Sean Black Blog

An Amazon Christmas

2012-01-06T04:04:00.000-08:00

When I read the new Lee Child, or Gregg Hurwitz, or any other author at the top of their game, I find it an intensely motivating experience. They're good. Really good. And experiencing the work of someone with true mastery of the genre makes me want to work harder, and improve my own work. Is there any hint of jealousy there? Sure. I'm only human. I'd also like Gregg's good looks and Lee's money, or with Gregg's chart-storming 2011 is it now the other way round?

It's with that general outlook on life in mind that I'd like to say to the other e-book retailers competing with Amazon, "For the love of Mike, stop whining about Amazon, and focus your energies on upping your game. And up it FAST because we need a diverse, competitive marketplace for books and e-books."

If I could give a single piece of advice to the likes of Barnes and Noble, Apple, Waterstones, and WH Smith, it would be this: focus, as Amazon have done, on the authors. With rankings, numerous charts and sub-charts, a brilliant self-publishing platform in the form of KDP, Author Central facilities which allow authors (of all varieties) to add and tweak content, Amazon are already light years ahead, but still catchable – just.

Ask yourselves some questions:

Who is more invested in the success of a book than the author? (The only entity that comes close is a publisher who has paid a large advance - but you want a majority of people pushing traffic to you.)

Who is therefore best placed and motivated to drive readers to a particular retailer?

Why is it that on author blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms, when authors link, they link more often than not to Amazon? (I strongly suspect Amazon's charts were originally a huge part of this, especially among traditionally published authors, who crave sales info like fat kids crave cake.)

Forget augmented content for e-books, covers that shimmer when your cursor glides across them and the other assorted fripperies that people seem to get giddy over. The real battleground of the one-click is driving traffic to your portal.

With the so-called indie-revolution in publishing, Amazon created a vast army of brand ambassadors who were highly motivated; primarily people who had been rejected by regular publishing houses for various reasons. And Amazon not only welcomed them with open arms but they gave them lots and lots of toys to play with, such as the Author Central facility where they could tweak product information, their bio, and link outwards to social networking. Asking whether these authors have work of value to sell to readers is an almost wholly moot point given the Darwinian nature of the Amazon marketplace. And now of course their ranks are being swollen by authors with backlist e-books, and some like myself who have decided to play on both sides of the street.

I had the parallel experience over Christmas of watching a tragi-comic promotion for the e-book of Lockdown unfold at a British retailer, complete with placeholder image where the cover should have been, while at the same time I put in hour upon hour over at Amazon.com shepherding the newly released e-book versions of the first three Lock books onto the charts for the first time. Of course, you could say that the great irony is that Amazon, in effect, had hours of unpaid labour from me. Or, you could say that what Amazon offer authors is a level of partnership where interests are aligned, and both parties share a direct financial benefit. Either way, it's clear that the winners in all this will be the authors, publishers, and retailers who truly embrace change. Above all though, retailers should grasp that authors are on their side when it comes to wishing to preserve competition in the marketplace, and begin to act accordingly.

2011

2011-12-30T03:29:00.000-08:00

2011 was a year of surprises. Most of them pleasant. The third book in the Ryan Lock series, Gridlock, was published in hardcover over the summer, and so far it seems to be performing even stronger, especially in e-book, than the first two books in the series – a good omen for this summer when it's released in paperback.

Initial sales of the paperback of Deadlock were, per the usual sophomore slump, a bit down on Lockdown's numbers but it still made the top 50 in its first full week on sale and its sell-through (the percentage of copies sold in relation to numbers that went into stores) was as good, and, in the cases of the big supermarkets, even better, than before. It also had staying power and hung in there well enough that it made the top 1,000 bestselling books of 2011 (see the link below - it's No. 886).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/dec/29/books-best-sellers-2011-nielsen#data

In my professional life, there were a few goodbyes, including a parting of ways with my agent, Luigi Bonomi. A lovely man and rightfully voted Agent of the Year, I wish him all the very best. I also said goodbye to my editor, Selina Walker, who left Transworld to head up the Arrow and Century imprints at Random House UK. No one in publishing was more deserving of such a promotion, and those close to me know just how much I admired and valued Selina's advice and championing of my career.

But alongside those departures came some exciting new arrivals, including the very talented Transworld editor Simon Thorogood, and my new agent, Scott Miller of Trident Media in New York. CAA in Los Angeles also came on board to help the doughty Luke Speed at Marjacq in London with film/TV rights to the Lock series.

Fans of the Lock books will be glad to know that I also signed a deal for one more book, which will be published in August 2012. It's being edited as I write and I am at work on a new thriller, also set in the States.

I wish everyone who has supported my work a happy, healthy and productive 2012.

Lee And Me

2011-10-14T06:44:00.000-07:00

Wednesday night saw me on stage in Dublin with Lee Child as he dropped by on his whirlwind promotional tour for the new Jack Reacher thriller, The Affair. Incidentally, if you haven't read it yet, you should. It's the big man at the top of his game, and you just know he had fun writing it, which is the guarantee of a cracking read.

Lee is a model professional, and despite the fact that he'd had an extremely long day he was both entertaining and engaging. There were the inevitable questions about Tom Cruise's casting as Reacher, which he dealt with honestly. It was a very enjoyable couple of hours so thanks to Easons for organising it and to everyone who came along.

News

2011-09-27T07:36:00.000-07:00

A quick news update:

Work continues apace on Lock 4, and it's starting to vaguely resemble a novel.

Next month I'll be appearing alongside Lee Child at the Easons store on O'Connell Street in Dublin. Details here: http://www.seanblackbooks.com/events.php

The audiobook of Gridlock is on the way, and I am delighted to tell you that the narrator is Jeff Harding, who also narrated The Da Vinci Code, The Bourne series, and, yes, Lee's Reacher books.

Finally, the agency that reps my books, Trident Media in New York, have announced a new e-book division. A great move by them and one that this client welcomes. It's going to make my life a lot easier.

Tess Gerritsen Is Stalking Me

2011-09-01T09:47:00.000-07:00

...or perhaps it's the other way around?
I give you Exhibit A, where Ms. Gerritsen is to be found strategically placed next to a whole dump bin of paperbacks of Lockdown. By the way, that small child has the look of a man gathering forensic science tips in order to pull off the perfect murder at a later date.

Exhibit B: Who is the first author who should appear in the 'Also Boughts' next to the Kindle version of Lockdown on Amazon.com?
Lockdown (Ryan Lock 1)
Yes, you guessed it. What is the loveliest woman in crime fiction slumming it next to me for? One can only guess.
Restraining orders on the back of a postcard carved from human flesh to Sean Black, Black Towers, Dublin, Ireland.

Lock Comes Home

2011-09-01T04:34:00.000-07:00

All three of the Lock books are now available for Kindle in the USA and Canada. They'll be rolling out to Barnes and Noble Nook, the Apple Store (US and Canada) and Kobo soon. But for now Amazon is the place to go for the ebooks, which are very reasonably priced compared to the UK, German, Dutch and Russian paper editions.
If you are in the US or Canada, would like a hardcover or paperback, and are having trouble finding one, please contact me via the website or on Facebook (www.facebook.com/seanblackthrillers), and I will try to point you in the right direction.
If you have stumbled across this blog post and are thinking 'huh?', 'what?' then check the website to find out more about the books and their author.
If you would like a signed first edition you can contact me via the website, and I will try and accommodate your request.
In the meantime, here are some links:

The Holy Grail - Part One

2011-06-22T06:46:00.000-07:00

With Gridlock (the third in the Ryan Lock thriller series) about to be released in hardback, now seemed like a good time to talk a little bit about the sale of the first book in the series, Lockdown. Lockdown was that near mythical creature, a debut novel (the very first novel I'd written in fact) which sold at auction. An auction is where more than one publishing house bid against each other to secure the rights to a book.

Selling a book at auction is an exciting, often surreal process, and one that usually only happens once in a writer's career, and only then if they are very, very lucky. Note how I said lucky rather than massively talented, because an auction is most frequently about having the right book at the right time. So for those who have often wondered what it's like to be in the eye of the storm, here is an eyewitness account.

1. You write the book, or in my case you write it twice. I spent six months writing a first draft, which I then threw out. I knew at around the halfway mark (40,000 words) that I wasn't going to use any of it but I persisted because a. I'd started a few novels but never finished one, and b. the only way to learn how to write a novel is to write one.

2. Once I was close to a finished second draft, I started emailing agents. UK agents are very approachable and I had three offers to represent me within a short period of time. American agents are another story entirely. They have all sorts of rules about how you can query them. It has to be a full moon close to the Equinox. Your query email or letter should be double-spaced, and written in Sanskrit. It helps if you sacrifice a goat in their name. (BTW, I now have an American agent, who I like a lot, and who hasn't as yet asked me to sacrifice a goat).

3. I signed with Luigi Bonomi, who is renowned for his ability to sell books at auction for a lot of money. This was good because I was broke. He had just sold Matt Hilton's debut for (brace yourself) £800,000.00, so it was a bit of a no-brainer to go with him.

4. Luigi made some suggestions, and I spent the summer tightening the book while he started speaking to editors about the book. This was, I would imagine, a crucial part of the process and there's no one better at this kind of viral marketing. The idea is to create what's called heat around the project.

5. At the start of September, the manuscript went out to all the main publishing houses (8 or 9 if memory serves). This is what Alex Ferguson the football manager refers to as 'squeaky bum time'. It was extremely squeaky for me because I was by now paying my mortgage with a credit card (don't try that at home, kids).

6. Silence. Squeak. Squeak. BTW, silence beats instant rejections. It means the manuscript is being read, and then discussed. The decision to buy a book is taken by a committee at a weekly editorial meeting.

7. Rejections. Not many but enough to make me nervous (or in one case make me laugh because the reasoning was so utterly off-the-wall).

8. A request from an editor for a picture of me. Luigi's comment: "And you thought it was about the book, didn't you?"

9. Much sweating. Very few pictures of me exist because I hate having my picture taken. Finally, I photoshop a picture of Gerard Butler and send it off, hoping no one will notice.

10. A phone call. A publisher wants to meet me in London to talk about the book. This is usually the prelude to an offer. Thank you, Gerard!

In part two, a nervous breakdown in Lidl, Lehman Brothers do their best to screw me over, and things start to get really squeaky...

The Early Reviews Are In

2011-06-18T02:24:00.000-07:00

Gridlock is now available for pre-order on Amazon (at a very reasonable price). It will also, so I'm told, be available for sale in hardback (again at a good price) at Asda.

As ARCs have rolled out and Amazon Vine reviews have rolled in, it's been gratifying to see the overwhelmingly positive response. All I can is say that writing it, I felt like I was getting closer to what I wanted than with the previous two books. A lot of that is down to my editor and friend, Selina Walker, who is moving from her post at Transworld to head up the Arrow and Century imprints at Random House UK (they have some writers you may be vaguely aware of. Somebody Grisham. Oh, and some Patterson guy. James, I think the first name is.)

I am obviously gutted, as everyone at Transworld is, to see her leave, but I am looking forward to working with my new editor, the highly-rated Simon Thorogood.

News

2011-05-28T09:57:00.000-07:00

Happy to report that the paperback of Deadlock made the UK's official Top 50 Bestselling Books chart. So I'm now two for two as Lockdown achieved the same feat. Thanks to everyone who went out and bought the books and made it all possible.

I think everyone in publishing was happy to see a deal to secure the future of Waterstones. I have visited quite a few branches as an author and the one thing I will say is that the staff are unfailingly excellent. From what I gather they've not had the easiest time of it over the past few years but this is one author who really appreciates their dedication and hard work.

Last but not least, congratulations to fellow thriller writer Barry Eisler on his deal with Amazon's new crime imprint. There is no doubt we are living through interesting times. Agents are setting up as publishers. Publishers are doing deals without agents. Amazon are signing up writers. Amidst all that sound and fury, this writer has decided to focus on getting on with his next book. Reading Robert Twigger's wonderful book 'Angry White Pyjamas' last night, I came across this great quote from Japanese martial artist and philosopher, Tesshu, which neatly summed up my current approach: "It is best to keep one's heart clear, face the work at hand directly, and act boldly.' Sage advice indeed.

Readers

2011-05-21T06:21:00.000-07:00

With the release of Deadlock, I've had quite a bit of email and Facebook messages from readers. Some are just discovering Ryan Lock and some have been eagerly awaiting the release of the second book. I can't begin to describe how much it means to me when people get in touch to share their enjoyment of the books. Doing media, swanky publishing events, book launches, all of these pale in comparison to someone taking a few minutes of their time to drop me a line. It's a massive buzz for me and I really appreciate it.

And, on that note, here's my favorite Facebook status update of the week:

Do not buy Deadlock...

2011-05-08T03:59:00.000-07:00

...if any of these apply to you:

1. You enjoy long, meandering works of fiction where nothing much happens.
2. You have to be up for work the next day having had a full night's sleep.
3. You lack a sense of humour.
4. You believe that a book can't be be up to much if you actually understand it.
5. You travel by bus, train, or underground and want to get off at the correct stop.
6. You get more upset by entirely fictional people being injured or killed than when it happens in real life.
7. You think that Deadlock gives white supremacists and neo-nazis a bad rap.
8. You were at school/university/work with me and hate the idea of someone you know having a chance of hitting the Sunday Times Bestseller list.
9. You are easily offended by sometimes crass humour or a lack of political correctness (if you think what's in the book is bad, you should see the lines my editor made me take out).
10. You think that heart-stopping, blood-pumping, adrenaline-fueled thrillers filled with violence (a lot) and sex (not that much really) exemplify all that's wrong with the world today.

Otherwise, this Thursday the 12th of May, at Asda, Tesco, Sainsburys, Morrisons, WH Smith, WH Smith Travel, Waterstones, and online and in independent bookstores across the UK - fill your boots.

And to the tens of thousands of people who went out and bought Lockdown last year, thank you!

Sean

Million Dollar Riot

2011-05-05T07:13:00.000-07:00

To research the first book in the series, which was also my debut, I underwent an intensive three and a half week bodyguard training course in the UK and Eastern Europe. Living in barracks with over a dozen other men, as well as the rigors of learning the close protection game, took me well outside my comfort zone. DEADLOCK would take me even further outside those boundaries.

In January, 2009, after an extended period of negotiation with the California Department of Corrections, I arrived at Pelican Bay. The statistics surrounding this institution tell you all you need to know about the environment I was entering.

The Bay holds three and a half thousand men. Somewhere between seventy five and eighty percent of those men are serving sentences of life without possibility of parole. It has no death row, that's at San Quentin, but it does have a Secure Housing Unit which is home to around twelve hundred men who are locked down for twenty three out of twenty four hours.

I was already aware of the prison's no hostages policy before I drove the seven hours north from San Francisco. My permission to visit was granted at the last moment. I was told not to, under any circumstances, wear anything blue in colour. The inmates wear blue and so it would be an escape risk for me to wear it. Also, if there was an incident on the yard, sometimes live rounds are fired, so it was important for me to be visible. I promptly went out and bought the reddest shirt I could find.

Part of the reason for the hesitation in allowing me access was that the week before there had been a riot on the main yard. Riots are not infrequent at Pelican Bay. Racial tensions, powerful prison gangs, and a healthy commerce in all range of goods and services conspire to create a lively atmosphere among men who are especially articulate with their fists and spend large amounts of time either working out or fashioning makeshift weapons.

This time the flash point had been a white inmate who on the outside was a member of the Crips, which is a predominantly African-American street gang. On arrival he had been advised to associate not with his fellow gang members but with other white inmates. As I was told by a guard, as far as the white inmates are concerned a white man who associates with black men 'is lower than a child molester' in the prison pecking order.

Having ignored some well meaning advice, the end result was inevitable and they showed me the footage. There is no pavement dancing as a prelude to an attack on the yard; no veiled threat; not even a succession of body language signals. There is only brute and brutal violence, swift and without warning. Violence on the yard doesn't so much break out as descend.

There was an almost comedic pause in the first few seconds after the young Crip was attacked. You could almost hear the wheels of his African American compatriots turning over. He was one of their own and yet he was other. Finally, they piled in to aid their fallen brother and it descended into a scene from Braveheart with tear gas taking the place of a misty moor.

Then came the puff of dust. Tiny. Barely perceptible. The first gunshot from the tower signaling that playtime was over, the point had been made, and now it was time for everyone to kiss the dirt or face the consequences.

On New Years Day, 2000, thirteen inmates at Pelican Bay were shot during a major riot. Miraculously, only one inmate died. It took a hundred and twenty guards a full half hour to stop the violence. But as I walked the yard one statistic was pressed upon me by my guide. The medical bill had been a million bucks.

PMT

2011-03-30T07:39:00.000-07:00

Which, in my case, stands for Pre Manuscript Tension. I suffer from it. I'm fine when I have events and promotion and media to do, but when I am between books, as I have been recently, I confess freely that I am not the happiest camper.
Last year I bumped into Brian Kennedy, the very talented Northern Irish singer and writer, while doing a radio interview in Dublin. We got chatting, as you do, and he used the word hormonal in connection with his own work and in particular his prose. In our sexist society it's a word most often associated with women, but it applies equally to writers of both genders. It definitely applies to me.
Part of it comes down to guilt associated with the infamous Protestant work ethic, which was drilled into me growing up. My Dad (who'll be 80 in a few days) was a prolific historian and scholar, and even now, with his health very bad, he is working on a new book - a biography of James Connolly, one of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin.
My earliest and fondest memories are of waking up as a boy to the clack-clack, or, more accurately, the hammer-hammer (Dad was a labourer in a sawmill from the age of 14 long before he was an academic) of a manual typewriter being wrestled into submission.
Although writing to me is work, work is a positive thing. I was brought up to believe that one of the most important duties you had was to make a contribution to society. If you had even a small modicum of talent then you used it. So that plays a part in my unease when I am not working.
On the plus side, I am rarely happier than when I've had a good day writing. So it's with some relief that after weeks and weeks, I have finally cracked the opening of my new book. Once I get that part done it tends to flow for the next forty thousand words until I hit the mid-book blahs. But, right now, it's a voyage of discovery. I am productive, and free of guilt.
In other news, if you are in London in May then look out for this poster on the London Underground.

Paradise Lost

2011-03-26T19:29:00.000-07:00

“I'm fifty-nine-years old, man. I never thought my life was going to end up like this.”

The words belong to Steve and they haunt me as I write this, a few short days after I meet him for the first time. We are standing next to Steve's home, a small tent positioned six hundred yards inside a ten foot by ten foot concrete storm drain next to one of the most famous landmarks in Las Vegas, Nevada. Steve has lived here for the past six years. He has bright blue eyes, a neatly trimmed beard and speaks with a soft, articulate desperation. I stand with Matt, my guide to the tunnels, and listen. When I leave, I slip Steve twenty dollars, and while he is grateful, I feel the inadequacy of my gesture. In some ways, I am as much a tourist as the people twenty-five feet above me having their picture taken with Elvis.

Minutes before, I was talking to Steve's neighbour, Michael, as he told me how his descent into the tunnels began with witnessing the woman he loved being killed in front of his eyes by a drunk driver. Death. Loneliness. The fragility of our existence. Never has the phrase 'there but for the grace of God go I' resonated more deeply for this atheist.

I am armed going into the tunnels. I have a big, carbon steel knife with me, sheathed and slung around my neck. The blade is dulled a little by several days use in the high desert of neighbouring Arizona, where I have been living on the land, sleeping under a Juniper tree. There, a knife keeps you alive by carving dead fall traps to trap pack rats and squirrels. Here, it may serve a more direct survival function. People worry me far more than coyotes, or bobcats or packs of wild dogs.

Junkies come down here to get high. Gangs sometimes venture into the tunnels looking for sport, with the homeless as their prey. There is talk of a Wild Man who randomly attacks the tunnel dwellers, descending on them in the darkness. Generally, the Metro police are never seen. There is no cell phone reception. If something happens, Steve tells me, you had best be able to deal with it yourself. He is thinking of getting a gun. Matt and I advise him that in a tunnel like this a gun may not be the best choice.

Despite my initial apprehension, I soon relax as I meet these men. I am old enough, and I have had enough of my own victories and screw-ups, to know that the choices they have made have played a part in their downfall.

They have alcohol issues. They have drug issues. Issues run through them like lettering through seaside rock candy. There is help available to them. Some have gotten out of the tunnels only to come back. Ricky-Lee tells me that he knows sooner or later he will end up back here, 'so why try to leave, man?' He will, in all probability (and the vast wealth of Vegas is premised on the general public's inability to understand that single concept), die here.

After more tunnels, more dragging my boots through dank standing water, past walls plastered with human excrement, and a graffitied quote from Milton's Paradise Lost (see the video), I call it a day.

After many hours, I get back to my hotel room. I strip off my clothes and take a long, hot shower. Looking out my window, twenty-five floors up, the neon signs of the Strip shimmer in the darkness.

In the morning there is an email on my Blackberry, bad news from my agent in New York. I'm facing a hefty cut in my income down the line. I feel deflated. It's a juvenile reaction to something, which is, after all, only business.

At this point, I should think of Steve, and find perspective. But I don't. Back home, I wake jet-lagged, and start to write this blog post. I think about how I can harness all the fear I have about being able to maintain the comfortable life I have built for my family, alongside the residue of emotions and thoughts from my research trip, to inform my central character's interior journey in the new book. It occurs to me that this reaction, this thought process, means I'm still a writer.

Finally, I feel better.

Going Underground

2011-03-02T00:13:00.000-08:00

Right now I am reviewing copy edits for the third Lock book, Gridlock, which will be released in hardback in August. I'm also hastily putting together a new research trip, which is going to involve learning how to survive in Arizona's bleak but stunning Painted Desert, followed up by some time exploring a side of Las Vegas which the tourists don't see.

The key to organising the research I do is to not think about it. I'll be out in The Painted Desert over at least two days and one night with a guide, and a knife, and little else. Well, that's not strictly true, there will be plenty of coyotes and snakes to keep us company.

Just as I did before I flew off to do my bodyguard training, and certainly just like the morning I woke knowing that I was going inside Pelican Bay, I'm sure I will be nervous as hell. Hence, you don't dwell, you commit.

Of course it would be more pleasant to sit at home drinking tea and eating biscuits and looking up stuff on the internet or reading books, but where is the fun in that? Also, having written three Lock books, I am in need of new details, new characters, and new experiences.*

So, flights are booked, and contacts have been made. New horizons await me. Then, when I get back, comes the really exciting and nerve-wracking part - writing that first draft of the new book - but first I have to go buy a new pair of boots.

*Don't worry, Lock, Ty and the crew will be back, although there may well be a book in between.

2011-02-19T08:27:00.000-08:00

It's great to see the success of Gregg Hurwitz's latest thriller, You're Next, in the UK. I am a huge fan of Gregg's work and it's gratifying to see that more and more people are discovering one of the great modern thriller writers whose work often eclipses much bigger names. Now all those people who loved You're Next need to go and read his fantastic backlist, including the unbelievably good Rackley series.

Onwards

2011-02-15T05:16:00.000-08:00

The third book of the Lock series, Gridlock, is now with the Transworld copyeditor. It will be released in the UK and Ireland (and lots of other places) in August. Authors can be notoriously bad judges of their own work but I will say that I am intensely proud of Gridlock. It has all the action and suspense of the previous two Lock adventures but this time we go a little deeper and there is more of a psychological edge. It also has a truly shocking ending. Anyway, here is the cover for it, designed by the handsome and talented, Richard Shailer.

Not one to rest on my laurels, I am planning a new research trip to the US for next month. Then it is head down over the spring and summer as I carve out the first draft of a new book.

Along with my London film agent, Luke Speed, CAA in Los Angeles are helping us package Deadlock. Speaking of which, the paperback is out on May the 12th.

I am entering a difficult period for a new author. You no longer have the sparkle which surrounds the debut and you have yet to establish yourself on the bestseller list. It's when characters are tested. A lot of hard work lies ahead, hence my motto for this year: Dig In. Dig Deep.

Thank you to everyone who has supported me so far. I truly appreciate it.

Sean

Cut and Run

2011-01-04T12:13:00.000-08:00

On the 6th of January, Matt Hilton's latest Joe Hunter thriller Cut and Run goes on sale in paperback in the UK and Ireland. Matt's series is terrific fun, full of action and he gets better with every book so look out for it.

Are we there yet?

2011-01-04T03:27:00.000-08:00

One of the most common questions I get right now is whether I have finished the third book. The answer is a less than definitive, well, kind of. It's broadly done but my editor and I are still working on it and will be for a little while more.
When I start a book I have a very broad idea as to the premise and how the beginning, middle and end will work. However I don't outline chapter by chapter because what I've found over the years is that if I know every beat of the story I tend to get bored. If I'm bored writing it then I surmise that the reader will be bored reading it. True or not, that has been my belief. I may revisit my prejudices for the next book. It's a good idea to challenge your own prejudices from time to time.
The only problem with writing as I do now is that I tend to take some wrong turns. I'll try things out and see if they work. If they don't then I'll change them. What that does though is create a lot of continuity issues, which are time consuming to fix.
On the plus side I don't get overly attached to the material. I'm quite happy to cut whole chapters or sections if it helps the story. Hell, for Lockdown, I wrote an entire first draft of 80,000 plus words, which I threw out entirely because 'pretty good' doesn't do it for me and there are certain things I want to achieve.
As anyone who has read the books will know I burn through story. Fast-paced doesn't apply to the Lock thrillers. They are lightning-paced.
I want my readers ripping through the pages. I want to leave them exhausted. I want them ignoring the phone. I want them not showering or leaving the dishes in the sink. I want them staying up until all hours even though they have work in the morning. If that happens then the book has worked.
The problem is that to achieve that, for me at least, takes a lot of work. A lot of writing material that never makes it into the book. For the 85,000 words that the reader gets I probably generate double that, most of which no one ever reads, my editor and agent included.
And on that note I had probably better get back to work.

Selling Ourselves Short

2010-12-28T03:43:00.000-08:00

I doubt that there is any blog more widely read by writers than Joe Konrath's. Not that everyone will admit to it, and possibly not in the company of their agents, editors or publishers.

Joe, if you haven't come across him, is a mid-list American thriller writer who is currently riding the e-book wave with great success. Smart, passionate and opinionated are three words which would describe him. He is the most high profile proponent of writers going it alone (with certain caveats) and publishing direct to e-book without a publisher. On Amazon if you set a certain price point you can receive a whopping 70% royalty, which compares favourably to the standard 8-12% rate paid by publishers. Needless to say Joe has made one or two enemies in publishing.

One of the ways that Joe and other writers have managed to drive sales has been through aggressive pricing. Joe tends to set his price at $2.99, which strikes most people as fairly sensible. My own take on pricing is that the price of an e-book (when the paperback is also available) should be around about the price of a discounted mass market paperback, especially for mass market commercial fiction. Other types of books, particularly reference books, can probably demand a higher price.

Of course many indie authors who self-publish have gone for an even more aggressive pricing strategy selling their books for under a pound or in some cases as low as 49p on Amazon UK. And, yes, you will absolutely sell copies for that price, especially if you combine your pricing strategy with an equally aggressive online promotional blitz (witness the Stephen Leather soap opera/car crash played out on Amazon's Kindle UK forums over Christmas). Note to Stephen: I love your books, I'm jazzed at your sales, but, dude, take a chill pill.

For an individual author rock-bottom pricing can make very good business sense. For someone like MIRA with their Christmas campaign of titles for a pound it is also a way of racing up the charts. But what does it do for publishing as a whole?

One thing it definitely seems to have done with a section of readers is lower the price they expect to pay. The agency agreement is seen by them as price fixing, a dark conspiracy, missing the fact that publishers are perfectly entitled to set prices. It seems that hell hath no fury like a small but vocal number of readers who have to pay more than the price of a couple of sandwiches for a book.

We now even see campaigns where one star reviews are filed against certain titles because a section of readers feel that the price is too high. They miss the fact that the poor author has very little say in any of this and it drives a wedge between author and readers.

In some cases, with the pricing of certain titles, they have a point. Charging more for an electronic file than a hardback book is understandably going to get readers backs up.

However, I worry that what we are at risk of seeing is a race to the bottom in terms of price which will have a lasting effect on not only publishing but ultimately writers. Of course, in the short term, there will be winners. But in the medium to long term I can see only losers.

Is a book really worth less than a sandwich from Marks and Spencer or a movie ticket? If it is then a lot of people are in trouble.

There are those out there who seem to delight in what they see as the inevitable collapse of big publishing houses. Maybe I'm sentimental but I'm not one of them. I actually like the people at my publisher rather a lot. They didn't get into publishing to get rich, they got into it because they love books and they love writers (although sometimes I would imagine that's a big ask). I don't want to see them on the dole queue in 2015 and a race to the bottom in the fasting growing sector of publishing will take us in that direction. It's something that everyone involved in publishing, including writers, need to think very carefully about, regardless of their own short-term interests.

2010 and beyond

2010-12-24T09:19:00.000-08:00

It's been a busy year. Lockdown came out in paperback and made it into the Top 50 (No. 31 to be precise) in its first week of release, and sold 10,000 copies in the first ten days according to Bookscan. Given just how tough it is for new writers at the moment that was a real achievement, not only for me but also for the terrific sales team at Transworld.

The second Ryan Lock adventure, Deadlock, was also released in hardback and went to a second printing within a week or two of release.

While all that was going on I was busy writing the third Ryan Lock book. It will be released in August, 2011 and follow on from the paperback of Deadlock, which is out in May. It's set in Los Angeles and I think it's going to be the best book of the series by some distance.

I also did a lot of press for the books, including my first lengthy TV interview (link below).

http://www.tv3.ie/videos.php?video=25374

A real highlight of the year was being invited to attend the Harrogate Crime Writers Festival where I shared a stage with Jo Nesbo, Zoe Sharp and Jeremy Duns for a panel moderated by Meg Gardiner.

It was also great to spend some time visiting with The Mark Wright Project. An amazing bunch of people, it's an absolute privilege to have been able to raise awareness of the great work they do.

2011 is going to be busy. I have to finish editing Lock 3 and then I start on a new project which I have been researching and planning for almost a year. It won't feature Lock and Ty but it is going to be another big, high-concept thriller set in the United States.

Thanks to everyone at my agency, LBA, and my publisher, Transworld, for all their hard work and support. But most of all thanks to my readers, especially those who got in touch via email or my Facebook page.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Sean-Black-Thrillers/385099805118

I can only apologise for the sleepless nights and the missed tube stops.

RTE Review of Deadlock and Interview

2010-09-21T09:58:00.000-07:00

Here's a recent interview I did with Harry Guerin for the RTE website:

http://www.rte.ie/ten/2010/0917/blacks.html

And here is Harry's review of Deadlock.

http://www.rte.ie/ten/2010/0921/blacks.html

Worth Dying For - In Praise of Lee Child

2010-08-12T07:27:00.000-07:00

Today I received an ARC of Lee Child's latest Jack Reacher thriller, Worth Dying For. No, I won't be revealing anything about it. But I did want to talk a little about Lee as a writer.

Lee is the titanic shadow that falls across any British thriller writer bold enough to set their books Stateside. He is to borrow a phrase coined by Bono to describe Sir Paul McCartney,'the man who discovered the country we're all living in.'

There was an inevitability when I sold Lockdown to Lee's UK publisher that the writer I would be most compared to would be Lee. The parallels, from what I can gather, go beyond the books. We both wrote our first novels at the age of 40 after a career in television and when we felt ourselves at a crossroads. We both wrote them to get ourselves out of a financial hole. We're both married to Americans. Both of our central characters were military policemen. The list goes on.

Driven by the marketing, reviewers in the UK have picked up on the similarities. So have many readers. Sometimes the comparisons have been favorable, sometimes not so much. Those are the breaks.

Writing the second book in the Ryan Lock series, Dead Lock, it struck me in a way that it hadn't before just how good Lee Child really is. I had a good degree of respect for his work before but when you move from debut into series territory you really begin to appreciate just how difficult it is to achieve what Lee has achieved with Jack Reacher and how astute his choices have been.

The other thing that has struck about Lee's writing (and I admittedly came to him late) was the brilliance of that stripped down prose style. The only writer we've had that comes close in recent memory is Hemingway (Raymond Carver's complete lack of inflection renders any comparison moot). Like Hemingway, Lee Child stacks one simple declarative sentence on top of the other, building from paragraph to paragraph, chapter to chapter, and in the process creating in the reader a profound emotional shift.

Lee Child is our Hemingway. Not the thriller writer's Hemingway. Not the crime fiction community's Hemingway. He transcends genre. He is the most American writer, with perhaps the exception of Cormac McCarthy, working today. As such there will be no 'new' Lee Child because Lee Child stands alone.

Flight 666 and Paul McKenna's Range Rover

2010-07-22T00:33:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the start of my promotional tour in the UK. The appropriately numbered Flight 666 from Dublin to Birmingham was late due to a problem with French air traffic control. So, sadly, I missed my appearance at the Buxton Festival. Sincere apologies to anyone who was due to attend, and also to the students from the University of Derby who I was going to talk to after the event. Even though it fell under the category of 'circumstances beyond my control' I hate letting people down.

At Birmingham Airport I was met by the legendary Bradley. Anyone who follows Tess Gerritsen's blog or Lee Child's blog for that matter will have heard of Bradley. He was due to drive Paul McKenna around this week so for the short hop from Birmingham to London I got to travel in the Range Rover that had been requested by Mr McKenna. And a very nice experience it was too, especially as I am banned by my wife from owning a 4x4 after rolling a battered old Jeep Grand Cherokee we had and taking down a farmer's wall in wildest Northumberland a number of years ago. I was fine, the wall and the Cherokee not so much.

It was great to see Bradley again, even if he is a Chelsea fan.

Flight 666. Paul McKenna's car. Strange days indeed.

Anyway, I'm now in London and heading off for a day of radio interviews. Tomorrow I'll be heading up to Harrogate for the annual Crime Writer's Festival.

Ryan Lock - Origins

2010-07-16T02:51:00.000-07:00

One question that comes up a lot is how I came up with the character of Ryan Lock. The answer is that in some ways, I didn’t. He came up with himself.

What I mean by that is that when I started to write the book that became Lock Down (it was originally called Extraction), Lock wasn’t called Lock and he was going to be Scottish. Except when I started to write the opening chapter where he first appears he sounded American. Not just sounded, he was American. Sometimes that happens with characters. You have it in your head what they’re going to be like but they disagree.

So, right from the get go, Ryan Lock was someone who challenged authority, and that to me is the key to him as a character. He casts a critical eye over everyone and everything, he is a sceptic without being a cynic, and above all he has no particular respect for authority.

With everything that’s gone on in the last few years, especially when it comes to the behaviour of politicians and their buddies in the banks, I think a hero who challenges the established order and asks awkward questions is a good hero to have on your side.

Publication Day

2010-06-24T05:35:00.000-07:00

So today the paperback of the first Ryan Lock thriller goes on sale in the UK and Ireland. I'll be out signing copies in Dublin on Saturday, then I'll be doing some radio shows next week. An article I've written about life inside Pelican Bay Supermax should be appearing in The Sunday Express in the next few weeks.

On the 6th of July, I'll be in Birmingham talking to librarians, then appearing on stage in the evening with Simon Kernick in Ipswich. After that it's back home for a few weeks before heading to Derbyshire to appear at The Buxton Literary Festival, swiftly followed by Harrogate, then up to Scotland for the launch of Deadlock.

In between all these events I'm hard at work on book three, which is set in Los Angeles and is going to be called GRIDLOCK. In GRIDLOCK, Lock is called in to protect a woman who finds herself the target of a very determined stalker who is carving a bloody swathe across the city. When Lock is pushed past breaking point, the hunter swiftly becomes the hunted as Lock takes off on his own bloody rampage.

As I've spent more time in Los Angeles over the past fifteen years than anywhere else in the US it feels great to be finally on home turf.

Finally, thanks to everyone who's bought the first book and been so supportive. I really appreciate it.

Touchdown

2010-05-20T05:08:00.000-07:00

You know you're in for a weird time of it when the man in front of you in the Ryanair queue is Shane McGowan, the one time lead singer of Irish rabble-rousers, The Pogues. Truth be told, I'd signed up for bodyguard school not thinking too closely about what it might involve. Checking in for my flight to the UK, all I could think of was what it might involve. Was Shane and the famously bad state of his teeth an omen of what I faced at an army camp in Wales?

While I was sure some of my fellow candidates might harbour fantasies of chaperoning Britney Spears around Hollywood, I was working on the assumption that the people taking this course would be seeking employment as PMCs (Private Military Contractors) in Afghanistan and Iraq. So the profile would, I imagined, be men in their twenties who were extremely physically fit and a few sandwiches short of the full picnic. In some respects, I would be proven right.

As it transpired, the candidates ranged all the way from a middle-aged American, who resembled Harry Potter a good thirty years after the films had dried up, to an ex-German special forces sniper fresh from service in Afghanistan whose only words of English were "Fuck the Taliban!" And here I was, a man at the wrong end of his thirties, who made a living writing television, about to embark on the same journey.

The course was advertised as very much 'hands on'. Rather than just sitting in a classroom we'd be putting the theory into practice. Some of the highlights from the course syllabus included:

CQC (unarmed combat) including Krav Maga and other systems of appropriate natures.

Advanced / Defensive / Offensive / Anti-Ambush Driving. The entire weekend is spent at out (sic) driver training area where you and your fellow candidates will go through (literally) many different vehicles, in a variety of ways!

Firearms training - to include Team drills. Use of 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6 person teams, live fire & movement, mutual cover & evacuation drills.

So, ageing Harry Potter look-alike?
Check.

Ex-special forces sniper who's wired to the moon?
Check.

Writer wondering what mayhem lay ahead of him?
Check.

And we weren't even the strangest candidates, as you'll find out next post, when I introduce the rest of a very motley crew, along with one or two beacons of sanity.

The Beginning

2010-05-19T00:27:00.000-07:00

Growing up in Scotland and spending my early twenties living in New York, when it was still very much a city gripped by the crack-cocaine epidemic, I've seen some unpleasant things.

I've seen one human being kicked unconscious by another human being. I've walked out of a neighbourhood bodega on 110th street to see dead bodies strewn across the sidewalk, victims of a gang-related drive-by shooting. I've had a knife pulled on me. I was witness to a Marine getting a bottle cracked across his skull when he tried to stop a homeless man dragging a woman into her apartment to rape her. Running down the stairs to see what was happening I actually thought he'd been shot because the crack of bottle on head was so loud, he wasn't moving and there was so much blood. (Note to readers: the would-be rapist absconded, the intended victim was very shaken but thankfully unharmed and the Marine made a full recovery.)

Beyond first hand experience, I count among my friends men who've served in some of the most dangerous places on earth. My brother-in-law started his career as a rookie patrol officer in one of the more dangerous divisions in the Los Angeles Police Department. Andy Carmichael, my technical advisor on all matters security-related, is a former member of the Royal Military Police close protection unit with service in Afghanistan, Northern Ireland and Sierra Leone.

In other words, it takes quite a lot to send a chill down my spine.

But that's exactly what happened some four years ago after I fell into a chance conversation with a well dressed couple who were enjoying a drink in the bar of the Four Seasons hotel on the banks of the Danube in Budapest.

I was there for a long weekend with my wife and daughter, who was then four-years-old. My daughter, bored by the grown-up discussion, was hiding under our heavy winter coats which were draped over a club chair.

That was when one half of the couple my wife and I were talking to leaned over to me, her gaze fixed on my daughter, and said, 'whatever you do when you're in Budapest, don't take your eyes off her for a second.'

It struck me as strange thing to say until she, and the man who was with her, a Belgian, explained that they were part of the narco-trafficking division of the United Nations, in town for a conference. And that, while we all grow up hearing tales of children vanishing into thin air and think of them as just that, stories, child abduction is a reality. For profit in some cases. In other cases there are far darker motives.

I thanked her for her advice, we finished our drink, and left. Needless to say my poor daughter wasn't allowed more than six feet from either of her parents for the rest of the trip.

The event stayed with me and it threw up several questions, all of which were about to be explored on prime-time television when Madeleine McCann was abducted while on holiday with her parents in Portugal.

The one question that plagued me the most though was this - you're a stranger in a strange land and the unimaginable happens. Who do you turn to? The obvious answer would seem to be the local authorities, but we all saw how that went for the McCann family.

So as I researched the answer to that question, I stumbled upon the world of private close protection security. It was a world that instantly fascinated me because the more I looked into it, the more my pre-conceptions evaporated. Yes, there were plenty of what my now friends would call 'thick-necked twats' working as bodyguards to C-list celebs, but there were also companies who you could turn to if you found yourself with a problem that conventional means couldn't solve, and, of course, if you had the money.

In the months before the McCann case exploded into the public consciousness, I sat down to write a television script about a child who is spirited away while her parents are visiting Eastern Europe. It wasn't a bad effort but it had one major failing. I didn't know who the men and women charged with finding this child were. They felt like photocopies of characters that I'd seen in movies or read about in books.

I wanted to get under the skin of the so-called bullet catchers, to really understand how they could place themselves in situations where there was a clear and present risk to their lives. Where the end-game for some of them is death.

So, through a desire to know more, and a sense that reading books and trawling the internet wouldn't give me any truly satisfying answers, I enrolled on a three-week residential bodyguard training course based in the UK and Eastern Europe. My family thought I had finally cracked, my colleagues ditto, friends queried my wife about 'whether I was okay?', but in 2006 I got on a plane at Dublin airport and headed for a former army camp in Wales.

To say it was an interesting experience would be like saying that Muhammad Ali could handle himself in the ring. I was about to step further out of my comfort zone than I'd ever done before.

It was the beginning of a journey which would change my career, my life and how I look at the world...

Lockdown- The Trailer

2010-05-15T09:48:00.000-07:00

On Thursday afternoon, I began to put together this trailer for the paperback release of Lockdown, which is slated for the 24th of June. I hadn't done any editing since I was in film school back in 1990's but I found it really enjoyable.

As the date of the paperback release draws closer, I'm going to be blogging about the story of how I came to research and write Lockdown, as well as talking a little bit about the crazy few weeks leading up to its eventual sale at auction.

Judgement Day

2010-03-18T05:54:00.000-07:00

Today sees the release of fellow LBA author Matt Hilton's book Judgement and Wrath in paperback. If it's anything like his first it will be a gasoline-doused, hundred-mile-per-hour roller coaster ride of ultra-violence.

You can buy it in the shops, or online here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Judgement-Wrath-Matt-Hilton/dp/1444705342/

here:

http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/matt+hilton/judgement+and+wrath/7162895/

here:

http://www.tesco.com/books/product.aspx?R=9781444705348

or here:

http://www.asda-entertainment.co.uk/books/judgement-wrath/7228573.html

Dead Lock - A Thank You

2010-03-13T08:44:00.000-08:00

The second Ryan Lock thriller is finished and will be out in hardback and trade paperback in July. It was, like many second novels are, a brutal process involving a lot of re-writing.

Thankfully, I have the most fantastic editor in Selina Walker who really pushed me to give of my best. Selina also works with Mo Hayder, Simon Kernick and Manda Scott among many other big names. She's also the UK editor for Dennis Lehane and Tess Gerritsen.

If readers enjoy Deadlock that will be in very large part down to Selina's hard work and forbearance.

E-book news

2010-03-13T08:30:00.000-08:00

You can now purchase the first Ryan Lock book at the Amazon Kindle store (go to Amazon and search under Sean Black Kindle) or click this link:

http://www.amazon.com/Lockdown-ebook/dp/B0038AUYGE/

It's also available as an E-book at Waterstones here:

http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/sean+black/lockdown+28ebook29/7566331/

Alarmfase

2009-10-21T08:41:00.000-07:00

The first publisher to buy my debut novel was Rienk Tychon. Rienk is a legend in the Dutch publishing world. He was the first person to publish both Lee Child and Dan Brown in the Netherlands. While the auction in London was raging between three of the big publishing houses, Rienk snuck in under the radar and snapped up rights for Holland and Belgium.

Alarmfase, as the book has been re-titled in Holland, will be published next month.

Here's a link to a brochure where you can see the fantastic cover art for the book. It's a very retro, gritty cover.

http://www.uitgeverijdevliegendehollander.nl/Catalogi/Brochure%20DVH.pdf

Interviews

2009-10-21T07:24:00.000-07:00

Here are links to a couple of interviews I've done over the past few months:

http://falcatatimes.blogspot.com/2009/07/interview-sean-black.html

http://crimealwayspays.blogspot.com/2009/06/ya-wanna-do-it-here-or-down-station_22.html

Daily Telegraph Review

2009-10-20T09:55:00.000-07:00

I'm very grateful to Jeremy Jehu for his review in the Daily Telegraph. Jeremy has this to say about my debut novel:

"In Lockdown, Sean Black's hero, Ryan Lock, causes New York to be sealed against a terrorist threat. Presumably in the sequels "Lockup" and "Lockin" he will rent a small garage, then take to drink. The synergy between name and title matters because it highlights the artifice underlying an excellent first novel. It reminds readers that the big game for British thriller writers these days is emulating Lee Child by writing classier American pulp than the Yanks. Like Child's Jack Reacher, Lock is an ex-military policeman. Unlike Reacher, he has a job (as an elite bodyguard), a home, friends and a sense of humour. Lock's likeability contrasts with Reacher's pomposity and Black's style is supremely slick."

Daily Mail Review

2009-08-12T15:40:00.000-07:00

The reviews are starting to come in. Here is the first newspaper review which appeared in The Daily Mail, one of the highest circulation newspapers in the UK.

I have reproduced the text below and beneath that is a link.

An impressive debut thriller from Scots-born TV screenwriter Sean Black that introduces a new full-on action hero.

Former Royal Military Police close protection officer Ryan Lock, is now working for a major biotech company in New York which is the subject of animal rights protests.

Ferocious and single-minded, but with a conscience, Lock proceeds to confront one of the finest female villains since Ian Fleming's Rosa Klebb with a style that would bring a smile to the face of his spiritual father - Lee Child's Jack Reacher.

Clearly influenced by Child and Joseph Finder, Black drives his hero into the tightest spots with a force and energy that jump off the page. He still has a little to learn when it comes to depth of character and pacing, but that won't take long. Lock is clearly going to be around for a long time.

With a spine-tingling finale that reminded me of Die Hard, this is a writer, and a hero, to watch.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-1204228/Thrillers.html

Lockdown coming soon!

2009-06-23T15:43:00.001-07:00

The first in the Ryan Lock series of thrillers, LOCKDOWN, goes on sale in the UK, Ireland and lots of other places on the 30th of July.

Currently, I'm finishing up the second Ryan Lock thriller, LOCK UP, which will go on sale in 2010.

Check back to the website and blog for more news.

Sean