Dave Walsh has published a 2nd novel, and I have asked him 5 questions for a 2nd time. Here are his unedited answers.
1) How did you
approach writing your 2nd novel differently from your first?
The
second one I approached from an entirely different head space. The Godslayer
happened because of a multitude of issues, most of which had to do with the
fact that I was frustrated with my own work. I was making a name for myself
writing about MMA and Kickboxing but I really wanted to write novels. Then, to
top it off, those sports were kind of "pure" before they blew up like
they did. I was always an internet nerd and I bonded with these sports by
interacting with other internet nerds over them, but eventually the sports
world caught on and everything changed.
That
is fine, in fact, probably better for those sports, the athletes and whatever,
but they lost their magic to me. I was frustrated by the people that were
coming on board, their views and how the culture was shifting. My actual first
novel I started writing in my last semester of college and underwent something
like four complete rewrites where I just tore it down and started over. It was
for good reason, though. There were serious problems with it. I'm talking tense
shifting, point of view shifting and the works. It was just a mess. I had a
weird mix of teachers in college that were either obsessive about grammar or obsessive
about ideas and story, I tended to latch onto the latter and it meant that my
technical skills slid a bit.
The
Godslayer was me venting frustrations about how the sport that I had watched
grow and dedicated a lot of my time into helping grow change into something
that I hated, but it was also me looking for a way out. I was sick of sports
writing because I hated sports and without a desire to work in actual print
journalism to help get myself a better paying job writing about the sport I saw
my way out as a novel. Weird, right? The Godslayer started by a crazy, manic
night of writing a short story about what I thought a retired MMA fighter would
feel like waking up in the morning and it was 14,000 words by the time I was
spent. The problem was that it was clearly going to be a lot longer, so I
decided to try turning it into a novel.
Basically,
everything with The Godslayer was kind of circumstance and hope. The reality
was that I picked a bad topic to write a novel about considering the fan base errs
to either not reading at all or reading nonfiction. I'm still overwhelmed with
how well that it sold, but I'm embarrassed by the lack of polish in it and have
this daily existential dilemma about it being out in the wild still.
Terminus
Cycle came from a lot of careful consideration. I grew up obsessed with science
fiction and was reading as much as I could by the second grade, just devouring
everything Isaac Asimov or Star Wars that I could find. It grew from there. As
anyone who went to school for literature or writing can attest to, I really had
it burned into my skull that to be a successful writer you need to write
literary fiction. I had that whole dream growing up of being the reclusive
author that released a book every ten years to rapturous praise and made
millions and millions doing so. That reality is just dead for the most part,
especially now that we realize that the writers who did get by releasing books
like that were probably supported by family money or died broke.
So I
decided to cast aside the literary dream for the time being and be a bit more
practical. I love science fiction and I love writing, why not blend them
together? Science fiction is one of the few genres that sells to a broad
audience of both males and females. If you look on Amazon there is also a wide
array of bestsellers on there in sci-fi that did everything themselves. I like
that. I'm still not sure why I'm attracted to the idea of working outside of
the system, but I just am.
We
finally got cable after not having it for a while in December of 2011 and I
found myself watching "Wonders of the Universe" and just being like
"Damn, why am I not writing about this stuff?" I loved Physics in
high school when it was all theoretical and fun, but struggled with it in
college, so I just started reading as much "accessible" science as I
could. I knew that I wanted to write science fiction, but I was afraid of doing
it "wrong" for some reason. I was finished writing The Godslayer by
mid-2012 and right around that time the Curiosity Rover landed on Mars and the
ideas started flowing. I had documents of ideas (most of which I abandoned
because early ideas tend to be rough/awful) and it was really the catalyst for
me to start approaching it more seriously.
I'm
not even sure when I actually started writing Terminus Cycle, but it was well
after The Godslayer was released in early 2013. I watched and read a LOT of
science fiction because I wanted to get back into that world. Kind of went
through the things that I loved years previous, shows like Firefly, BSG, Star
Trek: The Next Generation and books by Asimov, Herbert, PKD, Zahn and others.
It was a lot of fun and my wife thought it was total bullshit that I kept
excusing my watching and reading habits as "research" -- but it
seriously was! I discovered some really cool stuff along the way, stuff that'll
stick with me for a long time. Star Trek: DS9, for example, is clearly the best
Star Trek of them all and Babylon 5 might look cheesy but it's the absolute
best science fiction series in history. Don't bother arguing that with me, it's
nearly perfect.
I
tended to shy away from contemporary science fiction books for a reason,
though. I didn't want my work to be heavily influenced by them and be too
similar. Since I finished writing Terminus Cycle I've gone on a binge and read
a lot of the stuff that's floating around right now like The Martian, James SA
Corey's Expanse novels, Leckie's Ancillary series and more. There's some great
stuff out there, but from what I'm reading my stuff does kind of stand on its
own, which really makes me happy.
So
yeah, I've just gone on and on a ton and I'm not sure that I really directly
answered the question. Maybe I did, I'm not even sure anymore. Basically, I
looked at a market that I loved, found an opening and decided that it was going
to be where I make my name. Terminus Cycle was always meant to be the beginning
of a series (because series are what sells right now) and I'm already halfway
done with the follow-up novel to it that I plan to release the summer of this
year. I hope to have a third out before the end of the year as well. I made the
decision to scale back on my freelance work late last year and in August or so
I went through with it. I was about 25,000 words deep into writing Terminus Cycle
by mid-August when I quit and the other 70,000+ came between then and late
October.
I
approached this book a lot more like a business decision than just "I'M
PISSED OFF AND WANT TO VENT" like the last one was.
2) In terms of
getting the book out to the public yourself, have you developed any new
strategies this time?
Yeah,
absolutely. The first one sold more than I imagined and I still sell copies to
this day even though I do zero marketing for it. I've read horror stories of
people releasing books on their own and moving zero copies. It's scary. I had
some great support from my community when I released The Godslayer as well as
my friends, so I'd at least sell those copies to friends and family, but it
went well beyond that. So I thought, "what if I release something in a
genre that people actually read?"
I
did some reflection on The Godslayer and realized if I had made Alek Turner a
washed-up rockstar that chances are I could have sold a lot more copies. I felt
that the book was mostly focusing on just a guy and his struggles with his
decisions in life, but people cared about his occupation and it was either a
turn off or an attraction. The scary part for me with Terminus Cycle was I
didn't have that same level of support right off the bat. I have almost ten
years of experience working within Mixed Martial Arts and Kickboxing and zero
in science fiction. In fact, I have more experience in the online professional
wrestling community than I do with science fiction. I couldn't rely on some of
the top sci-fi blogs in the world writing stories about my book like I could
with my last one.
The
thing is, there are just more people who read science fiction out there and
while I don't have those connections I'm working to build them. I set aside
money this time to do stuff like press releases, buy ad space and come up with
marketing ideas. So it was more of a business approach than the last time when
I was just calling in favors and hoping to hell that it stuck.
I
also started blogging about the whole process on my website, http://www.dvewlsh.com.
I try to update it on the first and fifteenth of the month and I just kind of
share my thoughts on what I'm working on, how the process is working as well as
the human side like the fears, the highs, the lows.
3) How many people
were involved in this project?
I'm
not sure how I can even quantify that. Obviously it was just me, okay? No,
really, while writing is a solitary thing what a lot of writers might not realize
is how much you need other people. Running ideas by my wife in the car or
before bed were vastly important, as was her support and willingness to let me
leave some of my jobs and not make as much money to pursue this. It feels like
cheating in a way, but it's obvious that I work incredibly hard day-in and
day-out and stress about my work and future, so she doesn't mind much.
I
hired an artist to do my cover art. I had initially lined up a guy who works as
an illustrator for LucasArts on Star Wars stuff, but he had lost his job at the
time and needed commissions, then got his job back promptly and that fell
apart. I was bummed because I wanted everything with this book to be PERFECT. I
actually contacted one of my old friends from high school, Jenn Blake. She was
actually in one of my art classes with me when I was a senior and she was I
think a Freshman? She was kind of weird and into anime and stuff but she could
really draw, so since she was kind of weird she sat with my friends and I. I
think that we probably tormented her a bit, but we still became friends and
she's my friend to this day. She's done illustration work for a while and I was
just like "uh, hey, would you want to do something for me? I'll pay
you." I wanted it to be unique, not just a space ship floating over a
planet kind of thing. Terminus Cycle isn't some typical science fiction fare of
alien cruisers blasting away at each other, it's a lot more subtle and
character-driven and I kind of just said, "so, maybe something like this? Go
wild." She did and I love it. I still did the layout and graphic design on
my own because I'm like that, but still, I'm not a great illustrator and it's
okay to get help.
Then
of course there was editing. I had a friend do the last one as a favor and
neither of us really knew what we were doing. He did a good job without any
experience at all, but you know, we were both kind of knuckleheads about it. So
I reached out to my good friend in New York, Liz DeGregorio. We had all worked
together for a while and Liz was always the most detail-oriented person that I
knew. She had helped me edit a non-fic book pitch a few years back and I just
really like working with her so I practically begged her to work for me. I was
impatient and wanted this out by mid-December, but she wasn't available until
February to edit it. That turned out to be a good thing because of the
revisions that I put into it before it got to her.
The
other thing is the people that read and gave feedback for me. That's always
tough because you send stuff out to people for the first time and you hope that
it doesn't suck, you also hope that everyone is honest and not just telling you
what you want to hear. I sent out to something like two dozen people and got
feedback from maybe seven or eight? That's how it crumbles because it's asking
a lot to have someone sit down and read 100,000 words and give you thoughts on
it. So you take what you can get. I got some really great feedback from people,
though. Some of it was rough to hear but I needed to hear, some of it I really
mulled over but found to be personal taste and the rest made me feel great
about what I had done. That's what revision time is for and it's incredibly
valuable.
4) From start to
finish, how long did it take to present this book to the public?
I
guess if you want to count when I started actually writing it, which we'll say
was late-2013/early-2014 about a year. I really went into overdrive working on
it in late August and had finished writing the first draft by late October. I
worked on revisions from about December to late January (took a month off to
let people read) and then began working on the follow-up immediately. It's
March 24th now and it's released, finally (although not the paperback, I'm
working on that right now). In my head I like to think that I really started it
in August and finished it in late October, but the whole process was maybe
about a year.
Like
I said I expect the next one to be a lot shorter, but that's just because of
streamlining and not having outside distractions.
5) What was your
budget?
Budget
was important. I had zero budget for my first book and I think that it probably
showed. I set aside $1500 for this and the editing alone was more than half of
that, distributing a press release was about $150, buying Facebook and Twitter
ads has been a few hundred here and there (I'm awful at keeping track of
these). There was the money for the illustration which was a few hundred as
well. I also bought up a bunch of web domains that pertained to the book and
the series, which is probably about $100, plus I have future plans for some
promotional email stuff that'll be a few hundred bucks.
I
think that $1500 is about what I'll spend on this when all is said and done. I
made well over that on my last one so I'm expecting to make that money back but
I could just as easily not and it could be a great big flaming heap of failure.
What I really wanted to stress with this is that I learned from the last one
and wanted to do everything that I could to make this one as professional as
possible. I paid more attention to graphic design and layout work in this,
looked at professionally released ebooks and made sure that mine looked and
operated just as good as those did. I also made sure that it was as tight as
possible, that I won't look back at it in three years and say "why is this
on the market?"
