My Interview With Extra Ink!

Recently I was interviewed by Extra Ink, a magazine distributed in Georgia covering local artists, and here is that interview in its entirety.

INTERVIEWER:  To start off, tell us a little bit about "Psycho Save Us" — when was it published, what is it about and what was your inspiration?

CHAD:  Psycho Save Us is a supernatural thriller I published back in 2012 as both an ebook and a paperback.  It’s about two young African-American girls with a gift for telepathy who get abducted one night in Atlanta by human traffickers.  On this particular night, the eldest sister, Kaley, is only able to telepathically communicate with a man named Spencer Pelletier, a psychopath recently escaped from Leavenworth Penitentiary.  She’s calling out to him for help, and he’s really kind of a brilliant monster who is the girls’ only hope to escape.  They form a strange as Spencer races to save them, even as the cops and feds are on his tail.

The inspiration for the book comes from a lot of places.  First off, I follow the news a lot, and I’ve read for years about how Atlanta is the worst city in the U.S. for human trafficking and child sex exploitation.  Atlanta is number one again this year.  So that’s been in my head for years as a possible story, but I was always searching for a unique angle since I’m a suspense writer.

Also, years ago, I guess when I was about seventeen or so, I was walking through the living room while my dad was watching the news, and there was a story about these two girls that had been abducted.  Their faces were on the news, smiling in family pictures.  I remember thinking that even as I’m going to my room right now to play some video games, those girls are out there right now, suffering, perhaps dying.

I thought a lot about those girls over the years—I don’t even remember their names, but their faces are seared into my mind.  I still think about how all we needed to rescue them was an address.  That’s it, just an address.  If they could’ve made one phone call or telepathically told someone, they could be saved.  I know it sounds weird, but things like that sort of haunt me.  Ghost stories don’t really bother me, it’s stuff like that that does it.  That someone is out there right now being hurt, and I’m powerless to stop it.

I also had lots of other ideas that formed the premise for Psycho Save Us, like some sort of cat-and-mouse game where feds were chasing a brilliant escaped con.  All these ideas sort of came together as one.  A writer’s mind is kind of like that.  I always tell people an artist’s mind is like space, and an idea is like the formation of a solar system, with huge chunks of random debris and roiling gases just hurtling through space.  The larger bits, the good bits, are gravitationally attracted and collide with one another, and as they get better, they attract more bits.  You don’t know if you’ll end up with a moon, a rocky planet, or a gas giant.  And eventually you have a star, your central idea, that forms at the center, and all the ideas start revolving around that in a kind of harmony.

That’s when you finally have a book.

So I wrote the book, I found an editor named Will Fruman, a great guy, and I attracted the attention of a Marvel Comics artist named Axel Torvenius, and I commissioned him to do my book covers for me.  We made ourselves into a little “dream team” and we’ve been going at it ever since.

INTERVIEWER:  So, it’s being turned into a film, is that right?

CHAD:  Yes, it is being adapted into a film by Sundance filmmaker John Harkrider.  He surprised everyone at Sundance some years ago with his film Mitchellville, about a corporate lawyer who has his eyes opened after taking music lessons from an aging maestro.

John got in touch with me on Christmas Day.  He’d been looking for something suspenseful and with a dark supernatural twist to make into a film, and he found my book on Goodreads.  Psycho Save Us had been sitting at the #1 spot on Goodreads’ list of Best Indie Horror and I think #3 on their list of Best Indie Authors for some time.  Kirkus Reviews gave it a great review, and the Amazon reviews had been incredibly kind.  He saw it on Goodreads’ lists, gave it a read, and e-mailed me a month or so later.  We hammered out the details over the next few weeks and signed the contract, then he started on the screenplay.  He’s a writer, too, and when he’s finished I’ll be going over it a bit, giving him some notes, suggestions, that kind of thing.

I gotta say, it all came quite out of the blue.  I had just published the sequel, Psycho Within Us, and was just watching the first reviews trickle in when I got John’s e-mail.  It’s not even made it to film yet and already it’s opened a lot of doors for me.  I met a few others in the biz, hooked up with some industry professionals online and got back into acting.  I had done some acting a decade before, small stuff, but now I was meeting casting directors and ended up with a few small parts in indie films and one major motion picture that I can’t talk about because I signed an NDA (non-disclosure agreement).  I met with groups like The Otherside of Georgia Productions and groups connected to Pinewood Studios, which is connected to the big movie and TV movement that is turning Atlanta into the next Hollywood.

So yeah, it was pretty much the best Christmas ever.

INTERVIEWER:  Was this book self published? If so, why did you go this route, what was involved and what are the advantages of self-publishing?

CHAD:  I self-published Psycho Save Us for the same reason everybody else does these days.  You have to.  It’s just the way it’s done these days, at least if you’re looking for reasonable success.  It’s how you get your foot in the door.  Otherwise, you’re holding out for getting picked up by one of the “Big Five” publishers and that’s a lot like winning the lottery.

It took me eight months to research and write Psycho Save Us, another four months of working through it with my editor, and then almost a year of shopping it around to established publishers, both big and small.  Here’s the problem with that, though: they don’t’ want to hear from you.  The Big Five publishers, for those who don’t know, are HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster, the Hachette Book Group, Penguin Random House, and Macmillan Publishers.  It is nearly impossible to get a response back from any of them, and when you do, it’s pretty much always “No thanks.”

The reason for this is many.  The first is the advent of the word processor itself.  Stephen King has talked about this; where once it took a monumental effort for someone to write a book on a typewriter, and where they were reticent because they weren’t sure they knew how to spell correctly or use correct grammar, computers brought people things like spell checks and grammar checks.  It empowered people, made them feel like they could be a writer, no problem, perhaps even a millionaire, an overnight sensation.

What happened was people began flooding publishers with half-cocked ideas, rambling manuscripts, that kind of thing.  So, more than ever, the Big Five started turning down anything that was unsolicited.  In other words, if you don’t have an agent, don’t even bother sending them your manuscript.  They won’t talk to you.

So you need an agent.  However, the hunt for a literary agent presents another problem.  It’s very difficult to land an agent because they’re typically looking for someone previously published.  And there’s the conundrum—how do I get published if no one will represent me until I get published?

Another problem with both publishers and agents is that they’re constantly claiming to want something new, original, never seen before.  But as soon as you pitch your idea, they ask if you’ve got anything along the lines of this or that, hinting at Harry Potter or Twilight or whatever’s trending at that moment.  What many of them are asking is, “Do you have anything that’s like Harry Potter…but not Harry Potter?”

So, I self-published.

There is one big advantage to self-publishing, and that’s that, for the first time ever, writers are given the same chances that musicians and indie filmmakers have had forever.  Musicians have always been able to travel and perform in front of live audiences, even if it’s free concerts in some park, and they’ve long been able to make sample tapes or CDs to pass around local radio stations, get played late and night, and hopefully develop a fan following that eventually attracts one of the major record labels.

Self-publishing is the same thing.  Finally, writers have a chance to send out a “sample CD” of their writing to the public to get instant feedback—feedback that’s highly valuable.  Take Andy Weir, for instance, whose book The Martian was self-published first, then got picked up by a major publisher and now it’s being made into a movie starring Matt Damon.  Hugh Howey wrote the Wool series, self-published it, and then sold the film rights to Ridley Scott.  Howey in particular is considered the Cinderella story of self-publishing.  I’ve interviewed Howey, I talk to him on email and Facebook, and the guy’s doing great now with a full-time writing career and a family that he supports with it.  Neither Weir nor Howey would have ever seen that level of success if not for self-publishing.  Neither would I, for that matter.

INTERVIEWER:  You’ve recently tried to highlight the indie author movement. Can you tell us about the movement and how it is changing publishing?

CHAD:  Indie authors are definitely changing the game, for everybody and in a myriad of ways.  It’s actually got a lot of industry professionals freaked out.  Personally, I don’t see why.  To me, it’s allowing them to see exactly who can cut it and who can’t—like a literary version of American Idol—and who audiences want to see more of.  Then, they can go in and offer a lump of cash, buy up the book, publish it themselves and make away with a profit.

One of the reasons I know they’re upset, though, is that self-published authors and ebooks in general are accounting for more and more of the book sales every year.  We’ve all heard the stories about the brick-and-mortar bookstores going under.  A lot of people are blaming Amazon and other online retailers.  In all honesty, no one’s at fault here, it’s just the changing of the times.  People’s interests lie elsewhere.  I know that I first resisted e-readers, but now I can’t live without the Kindle my girlfriend got me for Christmas.

Self-publishing is allowing people who otherwise wouldn’t have the clout or connections to be published to get themselves out there.  Some established authors, like Brad Thor and Sue Grafton, have been vocal and even caustic about indie authors, saying we ought to do it the “old way” like they did.  But I think they don’t realize just how drastically things have changed, and that not everybody knows an industry professional to help them get their foot in the door.

Something to remember is that submitting to publishers and agents takes up a great deal of a writer’s life.  After you’ve spent all that time writing your book, you now have the hell of going through the submission process, and it goes something like this.  You write what’s called a query letter, which, depending on the publisher or agent, has to be so long or so short, and it includes your name, a short bio, and a summary of your book.  If they like that, they ask for a synopsis, and, once again, depending on the publisher, it has to be double-spaced or single-spaced, a certain font, one to three pages, maybe even five pages, et cetera.  If they like that, they ask for the first fifty pages or first chapter, whichever’s shortest.  If they like that, they ask for the whole manuscript.  And then, nine times out of ten, the answer is, “No thanks.”

It’s a huge waste of time for a person with a job, maybe even two jobs, perhaps a spouse and kids, and a dream of becoming a writer and doing what they love.  See, self-publishing lets the audience judge for themselves.  If they don’t like something, they’ll quickly let you know.  For so long, publishers have been the Gatekeepers, forbidding anyone to pass who doesn’t conform to what in my opinion is a system that typically pumps out the same clichéd works, often copies of whatever’s popular at that time.

Some industry professionals have claimed that that grueling submission system was a necessary evil, a kind of Wise Guard standing in front of the gate to make sure that no books of low quality get through.  But I couldn’t disagree more.  How many times have you read a book or watched a movie and thought, “This is one of the dumbest pieces of crap I’ve ever seen?”  And that writer got past this supposedly “Wise Guardian of the Gates”?  I don’t think so.  Crap is crap, and it’s just as likely found in big-budget or established properties as it is in the indie world.

Writers like Hugh Howey, Andy Weir, and hopefully myself are changing the game.  We made ourselves tech savvy and started producing our own stuff, meeting up with other indie artists—filmmakers, comic book artists, actors—and we started sharing ideas, working off of platforms like Kickstarter and YouTube and podcasting to get our readers involved, and connecting in ways most established authors don’t.

It’s a new world out there for writers, and indie authors are on the cusp.  Yes, there are crappy indie books, just like there are crappy books from “established” writers, but those are typically buried and forgotten pretty quickly.  A good indie book, I’ve noticed, will receive about one new review on Amazon every one to three weeks—much slower than the big names like Stephen King or George R.R. Martin because they’ve got huge marketing machines behind them.  It’s up to the indie writer alone to promote his or her stuff.  They do it all by themselves.  Thus, a smaller number of reviews.  It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re awful books, it just means they’re a struggling writer, an as-yet undiscovered property.

So indie authors are essentially small business owners.  We have to promote ourselves.  We go to conventions like DragonCon and ComicCon, shake hands, hand out samples of our books, do signings, pose for pictures, speak on panels and give lectures so that we not only promote ourselves, but encourage the next generation of artists.

There are lots of unique ways that indie authors are changing the game, almost too many to count.  Some are holding contests so that you the reader get to vote on what book the author writes next, and some have even encouraged people to self-publish parodyes of their works.  Hugh Howey has actually got a fan who parodies his Wool series and self-publishes the stories.  It’s just for a laugh, and the whole Wool fanbase just loves them.  It’s a communal thing.  Name me one “big name” author encouraging their fans to do that.

To sum it up, I get several messages on Facebook every week from new fans who discovered Psycho Save Us or The Immortal Game and are gushing about them, and I got paid thousands to sell the film rights to my novel and because of it I’m involved with a couple of film projects and appearing at cons to sign autographs.  Would I even have half of that success without self-publishing?  No, I’d be sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring, a phone call from an agent or publisher that’s never going to come.

Being a self-published author isn’t laziness, as some like Sue Grafton or Brad Thor have suggested, it’s hard work.  If I could curse in this publication I’d say it’s bleeping hard work, but you get the picture.  We can’t stop answering emails, communicating with fans, promoting ourselves on social media or appearing at a con.  We can’t slow down for one second.  It’s a small business and we have to nurture it and grow it.  It’s a 24/7 kind of thing, no time for slowing down.

INTERVIEWER:  What advice would you give other authors wanting to self-publish?

CHAD:  The advice I would give to authors who want to self-publish is the same advice I would give to any authors anywhere: read a lot and write a lot.  I know I’m just repeating what other writers have said, but honestly that’s the only answer that matters.  Anybody who says anything else to you, like saying you should pay money to this group or that group in order to get published, is just trying to take your money.  About the only thing you should ever have to pay for is your education, but not representation.

And there will be people trying to take your money.  Agents who charge a “reading fee” are not to be trusted, nor are those charging a “processing fee”—which is just a reading fee with a new name, since they figured out writers were getting savvy to that term.

Also, whatever you do in life, whether it’s writing or acting or something else, don’t do it for the money.  If you do, not only will you be disappointed with the lack of results, but your work will suffer for it.  For those who don’t believe me, I always tell the story of a biologist named Desmond Morris, who once performed an experiment where he taught chimpanzees how to paint.  He was amazed at how creative they could be, and that their work actually became better over time.  But then one phase of the experiment required Morris to give the chimps a peanut as a reward for every painting finished.  In no time at all, the quality of the paintings diminished, as the chimps just slapped paint onto the canvas in any kind of way, doing the bare minimum amount of work to satisfy Morris before rushing over to get the peanut.

My point is, I know we’re not chimps, but people certainly behave in similar ways.  If you start doing everything for a monetary reward, then your focus is on that reward and not on the work.  So I guess my advice is read a lot, write a lot, and enjoy it.  If you don’t enjoy it, you’re either doing it wrong or you’re not actually interested in being a writer.  Find something else to do.

If you’ve already written something and you’re wanting to publish it, I would say go ahead and do it, it’s free to do on Amazon.  Just make sure you’ve thoroughly edited and you’re genuinely sure of its quality.  Don’t kid yourself.  And if you’re just looking for ways to promote it, I advise you to use what I call the Four Pillars: Facebook, Twitter, a personal blog, and a personal website.  The first three are free and easy to set up, but the last one will cost you a little bit.  What you need to do is connect them all together, have your Twitter bio link people to your Facebook, and vise versa.  Have your blog and website do the same.  Promote yourself on these social media and slowly, over time, you will see a return.  As long as your writing is up to par, that is.  Remember, it’s all about the writing.  Focus on the quality of the writing, and in time they will come to you.

As for getting more information about self-publishing, I for one would recommend Hugh Howey’s website.  The guy’s constantly putting up information about the industry, and as a writer that’s exactly what you need, constant updates about the world you’re trying to get work in.  My own blog has updates about not just myself and my work, but also the publishing industry in general.  Those industry updates are important because, like anything else in life, if you don’t stay on top of the latest news, you’re bound to get left behind.  Like I said, being a writer means being a small business owner.  Your product is you and your work, and you have to know how to sell it.

INTERVIEWER:  You’re a Georgia native.  How long have you been living here, and are you a lifer?

CHAD:  I’m 34 years old.  I was born and raised in Cartersville, graduated high school from here, all that.  My mother was a mostly staty-at-home mom who sometimes worked for Criterion Mills, which is long gone now, and my dad was a Cartersville City firefighter, now retired.  I moved away for several years, bouncing around Georgia, sometimes into Atlanta and sometimes closer to where I grew up, depending on what job I had at the time.

I became heavy in the martial arts.  I taught self-defense for years, both to civilians and to SWAT teams, out of the Atlanta Martial Arts Center.  I got black belts and certifications to teach Kali, Jeet Kune Do and Chinese Kung Fu.  I trained in Muay Thai, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Pekiti Tersia, a few others.  It was an obsession for about 15 years.  It led me to teaching some of the bodyguards for Tom Cruise, Britney Spears, and a few who had worked details for different presidents.  I did security for a few reality TV shows before the writing thing started to take off.

Currently I’m back in Cartersville.  I don’t know for how long, though.  It all depends on where the next leg of my career takes me and what my girlfriend wants to do.  Gotta keep her happy!

INTERVIEWER:  How many books have you written and of those how many were self-published?

CHAD:  I’ve written many books, seven of which have been published and all of them have been self-published.  However, like I said before, once the ball starts rolling in the self-publishing thing, and now that I’ve sold the film rights to one novel, other doors start opening.  Thanks to recent events, the ball has already started to roll for me in several other venues.

However, there’s a lot to be said for staying in the self-publishing field.  For one, all the profits are yours to keep.  I mean, Amazon keeps their slice, but it’s a small and fair percentage and for the most part the power remains in the hands of the writer.

INTERVIEWER:  Are you working on a book right now? If so, please share some details about the plot.

CHAD:  Right now I’m finishing up Dust Devil, which is a novel about a boy named Caleb Ludgate who claims he met the Devil in 1935 during the Dust Bowl crisis in Kansas.  A lot of it is based on the stories I’ve heard from my father over the years, who was the youngest of ten children raised on a farm in Adairsville, Georgia.  I’m a history buff and I’ve always been fascinated by old-style farming and the era of the Great Depression.  It’s astonishing what the Homestead Act did for this country, the good and the bad, and how farmers almost destroyed themselves unintentionally.

I’ve just finished the third and final installment in the Psycho series, called Psycho Redeem Us, which will finally wrap up Spencer’s story, as well as the sisters and their arc.  My editor is soon to start on that one.  There’s Myrmidon, a suspense-thriller with submarines, and The Bards of Bedlam, which is a short detective novel in a fantasy setting.  Also look for a story called TRIX-1490, about computer hacking.

So yeah, I’ve always got a few irons in the fire.