I'm trying to move a little more toward literary fiction while still retaining a popular feel.
The idea is to become a best-selling author first and then the rest of my books will be slam dunks.
I don't think we [with Kate DiCamillo] intended to write a book about friendship, I think we intended to write a book about two friends.
Publishing, legacy or indie, is a vehicle, and you can't opine about whether someone has chosen the right vehicle if you don't know where she intends to drive it.
The only other thing which I think is important is: Don't write a book or start a book with the expectation of communicating a message in a very important way.
I don't want to write books that are intellectually staggering if nobody's going to read them.
I like the idea of trying to write a book in every genre.
I love YA, and it's been a really good fit for me. But at some point, I would like to try something else: a collection of short stories, or writing about something other than high school. A lot has happened to me since I was eighteen.
I want my books to sell, to be read. I'm not interested in being obscure.
If you want to publish two books a year under your own name and your publisher doesn't, maybe you need a different publisher.
I don't want to be famous per se, but I want to write books for as long as I can. And I plan on writing a lot.
When people write a novel, they want to have that reach and that impact. To get it with a first novel, you can either see it as an albatross or a calling card.
As soon as I finished the first book, I wrote a second, which I hope to sell this year, and I have just about finished the third book in the series. Two more are already outlined. I'm in this for the long haul.
I produced audio editions of 'Beneath' and 'Kronos' primarily to grow my audience. I'd seen it work for guys like Scott Sigler and J.C. Hutchins and thought their audience might enjoy my books as well. The goal was to get them hooked on the audio and hope they would migrate to the print books.
I have some other novels I want to write. I have a lot of short stories - I love the short story.
In my opinion, understanding who your target audience is, and what they want, and writing to them (and only them!) is the most important component of being successful as an author.
What the podcast novelists do isn't all that different from what self-publishers do. We put the books out in different formats, but the goal is the same: build an audience and attract a publisher.
I want to be a popular novelist who's also serious, or a serious novelist who's also very accessible.
One of my rigid goals is to keep each book under 300 pages because I think so much nonfiction is literally weighty that people don't get through these books ... If people don't finish your book, then they don't know what you're talking about.
Most of what I want to try to do is continue to go places with fiction that I've never gone before, and tell stories I've never told before, and one of the problems you rapidly discover about fans is what fans want is the last thing they liked. They want more of that.
I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.
I didn't say I have to be a writer, but I did say that I needed to publish at least one book.
Being published is not a necessary validation or a path everyone wants to take with their work. Writing—and finishing—a novel is a great thing in itself, whether or not the book is published, or becomes widely-read or not.
I think it's a very bad idea for someone to start writing for a readership.
I hope to build a reputation as a science-fiction writer. That's the pitch. We'll see.
