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The following is a transcript of a free podcast interview with NY Times best-sellingauthorScott Sigler interviewed by Joanna Penn of The Creative Penn
.Click here to access the free audio. The Creative Penn podcast has over 50 free audio interviewson writing, publishing options, internet marketing andpromotion for your book. It is aimed at authors, writers andpeople interested in books and publishing.You can see the fullbacklist of podcasts by clicking here. You can also Click here to subscribe on iTunes.
Hi everyone. This is Joanna Penn for the Creative
ScottSigler.Scott is the New York Times bestselling author of Infected and Contagious and his new book
Ancestor which is out on June 22
nd
, all publishedby Crown. Before being published Scott podcastedhis novels for free building up a huge fan base forhis writing and still podcasts regularly now. So,welcome Scott.SS: Thank you for having me.JP:
Oh, it‟s great to have you here finally. People have been
asking for you for solong now.SS:
That‟s great, wonderful.
JP: So,
maybe you could tell us just a bit more about your publishing journeybecause right now you seem to be everywhere with trailers and books andmassively successful but was it always this way?
SS: No, not at all. I spent a good eleven or twelve years writing every day and tryingto get published through the traditional channels of soliciting agents andpublishers and going to all the writing conventions and trying to meet people, and
run into a lot of resistance, I think in the first few years because I wasn‟t very
good. And then probably five to twelve years into it I was getting much better butthe rejection letters I got at that point were usually the same thing, which is we
don‟t know what shelf to put it on.We don‟t know whether to sell it as horror, sci
-fi, is it thriller, is it suspense, is it
action and that‟s not something that traditional publishing wants to touch very
often; any kind cross genre type story.
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So, I plugged away for all that time and then found out about podcasting back in2005 and the first thing that popped into my head was this is a great way toserialize a novel, it will be just like the radio dramas of the 40s and 50s.I went looking for
books to listen to via podcast and when I couldn‟t find any I
realized it was because nobody had done it yet. No one had put one out at thatpoint although coincidentally three people were all working on it at the sametime; myself, Tee Morris and Mark Jeffrey with his book The Pocket and The
Pendant. But when I found out nobody had done it yet then the marketing part of my brain kicked in and I was in a real hurry to record and get a podcast novel outthere and try and capitalize on being first to market.That led to several thousand followers listening to the podcast and when I put outa book, the first time Ancestor came out was in 2007, trade paperback from areally small Canadian imprint called Dragonmoon Press. But when that book came out despite having no marketing budget, no PR, no media coverage of anykind, no advertising, it was the number two fiction novel on Amazon the day itcame out. It was only there for a few days but it was still a pretty bigaccomplishment and then that got New York houses fired up that somebody coulddo that and their own and led to the book deal with Crown.JP:
That‟s fantastic and I‟m interested there about the cross genre because when I firs
theard about you, which was last year and I talked to J.C. Hutchins and, you know,the names get around. And
you’re kind of introduce
d as a horror writer but Ireally got into your books because
they’re not
pure horror, are they? Canyou explain that a bit more?
SS:
They‟re not and the biggest influences on my writing are horror writers like
Stephen King and Dean Koontz, but most of the horror writers out there usesupernatural fiction and kind of make up the environment as they go along forwhatever fits the story. So, while I like those stories, that never really resonatedwith the scientific part of my brain.So, I like what I call hard science horrors so these are, like most horror stories you
see, it‟s modern day, it‟s people like you and me in current settings with current
socio-politico things going on around them and there is some kind of hard scienceelement introduced to it which is where people some times tag me as sci-fi. Andthen there
‟
s that normal setting with that hard science background which takes thestory into a terrifying place where the characters are in grave jeopardy and have to
figure out how to get out of that and how to save the day if they‟re able to get out
of it at all. A lot of my characters die in the stories.
So, that‟s what brings us all the way back around
to horror. I sort of now see thedifficulty the publishers had because even my current publisher Crown,
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sometimes they market me as a thriller writer, sometimes they market me as a
horror writer and it‟s just not
a well trodden path to put all those things together. I
mean there are people who‟ve done it definitely like Michael Crichton or Douglas
Preston & Lincoln Child, but it
‟s not like you will find a shelf of hard science
horror anywhere in a bookstore.JP: Yeah, absolutely. Okay,
you mentioned your 11 to 12 years of slugging awaythere which is obviously key to your success but do you have any otherrecommendations for people who want to become New York Timesbestselling authors?
SS: Well, I think the biggest thing now is with the affordability and accessibility of allthe tools online, it is to
write every day, create the best story you can, edit thestory heavily cause you only get one chance for people to hear your story
or
they‟ll turn you off and
never come back to you again. Outside of that, which
hasn‟t changed in hundreds of years worth of fiction writing, it‟s
to
get yourcontent out online and start building up an audience.
The days of being discovered I believe are completely gone. The days of
someone pulling your manuscript out of a slush pile and like, „oh my goodnessthis is the greatest thing I‟ve ever seen,‟ those are totall
y gone. There will still berandom lightning bolts that strike and people, you know, one in a million willmake it through the traditional model, but I think where things are going to nowis, if you can get your stories online, give them away, build an audience andinteract with that audience, and
you will get to a point where you bring thataudience to a publisher.
So, instead of saying, “I know my book will sell
because this is just the best thing
ever,” you‟re going to the publisher saying, “I know my b
ook will sell because
I‟ve got fifty thousand people reading my blog every
day. There is a hugedifference there and publishers now are starting to understand this as well. So,instead of them just taking a chance based on their own taste or on the taste of
some English professor at some college who‟s dubbed the student, you know, thisis a very important work etcetera, now publishers can sit back and look at what‟sresonating out in the marketplace. And you‟ve got to remember, publishers are
risking an enormous amount of money with every book that they publish.
People‟s jobs are on the line with every book that comes out.
If you were in their shoes, most people are going to be more apt to go with moreof a sure thing to mitigate that risk. And
the way they can mitigate that risk is
look to see who’s out online building up an audience and already has people
that like their work. Those are people that publishers are going to startsigning and putting promotional money behind.
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How to be a NY Times best-selling author with Scott Sigler
Interview transcript with NY Times best-selling author Scott Sigler on how to be a successful author by writing, podcasting and promotion.
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