Online Book Review

Dear Online Book Review Readers,

I am thrilled to bring to you today an original interview for the Online Book Review with author John Rector. John is the author of the online book The Grove published on the Amazon Kindle. Just two weeks ago, John’s literary agent Allan Guthrie sold John’s latest novel The Cold Kiss to editor Eric Raab at Tor/Forge. This interview is especially interesting as John has just “broken through,” and the process is extremely fresh on his mind. I particularly found exceptional his discussion of his writing process, revision process, and how to develop sympathetic characters.

–Stacey Cochran

STACEY COCHRAN: Your novel The Grove has been doing extraordinarily well on Amazon Kindle. Beyond the fact that it’s just a kick-ass psychological thriller, what else accounts for how well it’s been doing on Kindle?

JOHN RECTOR: I’d like to think it was word of mouth, but more likely it’s a combination of the blurb, the description, generous reviews from readers, and of course, the price.  As a Kindle owner myself, I’m always on the look out for good deals, and at $.99, I think The Grove fits in that category.

STACEY COCHRAN: Now you’ve just sold a novel through your agent to a major publisher Tor/Forge to editor Eric Raab. Tell us first how you found your literary agent, and then please tell us how it feels to know you’re going to be working with such an outstanding editor and an awesome publisher?

JOHN RECTOR: My agent is Allan Guthrie, who in addition to being a fantastic agent is also a spectacular crime writer.  I’d read his novel, Two-Way Split, and absolutely loved it, so when I discovered he was also an agent, I put his name at the top of my list.  Then, after I finished an early draft of The Grove, I gave it to a novelist friend who liked it enough to send Allan an email on my behalf asking if he’d be interested in taking a look.  Allan generously agreed to give it a read, and thankfully he liked it enough to take me on as a client.

As far as Eric Raab and Tor are concerned, I couldn’t be happier or more excited, and I can’t wait to get to work.  This has been my goal since I wrote my very first short story eight years ago, and now that it’s happened, I’m at a loss for words.  The only thing I can say is that it feels exactly how I’d imagined it would, except a hell of a lot better.

STACEY COCHRAN: Tell us a little bit about your process to write The Grove. How long did it take? How do you revise?

JOHN RECTOR: The Grove was my first novel, and I got the idea while talking to another writer friend about how to generate ideas.  I think I was trying to sound cool and nonchalant about the entire process, so I rattled this idea off the top of my head about a depressed farmer who finds the body of a teenage girl in his cornfield, but instead of calling the police and reporting it, he decides to keep it a secret so he can sit out there and watch her decompose.

At that point there wasn’t much of a story there, but the idea was eerie enough to where it stuck with me.  Over the next few weeks I found myself going back to it over and over and asking myself questions about the character…  Who was the farmer and why was he depressed?  Who were the people in his life?  Who was the girl?  Etc.    Sometime during all of this, the company I worked for sent me to Houston for a week.  While I was there, I spent my free time in the hotel room knocking out the outline for the book.  By the time I got home, I had everything but the ending.  I started writing immediately and I finished the first draft in twelve weeks.

Revision is a constant for me.  When I’m writing, I’ll go back over what I did the day before and tweak it before I move on.  It doesn’t have to be perfect, but I need to see the shape of what I’m after in the prose.  As long as it’s there, then I can keep going.  If it’s not, then I go back to work.

The Grove went through six or seven drafts.  The new book, The Cold Kiss, went through closer to nine or ten, so far.  Most of them involve tweaking the prose and making each line as simple and as clean as I can.  My goal is to make my books effortlessly readable.  Unfortunately, for me, that takes a lot of work.

STACEY COCHRAN: Dexter McCray is one of those perfectly flawed characters. What is the key to making a character like Dexter sympathetic?

JOHN RECTOR: Well, I can’t argue that Dexter’s actions are morally wrong, but I never saw him as a bad person.  If anything, he was just a guy who had a habit of making incredibly bad choices.

In order to make him sympathetic, I tried to show him through the eyes of the other characters in the novel who cared about him.  If you look at his relationships with the people around him; his wife, the sheriff, even his daughter, you’ll see that everyone he was close to in his life cared deeply for him.  My goal was to use their feelings as a kind of filter for the reader.

STACEY COCHRAN: What are your thoughts on the state of traditional publishing?

JOHN RECTOR: I don’t think it’s as terrible as some people make it sound.  Sometimes I’ll read the doom and gloom reports out there and get worried, but not too often.  I think things are going to change, but as long as people want to read fiction, there will always be traditional publishing houses.

STACEY COCHRAN: What are your thoughts on writers building careers by using digital publishing (via Kindle and blogs) alongside more traditional publishing like paperbacks and hardcovers?

JOHN RECTOR: I think the most important thing you can do if your goal is to publish with a traditional publisher is to build a platform for your work.  If you can show a publisher a good manuscript and an established fan base who will buy X number of books, then you have that much better of a chance at landing a deal.  Look at Scott Sigler and David Wellington.  They both built huge readerships through podcasting and serialized online novels and now they both have major deals.

It can be done, but you have to understand the risks.  While great sales could lead to a publishing contract, poor sales could end your career before it starts.

STACEY COCHRAN: What do you think will be the most major changes we’ll see as writers with regard to publishing over the next 5-10 years?

JOHN RECTOR: I think e-books are going to continue to grow and hopefully we’ll see a standard e-book format sometime soon.  I also wouldn’t be surprised if publishing houses became booksellers in the future.  I can see writers having to submit their manuscripts and fight through the same query/rejection process they do now in order to be published and sold at the bigger book sites.

But then again, that might not happen.

All anyone knows for sure is that the internet is one big wild-west free for all.  No one knows what’s going to happen or where we’ll be in five years or even next year.  The best thing to do is to keep writing and submitting and promoting your work in whatever way seems best to you.  Some people are going to stumble on the right way to do it and be successful, while others won’t.  All you can do is make sure your chips are on the table when the cards are dealt.