Today we have another special
interview in the popular series - Secrets of Best-Selling Self-Published Authors. Today's guest is author Michaelbrent Collings, an internationally bestselling novelist, a #1
bestseller in the U.S., and has been one of Amazon's top selling horror
writers for years. He is one of the most successful indie horror writers
in the United States, as well as a produced screenwriter and member of
the WGA, HWA, and several other writing groups with cool-sounding
letters. He's also a martial artist, and cooks awesome waffles ('cause
he's macho like that). He published his first "paying" work - a short story for a local paper -
at the age of 15. He won numerous awards and scholarships for creative
writing while at college, and subsequently became the person who had
more screenplays advance to quarterfinals and semifinals in the
prestigious Nicholl Fellowship screenwriting competition in a single
year than anyone else in the history of the competition. His first produced script, Barricade, was made into a movie starring Eric McCormack of TV's Will & Grace and Perception, and was released in 2012. Michaelbrent also wrote the screenplay for Darkroom (2013), starring Kaylee DeFer (Gossip Girl, Red State) and Elisabeth Rohm (American Hustle, Law & Order, Heroes). As a novelist, Michaelbrent has written enough bestsellers that listing
them seems weird, especially since they're already listed elsewhere on
the website. In addition, he has also written dozens of non-fiction
articles which have appeared in periodicals on several continents.
Here he is, Mr Michaelbrent Collings:
Who are you and where do you come from? Do you think that your life
experience has gone someway towards making you a successful author in your
chosen genre?
I
come from a background that is mildly schizophrenic: a sickly, small kid who
devoured every martial art he could growing up; was a missionary for two years
in an exceptionally poor part of South America; graduated from college majoring
in TV production; went to a top 20 law school where I juggled work as a law
clerk, work on the law review, and an unpaid church job that took up close to
thirty hours a week; became a partner at a respected Los Angeles law firm; and
having failed at my fallback job moved into work as a full-time writer. Sheesh.
Yes,
this totally helped with my writing and my success. I learned to talk to people
as a missionary, I learned to work with graphics and layouts (talents that port
over to book covers and book trailers!) in college for studio work, I learned
lots about people in general through all of it. And my writing was a thread
throughout, learned from the very beginning at my parents' knees: my father, a
tremendously talented writer and English professor at a major university; and
my mother, who is Made of Awesome.
You are a #1 best-selling author on Amazon – if you could pinpoint one thing in
particular that has grabbed readers of your work, what would you say it is?
Most
people who write me say it's my honesty and my outlook. By which I think they
mean that I write a lot of scary stories, but those scary stories are, at their
core, stories about hope – about the light beyond
the darkness. Or at least about a sense that there is more to life than just
loss. And a lot of my books are populated not by nubile teens whose prime
motivation is "To bang or not to bang?" but by families with real
world problems – paying the rent, taking care of wayward kids, loving each
other.
You
are also a successful script-writer and a public speaker – how important are
the things that you do outside of writing novels and fiction, to your success
as an author? I.e. how important is it to self-published authors to be other
things (than just an author) and to spread their work across other genres and
creative outlets?
I think it's tremendously important that authors today be willing to
do things that take them out of their "writing caves." I blog, I
tweet, I Facebook, I speak at schools and comic cons and symposia. All this
feeds into people who (hopefully) look at my books. The books have to be
awesome to keep them as readers – and, more important, as people who will
recommend the books to their friends – but it's all a great net for catching
more audience.
I notice that you and other best-selling self-published authors also
write non-fiction titles. How important is it for successful self-published
authors to establish themselves as ‘experts in their field’ via non-fictional
works?
Non-fiction titles aren't tremendously important for me. I've
written some law and some martial arts instruction books, but those are so
outside my bivouac that most people looking for those aren't looking for my
fiction titles, and vice-versa. Or maybe they are, because they're as crazed in
their interests as I am. <grin>
What
kind of marketing did you do to establish your author brand and what do you
think is the most successful marketing for self-published authors? Is there any
one thing that you have determined has helped you sell more books – i.e. could
you outline your path to establishing your brand and your most successful sales
method/s as?
My
most successful practices for marketing and brand promotion are simply this:
1) Write great books.
2) Tell others about the
great books.
A lot of people don't
care to learn how to write. Or if they do, then they don't write volume – one or two is enough for them.
Mistake. Forbes recently did a study of the top selling authors of all time,
and the ONLY things they had in common were a huge body of work cranked out
over time.
And then, once you've
learned how to write awesome books (which will take an average of ten years of
hard study), and you have actually written them… you gotta tell folks about
them. No one will search in your underwear drawer for your manuscript, you have
to take it into the world yourself.
Well, I might poke around in your underwear
drawer, but that's a whole other ball of wax.
Do
you design your own covers? How important do you think cover design is to a
potential reader and how big a part do you think it has played in your success
to date?
Cover
design is critical. I do design my own covers, but again – thank you crazy
background – I had a bit more schooling on the subject than a lot of authors.
Don't do something that looks amateur – people won't buy it. They just won't.
If you haven't the skill to put together a professional cover or the commitment
to shell out some bucks to have someone else do it, people will infer that
you're work sucks. And they'll likely be correct. Stinky but true.
In
your opinion, is traditional publishing on the way out? Do you think that
traditional publishing can continue to keep up with the rise of
self-publishing?
I think they both
have an important place in our reading landscape. Self-pub is here to stay, but
trad-pub has great strengths, too. I'm not a "hater" of either. The
more the merrier . . .
For more of this fascinating interview, please visit Self-Publishing Successfully for full transcript.
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