Welcome to our Indie Spotlight series, in which TNBBC gives small press authors the floor to shed some light on their writing process, publishing experiences, or whatever else they'd like to share with you, the readers!
Today, we are joined by Chris Bauer, who answers the question:
“What’s it like to co-author a book with a USA Today bestselling author when you aren’t a USA Today bestselling author yourself?”
So
things went down like this.
Andrew
Watts, USA Today Bestselling author of three thriller series and a branding
expert via his Severn River Publishing (“SRP”) house, the publisher who’d launched
four of my thrillers and republished my first novel SCARS ON THE FACE OF GOD,
said to me not so long ago:
“Hey
Chris. I’ve got a proposition for you.
“A
number of my readers ask me ‘When do you plan to release the next installment
in your Max Fend Thriller series?”
Mr.
Watts had published two novels in the series at that point, but it had been a
few years back, and readers of the series, he said, were feeling neglected.
“The
challenge, Chris, is that I have an idea for the next one, but…”
Here
readers can pick from one or more of my remembered Mr. Watts perspectives.
“I
overcommitted myself with my other series…
“I’m
running a growing publishing house that needs a lot of TLC while I build and
care and feed my current stable of (x number) authors.” (Chris remembers that
number to be between five and ten at the time. Chris also notes here that the publishing
house’s current author stable now numbers forty-two novelists with titles that
include USA Today bestsellers, International bestsellers, WSJ bestsellers, and a
NYT bestseller.)
“I
know your work is good…” (Chris blushed an “Aw shucks, Andrew.”)
“I
have a good plot…” (Chris notes it was a great plot.)
“Sooo,
here’s a crazy thought,” Mr. Watts said, “and I’m fine, no worries, if the
answer is no. How would you like to co-author the next espionage novel in the
series with me? Maybe you can make my plot even better.”
That
was when I checked to see how well the two books in his Max Fend Thriller series
were doing, and they were doing very well. Checking them now on Amazon,
they have multiple thousands of ratings from his cultivated readership.
“Hell
yeah,” Chris said. “Where do I sign?”
If
you picked all of the above perspectives as backstory here, good for you,
because it did go down like that, just not verbatim. But do recognize that nowadays,
with me as a novelist, I do a helluva lot more lying for a living than I did
working for an insurance company for twenty-two years.
The
deal was excellent, a true 50-50 share in the proceeds for the thriller (title,
AIR RACE, a Max Fend Thriller). Plus, with me being a co-author with someone
who was bringing much more to the table in terms of readership notoriety than I
was, my name on the cover of our book might have suffered from the James
Patterson treatment (“JAMES PATTERSON with Chris Bauer”) but it didn’t, as guaranteed by
Mr. Watts hisself. (Reader should now look up AIR RACE by Andrew Watts and
Chris Bauer to check out the cover.) (See?)
Our
process worked well because it was simple, with Andrew emailing multiple pages
of his notes to start. Our writing styles were close enough: action-oriented,
peppy dialogue, some humor, good drama. Andrew Watts is a former Navy
helicopter pilot and a subject matter expert who could keep us out of trouble
when it came to the aviation aspects of the thriller, which exhibited
themselves in 75% of the scenes. We arrived at nearly thirty single-spaced pages
of a chapter-by-chapter summary, a lot of which required significant research
into airports and cities around the Mediterranean Sea and the Middle East. I selected
ten stops in the air race where the distances between them had to accommodate
the identically-equipped small aircraft and fuel consumption used by competing
teams of pilot and co-pilot, all from different countries. Fly during the day, with
drama, action, intrigue, crises, and espionage among the race teams. Continue
the conflict at night in different, exotic cities at each stop. Explosive, high
energy conclusion. We used a Microsoft Word program that allowed each of us to
see changes in real time as they were being made in our summary whenever we
were both logged into the document online. For the life of me, I don’t remember
the name of the interactive application. (Checks notes. Nada.)
We
finalized the chapter summaries and brought in a developmental editor who SRP
utilizes a lot. (Hi, Randall Klein.) Made some revisions. With that finished,
it became crunch time.
“You
will do a lion share of the prose,” Mr. Watts said.
“Yeah,
I get that. The nature of earning my wings. Frankly, it will be my pleasure,
Andrew.”
At
that point, yours truly kept his butt in his seat for four months straight and
cranked out the first draft, with Mr. Watts reviewing and revising where
appropriate, our chapter summaries as the roadmap. An interesting situation
arose. I use profanity, on the page and in real life, a lot. I’m also known for
writing graphically violent scenes. Well, we couldn’t have any of that here.
Andrew’s readership, more conservative than mine, would have wet their pants.
There was a certain scene with a banana… “Nope,” Mr. Watts said.
It
took a smidgen over four months to write—for me, an incredible feat, proving to
myself that I could do it when individual chapter summaries were in place. I
will never write a novel without an outline at the chapter level again.
So
what happened next?
We
liked the product. The readers liked the product. It sold well. It’s still
selling well, better than any of my other novels have sold. Not as well as Mr.
Watts’ prior offerings in the series, but well enough that he asked me if I’d
like to have his characters for my very own to play with for a two-book spinoff
series.
Another
“Hell, yeah.”
The
Max Fend Maximum Risk Thrillers spinoff rose from the depths with me as its
sole author, receiving 100% of the proceeds. Thank you, Andrew Watts.
COBALT,
Book 1 of the Max Fend Maximum Risk thriller that released in February 2024,
speaks to the mining of cobalt, a precious yet volatile metal necessary in the
production of batteries for electric cars, laptops, and iPhones. The Democratic
Republic of the Congo (“DRC”) possesses more than 55% of the known cobalt
deposits on the planet, and China is paying for 100% of the DRC output,
promising significant infrastructure development in the DRC in return. What if
the US, via entrepreneur and CIA-connected Max Fend (vs. competitors Elon Musk,
Jeff Bezos, and Tim Cook), found a deposit larger than the DRC’s? Where might
that be? Greenland, with melting glaciers from global warming that now expose
land not seen in millions of years? Hawaii? The Poconos? Would China let this
shift in precious metal dominance happen without a fight?
CRADLE,
Book 2 in the series, released October 22, 2024. In it, we will return to the
Moon, assisted by Max Fend’s aerospace company, NASA, and one very pissed off
undocumented Peruvian teenager with six fingers on both hands and a
mind-blowing secret she keeps in a leather pouch. We will find out what we
should have known all along, about everything, everywhere, all at once.
Would
I do another co-author gig if a good opportunity presented itself?
Hell
yeah.
Waiting
to hear from you, James Patterson.
(Phone
rings.) Hi, Mr. Patterson. Jim. You what? You’ve got this crazy thought…
But you say my example of co-author cover attribution in this blog post shows
my name in too large a font?
Sheesh.
Fine.
Sure. (Sigh.)
Hell
yeah. Where do I sign, Jim?
CRADLE https://amzn.to/3xYrHTY
"Max Fend's expertise. One
girl's fury. A universe on the brink.
Max Fend's world orbits around
the marvels of the stars above. As an integral cog in the imminent Artemis moon
mission and the heartbeat of Fend Aerospace, he's accustomed to challenges that
stretch beyond the Earth's atmosphere. Yet he's entirely unprepared for the
force of nature that is Gus Gomez.
Gus isn't just a brilliant
Peruvian immigrant harboring an indigenous leather pouch steeped in mystery,
she's a maelstrom of history, fleeing dark shadows while simultaneously
careening toward a cosmic destiny. The pouch she carries contains a crucible of
secrets, and it has the potential to upend humanity's understanding of its
place in the universe.
As a storm of ancient secrets
and vendettas swirls, Max is thrust into the fray. But with Gus's fiery
determination and enemies closing in, can Max navigate the dangers and keep the
past's revelations from shattering the future?
Chris Bauer's Cradle crafts
a tale woven in the tapestry of borderland stories and punctuated by the
promise of space in the latest adrenaline-packed installment of the Maximum
Risk series."
.jpg)
Chris Bauer is a brute force novelist who writes award-winning thrillers. His ninth novel released October 2024 (CRADLE, a Maximum Risk Thriller), his tenth releases April 2025 (I HEARD YOU PAINT COWBOYS, a Counsel Fungo Thriller). He’s a subject matter expert in none of the following, although his fictional characters are: firearms, crime scene cleaning, Hawaiian mobsters, law enforcement, bare knuckle boxing, the CIA, fugitive recovery, NASA, Tourette syndrome, or the Supreme Court. Nor does he have six fingers on either hand. He likes the pie more than the turkey. He won the “Best First Sentence” award from the International Thriller Writers THRILLERFEST’s 2024 Masterclass, so there’s that, too.
https://www.chrisbauerauthor.net/ | www.facebook.com/cgbauer | https://twitter.com/cgbauer
https://www.instagram.com/cntbauer1/ | https://www.tiktok.com/@chrisbauerauthor101
No comments:
Post a Comment