By John Gilstrap

I’m sure you’ve seen the ads popping up on social media. The 28-day course that will make you an expert on how to use AI to launch your productivity to new levels. I ignored them because as a creative, AI is supposed to be the bad guy, the thing we shall not use. In the end, I surrendered the $20 for the course.

Now I’m forking over twenty bucks a month for the paid version of ChatGPT. It didn’t take much convincing. Here’s my journey. Coming up on a book launch (Scorched Earth, February 24), I needed some fodder for social media posts. I never know what to say.

I logged into the basic, free version of ChatGPT and typed the question, “What makes Facebook posts effective when launching a new thriller novel?” Two seconds later, I got this:

Launching a thriller on Facebook is basically about triggering curiosity without giving the game away. The posts that work best tend to do a few specific things really well:

1. They tease a question, not a plot

Thriller readers love puzzles. Effective posts don’t summarize the book—they dangle a mystery.

• “What would you do if the person you trusted most disappeared… and left your name behind?”

• “Everyone in this town is lying. The question is: about what?”

If a post can be answered with “I need to know more,” you’re winning.

2. They spotlight stakes, not characters

Readers don’t yet care who your protagonist is—but they care deeply about what’s at risk.

• Life or death

• A secret getting out

• A ticking clock

• An innocent person paying the price

One clear, escalating threat beats three paragraphs of backstory every time.

3. They use short, punchy copy

Facebook is a scroll battlefield. Thriller posts that perform well usually have:

• 1–3 tight sentences

• White space

• A line break before the hook or CTA

Think movie trailer voiceover, not book jacket prose.

4. They pair text with a mood image

You don’t need literal scenes. You want vibe:

• A deserted road at night

• A cracked mirror

• A bloodless but unsettling detail (locked door, abandoned phone, empty swing)

Mood-first images stop the scroll better than character art.

5. They imply credibility or social proof

Especially important for new releases.

Examples:

• “Early readers say this one kept them up past 2 a.m.”

• “If you like Reacher, The Night Agent, or The Fugitive…”

• “My darkest thriller yet.”

This reduces risk for the reader.

6. They invite low-friction engagement

Posts that ask for opinions outperform posts that ask for purchases.

• “Which scares you more: being hunted or being framed?”

• “Night reading or daylight only?”

• “What’s the one line that makes you buy a thriller?”

Engagement boosts reach—and warms readers before the buy.

7. They rotate formats during launch week

Effective launches don’t repeat the same post. They mix:

• Hook lines

• Micro-excerpts (1–2 killer sentences)

• Behind-the-scenes (“This idea came from a real case…”)

• Countdown posts

• Reader reactions

Variation keeps the algorithm—and your audience—interested.

8. They end with a clean, obvious CTA

No cleverness here. Be clear.

• “Now available on Amazon”

• “Kindle + paperback out today”

• “Link in comments”

Confusion kills conversions.

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If you want, tell me:

• your subgenre (political, military, serial killer, tech, etc.)

• whether this is Book 1 or a standalone

• your target comps

…and I’ll write 5–7 Facebook launch posts tailored specifically to your thriller.

Yeah, all of that in a few seconds. Intrigued, I typed, “Scorched Earth is the 17th book in the award-winning Jonathan Grave political thriller series. Summary: Vengeance, murder, and violent political games are on a collision course in a propulsive Jonathan Grave thriller by New York Times bestselling author John Gilstrap. Disgraced U.S. President Darmond has been ousted from office, but his minions have taken aim at everyone they perceive to be enemies. Off-the-record contractors on a secret list are being eliminated, one by one. Jonathan Grave and his Security Solutions team manage to turn the tables when the assassins come for them. But the ultimate attack will strike deep at the heart of what’s best about American values.”

Most of that comes from cutting and pasting the description off Amazon. Two seconds later (and I’m serious about the two seconds), this appeared:

Nice—this has serious launch-post fuel. Since this is Book 17, award-winning, and political thriller readers already know the Jonathan Grave world, the posts should lean hard into stakes, legacy, and national consequences, not introductions.

Here are 7 high-impact Facebook launch posts, each with a different angle so you can rotate them across launch week.

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Post 1: The Hook (Pure Thriller Tease)

Vengeance has a list.
And Jonathan Grave’s name is on it.

When a disgraced president’s allies decide to erase their enemies, the killing starts quietly… and escalates fast.

SCORCHED EARTH is out now.

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Post 2: Stakes Over Story

They aren’t after money.
They aren’t after power.

They’re after revenge—and they’re willing to burn the country to get it.

Jonathan Grave faces the most dangerous enemy he’s ever fought in SCORCHED EARTH.

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Post 3: Series Credibility / Social Proof

Seventeen books in—and the threats have never been bigger.

If you’ve followed Jonathan Grave from the beginning, SCORCHED EARTH takes the fight straight to the heart of American ideals.

If you’re new? Buckle up.

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Post 4: Villain-Focused (Political Edge)

A president may be gone.
But his loyalists are still pulling triggers.

Off-the-books contractors are dying.
Secrets are being erased.
And the endgame is anything but subtle.

SCORCHED EARTH—available now.

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Post 5: Ticking Clock

They’re killing names on a secret list.
One by one.
No witnesses. No mercy.

Jonathan Grave and his team turn the tables—but stopping the assassins may not be enough.

Because the real attack is still coming.

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Post 6: Reader Identity Post (Engagement-Friendly)

Thriller readers:
Do you prefer a villain driven by power, or one driven by revenge?

If your answer is revenge, SCORCHED EARTH was written for you.

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Post 7: Clean Launch CTA

The rules are gone.
The gloves are off.
And the fallout will be devastating.

SCORCHED EARTH
Book 17 in the Jonathan Grave series
Now available in Kindle and paperback.

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Pro tip for Facebook performance

• Put the purchase link in the first comment, not the post

• Pair these with dark, symbolic images (burned paper, shadows, empty corridors, flags in distress—not literal violence)

• Pin either Post 1 or Post 7 to your page during launch week

If you want, I can:

• tighten these to Amazon-ad length

• write a Book 17 “jump-in” post specifically for new readers

• or craft a controversy-safe political hook that pushes harder without tripping moderation

Just tell me which direction you want to lean.

I started a dialogue with my machine, and together, we put together a plan. But it didn’t stop there. I decided to play with images. A pivotal scene in the novel involves an airborne attack on a campground where children are celebrating the annual “Planetariat.” Don’t worry about the name, just stick with me.

I wrote, “Create a photorealistic image suggesting that violence is coming to a Camporee.” This one took closer to 10 seconds, and this is what I got:

Disclosure: The first iteration was Boy Scout centric. The final version is the result of edits like, “Change Camporee to Planetariat.”

Addicted now, I wanted more. I wrote, “Create story-related captions for this image.” Boom:

Here are story-related caption options for an image titled “Mysterious campsite at twilight”, all tuned to Scorched Earth–style tension. I’ve grouped them by vibe so you can pick what fits the post or rotate them.

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Quiet Dread

• Twilight is when secrets stop hiding.

• By morning, this place won’t be what it was.

• Nothing looks dangerous… until it is.

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Ominous / Foreboding

• The calm before escalation always looks like this.

• Every tent holds a name. Every name is on a list.

• This is where the plan starts to unfold.

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Minimalist / Scroll-Stopping

• They thought they were safe.

• Safe ground is a myth.

• Night falls. Consequences follow.

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Political-Thriller Edge

• Revenge doesn’t care who’s camping nearby.

• When ideology turns violent, innocence becomes collateral.

• The fight doesn’t stay in Washington.

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Jonathan Grave–Flavored

• Jonathan Grave knew this silence wouldn’t last.

• He’d seen places like this before.
  They never stayed quiet.

• The mission always starts after sundown.

All of the above (and much, much more) ate up less than an hour of my day.

I’m hooked, folks. Have y’all played with AI yet?

Click the link if you’re interested in listening in as Jonathan and Boxers discuss Scorched Earth. Spoiler: Big Guy is not happy with me.

By John Gilstrap

The latest episode of a self-help podcast called, A Life in Color, which happens to be the intellectual child of my lovely and talented niece, Laura Branch, used music as a metaphor of what’s missing in many corporate offices these days. Managers want their employees to learn all the notes and meters, and the surest route to success is perform a tune that sounds perfectly fine every time. Rote recitation, no imagination required. In fact, she maintains, imagination is unwelcome in many corporate suites.

Taking Laura’s metaphor in a slightly different direction, perfectly fine music is the aural equivalent of a Bob Ross painting or the product of a paint-by-numbers set. True musicians, however, understand that the spots on the leger lines mark only the outline of where master musicianship resides. For an instrumentalist, music can be reduced to a math problem, but for a musician, those marks on the page reflect the heart and soul of the composer. Through phrasing and passion, a gifted musician pulls life and emotion out of those sheets of paper.

There’s a kind of magical transference that happens that I don’t begin to understand, but most of us have experienced a swell of emotion as a reaction to a performance–sometimes it’s a piece that we have heard many times before without any emotion at all. Perhaps it’s the sheer beauty of it as in the finale of Mahler’s 8th Symphony–“The Symphony of A Thousand“–which choked me up yet again when I was finding the right cue for the link. (Please give it at least a 90-second listen.) A more contemporary example is Carrie Underwood’s performance of “How Great Thou Art” on last year’s “American Idol.” Perhaps it’s simply the story being told, as in David Ball’s “Riding With Private Malone.”

So, what does this have to do with writing? Well, pretty much everything.

Let’s be honest here. Perfectly fine storytelling isn’t that difficult. Artificial intelligence can take assigned plot points with designated twists and barf out a tale. It will bring the reader all the emotional satisfaction of a paint-by-numbers image. It won’t be bad but it won’t be good, either. It will just . . . be.

I don’t want to just be. I want to leave an emotional impact on my readers–whether it’s fear or excitement or sadness or triumph. I want to be a master musician of genre literature. Stories need to be more than conduits for plots and twists. Books we love connect with us emotionally because a human author infused that emotion into their work. It’s in the ebb and flow of developments. In turns of phrase. In pacing. In the unique and insightful peeks into the world through the author’s eyes.

But because a book is a work of art, there’s room for limitless interpretations of the author’s intent. Just as we can never know how Gustaf Mahler or W.A. Mozart phrased their work during performances, readers of my books cannot know the rhythm of words that I imagined as I wrote them. Emphasizing one word over another in a paragraph can make a huge difference. Passages intended to make readers chuckle may in fact offend a few. A scene I write to elicit a tear may cause some readers to roll their eyes. And that’s fine. I hear from readers who find symbolism that I did not intend, but that makes the symbolism no less real to those who see it.

The emotional connection is what counts. Like musical composition, a story is in its way an immortal piece of its creator’s soul. It lies silently until living person picks it up and interprets the author’s words through the filter of the reader’s own life experiences. The result is an experience that is close to but never precisely what the writer intended. The result is musical.

=

On Sale Now. Listen to Jonathan and Digger talking about the book here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2A7Nn1sJyA

By John Gilstrap

Spoiler: It ain’t quick and it ain’t easy.

“Okay Boomer.”

There, we’ve all said it together so now that’s out of the way. I wrote my first published novel when “Lion King” and “The Santa Clause” were the top two new releases of the year, and O.J. Simpson’s criminal trial for murdering his wife dominated the news cycle. Query letters were sent via U.S. mail (don’t forget the self-addressed stamped envelope), and manuscripts, God help us, had to be printed then mailed via Fed-Ex at about $25 a pop. Submission and rejection were expensive. On the positive side, the expense was also a barrier to entry. When there’s expense, I think writers are more careful about their editing in particular and storytelling in general.

Thirty books later, a few of which were bestsellers and fewer of which bombed, I think I’ve got insight worth sharing about how to survive as a working novelist and end up with a decent reliable income. NOTE: Mileage may differ for other writers.

Write a good story that is accessible to a wide audience.

I write thrillers about families in jeopardy. They are emotional roller coasters that are simultaneously heartwarming and violent. I intentionally appeal to as broad an audience as I can.

You write what you write — romance, sci-fi, fantasy, young adult, children’s, whatever. Then there’s romantasy, a genre I didn’t even know existed until I did a joint signing with Jennifer Armentrout and saw that her line was about fifteen times longer than mine. The idea is to embrace the largest possible audience to sell the largest number of books. Even before we get into talking about publicity and marketing, if you’ve written a cross-genre sci-fi vampire romance set on Planet Xanthar where all the characters are ugly, you’ve got to understand that the odds of success are stacked against you.

Sell your work to and through a traditional publisher.

(See Okay Boomer, above). Yes, there are gatekeepers (yay for them!), yes, there’s rejection, delayed gratification and all the blah-blah and yada-yada about self-promotion is true. And yes, you have to have an agent to gain entry to the gatekeepers.

But your stuff is good, right? You shouldn’t be afraid of no stinkin’ gatekeeper. Once you’re through the gate and you’ve become a critical element of the traditional publishing machine, you’ll have access to retail outlets and film agents and foreign agents and subrights opportunities that can pay handsomely. All of these are negotiated by others on your behalf so that you can get on with the business of writing the next book.

NOTE: All the rumors you hear from “experts” who say that the traditional system is closed to new writers are lies. The entire industry thrives on new writers.

ALSO NOTE: The entry gate is also the exit gate. Once you get a contract, the pressure remains to keep producing good stories that are accessible to wide audiences.

To get ahead of the comments I imagine will come, I acknowledge the royalties paid by traditional publishers to their authors is considerably less that that which is paid through online publishers, but you’ve got to consider that trad publishers pay advances and then bear the burden of all production and marketing costs. By my math, 15% of 25,000 sales is better than 70% of 250 sales.

Don’t stop writing.

Whether you make $1,000 from your first book or $100,000, you can’t stop writing if you want to make this writing gig a career. One book per year, minimum — or even more than that if you’ve chosen certain genres. This is a business of numbers and name recognition. By definition, nobody knows who you are when your first book drops, but if readers like the story, a solid percentage of them will buy your next book, too, and then tell their friends about it. The people who first learn about you on your fifth book (or fifteenth) may be inspired to go back and buy your previous works.

So, folks, this brings us to the true secret of how to make a living as a novelist. Never forget that . . .

The backlist sells the front list.

Of my 30 novels, 16 are part of my Jonathan Grave thriller series, with #17 on its way in February, 2026. Every time a new book is released (look for Scorched Earth, dropping on February 24), there’s a big spike in sales for the first book in the series, and smaller spikes in all the books that follow. The backlist lives forever and produces income forever, but for best results, that income pump needs to be primed annually with a new release. Otherwise, the sales curves flatten.

Do the math. Every book is an evergreen revenue generator, and those revenues add up over time. Now, 30 years into this game, I have reliable income from my current book, previous years’ books, foreign versions of all of the above, ongoing renewing movie options, and miscellaneous sources like speaking fees and the occasional short story. All of this in addition to the Social Security payments I’ll start accepting in a couple of years.

As promised, the route to real money is neither quick nor easy. But it is very real.

Final note: If you read this post on the the day it was published, I will be in Las Vegas, hanging out with 65,000 of my closest friends at the SHOT Show. Check my Facebook page for updates.

Pre-order your copy today!

By John Gilstrap

Okay, folks, SPOILER ALERTS AHEAD FOR “A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE”

Kathryn Bigelow’s celebrated new thriller, “House of Dynamite” is, in this writer’s humble opinion, something of a master class in how not to write a thriller. To be sure, the premise is gripping: A nuclear missile is detected en route to an as-yet unknown target in the United States, launched by an unknown enemy. This happens at a time when the U.S. is at Defcon 4 (peacetime) and during shift change in the White House Situation Room. Time to impact:18 minutes.

The first minute or so is wasted on what resonated as truth to me: “Wait, that can’t be right, can it? Is it a computer glitch?” Then, Captain Olivia Walker, the duty officer in the Situation Room calms everybody down. There are procedures to be followed, people to be notified, and actions to take. America fires two interceptor missiles (only two) to take out the incoming warheads, but they both miss, and the National Command Authority (NCA) accepts the inevitability of a nuclear strike in Chicago. (I’m not going to address the ridiculous plot holes, except for the one where Captain Walker, who lives in Virginia and clearly loves her husband, surreptitiously call him and tells him to get in the car and drive west–toward the incoming nuclear blast.)

The intense 18 minute period from launch to impact is presented more or less in real time, but just before impact, the film shifts to show the same events from the points of view of the various people we know that Captain Walker has been interacting with–saving the president, of course, for last. Call it 20 minutes of screen time. Out of a 90-minute movie.

The rest of the film shows the same actions, same results, from different points of view.

Twenty minutes in, I was breathless. I thought, Wow, what an exciting yet flawed, implausible movie! Then came the reality that they were going to quadruple-down on the same flaws and implausibilities, just from a different angle. WTF?

But I don’t want to talk plot. I want to talk structure and character, and that’s where this film truly fails.

The filmmaker was making a point rather than a piece of entertainment.

Eighteen minutes ain’t a lot of time to make 100% correct decisions under stress. Got it. (And from submarine based platforms off the East Coast, the flight times are more like eight minutes.) Presidents, played in this case by Idris Elba, whose talents are woefully squandered, don’t spend a lot of their spare time scouring the target packages contained in the infamous “football”, which itself is cared for in the film by a twenty-something junior officer. Got it again. Awesome decisions must be made on the fly. Finally, horror of horrors, government officials give their families a heads up to get out of town before the roads become impassible. (Between you and me, I would 100% do that. RHIP, baby.)

The flaw in the film is that everybody simply follows the book–literally and figuratively. No one dares to fire an unauthorized third interceptor missile in attempt to save millions of lives even if it scorches their career. (Okay, I can’t resist a plot comment here. They limit the interceptor package to two missiles because they might need more if there’s a second attack. Better to char the Windy City. That made sense to a Hollywood writer. Someone needs a good old-fashioned Three Stooges slap, hair-pull and eye-poke.)

Reading procedures, discussing the efficacy of procedures, and then ultimately following them is . . . what’s the word? Oh, yeah. Boring.

A thriller is about characters taking chances and succeeding or failing as a result.

I don’t care about anyone in this film.

This reflects back on the intellectual origins of the film. Every character is merely a game piece to be manipulated to bring the larger points home. Once NCA wrote off the millions of innocents in the greater Chicagoland area, why would I give a rat’s patootie whether or not SecDef gets a last chance to tell his daughter he loves her? We all love our kids, buddy, and you just shrugged at toasting millions of them.

Stakes and tension are different things.

Within the first ten minutes of this turkey, we know the the Miracle Mile will soon be baked to glass because the screenwriter says it must be so. In storytelling parlance, I believe that’s called a Big Reveal. Normally, those are saved for the third reel, not the first. All that remains is the question of how the president should respond. The military cliche, of course, pushes for a global, kill-everybody response, and President Elba seems confused and disturbed by the plastic-sheeted four-color Denny’s-like menu sheets that details the pre-targets smorgasbord of retaliatory options. (Had I been sought out for my technical guidance, I might have asked, what’s the hurry to retaliate? As absurdly unlikely it is that an ICBM could be launched from an untraceable location, once detonated, the forensic evidence left behind would tell us everything we need to know for a surgical strike.)

The ending sucks.

That’s it on the ending. Hard stop. Sucks.

Never forget what a thriller is all about.

Pacing, tension, and ever increasing stakes for the characters are the elements that separate a thriller from the other suspense genres. That’s the job of the writer. If it’s a film, add screenwriter and director to that list.

If you ever allow an agenda to take the front seat, your project is doomed.

By John Gilstrap (Only my wife still calls me Johnny)

Last Saturday was the night of our annual Christmas party. It’s a catered event in our home where we host about 100 friends for an evening of food, drink and frivolity. Things were just getting started–I was taking coats at door and directing people to the various bars and food stations–when my wife’s urgent cries drew my attention to a 12-inch-high patch of flames on the dining room table.

“Oh, bother,” I said–or something like that. A lit taper had fallen from its base and had set the linen table runner alight. Linen burns pretty well with a bit of paraffin accelerant. However, it extinguishes quickly when you drown it with the water from a chafing dish. Thinking quickly, the caterer then covered the burn mark with a serving dish and the party was back on track.

About 18 hours have passed as I write this, and I realize that some blog topics are ordained. So buckle up as I set my writing creds aside and return to my previous line of work. For newcomers, that means 15 years in the fire and rescue service and 35 years as a safety engineer specializing in things that burn.

First, this video is mandatory. The first ten seconds or so will do. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Welcome back. Nothing about that video was doctored. Dry pine burns almost explosively, and it doesn’t care if it’s part of a tree, a wreath or a centerpiece. It also burns very hot. If the fire in the video had been in a real house, those superheated gases would have ignited all the furniture and wall coverings, creating an even hotter plume of gases that would have mushroomed along the ceiling to the rest of the house, self-propagating by all the additional items and structural members it ignited along the way. If it were a two-story house, the stairway would have been the internal chimney, and the Beast would have fed on everything up there.

Sobering Fact #1: You don’t have time. The Beast is coming, and you can’t stop it. Even if it’s not true in your one-off case, you have to assume it is true. If it’s after bedtime, and the smoke detector sounds, your reflex should be to call 9-1-1. If you live in an area that has “enhanced 9-1-1” service, you don’t even need to speak to anyone. The computer will know your address and the audio will tell the call taker everything they need to know. If it turns out to be a nothing burger of a call, well, that’s good news for everyone. Your house won’t have burned and the firefighters won’t have had to clean their equipment.

Sobering Fact #2: Everybody’s instincts are wrong.

• You keep your and the kids’ bedroom doors open because you want to hear problems. Remember the Beast in the hallway? He kills with his breath, not with his claws. Not only is he consuming all of the oxygen from the air, but the products of combustion from all that furniture and structural material are toxifying it with carbon monoxide and phosgene and oxides of nitrogen and God knows what else. Some of these gases are toxic at parts per billion, and if bedroom doors are open, they’re rolling right in. A closed bedroom door adds as much as 10 minutes of survival time in a house fire. Give the firefighters a chance to make a rescue instead of a recovery.
• You think you’re going to have time to rescue your kids from down the hall. You’re wrong. At least, you have to plan to be wrong. See everything written above. Honestly, you don’t comprehend how geometrically the Beast grows once he gets started. Dying in the hallway during a rescue attempt is not a rescue. It’s a tragedy. Likely part of a larger one.
• Your kids are going to run to you for help when things get scary. I don’t even want to write the rest. Read the paragraph above and extrapolate. Hands down, the worst day of my fire service life was when I found the bodies of two children under their parents’ bed. A part of me broke that night that still hasn’t healed.

Elements of a Fire Evacuation Plan 

• Every room has a way out–ideally, two.
  • If the CLOSED bedroom door is hot to the touch, the Beast is out there waiting to kill you. Don’t open it.
    • OPTION 1: If it’s safe, climb out a window.
      • Are your kids big enough/strong enough to open the window?
      • Do they know it’s okay to break the window if they can’t open it? (You need to tell them very specifically that it is permissible because you’ve spent their whole lives making it clear that windows are NOT to be broken.)
      • Is there a designated implement nearby that they can use to break the window?
    • OPTION 2: If the Beast is outside the door and window egress is unsafe, the only option is to stay put and await rescue.
      • Stay low and in plain sight
      • Make lots of noise. (Bedside whistles are a great idea.)
• Establish a meeting place outside and once there, stay there. 
• Do not hesitate. Hear the smoke detector, activate the plan.

Please consider this post to be my Christmas message of love.

We’re all extended family here at the Killzone Blog, and it so happens that the season of God’s greatest gift to mankind coincides in the Northern Hemisphere with the time of year when we stack the rules of chemistry and physics against ourselves by placing uniquely combustible fuels in close proximity to efficient ignition sources. There’s a reason why first responders refer to this time of year as Fire Season.

I don’t want to stress you out, but I do want all of you to take a look at every single display in your home. If having a real tree is important to you (or any real greens for that matter), make sure that they are moist and well away from direct sources of heat. Keep a pitcher of water near the fireplace in case a log falls out. You just have to cool it off enough to get it back into the fire box with the tongs. There’s no need to extinguish the fire in the fire box before you go to bed, but make sure that the logs are stable and won’t fall.

Candles out before bed. All of them. Don’t make me come over there and give you a talking to.

With all that lecturing behind me, I wish you all a wonderful Holiday Season, and I will see you on the far side of our annual hiatus!

By John Gilstrap

When Zero Sum, #16 in my Jonathan Grave thriller series hit the stands in 2024 as a “premium mass market paperback,” the paper copy retailed for $9.99 and the Kindle version cost $7.99. Fifteen books and as many years earlier, the standard mass market version of No Mercy, the first book in the series, retailed for $6.99, and for two weeks, the Kindle price was $0.00 before it skyrocketed to $2.99 after the promotional period expired*.

This coming February, when Scorched Earth, #17 in the series is revealed to the world, it will be in a trade paper format. If you’re not familiar with the jargon, trade paperbacks have the dimensions and font size of a hardcover, but with soft covers. Paper copies will retail for $18.95 and the Kindle version will cost $9.99.

For what it’s worth, I had nothing to do with this decision, and the decision itself isn’t about greed–at least not directly. Without wallowing too deeply in the weeds, the demand for mass market paperbacks has been dwindling for years, kept alive mainly by the reprints of last year’s bestsellers by big name authors. Those were the books you’d see in grocery stores and pharmacies and airports, but the real driver for the mass market were big box stores like Walmart and Costco, both of which announced that they would no longer be stocking their shelves with mass market paperbacks, with certain exceptions, including category romances.

This change concerns me. First of all, it’s change and I hate fixing things that don’t feel broken. I’ve always lived by the mantra, “Never try to make a happy baby happier.”

Trade paper has always been the format for literary fiction. At least that was the case in the United States. Thrillers were hardcover and mass market reprints. We are all creatures of habit. Will readers who generally trend toward hardcovers be more drawn to my books because they’re larger yet still softcover? Will mass market paperback readers who’ve reserved a specific spot in their briefcases for a small book be pissed off that they now have to carry something larger?

And there’s the price. Over the years, I’ve been blessed to be able to build a devoted fan base that’s willing to spend mass market prices for my stories. Will they stay with me as the price for the handheld book doubles? I guess I’ll find out. I worry less about my eBook fans because the price increase is less drastic, but it’s still change.

Now for the exciting part . . .

The format change has provided an excuse to re-release all of my Grave series in trade paper format. No Mercy and Hostage Zero will hit the stands at the same time as Scorched Earth. While all the concerns remain, it’ll be nice to see out-of-print titles returning to the shelves.

Good news for autograph collectors. If there’s one complaint I’ve heard more than any other over the years about the mass market format is that bibliophiles who collect autographs don’t like the way small paperbacks look on their shelves. I understand that, actually. And as the man signing the autograph, I confess that I will be happy to have a larger signing area on the page.

This brings us to the importance of pre-orders. I’m not a “please buy my book” kind of guy. I figure that if you have to beg, something’s wrong. In fact, I don’t even bring books with me to sell when I teach workshops. First and foremost, I’m not set up to be a retailer and have no desire to manage another layer of taxation. But also, I figure if I do my job right, people will be inspired to buy my books from a bookstore, or to borrow them from a library.

That said, if you’re inclined to buy my books when they come out, given the expanse of this change in the way of doing business, it would be extremely helpful for you to pre-order the book through your retail outlet of choice. Whether you prefer a physical book or an eBook, preorders send a message to the publisher and the marketplace in general.

So, what say you, TKZ family? How price sensitive do you think readers are? Are you going to miss pocket-size books?

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*I’m proud to note that No Mercy shot to the #1 free book on Amazon, “selling” over 60,000 copies during that time. When the price returned to $2.99 the book remained the #1 overall Kindle bestseller for the next week. That was a promotional gambit that worked better than I’ve ever witnessed.

By John Gilstrap

As a thriller author, I know all about testing the boundaries of suspended disbelief. As a consumer of thrillers, I do it all the time. Coincidences have to happen to make a story work, and as writers, it’s our job to make the coincidences feel organic to the situation the characters are enduring. For the sake of tension and drama, we stack the odds against our good guys. That way, when they ultimately prevail, the victory feels that much sweeter.

We’ve been watching a lot of streaming movies and television shows in our special viewing room over the past couple of months, and as the tropes stack up, I’m having a progressively harder time keeping my inner commentary silent, earning a few elbow shots from my beloved and more than a few harsh shushes. Consider . . .

. . . When crashing the drug den and the SWAT team is stacked up behind a ballistic shield and armed with enough fully-automatic firepower to topple Venezuela, why is Detective Danny Reagan with his pistol and designer ballistic vest out in front of everybody?

. . . Why don’t detectives ever just turn on a light? Instead, the search the dusty darkness of a suspects bedroom–or the basement where all murders were committed–with only the illumination provided by a tiny penlight.

. . . Why does our brilliant good guy wait till he arrives at the site of trouble before he chambers a round into his pistol? That means he’s been driving around all day essentially unarmed.

. . . After prevailing in the firefight in Room A, why doesn’t our good guy take advantage of the relative peace to reload before moving to Room B? Never bring old bullets to a new gunfight.

. . . For heaven’s sake, good guy or bad, just friggin’ shoot! You’ve achieved your goal. You’ve got your prey in your sights. And let’s be honest: At that point, while the victim very likely cares deeply that you intend to kill them, they’re not really going to be listening to the why. If they’ve got any sense, they’re going to be focused exclusively on either how to get away or to kill you first. Any way you cut it, your best call is to pull the trigger. Conversely, if you change your mind, your only move is to run like a bunny rabbit because only bad things lie ahead for you.

I make it a point to never pick on particular shows by name, but there’s one very popular program that makes my head explode every week. Let’s pretend there’s a show called “Trooper” and it features a character named Dalton Shames. To our knowledge, Dalton’s never had a conventional job, but it’s clear that he was raised by MacGyver. Give Dalton a can of Dr. Pepper, and he can turn a paper clip into a flame thrower.

Okay, I joke about the flame thrower, but he routinely produces a full-size 1911 platform pistol from the waistband of his trousers, right at the small of his back. His limp-wristed grip is all wrong for that gun (that’s a real description, not a pejorative), and none of the nations most draconian gun laws apply to him. Not even New York or Los Angeles.

In last week’s episode, a plucky 19-year-old is able to infiltrate the lair of a dangerous drug kingpin with the intent of kingpin regicide. It’s quite a feat given the army of armed guards. Dalton, in the company of the local sheriff, who has inexplicably ceded all law enforcement powers to this stranger from out of town, raid the compound themselves by ramming their way through the front gate. They have to keep the 19-year-old from being killed by the cartel, don’t you know.

Here’s the plan: The sheriff will hold off the army with his six-shot revolver while Dalton makes his way to the kingpin’s throne room, where the plucky kid has his highness dead to rights, but can’t bring himself to pull the trigger. Yada, yada . . . shot from off camera, kingpin gut shoots plucky kid, Dalton shoots kingpin and takes off running with plucky kid over his shoulder. Bad guys with rifles can’t hit a running target at ten yards, Dalton can’t miss with unaimed shots while running.

All is well but for this kid with a hole in his gut. Not to worry. There’s a horse veterinarian with a pouch of goodies who says he can help.

CUT TO: A kingpin’s yard filled with cop cars that would have been really handy a little while ago. But the vehicle we really care about it the ambulance with our plucky-now-gut-shot 19-year-old looking like a million bucks, all cleaned up, sitting upright in the stretcher while Dalton tells him everything’s going to be okay. Then Dalton allows the paramedics to close the back doors and drive him away.

Sigh.

There’s suspension of disbelief, and then there’s no element of this story is possible so therefore none of the story is engaging. I am without a doubt becoming progressively more curmudgeonly about these things, but I swear that lazy storytelling is becoming the norm.

In these days of Chat GPT and even simple YouTube searches, even uninformed storytelling is lazy. A car door has never been adequate to stop any but the smallest bullet, but ten years ago, not knowing that was forgivable. Now, there are entire channels dedicated to what stops what caliber of bullet. I have to assume that s true of every other once-esoteric subject.

What say you, TKZ family? How forgiving is the suspension mechanism for your disbelief?

By John Gilstrap

I have been blessed with nice offices my entire professional life. Not that I’ve always had an office job, or that my office jobs didn’t take me out into the field for many days out of the year, but when I was in town, in headquarters, I always had a door and walls. In several of my Big Boy jobs, I could look beyond my door to see other toiling in the cubical farm, but I’ve never had to endure the challenge of trying to concentrate in a crowd.

Ninety percent of the time, my door remained open, especially in my true safety engineering days, working at the explosives plant, because the open door encouraged drop-ins. “Hey, John, there’s a problem, I think, down at Building 240 . . .” On the flip side, the open door allowed me to catch in the hallway that person I needed to talk to who was never in his own office.

If my office door was closed–or is closed today–it’s a rare enough event that everyone knows I need to be alone. Back in the day, it could have been because of a personnel issue or a classified project, but now it’s because I’m in the Zone, or on a phone call or doing a YouTube video or Zoom meeting.

It’s no secret to anyone who knows me that I like comfort and I like my things. My stuff. Don’t get me wrong. I can be productive in a hotel room or sitting at a bar or in a coffee shop, but to feel at home, I want to feel special in my office space.

The office furniture I’d had for the past fifteen years or so was designed for a different time and for different priorities. My desk had a big cabinet for my tower computer and a slide out tray for my keyboard along with chases for a few cords. If I wanted to write with pen and paper–which I frequently do–I merely slid the keyboard into its slot and worked on the desk space. None of this affected the music I was listening to from the Bose CD player on the bookshelf.

Now, my laptop is my only computer. The keyboard tray is still the proper typing height, but I could no longer slide the tray in without closing the lid on the computer, which was also the source of the music or white noise I was listening to, not to mention the gateway to the internet research I needed to take notes on as I wrote by hand. It just didn’t work for me anymore, and after the move to West Virginia, the furniture didn’t really fit the space.

So, I designed myself a new office.

I like dark colors and I like the look of the hard surfaces. My old office provided just one horizontal surface and it was hard to access if I wanted to do anything by hand,. Here, the wrap-around design allows me to swing my chair around and have immediate access to more desk.

But let’s talks about some of the stuff.

This little guy never had a name but he was my childhood Teddy bear. One of my most prized possessions, he got me through some tough times.

On October 19, 1983 at 3:10pm, a contaminated batch of propellant for the Navy’s Standard Missile Program exploded about 400 yards from my office. The pressure wave blew in my window and collapsed my ceiling. This piece of shrapnel missed me.

While I was researching SIX MINUTES TO FREEDOM, President Bush invited Kurt Muse and me to Houston so that we could interview him for 20 minutes. We stayed for and hour and a half.

I was invited to teach a writing class to the military and civilians at Guantanamo. While there, I was interviewed by the base radio station, where I got a Fidel Castro bobblehead. The station motto is, “Rockin’ in Fidel’s Backyard.”

I’ve been trading Jonathan Grave challenge coins for a while now–long enough to put together a nice collection. Every one of those represents service to the nation or the community. It warms my heart to look at them.

A little daily encouragement from Dad.

And now, finally, time to go back to work.

By John Gilstrap

Every parent has confronted some form of the same horrible moment when their child declares their desire for the unobtainable. Perhaps it’s the skinny, five-foot-four high school junior who wants nothing else in life but to be a professional football player. Or the 13-year-old aspiring ballerina who cannot walk across the room without tripping over her feet. What’s the right call here? Do we tell them the truth and shatter their dreams or smile and say supportive things, knowing that they will fail? We love them more than life itself, but coaches and lessons are expensive. And c’mon, there’s the opportunity cost of the time lost not pursuing something where they’d have a better chance of success (and which might more closely fit with the plan we’ve always had for their lives).

Do we presume failure and shut the door on their unlikely dreams, or do encourage them and hope for a Rudy moment? (If you don’t recognize the Rudy reference, stop reading right now and go watch the movie. With the family. Bring Kleenex.)

Now, let’s take it a step farther (further? I’m never sure). You’ve exhausted the carefully collected 529 Plan money to see your son, Billy, graduate with honors from a prestigious engineering school, and during the celebration dinner, he announces his plans to go to New York to try to be an actor on Broadway.

Or his plans to take a year or two off to work at a coffee shop while he writes the mystery novel that’s been floating around in his head.

I’m going to take a guess at what what your initial reactions would be:

• Like hell you are;
• I’ve raised an idiot;
• Do you realize how much money we just dropped on your education?
• You’re going to starve.

But Billy is no fool. He’s thought through all of these objections. He’ll come back with:

• I’m only young once. This is the best time to take chances.
• It’s just me. I don’t need a lot of money. I’ll find a way to feed myself.
• Mom and Dad, this is my dream. If it doesn’t work out, engineering will still be there for me.

This is where you tee up the failure speech:

• The entertainment business is brutal. It tears people up and spits them out. It’s soul crushing. (All of this coming from articles you’ve read, having never actually attempted to live the life you’re trashing.)
• You were born to be an engineer, not a writer or performer. (Translation: We’ve spent a lot of money on our dream for you. We’ve told all our friends that you’re going to be an engineer. They’re going to roll their eyes and scoff when we tell them that you want to do this. Just as we’re doing right now.)
• Even people who are successful can’t maintain their success. Even if you can sell that first novel for a lot of money, it might not sell through and your career could be over. Even if your first song is a hit, there may never be a second song. You don’t want to risk the humiliation of being a one hit wonder, do you?

Finally, when Billy goes forward with his stupid plan, you hope he’ll fail early and spectacularly enough that it will set his head straight. Even if you keep a good poker face, your real thoughts will likely shine through.

You will launch your beloved son into his future armed with the knowledge that pretty much everyone who’s ever loved him has their thumb on the scale for him to fail. Those aren’t the words anyone speaks, but Billy can hear the “I-Told-You-So Chorus” being rehearsed in the wings.

And in his heart of hearts, no matter what he says, Billy expects to fail as well. Let’s face it: The odds are woefully stacked against him. Of the tens of thousands of hacks who push books out every year now that gatekeepers are gone and self-publishing is easy, how many actually make enough to buy a decent meal, let alone fund a lifestyle? Ditto the thousands of members in the Screen Actors Guild who make little more than pocket change. Who the hell is Billy to think he can succeed when so many others fail?

The answer is simple. Billy is better than all those hacks. He just needs to make the world realize it.

He can start by projecting success. Billy didn’t make this shift from engineering to the arts on a whim and a desire. Yes, he has passion, but he also has talent. How does he know? Because he does. He knows when his stuff is bad and because of that, he knows when it’s good. In the arts, that’s what talent is. True talent. Having it is the key element that separates him from the dreck peddlers. It’s what separates Broadway from dinner theater.

When Billy goes to a reading or a literary event, he makes it his mission to introduce himself not just to the author, but to the author’s agent or publisher or publicist who will likely also be there. If he attends a conference, he will sit among the cadre of authors he knows he will one day join. He will work the room in a way that only a confident person can. People will remember him not for being cocky or loud or even because he had a nifty idea for a book, but because he was interesting.

The entertainment business–of which writing is a part–is a business of relationships, and people love to help interesting people.

If Billy’s smart, he will stay away from anyone who sneers at his decision to pursue his dream, taking solace from the fact that those who sneer will be the same ones who want to take selfies with him after his dream proves to be successful. Billy should make a commitment to himself never to apologize to anyone for the artistic path he chose.

Everyone who has seen any level of success in the entertainment business started as Billy. They all share the common elements of talent, drive, focus, more than a little luck, and the ability to see rejection merely as a slammed door that opened a window.

A lot of Billys quit. Most, probably. They go home to the “I-Told-You-So” concert and complain that the industry isn’t interested in new talent anymore. They’ll testify without evidence that traditional media is dying anyway. The real route to success, they’ll say, is doing it all yourself because even if they buy your book, they’ll turn on you like jackals if the book under performs.

As evidence, Whining Billy will regurgitate the one-hit-wonder trope of their friend John who was really, really good. The industry paid him a lot of money, and got behind his first two projects. They sent him on tours, and while the books were bestsellers, they didn’t earn back the money the company spent, and now nobody will return his phone calls. Poor John.

Whining Billy glosses over the lede here–that John had a hit. For a period of time, however short, he got to live the dream. He got to see his name on bookshelves around the world. And while he beamed with pride of accomplishment, the world belittled him because he didn’t do it twice.

Perhaps Whining Billy–having quit and started a garage band, or maybe gone into teaching creative writing classes–was unaware of the fact that while John was having trouble getting his phone calls returned, he was still in the game making calls.

Yes, we’re talking about me now. And perhaps it’s pure hubris, but I never stopped believing in my abilities during the dark times. I never once saw rejection as personal. I understood the quiet happy dances performed by that handful of veteran authors who’d never made a fraction of what I’d been paid for those under-performing books.

I didn’t care that large elements of my extended family celebrated my slump because it’s what I expected of them. I think they had a lot to do with my desire to escape into fiction in the first place.

That noise doesn’t matter to me. I can’t let it matter to me.

To the outside world, it looked like my slump ran from roughly 2001 to 2006, but what no one outside of my very tiny circle of trust knew was that I had made the pivot of a lifetime. I was researching and writing my first and only nonfiction book–the first book ever to receive cooperation from the Army’s super-secret Delta Force. That book became Six Minutes to Freedom, co-authored with Kurt Muse, whose story it tells, and when it was done, we couldn’t give it away to the Big Five. (Nobody cares about Central America, Special Forces is overdone, neither of us is a “journalist” and therefore we’re not qualified to write the story.) I actually had to fire my agent over the book because she refused to represent it.

That’s when I remembered that Steve Zacharias, then a senior executive (now CEO) of Kensington Publishing had always been a fan of my work. My new (and better) agent, Anne Hawkins, sent him the manuscript, and he bought it. Boom! I was back in the game, and the research for that book provided the launch platform for the Jonathan Grave series.

The success of the Grave series allowed me to launch my Victoria Emerson Series, and now my Irene Rivers thriller series. That’s thirty books and counting folks.

And Six Minutes to Freedom is slated to be released by Netflix as a feature film in 2027.

The human tapeworms who troll the interwebs either spreading promises of quick riches through self/hybrid/vanity publishing or spreading rumors of doom and misery in the traditional world are lying to you.

Talent. Relationships. Persistence. The ability to tune out the naysayers. Those are four legs on the stool that defines success in the entertainment business. We talk a lot about tying your butt to the chair and writing. Well, yes, that’s important. But you have to get out there and meet people, too. Build relationships.

Your work has been rejected? Ah, that’s a shame. Get over it and try again. And again. And again.

Or quit. There’s no shame in that. Just remember that it was your choice to quit. Dismissive agents or cranky editors didn’t make you quit. You chose to quit.

And somewhere, you left and editor or an agent hungry for exactly what you’d written. After fifty rejections, you’ll never know if you would have discovered each other on your 51st query.

By John Gilstrap

By way of reader orientation, this post is built on the premise that the universe of writers is divided into two broad categories–those who outline their stories before they get to the business of writing, and those who plow into the story on page one, not knowing where it’s going to go until they get there. That latter group writes by the seat of their pants, ergo they are “pantsers,” and I number myself among them.

In my mind, there really are not pros and cons to be discussed about one approach versus the other because the preferred approach is writer-specific and hard-wired. I’ve never been able to outline. Even in high school and college, when I was supposed to turn in those damn 3×5 cards along with research papers, I always did them last, after I had written the paper. And story wheels? They make my head explode. This is why writing programs like Scrivener, which so many of my writer friends love, are wasted on me.

Two weeks ago, my post here in the ‘Zone dealt with the perils of pantsing a short story–specifically, how it spun out of control in terms of length. I stipulate that if outlining-then-writing worked for me, that would have been a far more efficient approach. But in the end, my pantsing worked. Once I discovered the real story, I was able to trim off about 2,500 words and turned in a tale I’m quite proud of.

Last weekend, I attended an excellent conference called Creatures, Crimes and Creativity in Columbia, MD, outside of Baltimore. The first panel I was put on was about screenwriting–a format that is very strictly structured. You’ve got 120 pages to tell an entire story for a feature film. Around 20 pages for a half hour TV show, and you’ve got to pace for commercial breaks! (Full disclosure: I’ve written feature films, but I’ve done nothing with television.)

Perhaps the most noted guru in screenwriting instruction is Syd Field, and his teachings clearly influenced the advice given by my fellow panelists. By Page X you have to have the inciting event (or whatever it’s called), and then by page Y must come the turning point(?). Et cetera, et cetera, and on and on. Pantsing a screenplay, they said, is not possible.

Enter the contrarian. C’est moi. Of course you can pants your way through a screenplay. That’s how I find the story. The characters interact with each other, they do stuff and say things, and through that, the creative crew in my mind wakes up and gets excited. I’ll hammer out something that is jumbled and woefully long, but I’ll have a whole story. It’ll be crap, but first drafts are supposed to be crap.

Now that I know the story and I’m excited by the dialogue, future drafts are all about shaping the pile of poo first draft into the beautiful golden structure of a screenplay that works.

It bothers me that inexperienced writers attend classes and take what they hear literally. As a story is first unfolding, I think it would be soul stealing to think that a certain plot point had to happen by page 10. First drafts are all about story flow. Don’t let artificial structures get in the way of your imagination. Get it all out, then fix it later.

To be clear: Structure is king in the world of screenplays, and I’m not suggesting otherwise. I’m merely suggesting that you should not let those structural concerns clog your imagination.