An Interview with Karen Traviss - Gears of War Novelist and NYT Bestselling Author Final Q (Life On The Other Side)
Traviss details her new projects and her life this past decade of indie writing.
I am in awe.
A month ago I started a back and forth email exchange with Karen Traviss and it has been one of the most memorable interactions I have ever had with an author. The kindness and openness Traviss has shown to answer questions about her career.
When I first emailed Karen, I wasn’t sure she would even acknowledge me. Why would she? I’m just one guy with a newsletter and a limited amount of outreach (currently). It doesn’t seem worth her time but I was transparent and direct about my request. Karen responded with thoughtfulness and even more thoughtful answers about not only Gears of War, but life as a writer with decades of experience.
I know I have expressed gratitude here before but it’s still worth noting and I hope to open up conversation with Karen again down the road.
For my last question I wanted to see where Karen was at now with writing and how life is different (or the same) from traditional publishing. Since the Halo novels, Karen has left the major publishing world and has written as a successful indie author. I wanted to give space for Karen to open up about all of that.
Jesse: For my last discussion for this interview, I want to talk about your work now. You have left traditional publishing and freed yourself from the complications that big companies can create. I also assume there is more work required on your end to make it all happen but it's also all on your terms. I see it as a reward for you to have put your time into the machine and come out on the other end writing the art, stories, and characters you want.
You have both the Nomad and Ringer series ongoing - Nomad Book 4 (Kings of the Mastan) is set to be out soon and the Ringer series awaits a 3rd entry. I want to give you space to talk about your artistic freedom now and any exciting developments on either series or anything else you might be working on. Just tell me what excites you these days when it comes to your writing/life
Karen: I'd like to knock a common misconception on the head before I get into the weeds on this. There's no sharp divide between creative freedom on one side and none on the other – there is a line, but it's somewhere else entirely. I had creative freedom with franchise work as well as with my creator-owned work in traditional publishing, but if you think writers have control of their original fiction, I'll tell you some sobering stories later. The latitude you get varies a lot from writer to writer and franchise to franchise, and some do put a lot of restrictions on authors and dictate the small details of the story, but that's the one complaint I don't have about trad pub. At least I can say nobody ever messed with my books or told me what I had to write. (In a few cases, I'm not actually sure they even read them, either.) It's actually not about writing at all: I jumped ship because of money and poor working practices. (See, I can still speak fluent Weasel after all these years!) The freedom in being an indie – for me, anyway – comes from the elements that aren't about writing. But then I left before the advent of sensitivity readers and other forms of censorship crept in.
I was going to talk about the nuts and bolts of being an indie, but I had a coffee with a couple of fans – something I haven't been able to do for years – and that made me get uncharacteristically retrospective for a change, because I do tend to erase the past. In March, it'll be twenty years since my first novel (City of Pearl) was published. I sat there talking to these two very nice fans and I had this moment of bewilderment about how I got here and why, and also why I'm still doing it. Well, I know why I became a novelist (it was someone else's idea and I needed the money) but I've had to think harder about why I'm still doing it. The reason I write now probably isn't the same as the one I had going in, because if nothing else, I don't have to write to survive now. There are things I'd have done differently if I had my time again that are nothing to do with the creative side. But I'm very bad at knowing when to quit and pausing to take stock, and my tendency to just look forward and occasionally get flashes of this weird place called the past probably means that if I don't learn lessons on the day, I don't learn them at all. My defense is that nobody's the same person in the same world that they used to be, and you make the best decisions you can with the data available at the time.
The Ringer Series
Anyway... the stuff that puts food on my table are my two current series, Nomad and Ringer, and to a lesser extent my Wess'har books. (I say to a lesser extent because HarperCollins still owns the rights to the print and e-books, so I only get a small percentage in royalties. But at least the series is still selling after all these years.) Ringer is a military techno-thriller series set on Earth today, with an SF element, because I was planning to change genres and write thrillers, so the original premise – the guy who doesn't realize what he is and just thinks he's crazy – was a kind of crossover to get me there. So far, though, Amazon's algo has just nudged me back towards suggested titles for SF readers rather than thriller readers, because they're the ones who buy it. That's how it works – it's counter to everything we old folk learned in marketing, which was about understanding who the customer is, and I'm grateful to Chris Fox for explaining it to me. It was like an optical illusion resolving. Taking your existing readers with you when you changed genres – or even series – used to be the Holy Grail of bookselling, but Amazon is about patterns in purchases, not customer demographics. Ah well. It sells, and it beats starving.
I still write all my books with a thriller structure so maybe I should stop worrying about sales categories and accept where I am. In eleven years as an indie, I haven't done any real marketing or promotion. (I just heard the thud of other indies fainting on the floor, because most of them embrace hardcore marketing with a focus that would scare an agency. Many are skilled enough to run a marketing service for other authors if they wanted to.) A large part of my reason is that I just run out of time: I'm physically slower these days, which makes a big difference in a deskbound job, believe it or not, and I need to spend that time writing. I also have my personal brand from my trad pub days that's still got a lot of momentum. But there's also the category factor, which includes something called "comp author." To target likely readers, it helps to know who else writes like you do. It's relatively easy to work out what kind of SF I write in category terms (except for Ringer... ) but comp authors have proved elusive. Professional marketing people who claim to understand metadata (optimum keywords for searches, comp authors, fine-tuning book categories) shied away when I held out my money and implied it was too hard. I ended up buying an automated service to analyze my style and vibe (because they often transcend genre in terms of what readers choose) and tell me whose readers I should also target if I ever bought ads. The service said it compared uploaded samples with best-selling authors in different genres and reported back with a shortlist. So I uploaded a chunk from one of my Halo novels first, because I don't trust any AI system not to use what I upload for its own ends (I wasn't wrong, was I?) and I knew the Halo books had already been pirated. The AI chuntered away and gave me the result, which wasn't what I expected.
The best-selling author whose style and vibe most resembled mine was... Karen Traviss.
Yes, I write like me, apparently. Who knew? But the bizarre thing was that I only matched myself 99%. I don't think my money was entirely wasted, because I had a good laugh, and it also proved I wasn't failing to spot obvious comp authors, so I wouldn't have to waste money hiring someone who claimed to be able to read the metadata runes but couldn't. If the AI couldn't come up with much, it probably meant there wasn't much to be found, because, as we all know by now, they've been swallowing pirated lists whole "for training purposes." So I'll just blunder on as I am.
So, Ringer: Going Grey (book 1) and Black Run (book 2) have been out for a while, 2014 and 2017 respectively, and I put book 3, Sacrificial Red, on the back burner several times for various reasons over the course of a few years. I didn't like what I'd written, I needed to get on with Nomad because it was doing well and I liked eating and not freezing to death, and of course there were real-world events that disrupted me as well as everyone else. But I'm rewriting Sacrificial Red again now, after being away from that universe so long that I actually omitted a character who should have been there. It took a long time to dawn on me. Yes, even seasoned writers do stuff like that. This is probably why I hated the earlier versions. There was a big gap in my simulation and I failed to spot what it was. That's what I call an “immersion failure:” at some point, I wasn't far enough into the three-dimensional world of each character and walking around with them, or I'd have seen them wondering what this character was up to now. The moment I deviate from my method, unconsciously or otherwise, cracks appear. The story will look like it's got lots of action, but there's no emotional arc underpinning it, and the intense focus from within the characters is my USP. It drives the story and it's what readers buy it for.
So Ringer is about fathers, sons, and how far people will go to protect their families. The complication is genetic engineering and very serious money, and how serving your country can unleash a chain of consequences that leaves no good deed unpunished. We've got a kid who's been engineered to display dynamic mimicry, assorted oligarchs, a healthy dose of Royal Marines, some feuding research scientists, and women behaving badly. There's some research background to it on the Ringer-page on my website if you want to read some of the freakier stuff. I had a real-life pioneering geneticist check the details and I found my wild ideas were nowhere near as out-there as the reality.
The Nomad Series
Nomad is fresher in my memory, so no characters have gone missing yet. Books 1, 2, and 3 – The Best Of Us, Mother Death, and Here We Stand – are out, and book 4, Kings Of The Mastan, will probably be out in late spring. It's first-contact, space colony, and post-apocalypse in book category terms, but not as we know it, Captain. (If you've read my stuff before, you can probably guess what to expect.) Earth's trying to recover from global bioterrorism that's wiped out key food crops in half the world, but the humans who end up leaving for Nomad Base, mankind's first extrasolar settlement, don't exactly volunteer for it and they're not one big happy family. They are, however, mostly men and women the mission AI decided were the best of humanity, and to all intents and purposes he's been running the project for the best part of a century. His chosen few aren't the people governments or institutions would have picked if they'd known what was going on. They're ordinary working people, farmers and soldiers, and for the first time the scientists aren't in charge, which has left some of them a bit miffed. This is a planet with a new world order.
Apart from a handful of bureaucrats and an Aussie black ops unit, nobody on Earth knows that the mission made it to Opis after all or that there are aliens out there – aliens with very valuable technology that'll change everything, and others that might nuke Earth from orbit. This lucrative frontier is 40 light years away, but that might not be far enough to stop a gold rush in the relatively near future. And if you're building a new world that far from home, are your loyalties still to Earth, or are you a new civilisation that should form its own alliances? Again, the series has a cast of military characters and aliens, including the SAS, a foul-mouthed avian, an aristocratic eel who's about to kick off an insurgency, and a colonial superpower that's lost a top-secret ship and a ton of classified data.
The Nomad-series started life as part of an indie collaboration with the guys at Galaxy's Edge, but given what had happened in my franchise days, I thought it would be safer for all of us if I set my stuff in a completely different timeline with no overlap at all with the main story arc that's something like a thousand years later, just in case. A separate story that could be unbolted from the universe without disrupting the rest of it would be less risky if the collaboration didn't work out. Why wouldn't it work, though? Well, it's my method again. When you follow characters that closely and show all your working-out, and don't gloss over the small detail that shapes their lives and decisions, it takes just one event emerging from a character's background, a single line of dialogue, or some other small but pivotal detail to steer the story in a totally different direction. And that's what happened. I'd added various Anglophone nationals because that was the logical outcome of the geopolitics caused by a series of global crises, and that created a lot of very different questions that had to be answered. Suddenly it was a different universe. I'd actually dusted off two back-burner series that I was worried I wouldn't get around to writing and salvaged some of their elements for Nomad, and before the end of the first book I could already see it taking on a life of its own that weren't like any of them, as always happens at some point. I decided to call it a day and unhitch the wagon because I knew it was only going to deviate further.
And it certainly has. When I write, I want to know what happens next as much as the reader does, because I don't actually know myself until a few moments before I hit the keys. I seem to have doubled down on that over the years and I'm doing even more of the characters' thinking line by line rather than looking slightly further ahead, so my books are getting longer, and they weren't exactly pamphlets before. But that's part of exploring the universe through the characters' eyes. I don't know it until they think about it. Whatever job title I have now, I'm still a news journo at heart. I'm still reporting. I'd be bored out of my skull otherwise.
Once you've laid the foundations for your original, creator-owned, I-can-do-what-I-like universe, you're as stuck with its rules as with someone else's. There are things in all my creator-owned series that I'm wedded to and sort of wish I wasn't, but it's that "follow the character" rule again. I have to forget scenes that would have been fun or cool or incredibly dramatic because they're not what the characters would do – in fact, it's a bad sign if I'm even thinking in terms of those scenes, because it means I've lost concentration and slipped out of sync with the character's mind.
Comparison of Lives
Now, if you're looking for the real difference between my trad pub days and my indie incarnation, here's the side that's completely different. I own Ringer and Nomad outright, so I get to keep the revenue minus the sales platform's percentage. All the rights belong to me and I can sell those rights with any conditions I choose if I want to. I choose my own editors, artists, and designers, and I set the price, the countries the books can be sold in, and the formats that are available. I decide every aspect of it. I can't do that with my Wess'har series because that was published traditionally. This is a broad brush stroke, because I know there'll be all kinds of variations, but what follows is or at least was pretty standard for the Big Four publishers. (Caveat: I've never worked for a small publisher, so I have no idea if this applies to them as well.) I still own the copyright of my original fiction, but the publisher holds the publication rights, and they'll own them until I've been dead for 70 years. Same with agents; you're still a pile of useful nutrients when you're dead because the royalties continue to go to your estate and the agent still gets his cut until the copyright runs out, because he's the "agent of record," linked to specific books, not to you. (Even if you fire an agent, they still have a claim on the books.)
With franchise work in trad pub, you don't even own the copyright. Anything you create is the franchise's, and they can use it as they wish without paying anything to the writer. Writers generate a lot of ideas and material for these companies but they don't get the benefit from that. (Some comics do reward writers, but comics are a different culture.) If royalties are in a franchise deal at all, they're so small that you probably never "earn out" – make enough in royalties to cover the advance so you start getting actual payment for sales. (In trad pub, most books, whether original or tie-ins, never earn out at all.) It's not the franchise you have the contract with, it's the publisher, and the publisher has to bid for a license to produce the books for a fixed period.
So you don't have to be an accountant to see it's all a bit one-sided, and that side isn't the writer's. It's no surprise that the indie sector has boomed, and it's done so mostly unseen by trad pub because indies generally aren't in the sales reporting systems that produce sales charts and trends, and the biggest player in the indie market, Amazon, doesn't share its data with anyone. But for a rough idea of what readers are buying or subscribing to, Amazon paid a quarter of a billion dollars to indie authors in the first half of 2023 for Kindle Unlimited reads. That's just Amazon and just KU subscription reads, remember, not sales, and not other online stores, or bricks and mortar, of course, because indies can get their titles into bookstores now. There have always been hardy souls who managed to produce books themselves and get them into shops, but the system wasn't designed to be easily accessible to lone writers. Then Amazon changed the publishing world and it happened fast.
At first I thought the indie trend might just end up being people who couldn't get published traditionally for a wide range of reasons, one of which was trad pub thinking the readership would be too small for some of the more niche books. But those numbers would be terrific for an author operating on their own, especially as they'd get to keep most of the revenue, and advances are so low these days that a lot of writers could forget them. I started to see established writers beginning to jump ship, and if there's one thing a freelance can spot at a hundred yards, it's the queue of rodents with suitcases and lifejackets waiting to disembark. As someone who's kept pet rats, I trust their judgment.
Like any big disruption – disasters, big shifts in politics or the economy, world-changing inventions – my own disruption was the end result of the accumulation of events that reached a tipping point. The indie boom started at roughly the same time I was seriously disenchanted with some publishers (I was working with at least three at the time) and lots of medium-sized irritants and a few serious ones had reached critical mass. I was also dealing with real life crises in the family, so I thought sod it, I'm not wasting what's left of my life on this. It was time for endex. Publishers were now an overhead I needed to cut. Even the nice ones seemed to forget authors existed and were the reason they had a product to sell at all.
It took a little time to extricate myself from my various commitments, although one exit was a simple "I quit" when someone wanted to alter a contract. I let the rest just run their course. Eventually I got the list down to an original series which was about to go into production with a publisher, so I told them I wanted to withdraw it and returned the advance. (I never spent an advance before a book was published, because you never know.) That series was Ringer and it was my first indie publishing venture. The transition to being a swashbuckling privateer was fairly smooth, except the cover artist failed to deliver and I had to scramble to get a new cover in place days before the publication date of the first book.
But even that was a valuable lesson in the things I could do as an indie that I couldn't do in trad pub. The launch date didn't matter. (Forget pre-orders, when you do have to stick to it.) It showed me I could turn a book around in days or even hours if I needed to. In trad pub, on-sale dates were a year or more in advance. Now I had options. I could do a "soft launch," which means releasing the book and promoting it later. In fact, I could even relaunch a book if I needed to. If your novel tanks, or sales just slow down with trad pub, your chances of resurrecting it are zero. But with an indie title you can keep relaunching. You can change the cover or the content as many times as you want if the first version doesn’t work. (I haven't changed any of mine yet, but I'm ready to freshen up the Ringer covers soon.) A guy I mentored for a while didn't do well with his first novel, so he withdrew it from sale, rewrote it with more polished skills he'd learned in the meantime, and re-released it as a greatly improved book that sold like gangbusters and kicked off a much bigger career. Try doing that in trad pub: there are no second chances. In the indie world, there aren't just second chances, there are as many as you need. Overall, being indie means you can move fast and your book will always be available, promoted by someone who cares about it above all else – you. The long tail business model of niche sales works. We now have highly successful authors who've never been traditionally published and don't need to be. They've worked out how to find their specific readership and keep them supplied with exactly the kind of books they want to read. They keep writing more books and they keep selling, and even in small numbers that adds up and becomes a steady stream.
I'm not saying going indie is a panacea. It can be totally the wrong choice for some writers. Yes, it is more work, and not everyone can or even wants to run a business . It's a separate skill. The personal side can also be difficult for some authors – negotiating money, firing people, or doing the promotional stuff can be stressful if you're shy and retiring. But if you're publishing traditionally, you'll have to do most if not all of the promotion of your book yourself, so if you're going to do that, you might as well try doing the rest and cut out the middleman. Just ask yourself what your publisher does for you and look at what you can do for yourself. You can even keep a foot in both trad pub and indie camps if you're a bit nervous – quite a few authors do that as a matter of policy. Okay, the indie world has its share of con artists and sociopaths like any industry, because where's there's money there's bad eggs, and Amazon can shut you down in seconds for breaking their rules and not even tell you what sin they think you've committed, but trad pub do all that bad stuff too, so this isn't a battle between good and evil. It's about deciding what matters to you as a writer and what kind of business model will achieve that for you.
If you think I'm being harsh on trad pub, though, don't take my word for it. I don't have the room or the will to relate all the horror stories, but take a look at this backgrounder: this is a newsletter I sent to readers in summer 2023, which was largely about a survey by The Bookseller trade mag on the experiences of debut authors with their publishers. TLDR: the majority of new authors felt their publisher hadn't treated them well – lack of support, lack of honesty, treating them like kids, dumping them unceremoniously – and 54% said the experience had left them with mental health issues. Okay, there'll always be a few people in any population sample who'll have mental health problems, and these days we seem to medicalise the normal down days in life, but 54% is way, way past any normal-for-the-workplace line. None of the problems the rookies cited would surprise any author who's been around for a few years, though, and I guarantee those veterans said what I did: those newbies ain't seen nothing yet. Like showbiz, publishing has an endless supply of hopefuls with dreams, and a handful of relatively junior but powerful gatekeepers with a lot of autonomy, and that's fertile ground for abusive working relationships. I know plenty of decent, hard working people in the industry, but if an editor has an unfortunate personality or unresolved issues, they can behave badly and get away with it. Either management knows and doesn't care, or doesn't know and therefore isn't managing. But telling writers it's "just you" and relying on them being too embarrassed or scared to speak out or even discuss it with other authors no longer works. Writers talk now.
I'm not boo-hooing about how hard it is to be a writer, because it isn't. Millions of people have dirty, dangerous, thankless jobs they weren't given much choice about, and nobody forced me to write. I didn't go through the usual authorial struggle in pursuit of a dream. A career consultant suggested it when I wanted to change jobs before what was left of my shriveled soul was finally sucked out of me like a CGI effect in a K-drama. I never starved in a garret for my art. I didn't even accumulate a pile of rejection slips. I did my research, wrote a business plan, and stuck to it, and I was able to quit the day job a few months after City of Pearl was published. So I'm not expecting sympathy, because I just ended up angry and highly motivated, not damaged. I built a new career on top of the old one.
Which brings me back to the assumption that an author has creative freedom with their original work. It's not as much as you think, especially these days. Authors being canceled at the behest of the mob and "sensitivity readers" are the new censorship. That all happened after I went indie, more's the pity, because I'd have really enjoyed a few hours' robust and jolly banter with some backroom zampolit. A buddy had a run-in with his publisher after a junior employee complained about an opinion expressed by a character in his manuscript. The opinion of one character didn't match hers and she declared it "offensive." My buddy was asked to change it. He refused, went indie, and made a great deal of money. But it doesn't always end happily. Rugs can also be pulled out from under you as easily in original work as in franchises. Writers get dropped all the time for failing to sell enough books, but even successful authors can find themselves screwed. There's one case that sticks in my memory out of many because I still wonder if anyone was held accountable. A friend who's a well-respected and experienced author was told by his publisher that they'd decided to split the first book of his new series into two parts and publish it as books 1 and 2. He warned them it wouldn't work because the original book wasn't written or structured to enable that, which would seem pretty obvious, but they went ahead, and as predicted, the first half-book didn't do well. They decided not to publish the second half because of that. So if anyone thinks publishers always know what they're doing, I'm afraid they often don't. There are things trad pub do that do make sense, especially in the production process, so indies need to beware of throwing useful babies out with bathwater, but it also does some serious damage and walks away from the wreckage.
Looking back from the twenty-year mark, the stuff I now wish I'd done differently is actually counterintuitive. They're the things that most people would see as the most desirable situation to find yourself in. Because I was looking for a new career, I only thought in terms of a full-job. At the time it was probably the best call to make, but it had consequences, and I can't say I wasn't warned. I attended Clarion in 2000 and one of the author tutors said I could have a successful full time career, but I really needed to think about the implications of that, because it could become what she called "the hamster wheel." She was right, as I discovered in due course. It's an isolating job, and while some people are fine with that, I'm an old journo and I need the real world and a noisy newsroom from time to time. So why didn't I heed that warning and write part-time? Because my motivation wasn't an ambition to write novels. I just wanted a different full-time job, and writing was easier than retraining as a diplomat. (I mention that specifically because another careers adviser actually suggested that once, which is hilarious considering that I'm not known for my soothing manner. We'd be at war with everybody now.) So I took the writing path, and that paved the way for something really counterintuitive.
Still at Clarion, I met a book editor who said they wanted to see a manuscript when I got around to writing my first novel. Fast forward a year, and I had firm publisher interest in the Wess'har series before I even got an agent. Before City of Pearl was released, I was approached by another publisher asking me to write for a franchise. As a debut author I'd obviously never done tie-ins, and I even had to ask a friend what they were, but the advance was substantial. I was given pretty much carte blanche to do what I liked within the franchise's environment and that set the pattern for how I worked from then on. That, to me, was normal publishing because I didn't know any better. I got an instant reputation for being able to deliver something marketable on time, and after that I never had to pitch for work. Editors contacted me. So I was earning a very good, steady income, which was the whole point to start with, and I was still writing my own original stuff as well.
Target achieved. Sounds idyllic, yes? No. That was the mistake. You can see the problem in hindsight – the money was coming in and I got regular offers, so I fell into the habit of just doing triage, looking at the gigs I was offered and saying yes or no, instead of setting my own goals. I just reacted. It's hard to remember how we really felt at any given time in the past, but I suspect I didn't think it mattered as long as I was making a living and had less hassle than in my last job. I've never had a novel in me trying to get out. I just pick a few building blocks and see where it leads, and this isn't me thinking I should have spent my effort on something more grand and worthier than franchises, because I'd have done very similar work in my original stuff, and readers don't care whose copyright it is anyway – they either like a book or they don't. What I regret is that I never made myself step back and ask, "Should I be doing this?" and I put up with some things very early on which were red flags and predicted what would happen to me later. If you tolerate something, you encourage it and it escalates. But I was brought up not to quit. Nope – trust your gut. If it looks iffy, walk away.
So what kept me writing when I reached the stage where I didn't have to rely on that money to survive? I'm still trying to work that out, because it's been a tough couple of years on the personal front and I'll sit down at my desk and tell myself, "You don't have to do this. Retire like a normal person." But I still feel driven by deadlines that aren't there. I enjoy the act of writing, the actual exercise of the craft, and as I said earlier, I've got a long list of things I want to write and I suppose I'm afraid I won't ever finish it. But I still can't tell where habit ends and genuine enthusiasm begins. Maybe that's what a vocation is. Bar a few months out of fifty years, I've always earned my living by writing and communicating, one way or another.
The one thing that makes sense as motivation in all this is readers. I've always been accessible and made a point of having personal contact, and I've made some good friends among them, especially in the military community – I have a lot of military readers, as you'd expect. No writer can set out to elicit specific reactions from readers because you can't possibly know the minds and lives of all of them. Each one will see your books differently, so you have no idea what'll be meaningful to them. You can take a broad guess, like making people laugh, or giving them a mystery to solve, and that kind of thing, but you don't know if your books help, hinder, or comfort them in their specific situation unless they tell you.
The one concrete thing I set out to do with my books was to tell the truth about what it means to serve, because there's so much ridiculously bad and inaccurate fiction – and journalism – about the armed forces. In a society where civilians have very little contact if any with the services, which is a big contrast to sixty or seventy years ago, that vacuum can easily end up filled with stereotyped garbage. So when I get an email from serving personnel or veterans to say this book or that book was on target, I feel I've actually done a proper journalist's duty. But then there are all the things I can't predict. People make use of books to get through difficult times. It can be temporary respite from a stressful situation, or they'll see something in a book that resonates with them and answers a question that's been weighing on them. It's accidental on the writer's part, because you can't possibly know they're out there with that need; they're the ones who do the work and look for the answer, and the book just provides a different angle that enables them to look at their own situation more clearly.
And some of those situations are heartbreaking. I have no idea how some people get up and carry on with the grief and pain life dumps on them. But they do, and then they thank you for the book, and while I know it's purely two paths crossing by chance and accidentally producing a positive result rather than me making a conscious effort to help, there's still a sense of feeling glad you were able to even do that for someone. If it's just one person in your entire career, it's still worth it. The fans I was having coffee with are costumers and do a lot of charity stuff, and they said pretty much the same thing: they turn up at an event, and for one reason or another it's very significant and comforting for someone, and they don't know what they've done right but they feel better for doing it. We live in an increasingly disconnected world and human beings never evolved to be isolated and divided the way we are now – quite the opposite. Making those connections even by accident is the essence of what we are as a species. My books focus on how characters cope with bereavement and extremely emotional situations, but also how they find a sense of belonging, so statistically they're bound to strike a chord with anyone facing similar challenges. I don't even have a word for this, but if I can be a catalyst for people finding what they need, that's enough motivation at this stage of my career. And I'm not saying that in some up-myself pious way – I'm saying that I often wonder what the point of writing is, but then a reader shows me. It's not something I'd have predicted twenty years ago. It makes me more at peace with the choices I've made.
So yeah, I came for the money and the absence of politics and a 160-mile drive every day, and stayed for the readers. Mine are the best, and I can't let them down now.
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Purchase The Ringer Series and The Nomad Series.
What a marvelous conclusion to an amazing interview, Jesse! I learned so much about publishing, even having been in it for some time. Gosh, it can be a pain in the rear for writers.