A Pair of Fun Articles on My Writing
A couple of really neat interviews I gave on THE KILLING OF OSAMA BIN LADEN and my writing in general came out last week. The first, at the KINDLE AUTHOR blog, is a great all-around interview by talented writer David Wisehart. Here's a small excerpt.
DAVID WISEHART: What was your journey as a writer?
MARK YOSHIMOTO NEMCOFF: It's been a long and winding road for sure. A loooong time ago, during the early '90s, I lost my job during a bad economy and I started my own business as a professional composer of music for TV and video games. I worked extremely hard and after a while I had done a few national series and a couple of big game titles. I went through some really heavy personal stuff and woke up one day to find that the most horrifying thing had happened to me: I completely lost the ability to write music. All the melodies and stuff I would hear in my head constantly, morning to night, were all gone. Poof. Just like that. Nothing. Crickets. Nada.
I had always been a creative writer in school, and one day while feeling very lost, I had a flash of an idea for a story. All I did for 19 days was write, and in the end, I had penned my first novel, The Doomsday Club, a furious thriller about 4 college friends who inadvertently kill someone and then invent a phony terrorist group to take the blame. I'd never attempted anything longer than a short story, but the book came out really well. I just hit the accelerator and never looked back. This being L.A., as I started showing my book around and getting some good responses, I got it into my head that I should try to break into TV and screenwriting. I put together some specs, got an agent. Got a couple of assignments. Got into the Warner Bros. Drama Writers Fellowship. Had one of my TV scripts directed by Bruce Campbell. Developed a couple of feature screenplays with a producer on the Sony lot. Wrote some more features on assignment… but nothing happened. I got fed up and was ready to give up, but I polished up another novel I had written, a noir thriller called The Art of Surfacing. In 2005, I put the book out in print myself and, needing a way to promote it, stumbled upon an article about creating something called a "podcast." So, I started this podcast, at first in my car with some cheap mp3 recorder, that within 4 months got me a deal with a podcasting network and then, surprisingly, a drive-time slot on Sirius Satellite Radio five nights a week. An editor at Playboy heard my show and did a nice feature on me and all-of-a-sudden, I was podcasting as my full-time job, making a great living at it.
So then, inspired by Scott Sigler, I took an old screenplay of mine that I had optioned a few times but never got made and very quickly adapted it into a book. Number One with a Bullet, came out as a serialized podcast novel and because it was a success (winning a Parsec Award in 2007) I started putting out more original audiobooks and growing my brand as an author. Around that time, I also had this crazy book out about the lives of Hollywood assistants named Where's My F*cking Latte? After Lindsay Lohan was arrested chasing her assistant in a car, I got a call to appear on "Access Hollywood" to talk aobut the lives of celebrity assistants. Boom. WMFL took off.
When the economy around audio podcasting started to erode, I started a video podcast, a funny news show called Things I Learned This Week, which I was also writing. Two years into it, that show was seen by a producer who offered me the hosting gig on a new nationally-syndicated TV newsmagazine about smartphones and mobile entertainment. I didn't even have to audition. We taped the first season of The MoShow earlier this year and are waiting to hear about a second season pickup.
In the meantime, to my surprise, I discovered that WMFL had been sitting on a Kindle subcategory bestseller list for over 2 years. I went back and looked at how much my Kindle sales had grown and realized with the release of the Kindle 3 and the proliferation of Kindle apps running on millions of smartphones, there was a very, very serious market here. In March, I started putting out more of my back catalog and new content for Kindle, including a book called Go Forth and Kick Some Ass: Be the Hero of Your own Life Storyrelating to some of the motivational "sermons" I had been podcasting (I am an ordained minister). Since I started really focusing on ebook content my sales have exploded. All the stuff above, those are just most of the highlights so it may seem like it's been an easy path, but I can tell you that I've fought tooth and nail for everything, and all the opportunities and doors that opened up were because someone saw something that I created and worked very hard on and decided to take a chance on me.
READ THE REST OF MY INTERVIEW OVER AT KINDLE AUTHOR HERE.
The next one is a fantastic feature piece that really goes into some depth about THE KILLING OF OSAMA BIN LADEN and the effects the book's sudden success has had on my career. Pardon the billboard sized photo of me they used in order to scare children, but once you scroll past that the rest is really cool.
Often in life, one thing leads to another and an initial act can be parlayed into great success. Enter this tale into the life of writer and television host Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff.
Following the capture and subsequent killing of Osama Bin Laden in May, things would start to fall into place for Nemcoff. The morning after news broke, he became stirred by acquiring information about how United States Special Forces pulled off the feat inside the Pakistani border.
This passion developed into writing a book, titled "The Killing of Osama Bin Laden: How the Mission to Hunt Down a Terrorist Mastermind was Accomplished." It was about the end of Bin Laden and as details came flowing in, the realization that he could have the first piece of any circumstance on the topic became great motivation.
READ "ONE MAN'S PATH TO PUBLISHED SUCCESS" HERE
