This is Part Two of Craig's interview with Scott Sigler. Part One was posted yesterday, Monday 5/4/10. Once again, special thanks go to A Kovacs (Dark Overlord Media), Stephen Wroth (SwanCon Guest Liason), and Alexandra Barlow (Hodder Publicity Manager), and of course Mr Sigler, for arranging the interview.
Photo by Amy Davis Roth, taken from Scott's website.
Let’s talk about your new podcast serial – ‘The Starter’, the sequel to ‘The Rookie’. Can you tell me a brief bit about that one?
Yeah, sure. ‘The Rookie’ is very different. I’ve got ‘Infected’, ‘Contagious’ and ‘Ancestor’ as my thrillers put out with Crown Publishing (a division of Random House), then I’ve got this strange animal called the Galactic Football League series, which is American Football 700 years in the future with different aliens playing the different positions based on their phenotype. So you have really large, strong things playing an offensive line; really fast things playing receiver; and then it is an analogy of the ability of sports to overcome racism and overcome attitudes. When you go play on a team where you may hate someone for no reason other than how they look, very shortly that becomes unimportant as long as that person can carry their weight on the team and help you win games.
‘The Rookie’ is about not just people who are different colour but completely different alien organisms that mostly want to kill each other. But you have to have all these races if you’re going to have a successful football team. There’s no way around it – you simply can’t compete. Because of that, to protect the players, the Overlord Government makes sure that all the teams have full diplomatic immunity, so you can’t just pull them over and kill one race in the team. As soon as the teams get diplomatic immunity, organised crime moves in and buys up all the teams, because now they can ship contraband and information all across the galaxy without being arrested or detained or searched in any way.
So it becomes a crazy combination of ‘Star Wars’ meets ‘Any Given Sunday’ meets ‘The Godfather’. So now that ‘The Rookie’ is finished, we’ve just put the sequel, ‘The Starter’ up for pre-order. That makes books One and Two of a seven book series.
Is podcasting then printing something you always plan to do or are there new directions you’re looking into involving digital or print media?
It’s largely keeping to the fans, keeping that fan base. I’ve got a core fan base that I know will buy the book on opening day, and keeping them happy, motivated, interested and entertained is critical to keep them excited about the next product you have coming out. So at this point I always plan to be podcasting, hopefully podcast everything I do unabridged and free ‘cause that’s been the magic solution so far. We are starting to get into a situation where when I’m writing a book a year for Crown and a book a year for the Rookie series – so that’s two books a year, plus touring, plus cons – it’s a really large workload, so maybe three or four years down the road, we’re not sure if we’re going to be podcasting everything. Or it might not be me doing the voice, especially if my career continues to advance and we starting working on movie deals or start trying to get a TV show going, that’s like a whole nother large job and something has got to give eventually. But right now the plan is to continue to podcast.
In August last year, you co-launched Dark Overlord Media. Can you tell me a little bit about this – what it aims to do?
Well, right now Dark Overlord Media is primarily focused on putting out the Galactic Football League series – specifically my books. And then other books I have that have not been picked up by Crown, such as ‘The Crypt’ or maybe ‘Nocturnal’ or books of short stories. Eventually the goal of Dark Overlord Media is to go out and find people who have created their own online audience, with a lot of followers that would want to by a book or comic or graphic novel – some kind of print product. We assist that person to put the book out. Our whole model revolves around pre-order. So if you have a large audience and say you will put a book out in September but are taking pre-orders in April, your hardcore fans will buy it in April and then you bring the money in, pay for the print run, and now you don’t have to take out loans just to print a book. So eventually we want to go out and get this other talent for Dark Overlord Media and make it its own company, but right now it’s just A Kovacs and myself who are the only people in it. We both have a couple of regular day jobs on top of that, so maybe three or four years down the road... Our goal is, when we get to book five of the Galactic Football League series, we sell fifty thousand copies on the first day of pre-order. At that point, that’s our full time job. We hire staff and we start going after other talent.
So how much time do you put into the marketing of your work?
Whew, a lot. At this point I think I’ve got three fulltime jobs. I’ve got the writing; then there is the podcasting and the website maintenance, talking to people online and all those things. That’s about 40 hours [a week]. And then I’ve got the marketing, which is anywhere from 20 to 30 hours a week. So it’s just an enormous amount of work, but it’s really got to get done at this point. All the time I spend interacting with the fans, that’s... I can’t not do that because the fans are the ones who got me here. I can’t not write books. And if I pull back on the marketing and leave that completely up to the publisher, that’s going to be a mistake, ‘cause for the publisher, as good as they are, it’s just another book and they’re putting out 300 this year. For me, it’s life or death that this book succeeds and does better than the book before it.
And are you happy that other authors have used you as a blueprint for podcasting success, or do you feel too many people are attempting this without the know-how?
No, I don’t think... ‘cause when I started out, there was no know-how. Largely I got to where I am by just messing things up a lot and making a lot of mistakes, both technical and strategical. So if I can be a model to somebody who is just coming in to it, and they can pay attention to what I’ve done, and that saves them time in recording and in editing, and they know better how to market themselves and how to go out and get an audience, if I can save them that time, then that’s fantastic.
I don’t think it’s flooded at all. I don’t think it will be flooded for a while, ‘cause there’s frankly not enough people with the balls to record their stuff and give it away for free. Everybody’s out there telling them, ‘No, no, no, don’t do this. Don’t do this.’ So for the people that actually do it, it’s still in the first-mover stage. It’s a very early adoption. I do tell people it’s a three to five year arc. You’re going to have to do this for five years before anything happens, before you get a print deal and move on from there. Some of them have embraced that and believe it and I think they’re heading for big success.
Is there any golden advice you could give upcoming authors?
My advice for people who want to podcast their book, I’ve got quite a bit of advice about that. First thing is, don’t podcast your first draft. You need to edit the book a few times. Don’t be in a hurry to get there ‘cause I’ve been waiting for regular publishing to get involved in this and they’re just not. There are very few people doing it, so you have time to make sure the book is right. Because once you podcast, when people listen to your first or second episode and the book is bad, there’s nothing you can do to get them to ever come back again. You get one chance to make a first impression and then they’re just gone.
The second bit of advice is learn to record and edit and give yourself a lot of time to get frustrated. You’re going to get frustrated and you’re going to make mistakes – that’s all part of the process. Don’t quit, just know it’s coming. When it’s coming, you’ll be like, ‘Okay, Scott said I’d get really pissed at this process and it’s just a normal part of the process’. Then when you get your book to where you want it and you learn how to record, record the whole book. That’s the biggest part of the advice: record the whole book before you ever put out a single episode. Things pop up in your life and nothing ever goes as you think it will. The most important part of this is consistency. If you can put out the book every week for 20-24 weeks, you’re going to build up an audience. If you put out three episodes and stop for a month and put out an episode and come back five weeks later, you’ve lost everybody. A lot of your work has been wasted.
When you’re podcasting your first book, you should be really working hard on your second book. You have to put out at least two in a row to build up any kind of an audience. So finish the book and edit it carefully. Make it the best you can make it. Record the whole thing. When you start putting it out, put it out consistently, don’t miss a week no matter what. Try and get at least two books out and then figure out how to keep content coming in. You got to go three to five years – that’s the hard part, you have to go for a long time. You gradually build up an audience so when you put out a book you’ll have five or six thousand people who want to go out and buy it.
So it took you the three to five years to build up your fan base?
Yeah, we’re just in the fifth year now. I’m coming up on my fifth year anniversary in a month. Things are really rockin’ for me right now. We’re waiting to see how ‘Ancestor’ does in the States, there’s a lot riding on this right now. So I’m at five years and this has been non-stop work, so hopefully ‘Ancestor’ is the big coming out party – we’ll see how it goes.
Are there any hints about future Scott Sigler work that you can give us?
Sure. The next book is going to be ‘Pandemic’, in 2011. It’s ‘Infected’, ‘Contagious’, and then ‘Pandemic’ will finish up that trilogy. Then we’ll be done with those critters one way or another. Then 2012 will be ‘EarthCore’, which I’m really excited about ‘cause ‘EarthCore’ was the first book I gave away, in 2005 as a free podcast. Now we’ve come in this big arc, as a writer and as a career arc, and now we will be re-writing ‘EarthCore’ and putting it out in hardcover through a major publisher. So it closes out the story of the podcasting very nicely. Then after that, we’re not sure what will be out next but that will finish up the five books we owe Crown. Then we’ll either re-sign with Crown or go with a new publisher, but we’ll have ‘Nocturnal’, ‘Descendant’ – the sequel to ‘Ancestor’ – and then if all goes well, in 2013 we write ‘Mount Fitzroy’ which is the sequel to ‘EarthCore’. A lot of people have been waiting for that. At that point, people will have been waiting for that for eight years, and I’ve become the author I’ve always complained about, like ‘Come on, why you make me wait four years for your book, you jerk!’. Now I’ve made people wait eight years. So, it should be fun.
Craig Bezant, on behalf of HorrorScope, would like to thank Scott Sigler for his valuable time, and wishes him every success in the future.
'Ancestor' is published in Australia through Hodder & Stoughton (Hachette) on arrangment with Crown Publishing (Random House).
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