in that. But on the other hand because American publishers almost never publish anything set in a foreign country it’s a little hard to judge that objectively but when I started hearing that so much it just really didn’t bother me a lot. We lived in Thailand and had a home here as well but I spent most of my time in Asia, and so I was perfectly happy to have the books published there.

It was like the old days. Newspapers actually ran reviews. Reporters called you up and did interviews, put your picture in the paper. If you’re a writer what you want is an audience and I had a terrific one. I had major newspapers all over the region who wrote nice things about me and then my books sold well so what the hell? What was the big deal?

Tim Knox: Did anyone ever try to entice you or convince you to change the location for the books for the American market?

Jake Needham: Oh yes, oh yes. That was some silly stories and you know I’m not sure I did the right thing in not doing it from the standpoint of purely commercial success because now I have two series and I’m sort of stuck with them because the series have a lot of fans. I hear from people constantly who say when’s the next Jack Shepherd book? When’s the next Inspector Tay book? I just don’t quite have the heart to say I’m sick of them; I want to write something else.

I’m going to write about a detective who lives in Miami because I don’t know if I’d bring anything to that. I’ve loved Asia all my life and I think what I do is different from what other people do and so I keep doing it but yeah, every now and then somebody says why don’t you write a book set in L.A.? I just have to say I don’t know if I can do that better. A lot of people are doing that really well right now. I just don’t know what I would bring to it.

Tim Knox: I’ve had several authors who write series like you do that have kind of said the same thing. They’re hesitant to change location or even marry off a character because their fans just get ticked at them if they do anything that drastic in the books.

Jake Needham: Well I think that’s true. I mean people invest themselves in these and they like them. I’ve never quite figured out why people invest themselves so much in some of these series but they do. They’re terribly nice people and it’s not so much that you think they would be annoyed with you but more you don’t want to disappoint them. In fact, the Reacher books. They’re all sort of the same. The argument that Lee Child makes is that that’s what people ask him to do and so that’s what he does. He doesn’t have the character change. People like Reacher as he is and they want another Reacher book and so that’s what he writes.

I find that the people who like my characters seem to like them a lot and sometimes I think I ought to change them and do something out there in left field but then I think I’d be disappointing a lot of nice people. Maybe I’ll do it yet but I don’t know. I’m finishing another Sam Tay book now. When that’s done all bets are off.

Tim Knox: Maybe Sam Tay can take a vacation in Miami.

Jake Needham: You know, people mention that all the time. If you think about, for example, I’m a big fan of Mike Connelly’s but I’m not a real fan of what happened when he got a little bored with Harry Bosch. He did this kind of silly routine in which Bosch discovers that… I forgot the lawyer’s name but it’s his half-brother. I thought, geez, that doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s sort of like you remember the old soap operas? Sally was Fred’s cousin’s sister’s third brother’s second wife.

That was the way every plot unraveled by somebody explaining that everybody was actually related. Somehow I felt when Mike did that he cheapened a really nice character by trying to link him in with another character in a way that felt to me artificial. Now I’m sure it didn’t feel artificial to him or he wouldn’t have done it but I just don’t think it worked.

If you also look, he took Bosch to Hong Kong once. I forgot the name of the book but it was terrible. It was just one of his worst books because I think when you take your characters out of their comfort zone and try to make them somebody else there’s a long history of that not really working very well. I think there’s a good reason not to do that. I would certainly be gun shy about doing it.

Tim Knox: Right. After The Big Mango, what was your next book?

Jake Needham: That was when I started the Jack Shepherd series. It was a book called Laundry Man, which was the first of the Shepherd books. What kind of interested me about doing that character was that Shepherd’s an ex-pat, which of course I have much experience with. When I started thinking about it I couldn’t think of a single novel about an American who had thrown up his hands one day and gone abroad to live, which I had thought was a sort of interesting idea.

Also, The Big Mango was written in the third person and I wanted to try and do something in the first person because I thought that might be kind of interesting and being able to do a first person voice of somebody who had followed a course parallel to mine, not the same but sort of parallel I thought might be kind of interesting and the character worked out pretty well. There have now been four Jack Shepherd books.

Tim Knox: What attracted you to the crime genre?

Jake Needham: That’s a good question. I guess it’s what I always read and the kind of stuff I always wrote. When I wrote screenplays the standard joke was that every screenplay that I’d ever written was The Third Man with a different title.

Tim Knox: I love that.

Jake Needham: I think at the end of the day you take the stuff you like and you do write that over and over. You write it because you liked it and it somehow affected you and you thought it worked and you found new ways to make the same kind of thing work. Look at Spielberg’s movies. I mean your big writers, your big directors. Essentially most of us that have done pretty well tend to do the same kind of stuff. It’s thematically connected because I suppose if you wanted to sit down and so some sort of shrink job on us you would sort of say that’s who we are.

Tim Knox: So really Jack Shepherd is not really you but there’s maybe a little bit of you. He’s also an ex-pat who’s in Asia as you have been.

Jake Needham: Well the ex-pat idea basically came from me in the sense that it seemed to me that that was an interesting road to go down. It’s funny you would put it that way because probably the most common question you get at book signings and that sort of thing is always, “Isn’t the hero really you?” I keep saying if anyone ever comes up to me and says, “Isn’t the villain really you?” I’ll give them all my books for free. I think that’d be the greatest question in the world.

The answer to both questions is yes, of course. You can’t make people up. The people that you put in your books are all partly you and partly your wife and your kids and the people you’ve met and the people you hated and the people you loved because that’s what makes them real. If you don’t draw from those kinds of things they’re going to cardboard. They’re not going to be real and I don’t draw comic books.

Tim Knox: I think that’s a really good point. I had another author tell me once that all of the good characters in his books are people he knows that he likes and all of the bad people in his books are people that he knows that he hates.

Jake Needham: I’ve never been quite that direct about it. It seems to me that all characters are just some degree reflections of yourself and then you leaven them with things that you remember about other people – funny things they said, events that occurred. Part of the fun of writing is this stuff comes back to you.

Things you have long forgotten, people you haven’t thought about in a decade, an event which occurred to the two of you somewhere come drifting out of the great file cabinet in the sky and you get to chuckle about it a little bit and bend it around and put it into somebody else’s mouth and shove it in the book. That’s what writing novels is all about.

Tim Knox: Do you do a lot of deep background on your main characters? Do you know Jake’s shoe size?

Jake Needham: No, no, I never understood any of that stuff. I think it comes from writing screenplays. I make this stuff up as I go along. In fact, the hardest thing about a series is once you’ve written a couple of books then you’ve got to do some real mechanical work because then you’ve got to go back and comb through the first couple of books and write all that stuff done.

Tim Knox: That’s true.

Jake Needham: You can’t suddenly say that he hates Benny Hill and then two books later have him love Benny Hill. You can make it all up in a book or two but once you’ve done that and you’ve committed to a character you have a bit of a mechanical problem and you’ve got to go back and dig that stuff up and start making lists of what you’ve already said so you don’t contradict yourself.

Tim Knox: Such a great point. You can’t be in the third book and have him become a chain-smoker all of a sudden.

Jake Needham: People do that all the time. It drives me crazy.

Tim Knox: I know, I know. You’ve been doing this a while. Talk a little bit about how things are changing. You’re Asia-based, your books are, but things are changing with the traditional publishing, the indie publishing, the self-publishing. Thoughts on that?

Jake Needham: For me personally it’s been a boom. It’s changed my life. When I started out, as I said literally you printed up a typed script and then you put it in a big box and shipped it off to people who then didn’t look at it and shipped it back and all that kind of thing. It was very frustrating because the only way you could gain access to the market was through an agent and through a publisher and then even once you did that, as my first agent always said, “The problem isn’t getting published; the problem is getting well published.” You could get buried and all sorts of wonderful careers disappeared because strange things happened.

When eBooks became popular I very carefully kept all of my rights except licensing very specific rights to specific territories. Now it wasn’t because I was prescient somehow but it was because as I mentioned before, when I was thinking in terms of okay so I license these rights in Asia and the UK and so forth but I keep the North American rights. I always protected those because I was convinced that one of these days HarperCollins would see the light and come running and I wanted to make sure those rights were protected.

Low and behold when eBooks became a really big deal, I had all the rights. I had never licensed them to anybody. They still belonged to me. I was able to start putting out my first books as eBooks and suddenly when I was an unknown in the U.S. because none of my books had ever been sold here, I suddenly was selling thousands of books here.

About three years ago I killed my publishing contract with my publisher, my UK publisher called Marshall Cavendish which had been bought by a Singapore media group. That’s another story because they decided that they didn’t like the Inspector Tay character. He was not sufficiently filled with praise for Singapore so they started pressuring me to make some changes and it was great fun to be able to go in one day and blow them the proverbial raspberry. Once I killed that deal I got no print editions for three years, four years maybe and the last two books have come out purely in eBook formats and, man, I freakin’ love it. I absolutely love it.

Tim Knox: So all of your books are now available via eBooks on Amazon and the usual outlets.

Jake Needham: Yeah, everything is out there on Amazon, the Kindle. Most of the books are also on iBooks, all the usual suspects. I’m one of those guys who just says, look, the greatest thing in the world is I suddenly have access to readers and readers have access to me. It seems to me that what’s really happening here, people spend a lot of time talking about publishing companies and the change in publishing and so forth but I don’t think that’s really the point. Publishers have always been slightly irrelevant.

Way back 10 years ago I could easily see that writers cared a great deal about what they wrote and readers cared a great deal about what they read and in between virtually nobody gave a shit. It was a commodity business. We were cans of soup and publishers didn’t care much about readers. They certainly didn’t care about writers. They cared about retailers.

If Barnes & Noble thought it was cool then it was automatically cool. If Barnes & Noble didn’t think it was cool they weren’t going to publish it and nobody spent any time talking about what writers wanted to write and what readers wanted to read. Now that’s all anybody thinks about and I think that’s absolutely terrific.

Tim Knox: It really has kind of leveled the playing field, hasn’t it?

Jake Needham: It’s done more than that. I think when you say level the playing field that’s almost the kind of commercial term and that’s certainly true but more than that, partly because of eBooks and partly because of the prevalence of social media, readers now feel they have a direction relationship with the people whose books they read.

I find that I get enormous amounts of communication from extraordinarily nice people who don’t want anything. They just want to say, “Hey, I really enjoyed that. When’s the next one coming?” I get 40, 50 tweets a day from people who have small comments to make like that, Facebook, email, what have you. It’s not a volume issue. It’s a matter of there being a direct relationship. Nobody cares who the publisher is. Nobody cares about their guy sitting in a box in Manhattan who take each other to lunch and talk about how they must be the gatekeepers. Nobody wants a gatekeeper. Readers are smart. They know how to find books. They don’t need publishers to tell them what to find.

From a writer’s standpoint not only do we get an audience that way but it’s an audience who actually cares about us. We don’t have to argue with the audience. We don’t have to wonder if Barnes & Noble is only going to put two copies in each store and then people are going to call up and say, “Why can’t I get your book?” It’s Amazon that’s a great leveler because any book you want, you can have tomorrow afternoon, any book anywhere in the world. You can have it tomorrow afternoon.

What that has done is it’s taken the retailers out of the picture because the retailers were the real gatekeepers. They were the arrogant sods who wanted to tell you what you could buy. That doesn’t happen anymore and from a writer’s standpoint, man it’s the golden age because people who actually want to read what we write can access it immediately, they can access us and I just think that’s bloody terrific.

Tim Knox: You know, I agree with you totally and that’s one thing I hear from authors who are doing the self-publishing is that word you said, relationship. They’re now accessible to their readers and they’re building a relationship and as a reader it’s pretty cool to be able to tweet back and forth with a guy who wrote one of your favorite books.

Jake Needham: Yeah, absolutely right. The way the system previously functioned was the writer had to deal a publisher who had to deal with the retailer who presumably dealt with the reader but the fact was they put it out there. You bought it or you didn’t. Take it or leave it. You know the old song, “Readers don’t make bestsellers; publishers make bestsellers,” because if the publisher put out 50,000 copies and stuck 500 copies at the front of every bookstore you were going to sell a lot of copies. I mean hell, if they put a million copies of my book in every store in the world you’d sell a bunch of copies.

Tim Knox: Sure.

Jake Needham: Publishers don’t make bestsellers anymore. They’ve lost control and they’re going nuts because their role in all of this has always been suspect and now it’s clear that their role is virtually negligible. So you’ve got people like Patterson who are dependent on that old system who attack people who aren’t a part of that old system. That’s kind of ugly but that aside it doesn’t matter if it’s ugly or sweet.

What matters is that readers get access to what they want to read. I have an audience. I’m happy to have an audience. If I had an audience that was 1,000 times bigger than the one I have would I be 1,000 times happier? Not a chance. I’m fine. What every reader wants are books that they enjoy and what every writer wants are readers who enjoy his books. Man, the system is breezed for that now. You just can’t beat it.

Tim Knox: Great insight. What are you working on now, Jake?

Jake Needham: I’m doing the third Inspector Tay book. Tay is a CID detective in Singapore who is not real keen on being a cop and even less keen on being a Singaporean, which is why when the Singapore media group bought my publisher they weren’t real keen on Tay. I’m doing the third Inspector Tay book, which ought to be out in September, called The Dead American. The fourth Jack Shepherd book was called The King of Macau and that came out in February and has done brilliantly for me I’m happy to say.

So now I’ve got Shepherd living in Hong Kong and hustling the casinos in Macau and I’ve got Sam Tay in Singapore who’s on suspension because he shot the wrong guy at the wrong time and dealing with the Wall Street Journal, who’s trying to get in to help investigate a dead American who was found in Singapore to no one’s great interest and that makes a pretty good parley, huh?

Tim Knox: That does. On behalf of all of us folks here in the States, we’re glad we can get your eBooks now.

Jake Needham: Well Tim, I’m even happier about that. They’re all out there. I’m delighted when people discover them and I think the nicest thing you can get are the emails, the tweets and the Facebook postings and so forth in which people say, “Hey, I just discovered (fill in title here) and I just loved it and I’m going to go and buy all the others.” There’s just nothing nicer than that and that’s really what keeps you going day to day, and eBooks now make that possible because in the olden days, meaning a couple years ago, people had trouble tracking down physical copies. It is the availability of eBooks which I think has really changed the game. I just couldn’t be more delighted to be part of the game now. It’s a great time to be a novelist.

Tim Knox: Very good. Jake, this has been a pleasure. Where can folks find out more about you?

Jake Needham: Well Tim, the website is easy to remember. It’s just JakeNeedham.com and you’ll find on the website not only all the books but I used to write a series called Letters of Asia, which was about my sort of adventures as an ex-pat living in Thailand and Singapore but as you may remember we had a fairly nasty military coupe in Thailand a few weeks ago and my wife and I slipped out quietly when nobody was looking.

The last couple Letters of Asia were about the coupe and the military crackdown in Thailand, which is funny and sad at the same time. There’s lots about it there. There’s lots about the books. They can access sample chapters from every book and they can always find a way just to write me if they’ve got any questions right through the website, JakeNeedham.com.

Tim Knox: Very good. Jake, this has been a pleasure. You’ve got to come back when your new book comes out.

Jake Needham: Tim, I’d love to. Thanks, man. I enjoyed it.

 

 

The post Jake Needham: Going Great Distances To Write Really Great Books appeared first on Interviewing Authors with Tim Knox, Author, Talk Radio Host, Serial Entrepreneur, Small Business Expert.

Vickie Sullivan: Define The Message, Build The Brand, and Sell More Books

Vickie Sullivan is internationally recognized as the top market strategist for authors, speakers, executives, and experts in a variety of fields.

She has twice served on the editorial board for Professional Speaker Magazine, and currently serves as contributing editor for RainToday.com, a prominent community of 120,000 service professionals.

Her articles have been published in other publications such as Presentations and USA Today magazines and the Handbook of Business Strategy.

Vickie also has been quoted in mainstream media such as Fortune.com, The New York Times and Investor’s Business Daily.

Her work and views have appeared in books such as Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America, Secrets of Six-Figure Women, and Getting Started in Consulting.

Vickie Sullivan Interview

Scroll down for a complete transcript of the interview or click the Play button below to listen to the interview now. And don’t forget to leave a comment to let us know what you thought of this interview!

Vickie Sullivan Transcript

Tim Knox: Hi everyone, welcome back in to Interviewing Authors. Vickie Sullivan is my guest today. Vickie is recognized around the world as one of the top market strategists for experts, thought leaders, speakers, authors and companies.

Now Vickie is the person you want to talk to if you have no idea how to market your book, how to define your message, how to build your brand because that’s what she does. We cover a lot in this interview.

Vickie talks about what it takes to be a successful author, whether you are a fiction or non-fiction author. Fundamentals are pretty much the same. She talks about book branding. She talks about trends and she talks mostly about market analysis and how you can market yourself not only as an author, a speaker or as a company but you can brand yourself as the expert, the go-to guy or the go-to gal in your field and that’s how you build a brand and that’s how you sell books.

So great interview. Get ready. If you have no idea what market strategy is, this is a must listen to for you, my friends. Here we go, Vickie Sullivan on this edition of Interviewing Authors.

Tim Knox: Vickie, welcome to the program.

Vickie Sullivan: Hey, Tim. I’m thrilled to be here. Thanks so much for inviting me.

Tim Knox: I am so glad to have you on the program. This is like old home week getting to talk to you.

Vickie Sullivan: Absolutely.

Tim Knox: You know we could probably spend an hour just telling the audience about our past and all the fun stuff we’ve done together but maybe we should stick to topic. What do you think?

Vickie Sullivan: Yeah let’s just keep that a secret.

Tim Knox: Well for those who are not familiar with your work, give us a thumbnail on who you are and what exactly do you do?

Vickie Sullivan: Well I’m Vickie Sullivan and I basically do market strategy for thought leaders. So people who have something to say, someone who really wants to serve the greater good out there with a message, a cause – I help position them in the right market so that cause can catch fire.

Tim Knox: You and I, that’s how we met. You were actually my market strategist and you helped me develop a message and a platform and eventually all kinds of books and stuff. You do a lot of work with speakers and with authors, right?

Vickie Sullivan: I work with speakers, authors. I work with executives in midsize businesses. A lot of folks are really getting… they’re wanting to do something meaningful. So we create a cause from their expertise that everybody can get behind and that really opens up a lot of opportunities.

Tim Knox: Well that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on here because as an old author myself, a lot of authors never think about market strategy. Hell, most of us don’t even know what market strategy is. Give us a definition.

Vickie Sullivan: Sure, market strategy is the collection of decisions you make about the role in the conversation that you want to participate in. So think about it. Think of the marketplace as a big cocktail party, okay, and everybody’s talking and everyone wants to visit and all. What conversation do you want to have with some of those people at the party? There’s going to be some people you want to talk to. There’s going to be some people you don’t want to talk to. There’s going to be people that you really want to connect with. What market strategy is is about having an idea about your role in the overall conversation about something you’re interested in.

Tim Knox: And how does that apply to authors, for example?

Vickie Sullivan: Well the book is basically a spotlight on your point of view. Now I work with clients that are in the non-fiction arena but even in fiction, and we talked about this offline, you have to have an area, whether it’s romance, whether it’s fantasy, zombies or vampires or whatever. You’ll notice that each of these artists or… whether you’re a filmmaker, an artist, whatever. You usually have pretty much a central message or theme that runs through all your work.

You’ve got to be strategic about that theme. Too many authors create a theme by accident. They create it in a vacuum and what happens when you do that, because the marketplace is just flooded with books right now, I mean flooded, I mean hundreds of thousands of books. Every year the march continues. It’s getting harder and harder to stand out.

Tim Knox: One of the points you make, and I think this is really important to point out, is it really doesn’t matter what genre you’re in whether you are non-fiction, fiction in a subgenre like romance, suspense, whatever. You’ve got to have some kind of strategy to take your book or your message, if you will, out to the market.

Vickie Sullivan: Absolutely and if you’re in fiction that key central character personifies something. They personify something that connects with the audience and they care now about that character. That’s what builds a series of books. So that happens in fiction just as much as it happens in non-fiction.

Tim Knox: Exactly and you know one thing we talked about offline was the importance of having that series or that backlist so if one of your books does catch fire and then the reader is like, “Wait, this is really good stuff. What else does this author have?” You better have another something in your bag of tricks to sell them, right?

Vickie Sullivan: Oh absolutely. I mean so many authors are ill prepared for the success that they are chasing.

Tim Knox: It’s like I’m a dog, I catch a car. What do I do with it?

Vickie Sullivan: Exactly. It’s such an opportunity lost because a book is really jet fuel, you know. You’re the rocket. The book will take you higher but if you don’t have something to sustain yourself up there, you’re going to come right back down.

Tim Knox: Such a great point. I know you deal usually with non-fiction. You deal with a lot of speakers. That was the association that you and I first had. You were the one that actually took this little chubby boy from Alabama and taught him how to be a speaker. I talk to a lot of speakers. I talk to a lot of authors. It seems that speakers want to be authors and authors want to be speakers.

Vickie Sullivan: Well yeah because everybody has something to say now. What you’ll notice – and this is one of the biggest trends in books right now – is who’s writing. Everyone and their brother is writing now. You’ve got politicians writing. You’ve got celebrities writing. Books have really become a vehicle for that spotlight and if you have a popular book then you get all sorts of opportunities that just come out of nowhere. It’s not about selling books. I mean of course it’s great when you do that but it’s the other opportunities.

I just heard about a very popular author that had a bestselling book about introverts. Do you know that she is in partnership now with an office furniture manufacturer to help produce furniture or cubicles in an office that helps with introverts?

Tim Knox: How does that work?

Vickie Sullivan: Well exactly. Here’s how it worked. She got so prominent and so popular and became to personify the introvert employee, the introvert leader, the introvert anybody. They came to her to partner with because they felt as the author of this popular book, she knew introverts better than anybody.

Tim Knox: And whether she did or not, she positioned herself as the expert in that area, right?

Vickie Sullivan: It didn’t matter. It was all about the popularity of the book.

Tim Knox: You do a lot of market strategy and you look across a lot of different things. What are you seeing in the book industry? You talked a little bit about there are a lot of books out there and a lot of authors but are you seeing anything specifically, any trends that authors need to be aware of?

Vickie Sullivan: Well I think that the biggest trend that authors need to be aware of is… how do I explain this? It’s kind of like what you don’t want to be. Too many authors are just putting their ideas out there willy-nilly. They need to be more aware of competition. A lot of authors are getting placed in the old wine in a new bottle category because their books really don’t say anything new. It’s just a different story, same message. That is the kiss of death for any author in this noisy market.

So what’s really happening from an author’s standpoint is you’ve got a lot of books out there and you’ve also got a lot of social media and places to promote that book. It’s not lack of access. It’s now lack of differentiation.

Tim Knox: Standing out among the crowd.

Vickie Sullivan: Exactly. So in the good old days if you got a media interview or if you went to Oprah or if you went to some of these talk shows, you would get a bump in book sales. That still happens to a certain extent. I mean Stephen Colbert talks about The Colbert Bump and there’s a grain of truth in that but that doesn’t happen as much anymore because there’s so many opportunities both online and off to promote your book that the noise level has become deafening.

So now the pendulum has swung toward strategy in that if you don’t stake your territory and if you don’t own your corner, no one’s going to pay attention to you. You’re going to look like one of many and if you look like one of many, you’re done.

Tim Knox: That doesn’t matter if you’re fiction or non-fiction or whatever.

Vickie Sullivan: Absolutely. If you look like a cheap imitation of a famous author, people are going to see that and they’re going to say well why not buy Stephen King’s book versus Stephen King-like?

Tim Knox: That’s one mistake that so many authors make. Okay, let’s see. What’s hot? Teenage vampires, zombies. I’m going to go write what’s hot and very rarely does that actually work out. I interviewed this guy, Armand Rosamilia, who’s been writing zombie books for forever. This guy is the king of the zombie books. If you ask Armand are you ever going to write romance? He’s going to go are you crazy? Why would I do that? This is my niche; this is what I know. If you’re an author jumping on every bandwagon that comes by, that’s really no guarantee that you’re going to sell a single book.

Vickie Sullivan: Absolutely. That’s why you’ve got to combine your strengths and your passion with what’s going on out there in the marketplace. That intersection is magic. That is pure gold.

Tim Knox: Really I think one of the things you’re saying is the author, him or herself, you’re not going to get successful on the merits of the book. You’ve got to brand yourself and get involved. You’ve got to be a product just as much as the book is, right?

Vickie Sullivan: Absolutely and that’s why you have to personify something bigger than yourself so that that book personifies a bigger message than a good story.

Tim Knox: How do I do that?

Vickie Sullivan: Well the first thing you do is you get clear on what you have to offer. You have to go deep. The market is no longer going to tolerate stuff at 30,000 feet. You have to really go deep and look at the message or the thing that you want to advocate. Tyler Perry is a great example. He does movies. He does all sorts of stuff. His whole platform is on family forgiveness.

Tim Knox: He has a running theme through all his movies.

Vickie Sullivan: Exactly and 100 million dollars on forgiveness and what that looks like and how you do that in the most dire situations and how do you lift yourself up from that. That’s the kind of thing you’ve got to really look at.

The introvert author, she celebrated introverts. She said introverts have so much to offer that people completely miss. She became what I call the spokesperson of a demographic. She represented a point of view or a characteristic that people resonated with.

Tim Knox: They connected.

Vickie Sullivan: Exactly. You’ve got to look at what do you connect with on the deepest level? Many authors stay at 30,000 feet. I’m going to be blunt here. They stay at 30,000 feet. They think my story of – and I had somebody call me one time; this is crazy. Someone said I want to write about my divorce and depression. I’m thinking to myself you better go a few layers below that, buddy. Everyone’s been divorced. Everyone’s been depressed. No one’s going to understand what you’re coming back from.

That’s a big trend that I see out there with books. I call it the battle of the stories. Storytelling has become so hot right now. We’re so focused on telling stories that we have forgotten about the point of those stories, the insight of those stories. You got to get to the insight too.

Tim Knox: You see that even a lot in the non-fiction genre. You see a lot of these authors now who are telling stories to try to get a point across, if you will, and some of them are really successful at it, others not so much. One thing you said that I want to go back to really quickly is as an author you’ve got to know yourself and your message before you write a word, don’t you?

Vickie Sullivan: Absolutely. Sometimes you can write… what’s great about writing is that you learn about yourself through your writing. Sometimes you can write just to get to know yourself, just to get to that depth. Then you can be ready to write a book.

Tim Knox: You talk a lot about branding in what you do. I’m an author. I’ve got a new book. I’m self-publishing. No one knows who I am. What are some of the things I can do to brand myself? Start off by defining branding for us.

Vickie Sullivan: Branding is the story other people tell themselves about you.

Tim Knox: What a great definition. I love that.

Vickie Sullivan: Bottom line. It’s simply a story that people tell themselves about you. We can influence that story with our interactions, what we give people, how we behave online. There’s a ton of different influences. It’s the story in our heads and our stories in our heads about other people really are around what I call unconscious comparisons. People make unconscious comparisons about us and each other every single moment. Every single moment they are comparing do I agree with this person? Do I believe this person? Is what they say true for me? Has this touched an emotion so I can connect with this person? That kind of thing. There’s all sorts of comparisons going on.

So what I tell a brand new author, the first thing I ask them is what is your real motivation for writing a book? What’s the real motivation? A lot of times it’s, well my business is slow. My consulting business is slow and so I thought I have all this time on my hands; I’ll just write a book.

Tim Knox: We need another book from a consultant, don’t we?

Vickie Sullivan: Exactly. That’s not going to work, okay. The authors that come to me and I’m thinking of a CEO of a midsize firm that I worked with – he had such a vision about how to build cities, right? All he needed was a frame around that vision so that people could engage him.

What I would say to authors is what message are you giving out there on your book that gives people the opportunity to join forces with you, to engage with you, to connect with you? What are you being a conduit for? What ideal are you advocating, are you promoting? Are you just putting out an idea because you got nothing else to do?

Tim Knox: Right. I’m bored so I’m going to write a book.

Vickie Sullivan: You’d be surprised.

Tim Knox: No I wouldn’t.

Vickie Sullivan: There’s a lot of – and I’m going to get on this tirade and then I’m going to get off. There’s a lot of folks out there that help people write books and they’re not helping, okay. They’re helping themselves more than they’re helping the author. All of those people are saying write a book, write a book, write a book because it’s in their best interest that the entire free world write a book.

Sometimes it’s too early to write a book. You’ve got to look at your timing, okay. If you don’t know yourself well enough, if you haven’t had an idea fleshed out well enough then it’s not time for you to write a book. There’s other ways to promote your work. There’s other ways to get yourself out there. You really got to check your motivation.

The second thing I ask new authors is what do you want to put a spotlight on? The book is a spotlight. The book draws attention to you. That’s the purpose of a book. What are you drawing attention to? If they can’t give me a clear answer to that, that’s lack of strategy, positioning and branding. It’s too early for them to write that book.

Tim Knox: That’s one thing I was going to ask you is at what point do they write the book? What you’re saying is they write the book when they’re ready and they have all their other ducks in a row and they have their message figured out, right?

Vickie Sullivan: They have their message and they have their business model figured out. You and I were talking about this offline. You got to be part entrepreneur if you’re going to write books. There’s no one out there that’s going to say let me take this book and make it a bestseller. I’ll call you back when it happens.

Tim Knox: I’ll send you a check.

Vickie Sullivan: Exactly. It ain’t happening. No way is it happening. You’ve got to be entrepreneurial and entrepreneurs have a business model. What do you want in exchange for people enjoying this book? What’s your business model? Is it more books? Is it an entire catalogue like you and I talked about before? Is it consulting? Is it group coaching? Some midsize businesses that I work with, they’re writing books to get a bigger vision out to position their company so they’re wanting opportunities to work with fabulous people or other fabulous companies.

What is the business model? So what’s your motivation? What are you going to put a spotlight on and what’s your business model? Those three questions will determine if you really ready to write a book.

Tim Knox: I think that’s so important. Out of all these interviews that I’ve been doing, the one common theme that comes out from all of these successful authors, I don’t care if they are traditionally publishing with an agent or they’re self-publishing, the message time and time again is you’re an author but you’re an entrepreneur. You have to understand that the books that you write aren’t your babies; they’re the product of your business.

Vickie Sullivan: Exactly and they have a role in your business and you need to be clear on what that role is. A lot of politicians write books so that they can go on a book tour and hit all the media circuit. You’ve got businesses out there writing books and they call it an oversized business card. Now there’s some pros and cons to that strategy.

Everyone has a purpose or an agenda behind a book and a lot of new authors write a book in a vacuum. They’re like well I had nothing to do. My business is slow or the economy is slow or I just like to write so I’m going to write and throw it out there and see what happens. Now there are people who get discovered at the soda shop, so to speak, but that’s happening less than in the good old days.

Tim Knox: Right and you work a lot with the top guys and gals in the business, top speakers. You’ve got some that write a book to use as a marketing piece, right? It’s how they generate leads.

Vickie Sullivan: Absolutely. Speakers do it. Midsized companies do it. I’ve worked with a lot of executives from midsized companies that do it as a personal branding tool. Here’s what I stand for. Look at the CEO circuit, Jack Welsh. He wrote a book and said here’s what I stand for. I’m a success, therefore I’m going to tell you my secrets. That was just to draw the media to him and his new projects.

Tim Knox: It’s just a marketing piece. It’s all about what we talked about a minute ago and that’s branding for him.

Vickie Sullivan: Exactly. So then from an author’s standpoint, you’ve got to know that those competitors are out there. So how do you dominate your corner of the territory? What do you own as far as your role in that conversation? If you are a midsized company and you’re a PR firm and you want to talk about promotion – and I’m just making this up – then what part of that conversation are you going to dominate?

I worked with a CEO of a midsized firm and she was into user experience. We had her advocate a particular thing about the user experience domain. In the purpose of her work, her thought leadership was if you want to know about this then I’m your girl.

Tim Knox: Right. I’m the source.

Vickie Sullivan: Right, I’m the source. So that is part of market strategy and branding is deciding what corner are you going to own.

Tim Knox: How important is it for that message to be unique? I’m not going to write here’s my new book, Vickie. It’s called Who Moved My Cheese under My Colored Parachute. Who’s going to buy that?

Vickie Sullivan: Yeah, that’s the thing. Thank you to the internet, YouTube and all that – you’ve got a lot of good ideas out there free. Here’s what’s happening. When money exchanges hands, even if it is $0.99 on Kindle, okay, people have expectations. Your message has to be very unique because in comparison the non-unique is free on the internet. You’ve got to look at the comparisons. People are saying, wait a minute. Why should I pay you for this book if I can get the same information for free? That’s that unconscious comparison that we were talking about before that authors need to be aware of.

It’s very important that your book have a message that is unique enough that doesn’t put you in the one of many category or cheap imitation category because otherwise people aren’t going to buy it. Why should they? They get the same for free.

Tim Knox: It’s just like if you’re an author you have to think of yourself as an entrepreneur. You have to think of your readers as your customers.

Vickie Sullivan: Exactly.

Tim Knox: I don’t care if your book is $0.99. If they don’t feel they get their money’s worth, you’re going to hear about it.

Vickie Sullivan: Well yeah and in our transparent society with social media you better believe if anyone feels any degree of rip-offedness, they’re going to tell you about it.

Tim Knox: Is that a word?

Vickie Sullivan: Probably not.

Tim Knox: You just made that up. Let’s go over to the dark side here for a minute. We kind of touched on this but what are some of the more common mistakes that you see authors making that can taint the book altogether?

Vickie Sullivan: Well the first thing, and we talked a little about this, and I call this writing in a vacuum. Now writing for your own edification or writing to get to know yourself better, there’s always value in that. If you are interested in authorship as an entrepreneurial pursuit, you cannot write that book in a vacuum. You’ve got to look at the marketplace and again decide what corner you’re going to own.

So the biggest mistake I see is a lack of positioning. So many authors think I’ve got a great idea. If I just put that idea out there in a book it will catch fire. It’s not true, it’s not true, it’s not true. They’ve got to be aware of the comparisons. If you’re seen as one of many, if you’re seen as a cheap imitation, if you’re seen as old wine in a new bottle, you’re going to fall flat. I’m telling you what, the price of falling flat has gone up, Tim. I’ve seen businesses go under because of a book gone bad.

I have a colleague that I knew for years. She had a leadership institute and she wrote a book and she wrote that book in a vacuum. She thought all she had to do was write about her ideas and that was enough. The book tanked. She spent six figures on vendors proofreading the book, doing this, doing that, promoting the book. Because the book wasn’t well positioned, all the promotion in the world will not overcome bad strategy.

Tim Knox: Or a bad book.

Vickie Sullivan: Yeah, it will not overcome that. She threw six figures at this and it was enough to tank her. She went in to retirement.

Tim Knox: You can’t just throw money at something like this, can you?

Vickie Sullivan: No, you’ve got to use some brain cells. You’ve got to think. You’ve got to see the book as a business tool and you’ve got to invest strategically. I mean I see a lot of authors spend more money on proofreading than they will on strategy and that’s just a recipe for disaster. It really is.

Tim Knox: Let’s talk about in the few minutes we’ve got left – what’s your advice if I’m a new author? You specialize in non-fiction but I think some of the advice will go across the board. If I call you up and say I’m thinking of writing a book. What do I need to know about the market? Is this a good time? What’s your best advice?

Vickie Sullivan: My best advice is the market always has space to discover new things. So I would talk to that new author about what they want to put out there – what are they advocating, what are they supporting? What’s really the fire in the belly? Then I would say, okay, now that we know your fire in the belly let’s go out there and find a corner to own. What corner can you uniquely own that no one can take away from you? That is where you build the book around. You build the book around that corner. You don’t retrofit it.

Sometimes authors will come to me after they’ve written the book and they’re like, okay, I’m ready to talk to you, market strategist, because I have my book written. Now where’s your magic wand? I’m like, oh, horse’s out the barn. What are we going to do now?

Now there are some things you can do so let’s continue our trip on the dark side. Let’s say you wrote the book, you made all the mistakes we’ve been talking about. You’re seen as one of many. The book’s tanking. What can you do to kind of turn the ship around? Well you could take the media that you’re creating and you can stop talking about the book and talk about something bigger. Use the book as a toolkit or as a reminder. So what you would say is I wrote this book to remind everybody that we blah, blah, blah – there’s the message. So even though the book doesn’t outline the message, you can do it in media and promotion efforts so that people have a frame around the book.

Tim Knox: Very good. Vickie, tell us where we can learn more about what you do.

Vickie Sullivan: Well you can go to VickieSullivan.com and you will see three options there for you. You’ll see professional speakers. You’ll see thought leaders, which a lot of authors kind of fall into the thought leader category because they want to stand out and distinguish themselves and you will even see the midsized businesses there.

Click on one of those and you and I will kind of start an online conversation about what’s going on out there, what you need to be aware of, what you need to be thinking about and then if there’s something that I can do, I’ve got all sorts of learning systems that will help people distinguish themselves, will help them do kind of a test run on some of their ideas or their business models so they can go to the store.

They can sign up for my blog if they just want to see me, tips, trends and tirades, if they want more on the frontlines of market strategy, what’s going on out there to brand yourself and be unique.

Tim Knox: One thing you are very good at, and this is my personal testimonial, is you’re very good at grabbing someone by the ankles, turning them upside down, shaking them ruthlessly until all those jumbled thoughts in their heads start to gel. That’s what you did with me a while ago. It’s been a few years now.

Vickie Sullivan: Absolutely and, you know, it always amazes me what people have inside them. I will say this one last thing. People know far more than they’re telling. I have seen that time and time again. Authors are especially guilty of this. They’ll cruise at 30,000 feet thinking they’re doing right but I’m telling you, they know far more than they’re telling. The people that work with me, we get into what you really know.

Tim Knox: One of the things that I really liked about working with you is you’re a great sounding board. I think that’s one thing that authors need because being an author, especially a fiction author, is kind of a lonely business. You are there by yourself most of the time working, writing. It’s always great to have someone that you can throw ideas at and will throw them back. You were very helpful with me in that respect so thank you.

Vickie Sullivan: Oh absolutely. I tell people all the time – the sharpest knife cannot carve its own handle.

Tim Knox: I love these sayings you have.

Vickie Sullivan: I’m telling you. I bring people into my business. Even though I do it for other people, I bring people into my business because I know I can’t carve my own handle. Same thing with us all. We all just need to help and support one another and that’s the rising tide that lifts all boats.

Tim Knox: Unfortunately not everybody sees it that way. In publishing and speaking too, there’s a very me, me, me mentality and a lot of that has to do with the state of the industry I guess.

Vickie Sullivan: Well I think there’s a lot of desperate people out there and you know authors, particularly new authors, need to be very, very careful because there’s desperate people whose business models have collapsed and they’re now looking for any kind of money that they can get. I truly believe that people don’t wake up and say, “Hey today’s Thursday. I think I’m going to go rip off a bunch of people today. Woohoo!”

I don’t think there’s any of that kind of thinking on the whole. I think folks just get so desperate and they’re so scared because they don’t know their next move that they just start saying that they can do stuff when they can’t but they don’t know they can’t. So new authors who don’t know any different can really fall prey to that kind of dynamic.

Tim Knox: You’re right. You have to be very careful because the internet especially is full of people that will help you get your book published and will edit your book and help you build a platform and buyer beware on most of this.

Vickie Sullivan: Yeah because what happens is they’ll charge so little that the author will say, well this is low risk and so what have I got to lose? Well that’s how authors die, by a thousand paper cuts. One of the biggest pieces of advice to go back and answer your question that I would help new authors with, is determine who’s real, who’s not, who’s just going to give you information that you could get for free versus who’s going to really help.

I think that’s what I do differently than a lot of other folks is we really dig deep. I mean the depth of the work is not 30,000 feet at all because the money, the profits, the value is in the nooks and crannies of the market. It’s in that corner you choose to own. That’s a very strategic choice that people just don’t make, don’t see until it’s too late.

Tim Knox: I know when I worked with you, you kept telling me to be a thought leader and I kept telling you that would require thoughts. Vickie Sullivan, you are a market strategist, branding expert. Again, give us your website address.

Vickie Sullivan: VickieSullivan.com.

Tim Knox: Very good. It’s been a pleasure my dear. Talk to you soon.

Vickie Sullivan: See you later.

 

 

The post Vickie Sullivan: Define The Message, Build The Brand, and Sell More Books appeared first on Interviewing Authors with Tim Knox, Author, Talk Radio Host, Serial Entrepreneur, Small Business Expert.

Paula Slade: Giving Voice To The Author’s Words

Paula Slade is one of the busiest audiobook narrators in the business. She works with a number of authors across a variety of genres to bring their work to life.

An alumnus of NBC-TV’s Daytime Writers Program, Wisdom Bridge Theater, and The Players Workshop of the Second City, she served as head of the Literary Department for the Savage Agency in Hollywood; developed radio and television programming for Blair Entertainment in New York, and wrote for a number of diverse publications.

Paula is also an accomplished actress whose credits include television series Starman, Hardcastle and McCormick, Remington Steele, and General Hospital.

She’s also done a number of national commercials (on-camera and voice-over) for clients such as Sears, McDonald’s, Baldwin Pianos, and Toyota.

Today she serves as Vice President/Creative Director and audio book narrator for Artistic Media Associates, based in Boston.

Paula Slade Interview

Scroll down for a complete transcript of the interview or click the Play button below to listen to the interview now. And don’t forget to leave a comment to let us know what you thought of this interview!

Paula Slade Transcript

Tim Knox: Paula Slade is my guest today. Paula has quite the varied background in media. She has done radio. She has done television. She’s been the head of the literary department for a company that develops radio and television programs. Paula was also an actress. You might have seen her on shows such as Remington Steele, Hardcastle and McCormick and the perennial favorite, General Hospital.

Now Paula is working as one of the top book narrators in the business. I’m talking about audiobooks, audio versions of books which that industry is growing like wildfire. Paula talks about that, how the growth in the industry is spurring more and more books to become audiobooks, which books make great audiobooks and which books do not.

She talks about working with the authors, the process and a whole lot more. If you’ve ever thought about getting an audiobook produced of your work you don’t want to miss this interview with Paula Slade, one of the best narrators in the business, on today’s Interviewing Authors.

Tim Knox: Paula, welcome to the program.

Paula Slade: Thanks, Tim. It’s really wonderful to be here.

Tim Knox: It is wonderful having you here. We get so many questions on the website about audiobooks and how to get them made and how to find talent and you’re one of the best so I’m very happy that you’re here today to talk to us about that. Before we get started give us a little background.

Paula Slade: I’ve been on radio and doing voice work for 38 years.

Tim Knox: You started at the age of five.

Paula Slade: Thank you, Tim. I’ve been at it for quite some time. I’ve done many, many different types of narration; everything from audiobooks now to commercials national, just about everything you can imagine that needs to be narrated – point of purchase demonstrations, you name it.

Tim Knox: You do have quite a varied background. I was reading your bio. You started in radio and you ended up doing a lot of voice over work. You also have done some acting in your day.

Paula Slade: Oh yes, oh yes.

Tim Knox: Remington Steele. I was a Remington Steele fanatic.

Paula Slade: You were.

Tim Knox: I was and also I watched General Hospital a time or two but let’s not spread that news. How did you go from being an on air reporter, an announcer to doing acting, to doing voice overs to now doing audiobooks?

Paula Slade: Well it was a path that just kind of meandered in many different directions over the years. After I left the radio business I wanted to get into acting. That was kind of a backdoor way of getting into it. I started doing a lot of background work. Chicago was a market where you could work all the time doing background work and I worked my way up from background getting into commercials on camera. I went from local commercials to national commercials and then I decided to make the switch to move out to Los Angeles.

During that period of time I was studying everything I could get my hands on as far as acting. I was working with Wisdom Bridge Theatre, Second City, you name it – on camera, off camera, just really getting a good three, four years of solid education. That’s what enabled me to move to Los Angeles because actually I was a working actress in Chicago before I left. Many people try to get out to Los Angeles to work and get a career established without doing the basics and that is a problem for them.

But it was a long road and in addition to doing the acting out there – it’s not a full-time job but it was nice when you did get a gig. I also worked for a talent agency. It was children’s talent. The owner of the agency, Judy Savage, wanted to establish a literary division. I headed that for her and worked with a lot of different screenwriters getting their books placed and their scripts placed. So it was a very interesting path that we took.

In the process my husband and I also wrote together. We had developed some programming which was picked up by Blair Entertainment out of New York. We were working very hard to get into the area of soaps and Lee Bell from The Young and Restless, The Bold and the Beautiful had heard of our work and recommended us to Blair Entertainment and it took off from there. It was a project that we worked on for several years. It was developing radio crossover programming, which was to go to television eventually.

So we had to do casting and the casting for this type of thing was the talent had to look the way they sounded, which was a very unusual concept in radio.

Tim Knox: Exactly. You have a face for radio.

Paula Slade: Exactly but the eventual transition was to move it to television, to primetime. It was in the heyday of the primetime soaps so that’s how that whole thing developed. From there then we retired from the business for a few years to have a family and got back into it a few years ago basically with our own company, Artistic Media Associates, and have taken off in many different directions with the contacts that we’ve had throughout the United States and over the years.

We’re doing a plethora of different things that are involved in the industry, everything from booking talent for live venues to audiobooks and that is a major focus recently. We also do restoration of old films and you name it. We’re into it.

Tim Knox: It sounds like you put in the proverbial 100,000 hours. You paid your dues and you went out and did a considerable amount. It really all kind of ties together because it was media, it was voice and what you’re doing now with the audiobooks I think especially is timely. I think that’s where books are going. Everybody talks about audiobooks and no one has a lot of time to read anymore. They just want to listen. What was your first audiobook project?

Paula Slade: I’d rather not say because it was a nightmare.

Tim Knox: Can you just tell us why it was a nightmare?

Paula Slade: The individual approached us. This person had heard my voice and wanted me to do a book. It was a sizable book with many other books involved in the series. I was not familiar with her work and I was flattered. It came out of nowhere. When I finally got the script and I realized what I was up against and I was listening to other audiobooks that this individual had put out, I cringed. I absolutely cringed. I should have done my homework checking this person out but I was flattered. Let’s put it that way. When I heard the quality of the books that were being offered out there, they were flat narrations, there were mispronunciations, you name it. I cringed.

When working with her script, or the individual’s script, I found many, many errors and not just grammar but in the books themselves, which also made me cringe because having done some writing myself it was very difficult to swallow and I said, “Would you like me to go along and help you reedit this for your Kindle?” They basically told me no, just pay attention to the narration and don’t bother with that. That’s not your business. I went and I did some of the book and it started getting worse and worse and worse. It was not a pleasant situation. A learning situation? Yes, very definitely.

Tim Knox: But don’t you think you have to kind of go through that? Really you’re dealing with authors and my God what an egotistical bunch we are. I can say that because I’m right in there with them. I’ve done a lot of radio and that sort of thing but I can’t imagine doing an audiobook because to me I would bore myself just reading it. How do you make it entertaining?

Paula Slade: How do you make it entertaining? It depends on the topic. If it’s a non-fiction, which I actually am a non-fiction fan. I read just about anything that comes down the pipe as far as non-fiction is concerned. You have to get into the author’s head really. You have to hear their voice and incorporate their voice into your voice. Their speech pattern, it’s evident as you read in non-fiction.

Now in fiction that’s a totally different thing. You approach that as an actor, as if you were being given a script either to do for stage or film or television and you breakdown the character. You take apart everything from their emotions to their motivations. You kind of write a mini biography in your head, where you think this person has come from so that you can actually bring that person alive in the dialogue. A good writer as they’re developing a book will do that. They will write a biography for that person or they’ll have notes scribbled all over the place saying he went to school at Harvard so he’s got a little bit of an accent here or he doesn’t get along with his dad so he’s very rough at times with his own son. There are different elements that will come out in the character when you speak so it’s an entirely different approach.

Which is more fun? I would say probably the acting part. The fiction is probably a lot more fun to do because you get to stretch as an actor, as a narrator. You get to take on many different voices or personas within a book. If it’s well written and the character speaks to you, you can speak for the character. It’s not a boring situation when you’re sitting in a real tiny booth for several hours a day and it’s dark and you’re reading.

Tim Knox: So really when you’re doing the reading of the audiobooks it is a form of acting. You’re just not doing a flat read. You are trying to put yourself into the head of the characters and the emotion of the book just like you’re doing an acting part.

Paula Slade: Absolutely. We just recently wrapped a marvelous book, The Haunted by Michaelbrent Collings, and I know you interviewed him

Tim Knox: I love Michaelbrent. He and I are pals.

Paula Slade: He’s a wonderful fellow, wonderful. It was a joy to do. It really was because the characters were so rich. The story was rich. It was a rich visualization too. When you talk about audiobooks, a lot of it translates to the mind’s eye as you’re listening and it comes alive. There were just so many different wonderful voices that I was able to do and he was great to work with.

Tim Knox: He’s such a nice guy. I said do you ever think of reading your own books? He’s like why would I do that? I have Paula. Anytime someone goes, why would I do that? That’s a great testimony for you. Let’s talk a little about the process. So once you’re contacted and you talk to them do you ask to read the book ahead of time or is just taken on as project work? What really is the process? If I’m an author. For example, if I was thinking about having you do my book, Angel of Mercy, I would call you up and the process would be what?

Paula Slade: I would like to read the book first, not to say yes or no. I mean obviously I would do my homework on the book but in order to get a feel, to make sure that I’m the right person for the book and that I can pull it off I want to see it. I want to see it from start to finish. Also when I go through and read a book I highlight all of the… I start acting it out. My husband and I will sit and we’ll do the read-throughs for an hour, two hours a day until the book is done.

As I’m going through I underline or I color code the characters so I start getting an idea of how they’re speaking and their voice and underline any problem words if something is a foreign word to me or is pronounced a certain way. I will take that into consideration. I’ll put little notes in the text. I prefer to have something sent to me in a Microsoft Word format so I can do all of this doodling there. Then once I feel secure with it, it’s a go. Yeah, we generally start with a read-through first. You have to.

Tim Knox: Does your husband do the male voices?

Paula Slade: Not yet, not yet.

Tim Knox: You sound like you want him to.

Paula Slade: I do. I think he’s got a marvelous voice. In fact a lot of people have said to him, “Have you ever done voice work?” “No, that’s not mine. I’d rather sit and do the mastering.”

Tim Knox: Can this be equated to do you remember the old radio serials? I know you and I are both too young to remember those but I’m sure you’ve seen them on documentaries and movies. Is this kind of the same thing almost as far as acting out the book in audio?

Paula Slade: I approach it that way and the reason I approach it is because of that major project we worked on for Radio Cinema Network. I think that’s the direction. I mean if you listen to a lot of audiobooks you’re going to find many, many are a very flat read which is fine. For some books that’s perfect. The trend I’m starting to see are real actors getting into the roles and really exploring the characters in-depth and making them come alive.

Tim Knox: That’s interesting. What do you say to authors who are of the mind that they want to voice their own audiobook? How do you poke that ego with a stick?

Paula Slade: Okay, I certainly understand that. 15, 20 years ago if somebody said to me, if I had written a book at that point and I wanted to do it I would kind of say I’m not sure I can handle it. The reason I would say that is you got to have the training, you’ve got to know what you’re doing, you’ve got to have the acting background. It really is important. It’s not just getting up and reading a book verbatim.

You also have to be able to have the recording facility. There are things that sound like they’ve been recorded in a bathroom. Honestly, they’re out there and they are for sale. It really is a shame because some of the books are good and that really depends on where you look for your talent or where you look for your studio. There are places you can go online and get very, very inexpensive talent. I’m not knocking them. I’m not basing the audiobook industry on the price of the talent. You can negotiate anything from $0, which would include a royalty share, to $1,000 per finished hour with a talent. It really depends on the talent. It depends upon what you’re comfortable with. If your book was a really hot bestseller and you have the rights for it then you probably would want to buy the talent out. That would be my feeling. If your book is doing extremely well and you’re all over the place in media and everything, you might want to say let’s try a royalty share. Let’s try that, 50/50 split. It really depends on the contract that you setup with the narrator.

Tim Knox: So the royalty split would be where the narrator provides the narration and the product and then there’s a royalty split among the narrator and the author.

Paula Slade: Right, right and there would be no pay upfront. There are things like on Audio Creation Exchange where in order to get a really good book done that people aren’t auditioning for, they’ll offer something called a stipend and the stipend is a modest sum around $100, $115, $125 per finished hour for you to do the book, plus you get a royalty share. Audible is offering the stipend, not the author. The author does not have to. There are different ways you can work it out. It’s all over the map. It’s whatever is your comfort level.

Tim Knox: Let’s talk a little bit about that. You mentioned a dollar amount per finished hour. How many hours really goes into a finished hour?

Paula Slade: A lot. Again, depending on the book it’s anywhere between 6.5 to 8.5 hours per finished hour and it can be more than that. It depends on the book and it depends upon how fast you narrate the book. There are certain books that have a quicker pace of narration but then there are books that will go up and down and you’ll be painting a picture in a very slow way but then you’ll slowly be increasing your time, increasing the pace of your reading.

The givens are at the very end, after you walk away from say recording an hour or half hour or 20 minutes or whatever, there’s quality control that has to be done. Oftentimes too it’s incredibly easy to add a word when you’re narrating and there are times that both my husband and I have both missed it and we’ll catch it on a final read-through listening to it again. It’s like oh darn. I added an ‘a’ or I didn’t say this right. Let’s do it again. You kind of go back in and clean it up and make sure… it’s a permanent picture of what and who you are as a narrator. As far as I’m concerned I want it to be the best that it can be.

Tim Knox: How do I know that my book is a good candidate to become an audiobook?

Paula Slade: Just about every book if it’s well written is a good candidate. The industry is just huge right now. I think it was last year. The audiobook industry raked in something – I think it was just on Amazon – over a billion dollars a year. It’s huge.

The only two books that come to mind that aren’t suitable are cookbooks and children’s books, let me say children’s picture books. However, on the children’s picture books if you were to add music, sound effects and of course character voices and stuff you can build on that. It’s a little bit longer than, you know, the 32 pages but again if we’re getting into the world of adding music we’re talking about other rights that you have to buy out. That can become very expensive. What I’m saying here is if there’s a visual element that is very necessary to the book it might not translate well.

Tim Knox: Let’s talk a little bit about cost because you mentioned a little bit about the cost per running hour and that sort of thing and how much effort really goes into the finished hour of product. If I’m an author with a typical fiction book, 300 pages – what all has to happen in there and what are the costs that I might incur along the way?

Paula Slade: It depends. First of all, you have to be the rights holder of the book. In other words, sometimes people are published through houses and they don’t have the audio rights so really it’s the publisher that has control of it. That’s the first step. You have to have your own rights. You can buy your rights back from your publisher I assume so if that’s important to you then go ahead and do that. That would be the only thing.

As far as pay along the way, again it depends upon the contract that you cut with the narrator or the studio. For example, on Audio Creation Exchange you have that option. You have the option to go zero money down and go totally royalty share. Now when you enter into ASX they will also look at your book and they’ll see how your sales are doing, particularly on Amazon. If they think your book is really good and you’ve got some excellent reviews going they may offer a stipend for a talent to say, “Hey, let me look at this book. I might really want to do that and take very little upfront and then do a royalty share.”

You can start off with nothing as far as putting money into it. Then you can go to Audible approved only narration people and I think what you have to do is something… you have to have done 25 books with Audible in order to get that approval. That can run you anywhere between $400 to $1,000 an hour per finished hour. Finished hour is if your book turns out to be eight hours narrated and you’re being charged $1,000 an hour it would be $8,000.

In most cases the average book, if you wanted to add your own money or offer say $100 or $200 per hour, you figure on that and they give you a way to figure out how many hours your book actually will be. There’s a formula that you can do for the number of words in the book and it translates pretty closely within maybe 15 minutes in either direction.

Tim Knox: How long does it typically take to produce the audiobook? If I’m the author and we do a deal today, when am I going to see a finished product?

Paula Slade: It depends upon the length of the book and the complexity of the book. Average books if they’re small, just 100 pages or something, can take anywhere between three weeks. If it’s a larger novel or self-help book or something it can take eight weeks, but somewhere between the three weeks and the eight weeks you can expect to have a book delivered.

Now if you do it through ASX there’s also a quality control that they do afterwards, which is very nice. It’s very, very nice for the client because if there’s anything missing or there’s any problems they’ll come back. They’re very stringent on what they do and that’s good. That’s very, very good for the author. It gives you the best sound.

Tim Knox: Now if I’m an author how much can I expect to make from the sale of audiobooks? How does it compare with my paperbacks, my digital books, et cetera?

Paula Slade: That depends upon what you price it at and it depends upon how much you’re in the marketplace. If you have say a website, if you’re into social media, if you have a presence, you go and visit libraries, you do lots of book signings and things of that nature – you have an audience already built in. People will buy the audio version even if they have read the actual book version.

One of the things Amazon offers now is this Whispersync, which if you have a Kindle… let’s say your Kindle’s selling for $2.99 or $3.99, they’ll include the audiobook into the Kindle if it matches. It’s got to be well recorded and it’s got to match word for word but they’ll include it. There’s various different forms of incentives that they’ll offer you to get your book out and get it going. They give you a lot of good advice, an awful lot of good advice.

Again, your media presence is very essential too. If your book was successful your audiobook will probably be successful as well.

Tim Knox: Are you seeing the audiobooks as kind of an extension of the product offering? Remember back in the old days when all we had were books? They were hard and they were rectangular and you had to hold them. Everything now is digital and eBooks. Do you see the audiobook just as the natural progression of where things are going in publishing?

Paula Slade: Yes I do. I see it along with the Kindle. I love books, a real book in my hand. I do and I love the smell of them but eventually I do see this happening. It is a faster, easier way to get product out to people. It’s an alternative and we also have a baby boom generation that’s aging that may not be able to read books or see them as well even in large type and large type is not always made possible. I think it’s a trend and I think it’s a trend because of the sales that have been happening in the industry itself. It is burgeoning. It’s just huge.

Tim Knox: It seems to me that a lot of the authors, especially the marketing savvy ones, are looking toward audiobooks as the next go. It’s kind of like, you know, a lot of people are doing book trailers now, a little video. I think it’s a wave that’s coming and I think you’re in the right place to ride it well. For authors that are thinking about getting an audiobook done, what are some of the things they need to think about when it comes to casting the right voice for their book? Not every voice talent is cut out to voice every book. What are some of the things to consider?

Paula Slade: I think the very first thing you need to do is ask who your audience is and who’s your central character in a fiction book? Who’s talking in that book? Is it a male or a female? That’s the very first thing you need to ask. Are there other characters that take over in that book? Let’s say you start off with a male character and then it becomes a female leading the way.

The final thing is who’s your audience? Who do you deal with? Is this a romance novel where you’re going to be selling primarily to women? Do you want a woman’s voice or do you want a man’s voice? I mean there are a number of ways and that’s the first thing. First look to see who speaks.

The next thing you should be looking for is somebody who has broadcast experience but also an acting background, particularly if it’s a fiction book. It’s not so important if it’s a non-fiction but definitely if you have a fiction book you want an actor coming in there and interpreting your book as best as it can be.

Tim Knox: As the author, am I involved in this process at all?

Paula Slade: If you’re the rights holder, yes, you should be 100% involved. If you have a publisher that you’re dealing with they may or may not allow you to make some suggestions or choices or bring people to the table. Ultimately if you’re not the rights holder they will have the final say in it.

Tim Knox: But the author’s not going to sit in the room and watch you do the book.

Paula Slade: No.

Tim Knox: God help you.

Paula Slade: What will generally happen is when somebody is looking for voice talent the word will go out, calls will be made, you’ll either be offered an audition or if you hear about it you will go forth and offer your own audition and send it down as an .mp3 file. Then they make their choice. As an actor or narrator you can’t be disappointed if you don’t get it because they had something else in mind. So it’s a fun process but you never know where it’s going to lead. One thing as an author, one of the things I’d like to suggest is when you listen to auditions be open to the unusual. Be open to somebody bringing in something that you’ve never even anticipated.

When we were casting for the Radio Cinema Network we were going through lots and lots of talent and in some instances some of the actors brought in readings that just bowled us over, totally blew us away. They brought in more than we wrote. We had to put the ego aside and say you got the job because you have really brought this further than we could have ever imagined. That’s one of the things as an author. Be open to the new and the surprising.

Tim Knox: Do you find a lot of authors have preconceived notions as to what they want it to sound like before it starts?

Paula Slade: Probably yes, I would say definitely yes. As a writer I have a preconceived notion about how my things have to be written or spoken but I also am open to somebody coming in and if you can do it better, do it please. I will step aside.

Tim Knox: Right, now if you wrote a fiction book would you want to voice it yourself or would you have someone else do it?

Paula Slade: It depends. I probably wouldn’t do it myself being so closely involved in it. I would probably try to find somebody who will do it better than I could and bring a whole new element to it that I may have missed. It was a lesson that I learned and it’s something you need to keep in mind. If they bring more to the table, that’s to your benefit.

Tim Knox: Paula Slade from Artistic Media Associates, this has been wonderful. Such great information. Tell us where we can find more about your work, your company.

Paula Slade: Well you can visit us on ArtisticMediaAssociates.com and you can go in and hear some samples right now on ACX, Audio Creation Exchange.  Just type in my name, Paula Slade, as a producer and you’ll get a whole preview of lots of things and also you’ll be able to hear the first five minutes of The Haunted. We just put it up there the other day. We’re so excited about it.

Tim Knox: Fantastic. I’ll have to go listen to that and call Michaelbrent and go, “Hey you’re not going to believe what I heard.” Paula, this has been fun. Let’s do keep in touch. You are my audiobook expert now whether you like it or not. Anytime I have a question I’m calling you.

Paula Slade: Thank you so much.

Tim Knox: Paula, thank you so much. We’ll talk to you soon.

The post Paula Slade: Giving Voice To The Author’s Words appeared first on Interviewing Authors with Tim Knox, Author, Talk Radio Host, Serial Entrepreneur, Small Business Expert.

Corban Addison: How A Social Conscience and An Activist’s Heart Led To Bestselling Novels

Corban Addison is the author of two international bestselling novels, A Walk Across the Sun and The Garden of Burning Sand, which address some of today’s most pressing human rights issues.

An attorney, activist, and world traveler, he is a supporter of numerous humanitarian causes, including the abolition of modern slavery, gender-based violence, and HIV/AIDS.

He lives with his wife and children in Virginia.

Corban Addison Interview

Scroll down for a complete transcript of the interview or click the Play button below to listen to the interview now. And don’t forget to leave a comment to let us know what you thought of this interview!

Books by Corban Addison

  

Corban Addison Transcript

Tim Knox: Corban Addison is my guest today. Corban is a former corporate attorney turned author who initially got into the business with a little help from a guy you may know by the name of John Grisham.

Now Grisham sees some of Corban’s work and introduced him into the right circles and his talent took him the rest of the way. Corban has written two books – A Walk Across the Sun and the new book, Garden of Burning Sand. Both of them deal with human rights issues around the globe.

Corban talks about how he traveled to South Africa and other places researching these books and how at times his own life might have been in danger because of the subject matter of human trafficking and the rights of young women in these countries. A great interview; you’re going to learn a lot today about research and character development and how to turn a successful career as a corporate attorney into an equally, if not greater, success as an author.

Give it a listen. Here’s Corban Addison, author of A Walk Across the Sun and Garden of Burning Sand, on today’s Interviewing Authors.

Tim Knox: Corban, welcome to the program.

Corban Addison: Thanks so much, a pleasure to be here.

Tim Knox: We appreciate you being here. Before we get started, give the audience a little background on you.

Corban Addison: Yeah so I’m 35, practiced law for a while. I graduated from the University of Virginia Law School, did that and like a lot of attorneys I met I was an aspiring author, a storyteller. I’m not sure why that is but definitely a sort of commonality among attorneys to want to write books. I was one of them for quite some time, knocking my head against the wall and New York publishing and getting the raft of rejection letters about books I’d written previously that nobody seemed to be interested in publishing until about 2008. We watched a film on human trafficking. My wife had previously given me the idea that perhaps if I continued to write maybe I should write something that’s a little bit more topical.

Tim Knox: What were you writing before that?

Corban Addison: You know it was honestly the kind of stuff that so many aspiring writers right out of the gate try to do, so various kinds of autobiographical stories, things that were more reflective and philosophical. I have sort of a background in that. Anyway, it was not terribly surprising that nobody wanted to publish my story in fiction but nevertheless that was what I was cutting my teeth on. It was great for trial and error but I’m glad that none of those books ever got published.

So anyway, we watched that film on human trafficking and my wife pretty much said I think this is a topic you could take on. I was willing to try and it was this crazy odyssey that took three and a half years from conception to publication but ultimately it got me out of the gate and got me started on writing stories about international human rights. My second one, The Garden of Burning Sand, just came out last month.

Tim Knox: I can’t tell you how many authors that I interview that used to be lawyers. Is that something among lawyers? They just have stories in them that have to get out. They want to be a writer. What are your thoughts?

Corban Addison: I think people who are attracted to the law are communicators and especially people who practice in the courtroom as I did are storytellers. To be honest, law school is one of those sort of catchall places. When I was in law school I remember meeting people from all across the spectrum of life who were drawn to the law because it’s such a versatile degree. I find that a lot of lawyers they get out, start practicing. Some people who become lawyers are really cut from that cloth and really want to do it with their lives; a lot of them aren’t and find pretty quickly that it’s a harder road than they thought when they just got a nice LSAT score and got into a good school.

I think it’s the nature of being a communicator and also just the allure of expressing yourself in the written word. As far as why we succeed as lawyers turned writers, that I do not know except that perhaps I would say that the law is just a perennially interesting topic for fiction.

Tim Knox: One of the things I hear you saying is that during this time you just kept writing and writing and writing. I think that is also a central theme that I hear from a lot of successful authors. They just kept on writing and doing the work and had faith that eventually something would happen.

Corban Addison: Yes and it’s funny. I tell audiences all the time that one of the things that sticks out about my story is the blessing of failure. It’s sort of one of those blessings in disguise. You don’t expect it at the time and frankly failure’s really… it hurts to get rejections but at the same time if a person is a true writer, and by that I mean someone who writes for no audience at all simply because it’s a joy to put words on the page to mess around with them; it’s the way that we process the world, then keep writing by all means and as I did – learning by doing, learning by failure, learning by rejection, taking criticism, learning how to take the punches, roll with them, gleam the wisdom from them, make myself better.

I look back and see it was a broken and very long road. It was about 10 years for me from the first time that I put a word in a book that I ultimately finished to the time that A Walk Across the Sun, my first book, was published. So a decade but it was worth it.

Tim Knox: So you were a 10 year overnight success.

Corban Addison: That’s right.

Tim Knox: I think another point that you bring up that’s very important to new authors is rejection is part of the process. You really can’t let it knock you down. You have to just keep writing and writing. Did you find that you actually became a better writer because of the rejection?

Corban Addison: Oh I sure did. I will say that everybody… I mean, I’ve sort of run across two different types of authors. There are the types of authors who really just doubt themselves constantly and really need to be built up by people around them to say, “Hey, you have a gift,” and then there are other aspiring writers, and I was sort of in this camp, “Hey, I get finished with the first manuscript that I complete, put that final word on there and I’m sure it’s going to be the next great bestseller.”

Frankly I don’t know how the people who doubt themselves that much persist. It’s actually quite courageous that they do because to be honest it takes so much work for most people to get published that if we didn’t have this kind of weird, unnatural hubris in some sense to just keep banging our head against a wall and everybody tells us we’re never going to get a breakthrough, I think most people would give up long before. It’s just, for me anyway, it was an incredibly arduous process but again I look at the road and I’m grateful for it. I really see it as extremely productive in helping me hone my craft.

Tim Knox: Listening to the traits that you list of a successful author – the ability to keep going, the ability to give up off the ground and get back on the horse, that sort of thing – they are traits similar to the entrepreneur. Now do you approach your writing from a business standpoint? Are you an entrepreneurial author?

Corban Addison: That’s a great question. To be honest I didn’t when I first started out but one of the things, one of the gifts of being a lawyer was that I learned the world of business and I learned what it was like to take a skill and market it. One of the things that I also discovered about my writing, and it was all sort of part and parcel of the same growth process, but I discovered that in order to write a successful book you actually have to write for an audience and not just write for your own pleasure.

When I started out I was writing more, you know, it doesn’t matter who reads this; I want to write it for myself. I realized along the way that wasn’t working and that I actually needed to have an audience in mind. So yes, I’ve developed a very rigorous kind of approach for the books that I write both from the standpoint of writing for a very clear audience to my own process, which I keep business hours in an office offsite and not in my home. I work normal hours unless I have deadlines, in which case I can burn the midnight oil like everyone else. Yeah, I definitely have sort of developed a fairly rigorous approach. It is very much like building a business.

Tim Knox: Your first book, A Walk Across the Sun, was inspired by a documentary that you saw on human trafficking. Tell us about that.

Corban Addison: Yeah it was intriguing. It was actually a feature film that didn’t do very well at the box office, largely because it was kind of depressing but it was called Trade, with Kevin Kline. It was more documentary-like than any of the other feature films that I’ve seen that touched on modern slavery, like Taken for instance with Liam Neeson. It did fabulously at the box office but it was much more sort of a James Bond story.

The Trade really sort of opened our eyes and I say that very intentionally my wife and I both were really touched by that story and were moved to consider the reality of modern slavery in a way that we never had before. Then the spark for the idea of the story came soon after that. Like I said, my wife had said why don’t you write justice stories? But I didn’t have an issue. This film launched and suddenly I had an issue and that’s how things sort of began.

Tim Knox: So the feature film really brought this topic to the foreground for you. I assume by this time you knew how to write a book. You had the mechanics down and you knew how to go about turning this inspiration into something people could read.

Corban Addison: Yeah it was great because by that point I had written three unpublished manuscripts that, like I said, I’d gotten a raft of rejections. I knew how to write a story. I knew how to begin and end a story. I knew how long it would take to write a full length manuscript and I had a strong sense for developing characters and all of that. I had gotten enough good feedback from literary agents and other folks along the way that I felt strongly in my ability to write a story.

The topic was something that, as you said, I was certainly not an expert on and I knew virtually nothing about it. I approached it like I used to approach – when I was a litigator – complex civil lawsuits. I was a lawyer and would have clients come to me and say, “You need to become a subject matter expert in our field before you ever take our case to a judge or jury.”

So that’s the way I approached this book. I basically said, okay, I need to go to the source and find people in this world who can talk to me about what they do, people in law enforcement, people in the non-governmental organization community here and abroad. It needed to be an international story. I felt that from the beginning. It’s such a global issue so I had to pick certain parts of the world. I did that based on connections that I had and was developing. India sort of became the locus of the story and then Europe and the US were more natural for me to weave in.

Thankfully people came out of the woodwork and when I told them what I wanted to do, I had no credentials beyond my legal credentials to offer but I had an idea that people found intriguing and they opened the doors from here to Mumbai and let me in and gave me access and information and interviews. So over the course of about nine months from conception to the first word on the page I had done a tremendous amount of research.

Tim Knox: And you didn’t just get on the internet and go to Google to do research. You actually got on a plane and went over there. You went to India, Mumbai, those sort of places.

Corban Addison: Yeah. I wanted to write a story that wasn’t just topical but I wanted to write a story that was culturally rich and that I could… especially when I’m writing about another culture. I’m very careful about the perception as a white American going to sort of the post-colonial cultures like India and Africa in my second book. I’m just very careful. I wanted to portray people and places and cultures accurately, faithfully so that when Indians read my first book or people from South Africa read my second book, they say, “You got that right.” I was very, very sensitive to that from the beginning.

Tim Knox: Let’s talk a little about character development. A book like this – how do you go about researching and developing your characters?

Corban Addison: In A Walk Across the Sun there’s sort of two primary intersecting storylines. One begins in the East Coast of India, south of Chennai, in the region that was affected, really devastated by the tsunami in 2004. That incident, the tsunami causes two girls, sisters, to be orphaned. They lose their family in the tsunami and that creates the vulnerability that as they try to find their way to safety they’re exploited by human traffickers and they get swept into the underworld.

Then on the side of the world in Washington D.C. there’s a sort of disillusioned lawyer, a young lawyer, who’s been hurt by some family tragedy and his wife leaves him and he’s already lost a baby. He’s sort of in this place where he’s trying to figure out what to do with his life and takes a year, a sabbatical essentially from the big firm law, to go to India and work with an NGO that does human rights work. When he’s there he finds out about the story of the sisters who have been trafficked to Mumbai and decides to make it his personal mission to rescue them. His name was Thomas Clarke.

I wanted to start with very different kind of worlds apart and then bring them together as the story progresses.

Tim Knox: So you did manage to get a lawyer in the story after all.

Corban Addison: Oh yeah.

Tim Knox: Was there anything autobiographical about this character, the attorney? I know your life is on track and doing great but he was a bit of a train wreck. Is there any Corban Addison in this character?

Corban Addison: I’m sure. I think anytime you write about a subject you know well that that’s going to come out. I did try… I had done quite a bit, like I mentioned before, autobiographical fictionalization in my early unpublished manuscripts so I was careful this time to try to create an authentic character that was separate from me.

Sure, I think there’s an extent to which his experience in Mumbai in particular was very much influenced by my own. When I landed on the ground in Mumbai, I flew in having never been to India before. I had contacts that were welcoming to me but I wasn’t going with anyone. I had no guide for the process. It was all very much an indigenous experience and it was quite overwhelming. India is so colorful and so noise intense and smell intense and commotion intense and it’s just like a thrill ride. I tried to write that into the story. I would say that more than anything that’s the autobiographical content is just his exposure and his sense of India.

Tim Knox: Now when you were over there researching the book, did you ever feel like you might be in danger? Were there times when those around you were worried about your safety? Were you worried about your safety?

Corban Addison: Sure, I did at the end and after spending time with a group that actually rescues girls, works with the police to rescue underage girls from brothels in Mumbai. I had spent time with their lawyers. I’d gone to court with them. I had interviewed their investigators. I had spent time reading their confidential files and seeing undercover videos and all kinds of stuff. I really wanted to go undercover into the brothel district myself before I left because I knew that I was going to include some scenes like that in my store. While I can read about them for descriptions, there’s nothing quite like seeing something to be able to make it authentic.

Thankfully I was able, with the help of my contacts, to go to an undercover brothel, as weird as that sounds. I went with an Indian guide who was known to the brothel owners and the pimps who was actually an undercover agent but he had maintained his cover. He was able to take me in and get me past the guards even though I had the white face that made all of them afraid thinking that I was with the cops or something. I was able to go up and act like a customer, of course not making a purchase but to go up and see the girls and see the brothel.

I did that a couple different times and yeah it’s weird because at the end of the day I’m not trusted so anything could have happened and I was warned about that from the beginning. I was very nervous. Nothing sensational occurred. Ultimately my guide was the key. I mean he got me really a tour. They showed me the rooms. It was pretty wild and then I just kind of indicated that I was not interested in making a purchase and shook the brothel owner’s hand and walked out. It was definitely a surreal kind of experience.

Tim Knox: Listening to you describe that – for those of us here in the United States, we hear about that sort of thing going on but to actually be on the ground there and see it happening, it had to be just very other worldly almost, isn’t it?

Corban Addison: Definitely, definitely and it imprinted itself in my heart in a way that made very personal what I was trying to do. I went there with the desire to write a story that would humanize and personalize an issue that a lot of us have heard of but don’t really know much about for readers around the world. So meeting those girls and feeling helpless, feeling like I knew that I couldn’t do anything in that moment that would not have endangered myself and them. So I really was impotent in the brothels to do anything to help them.

What it did do for me is it really galvanized my passion to come home and write the best book that I possibly could in the hope that it would help, while it entertains, it would also educate and perhaps even spur people to find ways to get engaged in the movement to end modern slavery.

Tim Knox: Once you were back home and you had finished all the research, how long did it take you to actually write the book?

Corban Addison: Well it kind of wrote itself in some sense because I feel like I frontloaded it with so much research and when I came back I didn’t spend more than about a month before I wrote the first word so it was all very fresh.

I had done a lot of character development and story building. I don’t start with a full outline but I started with a very strong sense of where I was beginning and where I was going and who my characters were and what the defining elements of the story would be so that once I got into it I wasn’t going to get lost in the weeds and taking detours in the wrong directions and what not.

It was about four months from the first word to the last but I will hasten to mention that that first draft then became 13 drafts before it was published. Some of those were longer edits than others but I had to do a lot of re-writing, a lot of story editing work before anyone was willing to buy the book.

Tim Knox: Once you had the manuscript finished did you attempt to get an agent?

Corban Addison: At that point, yeah, I didn’t have an agent. What I did have, which was an incredible grace on one level because I spent my entire, well my wife’s and my savings account on this adventure, which was speculative from the beginning and basically stretched ourselves to the breaking point to get the book done. I was working in the law during the day. I was writing in the evenings and on weekends. We had a small child in the home. It was quite sort of insane so gratefully before I went to India, I’d been fortunate enough to meet John Grisham through connections I had and he was interested in the topic and was willing to at least look at my book when I finished it.

That was my goal. My goal was to write a book that he would love and of course something that I’d be proud of. So that’s what I did. As soon as I finished the book I gave it to him. I didn’t have an agent. I didn’t have a publisher at that point and of course I didn’t have a promise from him that he would do anything other than take a look at it, which could have very easily been read five pages and throw it out.

So I went into this sort of hole where for about four and a half months… I should mention that I had some friends read it before I gave it to him and I got some feedback initially. That’s always important. Then I gave it to him and I let it go. I didn’t know what I was going to do if he hated it because I knew how hard it is to get an agent, the query letters and everything else. I’d gotten so many rejection letters before. I really didn’t know what I was going to do but as it turned out it took him some time but eventually he got to it and then ended up loving the manuscript and offered me help and gave me a great endorsement, at which point I then had to query agents but I got more attention than I would have otherwise with an endorsement from Grisham. Once I found an agent they found me a publisher and that was kind of the process.

Tim Knox: I would assume that if you’ve got an endorsement from John Grisham, that’s going to open some doors, but I would also assume that you must have been on pins and needles waiting for some kind of response because Grisham has to be a really hard guy to impress.

Corban Addison: Well yeah and, you know, actually the endorsement that he gave me was the first of its kind in his 20 year career. I mean he’s given blurbs before for books that are already in the pipeline for publication but he’s never given a blurb to an unpublished author before. So it was really an amazing thing.

The four and a half months felt like four and a half years. I mean it’s funny looking back I think, oh gosh, it’s not very long. It’s not even half a year. Every day sort of dragged itself out. I really didn’t know because I didn’t hear anything from him and I was sure a thousand times in that process that he hated it, that he didn’t have the heart to tell me that he hated it. I wasn’t his friend. It was more like an acquaintance of a friend.

So anyway I expected him to do nothing but at the same time there was that part of me that just was like, look, we’ve gone to the edge for this and really believe in what we’re doing and he’s a good guy. I think it’s a good book and my friends really loved it so maybe. I’ll never forget the day I got the email from him out of the blue and I nearly fell off my chair.

Tim Knox: Once you picked yourself up off the floor, did you do a happy dance?

Corban Addison: Oh yeah. It was funny. I was at a continuing legal education conference. We’re required to get credits every year taking classes about how we don’t get disbarred and I got that in the middle of the session. I don’t remember anything that was said from that day except for that email.

Tim Knox: So that’s the story of the first book, A Walk Across the Sun. Let’s talk about the second book that is out now, Garden of Burning Sand. Tell us about that.

Corban Addison: After I wrote A Walk Across the Sun I discovered I’d kind of taken the legal fiction in a new direction and made it international and cultural and sort of added in elements from say like Khaled Hosseini’s writing and sort of outside the context of the big firms. My main character becomes kind of an NGO lawyer and so non-profit lawyer. I thought I could actually write many books like this. I could take an issue, a human rights issue, and embed this sort of legal context but take the story to places that are interesting in the world in which these issues are very much alive but then bring them back and essentially make them relevant for a Western audience. So it was actually Grisham who gave me the piece of advice before I had an agent or publisher to start writing my second book.

Thankfully I had an idea and the idea had come from some friends who were actually going to start a non-profit working with kids with intellectual disabilities like Down syndrome, Cerebral palsy, autism, those sorts of things in Zambia, a country that I’d never thought much about, probably could not have pointed it out on the map. They were going to work with these kids in a place where unlike the West we’ve really improved in our treatment of kids with intellectual disabilities but in Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, children like this are treated really as not even subhuman. They’re almost like nonhumans. They’re often not fed or medicated. They’re treated like a curse.

So really no one was doing this kind of work and I remember when my wife and I heard from our friends about their desire to go over there we thought, both of us, this is an issue that needs to be talked about but I didn’t have a narrative. It was sort of serendipity that I ran across a story from a different non-profit, this group of lawyers and social workers that do work with poor kids and women in Zambia among other places in the world.

There was a story of a girl with Down syndrome who had been raped and their lawyers came to her aid. She came from a poor family and would have had no access to lawyers or justice or anything in Zambia. Because of the really sort of heroic assistance they were able to provide this girl and her family… they pushed a very sort of broken court system to put the guy, the abuser behind bars and give the girl justice.

I thought that’s a very unusual kind of legal story. I could tell that with sort of courtroom scenes and investigation and that kind of drama but I could also actually build that into a bigger, broader story about violence against women and girls worldwide, which is obviously a problem with great significance. It’s been highlighted by Hillary Clinton and the United Nations and the New York Times and various others. It’s sort of a great moral challenge that we face about the way that women and girls are treated in a lot of the world, including sadly still in the West. Rape is still very common.

My desire was to write a story that would bring all that together, but within the African context bringing alive the beauty and the horror of life, especially for the poor in a place like Lusaka, Zambia and then tie that back to the United States and make it very relevant for my readers in the West.

Tim Knox: The two books are very different but they are similar in theme. What attracts you to this kind of story?

Corban Addison: Well I went to law school because I love justice and there was a desire in me, a sort of deep seeded desire, to make the world a little better. I don’t have pretention that I as a single person can change the entire world but I do believe that all of us have the ability to make our sphere of influence, however small or big it might be, a little bit better. So that was my motivation for becoming a lawyer.

I quickly discovered that the real life of practicing law is often not really about that, which was one reason I loved the idea of being able to write these stories and take my passion for justice and sort of weave it into stories that ultimately confront justice and evil head on, the abuse of the poor by the powerful, and then give my readers a sense of hope that it’s based on reality. In fact courage can be rewarded in the world, that real ordinary people can make a real difference in the lives of the needy in big ways. If a person feels a strong sense of calling to work in the developing world there’s a lot of opportunity there but the truth is that all of us can have a hand in different ways and get in and connect with the work of justice.

The passion in me flows into the stories and I write stories that I hope are entertaining on their face as works of fiction but my heart for justice is definitely at the core of what I’m doing.

Tim Knox: Right. You mentioned that you just turned in your latest book to your publisher. What’s next? Are you going to just jump into the next book or are you going to take a little break?

Corban Addison: Goodness yeah, I’m taking a break. The three books, each book took me to a different part of the world on these long odysseys, a month or a month and a half away from my family and then four to six months of writing and then basically a month and a half to four months of editing, depending on what was needed. So anyway, yeah I’m taking a break.

Tim Knox: So Corban, what’s your best advice to our audience – the writers out there that are wanting to do what you’ve done. What’s your best advice for them?

Corban Addison: I would suggest to anybody who wants to make it as a writer to believe in what you’re doing, to keep persisting against all the rejections you get, to find some people who support you and believe that they’re telling you the truth when they say that you have something. Then ultimately just continue to fight for that one person, as it was with me. Find one person in the industry inside the citadel of publishing who’s willing to say, “I believe. I love what you’re doing.” As soon as that person is found, that’s the way in. you can’t break into publishing. It really is about finding someone inside who’s willing to open the gates and invite you in. It’s kind of one of those things that I wish there was a path to success but persistence is a huge part of it and believing in yourself and continuing to refine your craft over the course of months and years, as long as it takes ultimately to get somebody to say yes.

Tim Knox: Corban, great information. Your books – A Walk Across the Sun, Garden of Burning Sand, a third book submitted to the publisher. Do you have a title for that book yet?

Corban Addison: Yeah it will be called The Tears of Dark Water.

Tim Knox: Very good. Corban, where can the audience find out more about your work?

Corban Addison: My website, CorbanAddison.com and my books are available everywhere in print and in eBook formats on all the typical sites and bookstores.

Tim Knox: Corban Addison, it’s been a pleasure. When the new book comes out we expect you back on the program.

Corban Addison: Excellent. I appreciate it. It’s been a pleasure.

 

The post Corban Addison: How A Social Conscience and An Activist’s Heart Led To Bestselling Novels appeared first on Interviewing Authors with Tim Knox, Author, Talk Radio Host, Serial Entrepreneur, Small Business Expert.

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