“Going wide” is a hostile issue for indies. It’s somewhere up there with the duke-it-out debate on plotting vs pantsing and the never-ending fight over show vs tell. For me, going wide was a no-brainer once a much-more-successful indie friend said, “Garry, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table by remaining exclusive on Amazon.”

So it was that last year, in the year whose name shall not be mentioned, I took the leap of faith and published my ebooks on Kobo and Nook. (Best damn book business decision I ever made.) I’m still with Amazon, though, and I freely admit I still make the most money letting the Zon pimp me out. However, Kobo is great, simple to use, and gives me a wider exposure than AZ. I’ve had Kobo downloads in 66 different countries. Nook, on the other hand, is barely worth the bother.

I couldn’t go wide on Apple until recently. That’s because I’m a PC guy and Apple publishing was exclusive to Mac users. That changed when Apple completely remodeled their ebook and audio book store and opened its Apple Books For Authors membership to PCers.

I bit into the Apple platform over the last few weeks and moved 8 publications in my based-on-true-crime series over to Apple Books. They’re now up and available if anyone wants to take a look. Publishing on Apple took a bit of time and, from the stats so far, seems to be worth it. But… there are a few things I’ve learned about Apple that I wish someone would have told me at the start. Hopefully this post will help someone who wants to know how to easily publish on Apple Books.

The Big Difference Between Apple Books and the Other E-Tailers

I’m probably like you in that I research things before I take them on. Publishing on Apple Books was no different than any other new venture, so I did my diligent homework before the dive. I read some blogs, watched a few videos, and took an Apple-sponsored webinar hosted on Alli – the Alliance of Independent Authors. All good stuff, but all failed to explain the big difference between Apple Books and the other e-tailers. And I had to find out a vital secret — the hard way.

Before exposing this vital secret, let me point you to a few good Apple Books publishing resources. First, go right through the Apple Books For Authors website and absorb it. It’ll take a while. There’s a lot there, but you’ll be poorly equipped for the trip unless you do so.

Second, check out these helpful articles:

David Gaughran — https://davidgaughran.com/apple-books-for-authors-launches-pc/

Reedsy — https://blog.reedsy.com/how-to-publish-on-apple-books/

Written Word Media — https://www.writtenwordmedia.com/how-to-self-publish-on-apple-books/

So these links, plus the info in this post, should get you onto Apple Books as smoothly and painlessly as possible. Something nobody tells you (the big difference between Apple Books For Authors and the other e-tailers) is that Apple has two separate publishing interfaces. Unlike Amazon, Kobo, and Nook, Apple has Apple Books For Authors as the mechanical part of publishing (uploading files, covers, metadata, etc.) and iTunes Connect as the financial end (setting up an account, setting prices, stores, tracking stats, getting paid, etc.).

Now for the hidden vital secret. There’s a glitch in the iTunes Connect interface that defies all logic and common sense. However, it’s there and if you don’t know about it, ITunes Connect won’t let you go forward with the Apple Books publishing side. Basically, you’re screwed unless you know the trick.

Once I found this out and cleared the incredibly frustrating roadblock apparently intentionally set-up to peeve-off a poor person like me, it was clear driving all the way to the Apple Store. Here’s a step-by-step hand-hold with applicable screenshots on how to easily publish on Apple Books. And a story to go with it.

Step 1 — Deal with iTunes Connect

Create an iTunes Connect account (if you don’t already have one). I didn’t have one because I don’t have a Mac device. BTW, the Alli webinar reported there are 1.5 billion Apple devices worldwide so you can imagine the depth of the Apple Books market.

Now the trouble started. Dave Gaughran said the iTunes Connect interface was “a bit clunky”. For me, it was a rattletrap. Simple things like entering your username (my email address) and my password were seamless. So was declaring myself as an individual as opposed to an organization. I clicked Accept on the Terms Of Service without reading them. Seriously, does anyone other than a Philadelphia lawyer ever read all that BS?

I moved on to the Complete The Agreement part. Here was the tax section which took a bit of figuring out but I struggled though it by telling the IRS that I was Canadian and to go talk to Revenue Canada about bloodsucking matters. They bought it and I made it to the next iTunes Connect round called Add New Bank Account.

It’ll be easy, they said. Just enter your chosen currency (Tip—enter USD because it’s going to make it easier when you get through this part, sent over to Apple Books Publishing, and then get rerouted back to iTunes Connect to list your ebook pricing and the countries you’re selling to. Whatever country you bank in will have its own par-value to the United States Dollar and will do the current currency exchange. Trust me on this. Do your Apple business in USD.

Then you enter your banking institution name. For me, it’s TD (Toronto Dominion) Canada Trust which is a top-ten North American financial institute. Easy enough, I thought. This should be a breeze—just like entering my name here.  No problem again, same with my account number, and the last step was putting in the Transit Number or what’s also called the ABA Routing Number.

I entered 92220 which is my bank’s transit/routing number. A pop-up with a large yellow exclamation mark appeared and said “The Transit Number Is Invalid”. Hokay. Let’s try this again. Same thing. “The Transit Number Is Invalid”. I got up and got my file stashed away from when I opened my TD account, blew off the dust, and checked the information. There it was in faded black and white: Transit Number 92220. I went back to my PC and told iTunes Connect on its Apple interface that I was right and they were wrong.

Once more, “The Transit Number Is Invalid”. My wife heard my cursing. Rita had five years in the banking industry back when I first met the pretty little dish so she tried troubleshooting the matter. “They might want both the transit number and the institution number,” she said. “Here. Try entering 92220 followed by 004.” I did. Once more: “The Transit Number Is Invalid”.

The pop-up had me hostage. There was no way it was letting me past this gatekeeper, and there was no way I was ever going to get paid for selling on Apple Books without iTunes Connect brokering the deal which was the whole point of this entire exercise. “I know,” I told Rita. “I’ll go down to the bank. They’ll figure this out.” So I took a screenshot of this pesky pop-up, printed it out, and walked downtown.

With luck, my favorite teller was open. I showed Amy-Beth my sorrows. She checked the transit number, institution number, the account number, and even my name. “I don’t know, Garry.” Amy-Beth smiled a sweet smile that suited her name and shook her head. “Everything is in order. You shouldn’t be having this problem.”

“Did you, like, recently change your transit and institution numbers?” I struggled for answers.

Amy–Beth smiled less. “No, Garry. We’ve been in business since 1855. We’ve had the same numbers for a hundred and sixty-six years. They’re a standard in the international banking industry. Some things never change.”

I thanked Amy-Beth for her time and walked home. Rita had a suggestion. “Why don’t you call Apple Support? You can’t be the only one who’s had this difficulty.”

Good idea. I dialed 1-800-MY-APPLE. A service rep came on. Now, I live in North America. The service rep didn’t. I speak fairly fluent English. The service rep didn’t. I knew what my problem was. The service rep didn’t. Try as I might, there was no resolving it with the service rep.

I was frustrated as hell. Rita wasn’t. She came up with another idea. “Why don’t you ask Rachel? She’s a whiz at all things technical.”

FYI, Rachel is my close indie writer friend in the UK and the one who told me I was leaving a lot of money on the table by not going wide. By my reasoning, Rachel was the reason I was in this trouble with Apple so it was her responsibility to get me out. I emailed Rachel the situation.

Rachel replied right away. (British accent) “Blimey. I remember that snafu. If I reckon right, you have to put a zero in front of the transit number and the institution number. So it has to appear as 0XXXXXYYY. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But that’s the secret. A silly little zero.”

I asked Rachel how she found this out. She replied, “I had the same trouble, so I called Apple Support and they immediately solved it for me. Lovely folk, those blokes at Apple they are.”

So there you have it, Kill Zoners. The vital secret. A silly little zero, and you’re through the banking information turnstile and away you go. To clarify, my transit number looked like this and it worked.

092220004

In what universe this makes sense, I don’t know. But I know I’ll never have to deal with this strangeness again, and I’m happy to say the rest of the Apple publishing experience was excellent.

Step 2 — Publish on Apple Books For Authors

To start this step, as soon as you log onto your newly-created account at Apple Books For Authors, iTunes Connect will text you a one-time, six-figure, two-step verification code. Note: This happens every time you work with Apple Books For Authors and iTunes Connect, so get used to it.

Once you’re in the Apple Books For Authors portal you’ll see a screen titled Choose How To Publish. You have three options — Submit a New Book, Update a Previously Submitted Book, and Setup a Pre-Order. Click Submit a New Book, and follow along while I upload At The Cabin which is the 8^th book in my Based-On-True Crime Series.

I’ve got to stop the slideshow for a sec and say something about the book description section. Writing book descriptions, jacket copy, blurbs, or whatever you call them is an art on its own. That’s for another day, but I will say that Apple’s window is a bit tight to work in. It doesn’t like paragraph spaces and will look like a picket fence in real time if you try it. Also, it doesn’t have HTML features like some of the other e-platforms do. So if you want to use bold and/or italics, you’ll have to handwrite HTML code the old fashioned way like this: <b>bold</b> & <i>italics</i>.

That’s it! It’s just that easy, and Apple walks you right through it. All you do now is click the blue bar Upload Book to iTunes Connect and you’re going to head back to the interface that sells your book and pays you.

I’m going to back up and cover two important points in the first step where you upload your e-file and your cover art. Apple works off an ePub file, not Mobi like Amazon’s proprietary file. I write my manuscripts in MS Word.docx and convert them to ePub files through Calibre. From my experience (over 20 publications now on four platforms) I firmly believe the key to clean productions (other than proper editing /proofreading) is to format your Word.docx file properly. I wrote a Kill Zone post titled Top Ten Tips on Formatting eBooks from MS Word. Top take-away from that is never use Tabs or even the dog won’t like your e-file for breakfast.

I see Apple has an auto-convert feature built in that bypasses a specialized e-file converting software like Calibre. I didn’t try it, but I’ve gone that route on Kindle and Kobo and wasn’t satisfied with the final product. I’m very comfortable with converting MSWord.docx to EPub and Mobi on Calibre and it only takes two minutes. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it but you can try the built-in conversion because, one way or the other, you’ll have to upload an ePub file to Apple.

Changing the subject to covers. It’s something for an upcoming post where I’ll have my cover designer, Elle Rossi of Evernight Designs, join the Kill Zone crowd for cover lessons. Apple has a specific artwork image requirement. They want a jpeg file in size 1400 x 2100 (same as Kobo).

Step 3 — Back to iTunes Connect

I promise you – no more monkey business once you’re back on the iTunes Connect interface. Once you’re past that @#$%^& Zero thing, it’s user-friendly. Here’s what happens:

That’s it! Hit done and iTunes Connect and Apple Books For Authors will do the rest for you. It takes a few hours to a day for your new book to go live in the Apple Book Store. They’ll send you an email confirmation with the website link.

Just a few comments about completing the metadata on iTunes Connect. (Metadata is just a fancy word for information.) DRM (Digital Rights Management) is an option you have and every source I’ve ever listened to all says to leave DRM off. I don’t exactly know what it entails, but I understand by opting in you somehow limits your exposure.

Speaking of exposure, make sure you click on the Select All for Countries and Regions. Seeing as Apple currently has 51 worldwide stores, I can’t imagine why any self-respecting indie would not want to be in every store. Sidenote: Since I went wide on Kobo last year, I’ve had eBook downloads in 66 different countries. It’ll be interesting to see how Apple’s performance compares.

One final thought is on pricing. My experience is that $2.99 USD is the sweet spot for my crime genre books. But you can price anywhere up or down the scale you want, and with Apple — unlike Amazon — you don’t take a royalty beating for going below $2.99 or above $9.99.

Okay. On to pubbing on Google Play! How about you Kill Zoners? Anything you’d like to add on this or any other subject that’s on your evil minds?

———

Garry Rodgers is a retired homicide detective and coroner. Now, Garry has reinvented himself as an indie-published crime writer whose books can be downloaded on Apple, Amazon, Kobo, and Nook. Soon they’ll be out on Google Play.

Vancouver Island in British Columbia is home for Garry Rodgers. Garry lives there because he’s a wuss and it’s the warmest year-round place in Canada. You can reach him at garry.rodgers@shaw.ca, at his website DyingWords.net, or on Twitter (@GarryRodgers1).

By John Gilstrap

You experienced writers out there please talk quietly among yourselves while I address the rookies for a few minutes.

I’ve mentioned here before that I frequent Facebook pages that cater to young, new or upcoming writers. I consider it a form of paying forward, and I try to help in ways that I reasonably can. Those pages also serve to give me ideas for this blog and well as for my YouTube channel.

What I want to talk about here today is less about writing, per se, than it is about fulfilling dreams of pursuing a writing career. Cutting to the chase: If you’re posting online, you’re in a public forum. Every item you post, every comment you make, is part of a truly permanent record. Before you click that “Post” button, ask yourself if you’re about to do something good and helpful, or are you about to do something you might have to apologize for sometime in the future.

I belong to one Facebook fiction writing group that boasts over 120,000 members. I’m not sure if its possible to know what the demographics are of that group, but judging from the posts and responses, many are young, the majority are inexperienced, and for a substantial number, English is not the members’ first language. As with all virtual groups of that size, trolls are common.

What’s less common–in fact, what’s damn difficult to find–is good advice. Most of the “wisdom” from members feels like advice we’ve all heard over the years presented as inviolable rules. Those of you who have hung around TKZ for a while know my opinion on the rules of writing: There aren’t any. Fiction writers need only to entertain their audience. If they can do that while including a prologue that’s all about waking up from a dream in the middle of a thunderstorm and wondering who they are, then Godspeed.

Posting Stories Online

I know you’re new to all of this, and I know that it’s hard to get feedback on your writing from real people in the real world, but do yourself a favor before you post a work in progress: Ask yourself what you hope to achieve by posting what is essentially a rough draft in a public forum.

What will you do with anonymous feedback from largely unqualified critics? Clearly, you will share the glowing praise when it happens, but what about the less glowing yet honest critiques? Worse, how are you going to handle the slashing troll attacks? All too often, feelings get bruised and wounded submitters engage in ad hominem broadsides with their gloating trolls.

What about that exchange seems helpful? I submit that every bit of it is 100% harmful. What’s the sense in seeking feedback that can never be trusted?

And to make it even worse, the submissions, responses, and arguments reside in that public forum forever, where deans of admissions, employers, security clearance analysts, editors and agents can all see them and learn from them.

TKZ First Page Critiques Are Different

My intent is not to shill for our First Page Critique program, but I do want to differentiate it from what I discuss above. Three key differences come to mind:

First, the critiques come from writers who have walked the walk in their own lives and have enjoyed some success in the fiction writing biz. That doesn’t mean we know what we’re talking about, necessarily, but at least our opinions come from an earned place.

Second, submissions here are anonymous for a reason. If a critique is harsh (they should never be mean-spirited), the author need never step forward and take responsibility for the piece. Hopefully, they will learn from the experience, but there’s no embarrassment. In fact, as the designated critics (critiquers?) we never know whose work we’ve analyzed.

Third, submissions to the First Page Critique program are curated at the beginning. Occasionally, submissions are so immature or undercooked that it would be unkind to expose them to public critique. We will never savage anyone here.

Spelling and Grammar Count

I recognize that I am now strolling on very thin ice. I find that it is the rare TKZ post with my name attached that does not have at least a couple of typos in it. It ain’t for lack of trying, but if there’s one truth I’ve learned over the past decades, it’s that I suck at finding little things, whether it be a typo or the milk that is right in front of me in the refrigerator.

That said, if you’re part of my targeted audience with this post–the new, upcoming, young, struggling writer–you have to be more careful than I do. I’ve earned a Mulligan or two, while your Mulligan bank is empty. Every word you post in a public forum is part of an ongoing audition for your future as a writer. Don’t squander marvelous opportunities to make good impressions.

And for heaven’s sake, don’t destroy a history of well-thought, well-constructed posts with an ill-considered rant about anything.

Writing is a craft, and crafts need to be practiced. Just as golf and tennis swings require muscle memory that repeats good habits, so does writing. If u r in da habit uv riting in internet-speak, I urge you to stop. Immediately. When bad form and bad syntax start feeling normal, it has to affect the quality of other written communication. It has to.

Your turn TKZ family. Am I all wet here? Have I missed anything?

Howdy to all y’all from the Great State of Texas!

I’m Reavis Z. Wortham, and I write the Red River historical mystery series from Sourcebooks, the Sonny Hawke thrillers published by Kensington, and coming soon, the Tucker Snow series, also from Sourcebooks.

I’ve been published since 1988, starting out as a self-syndicated newspaper columnist for rural and small town papers before my work appeared in a variety of magazines including American Cowboy and Texas Fish and Game Magazine. I’m still on the masthead at TF&G as their Humor Editor. To date, I’ve written over 2,000 newspaper and magazine columns and articles, along with 13 novels and a handful of short stories.

I’ve been kinda busy, and continue to add to that worklist, because I love this profession.

Before the lockdown, I traveled the country, attending conferences where I served on writers panels and taught the craft of writing. It evolved into speaking to civic groups, writers groups, and book clubs, as well as signings for my novels.

Invariably, after my presentations or talks, someone will come up to visit while I’m signing books. “Would you sign this? It’s not for me, but for my Uncle Azariah. I just love your books.”

“Thank you! How do you spell that name? It sounded like you said Az-er-Yaw”

“Just common spelling.”

“Uh…”

“I’m gonna write a book someday about my Uncle Albert, though. He was such a character…”

“Good for you. Why some day? Why don’t you start it now?”

“Uh, well, because I have a job (you can also insert: husband, family, kids, grandkids, yardwork, cooking classes, hot-flash yoga, a future paint-by-numbers career, or anything else they can use as an excuse).”

“What’s the real reason?”

This is where they look somewhat constipated. “Those are the reasons. I don’t have the time right now to write a book.”

“Sure you do.”

“How?”

“I’d suggest writing instead of checking your Facebook page. Those are lost minutes, or hours. Or I have an idea, instead of thumbing through Instagram or Twitter, spend the same amount of time working on that novel about Uncle Yaws.”

“Uncle Albert, but like I said, I’m busy.”

“I completely understand. Let me tell you how I wrote my first novel…”

“Never mind. Bye.”

That brings us to the present. I’m writing this first Killzone column on an impending deadline, because I got the dates wrong. I’m typing in between a river of distractions. Right now I’m in my chair, pecking away at the laptop while our eight-month-old grandson chews on the toe of my boot.

He learned to belly crawl last week, and seems to have an inexhaustible supply of drool from a third tooth that’s coming in. This kid leaves a slime trail wherever he goes, and now the toe of my boot is soaked.

Oh, well, it’ll help with his immune system.

Another grandson is on the couch, stuffing strawberries down his neck and watching Paw Patrol which is apparently fascinating to a two-year-old, because he’s missed his mouth half a dozen times with the strawberries, making him look like a cute zombie.

Their parents are on vacation in Vail. Great timing.

In addition to those distractions, my Bride also presented me with a list of honey-do items yesterday, and I’ll eventually get to them, but only after weeding the garden, repairing a number of shelves in the RV, mowing the back yard, installing a screen door over the entrance coming in from the garage so flies won’t get into the house, and trimming the hedges.

Here’s the problem today. We’re leaving twenty-four hours from now to spend the weekend with friends. The only way I can finish this particular installment in time is to grab onto brief bits of time to write between diaper changes, lunches and snacks, watching the oldest grand-critters swim in the pool when they get here a little later today, making sure the baby doesn’t pull up and fall back on the hardwood floors because he’s about as graceful and coordinated as the aforementioned zombie), and lastly, I need to pack.

But I’m writing when I can, because that’s what I learned to do when I had a fulltime job and decided one day to become a columnist and eventually, an author. Fate was on my side and I found a small-town paper that believed in my style. With The Paris News as a cornerstone, I built a readership across the Lone Star State one paper at a time until I was in over 50 publications. It was then that King Features Syndicate noticed my success in 1999 and vowed to make me the Dave Barry of the outdoor world.

Those columns still continue today in a few paper but that success ended with the arrival of the Internet, which killed newspapers across the country. At the same time, I had a full-time career, a second job on weekends and weeknights as a wedding photographer (brrrrr), and I contracted as a freelance photographer for school districts while at the same time dipping my toe into the magazine world.

To make things even more interesting, I started My Novel.

The Bride and I had two daughters who were in every social club and sport in the world. I spent an inordinate amount of time on bleachers, in auditoriums, or waiting the in the car, and those activities provided brief periods of time to write. I also wrote at stop lights, while eating lunch in the car, or in boring meetings. I wrote after the kids went to bed, before work in the mornings, and while they were doing homework in the evenings.

I kept a notepad close by, and jotted down dialogue or a paragraph or two any time I could find a few minutes. Without looking, I penned cryptic notes on that aforementioned pad resting on the console of my pickup as I blew down the Texas highways, heading for another photo shoot.

There were nights when an idea or bit of dialogue came in the early morning hours and I’d get up and write in my office in order not to wake the Bride (who really doesn’t sleep anyway and I think she’s part vampire, because no matter what the hour, I can look at her and those hazel eyes will pop open…creepy).

Months stretched into a couple of years, and using my time wisely (as my elementary school teacher Miss Russell always said while at the same time reminding me that all my screwups would eventually go down on my Permanent Record which I’m sure has followed me throughout my life), those little captured moments produced sentences and paragraphs that grew into a full manuscript.

I sold The Rock Hole in 2010, and it released in 2011, the year I met my mentor and brother-from-another-mother, John Gilstrap. My publishers liked the storyline and characters and soon they unexpectedly offered me an unlimited series that has now stretched to nine titles (#9, The Texas Job, releases in February, 2022).

I achieved a lifelong dream at 56-years-of-age. You know why? Because I quit talking about it and wrote.

So when someone tells me they’re too busy, it’s all I can do not to roll my eyes. Writers write. They don’t talk about it. They don’t find excuses for not writing.

We write.

I’m getting a feeling of déjà vu here hammering this out while the grand-boys are doing their thing. It’s not just this blog post, either. Our house is a central hub for a total of seven grandkids, two daughters and their husbands, and an assortment of friends, who seem to be here all the time (in fact, I’m not sure they ever go home).

I have to produce. Here’s how I do it. I write when I can. I’ve started and stopped on this column a dozen times of the past few hours since I typed the first sentence. At this very moment, the two-year-old is on the couch with me, his feet in my lap, as he watches P.J. Mask for a few minutes before nap time. To keep him still, one hand is on his legs while I type slowwwwly with the other.

Despite this chaotic and fun life, I do my best to add at least five pages to my primary work in progress.

At the same time, I’m working on other manuscripts and on good days, I can add a couple of pages on each of those WIPs, in addition to my weekly newspaper column, a bi-monthly magazine column, (now every other Saturday here for Killzone) and other projects that arise like bubbles in a boiling pot.

On “bad” days, it’s five pages on just one project. This is no brag. Just fact. I’m telling you this for a reason.

If someone wants to write that book, there’s no reason why they can’t. It’s called discipline. I urge those folks to quit finding excuses not to write and do it.

These cold hard facts might strike some people as harsh, but to me, it’s reality. To be an author, you have to sit your gluteus maximus in a chair, somewhere, and string words together.

But I need to be clear on one point. This works for me. You might be different, and can’t manage five pages a day. That’s fine. Go ahead on, though. Write anyway. Shoot for a page a day. At the end of one year, you’ll have a novel in your hands.

I’m reminded of a line from one of my favorite movies, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. Tuco (Eli Wallach), is in a bathtub when bad guys burst into his hotel room, guns drawn, and spend wayyyy too much time saying they’re going to kill him.

He shoots them all through the bubbles floating on the surface of the water and after they drop, delivers the perfect line with a slight shrug, stating the obvious. “If you’re gonna shoot, shoot, don’t talk.”

(I just had to quit writing and drag the eight-month-old out of the fireplace.)

So, channeling Tuco, I offer this advice. “If you’re gonna write, write, don’t talk about it.”

Thanks for reading. I’m glad to be here, and look forward to hearing from y’all soon.

You know your prose will stun your editors with its brilliance. When you reread that passage, it brought tears to your eyes. The emotion quivers on the page.
So why are your editors asking you to cut and rewrite your favorite section? Why do they see your fiery passages as deep purple?
I don’t know about you, but I have the most problems when I’m starting a novel.
Once it gets going, I’m okay – sure, I have to watch for sagging middles.
But here is a problem I had with a rough beginning, when the murder came too late in Brain Storm.

The first book in my Angela Richman, Death Investigator series was hard to write:
I was starting a new series, and it was hard-boiled, not cozy, a change for me.
Also, the plot used my actual experience. In 2007, I had six strokes, brain surgery and a coma. It took seven years to get up the nerve to write about this, and another year for my agent to sell this story.
Here’s the plot: Death Investigator Angela Richman has a series of blinding headaches. She goes to the ER and Dr. Porter Gravois tells her she’s too young and fit to have a stroke. He sends her home, and she has six strokes and brain surgery. She’s saved by Dr. Travis Tritt, a brilliant surgeon with a lousy bedside manner. Dr. Tritt hates Porter Gravois, and when Porter is murdered, Tritt is the main suspect. Angela, still sick and drug-addled, has to save the man who saved her life.
When Brain Storm sold, my manuscript went to Bryon Quertermous, a freelance development editor.
Here’s what Bryon wrote:

Plot-wise, I think you have a good motive and solid characters and a nice arc. That said, I think the arc starts too late and needs to encompass more of the first half of the book as well. You do a good job of starting strong with the character and with Angela’s job and readers will forgive a little slow burn to get into this cool world, but we need to see some plot development sooner than almost halfway through as it is now.
The biggest note I have is that Dr. Porter’s death scene needs to come sooner in the book, ideally a quarter of the way in or so. For Angela to really work at her best as a character she needs to be actively investigating a death, not just playing armchair detective with her friend, the pathologist Katie, as she does now. I think there are some great interactions between the two of them and I don’t want those to go away, but I think you can kill two birds with this.

First, you need to make a list of all of the scenes that come before Porter’s death. Next, write a little bit about each scene. Then figure out which ones can be reworked to come after that scene and which can’t, and then go from there.
I think a lot of the discussions with Katie about the Angel of Death can come after. I love the idea that you briefly toy with of having Angela obsessed with the perfect Hobie as the killer and, better yet, as a vigilante killer. I think Angela needs to come to this obsession sooner and it needs to coincide with her talks with Katie about the Angel of Death murders.

You need to build her paranoia here and really play around with it as she wonders in her head if what she thinks about Hobie really is true. I think you need at least one more big set piece hallucination (like the fake hospital one which I though was brilliant) and I think as Katie realizes more and more that Angela isn’t playing devil’s advocate that she actually thinks Hobie is the Angel of Death and that he killed Porter this can create some nice tension between the two friends. Part of this will come from a line of investigation I think you need to develop where Angela starts digging into the backgrounds of the other Angel of Death victims to see if they have anything in common or if they were bad people who needed to die like Porter did.

Bryon gave me good advice: I don’t believe the murder should always be in chapter one – but if someone isn’t dead by the first third of the book the writer is making the fatal mistake of slowing the pace.

But how could I cut those wonderful scenes?
Bryon had the answer: List all the scenes.
See which ones can be combined or relocated to another section of the book.
Kill the ones that slow it down. Be brave. If you want your book to live, you’re going to have to kill – or at least transform – those darling scenes.

Have you had to kill your darlings? Tell us about it.

Here’s how Brain Storm turned out. https://tinyurl.com/7kwezp3t

If I could host one guest on The Kill Zone, it’d be Stephen King. That’s not likely to happen, just as it’s not going to happen that I live-host Ian Fleming who created the immensely successful James Bond spy thriller brand. Ian Fleming has been gone from our writing, reading, and viewing world since 1964 — one year after he wrote a masterful essay on his commercial writing approach.

However, I was net-surfing the other night when I stumbled upon this 58-year-old gem titled Ian Fleming Explains How To Write A Thriller, Circa 1963. I read it, reread it, and read it again. “This has to be shared on TKZ,” I said to myself. Then I mumbled about being criticized for plagiarism, so I thought I’d paraphrase it, or edit it, or modify it in some way to maybe shorten it up or put my own twist to it.

“Hang on here!” I said with second thoughts. “Who the hell am I to interfere with thriller writing advice taught by Ian Fleming, told directly in Ian Fleming’s voice, that he intentionally left for the world?” So whack my pee-pee for cut & paste violation, but this piece needs sharing. Here’s the complete and unabridged (shaken, not stirred) 1963 version of How To Write A Thriller by the one and only Ian Fleming:

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“The craft of writing sophisticated thrillers is almost dead. Writers seem to be ashamed of inventing heroes who are white, villains who are black, and heroines who are a delicate shade of pink.

I am not an angry young, or even middle-aged, man. I am not “involved.” My books are not “engaged.” I have no message for suffering humanity and, though I was bullied at school and lost my virginity like so many of us used to do in the old days, I have never been tempted to foist these and other harrowing personal experiences on the public. My opuscula do not aim at changing people or making them go out and do something. They are written for warm-blooded heterosexuals in railway trains, airplanes and beds.

I have a charming relative who is an angry young littérateur of renown. He is maddened by the fact that more people read my books than his. Not long ago we had semi-friendly words on the subject and I tried to cool his boiling ego by saying that his artistic purpose was far, far higher than mine. He was engaged in “The Shakespeare Stakes.” The target of his books was the head and, to some extent at least, the heart. The target of my books, I said, lay somewhere between the solar plexus and, well, the upper thigh.

These self-deprecatory remarks did nothing to mollify him and finally, with some impatience and perhaps with something of an ironical glint in my eye, I asked him how he described himself on his passport. “I bet you call yourself an Author,” I said. He agreed, with a shade of reluctance, perhaps because he scented sarcasm on the way. “Just so,” I said. “Well, I describe myself as a Writer. There are authors and artists, and then again there are writers and painters.”

This rather spiteful jibe, which forced him, most unwillingly, into the ranks of the Establishment, whilst stealing for myself the halo of a simple craftsman of the people, made the angry young man angrier than ever and I don’t now see him as often as I used to. But the point I wish to make is that if you decide to become a professional writer, you must, broadly speaking, decide whether you wish to write for fame, for pleasure or for money. I write, unashamedly, for pleasure and money.

I also feel that, while thrillers may not be Literature with a capital L, it is possible to write what I can best describe as “Thrillers designed to be read as literature,” the practitioners of which have included such as Edgar Allan Poe, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. I see nothing shameful in aiming as high as these.

All right then, so we have decided to write for money and to aim at certain standards in our writing. These standards will include an unmannered prose style, unexceptional grammar and a certain integrity in our narrative.

But these qualities will not make a best seller. There is only one recipe for a best seller and it is a very simple one. You have to get the reader to turn over the page.

If you look back on the best sellers you have read, you will find that they all have this quality. You simply have to turn over the page.

Nothing must be allowed to interfere with this essential dynamic of the thriller. This is why I said that your prose must be simple and unmannered. You cannot linger too long over descriptive passages.

There must be no complications in names, relationships, journeys or geographical settings to confuse or irritate the reader. He must never ask himself “Where am I? Who is this person? What the hell are they all doing?” Above all there must never be those maddening recaps where the hero maunders about his unhappy fate, goes over in his mind a list of suspects, or reflects what he might have done or what he proposes to do next. By all means, set the scene or enumerate the heroine’s measurements as lovingly as you wish, but in doing so, each word must tell, and interest or titillate the reader before the action hurries on.

I confess that I often sin grievously in this respect. I am excited by the poetry of things and places, and the pace of my stories sometimes suffers while I take the reader by the throat and stuff him with great gobbets of what I consider should interest him, at the same time shaking him and shouting, “Like this, damn you!” about something that has caught my particular fancy. But this is a sad lapse, and I must confess that in one of my books, Goldfinger, three whole chapters were devoted to a single game of golf.

Well, having achieved a workmanlike style and the all-essential pace of narrative, what are we to put in the book—what are the ingredients of a thriller?

Briefly, the ingredients are anything that will thrill any of the human senses—absolutely anything.

In this department, my contribution to the art of thriller-writing has been to attempt the total stimulation of the reader all the way through, even to his taste buds. For instance, I have never understood why people in books have to eat such sketchy and indifferent meals. English heroes seem to live on cups of tea and glasses of beer, and when they do get a square meal we never hear what it consists of.

Personally, I am not a gourmet and I abhor food-and-winemanship. My favorite food is scrambled eggs. In the original typescript of Live and Let Die, James Bond consumed scrambled eggs so often that a perceptive proof-reader suggested that this rigid pattern of life must be becoming a security risk for Bond. If he was being followed, his tail would only have to go into restaurants and say “Was there a man here eating scrambled eggs?” to know whether he was on the right track or not. So I had to go through the book changing the menus.

It must surely be more stimulating to the reader’s senses if, instead of writing “He made a hurried meal off the Plat du Jour—excellent cottage pie and vegetables, followed by home-made trifle” (I think this is a fair English menu without burlesque) you write “Being instinctively mistrustful of all Plats du Jour, he ordered four fried eggs cooked on both sides, hot buttered toast and a large cup of black coffee.” No difference in price here, but the following points should be noted: firstly, we all prefer breakfast foods to the sort of food one usually gets at luncheon and dinner; secondly, this is an independent character who knows what he wants and gets it; thirdly, four fried eggs has the sound of a real man’s meal and, in our imagination, a large cup of black coffee sits well on our taste buds after the rich, buttery sound of the fried eggs and the hot buttered toast.

What I aim at is a certain disciplined exoticism. I have not re-read any of my books to see if this stands up to close examination, but I think you will find that the sun is always shining in my books—a state of affairs which minutely lifts the spirit of the English reader—that most of the settings of my books are in themselves interesting and pleasurable, taking the reader to exciting places around the world, and that, in general, a strong hedonistic streak is always there to offset the grimmer side of Bond’s adventures. This, so to speak, “pleasures” the reader . . .

At this stage let me pause for a moment and assure you that, while all this sounds devilish crafty, it has only been by endeavoring to analyze the success of my books for the purpose of this essay that I have come to these conclusions. In fact, I write about what pleases and stimulates me.

My plots are fantastic, while being often based upon truth. They go wildly beyond the probable but not, I think, beyond the possible. . . . Even so, they would stick in the gullet of the reader and make him throw the book angrily aside—for a reader particularly hates feeling he is being hoaxed—but for two further technical devices, if you like to call them that.

First of all, the aforesaid speed of the narrative, which hustles the reader quickly beyond each danger point of mockery and, secondly, the constant use of familiar household names and objects which reassure him that he and the writer have still got their feet on the ground. This is where the real names of things come in useful. A Ronson lighter, a 4.5 litre Bentley with an Amherst-Villiers supercharger (please note the solid exactitude), the Ritz Hotel in London, the 21 Club in New York, the exact names of flora and fauna, even James Bond’s Sea Island cotton shirts with short sleeves. All these details are points de repère to comfort and reassure the reader on his journey into fantastic adventure.

Well, I seem to be getting on very well with picking my books to pieces, so we might as well pick still deeper. People often ask me, “How do you manage to think of that? What an extraordinary (or sometimes extraordinarily dirty) mind you must have.”

I certainly have got vivid powers of imagination, but I don’t think there is anything very odd about that. We are all fed fairy stories and adventure stories and ghost stories for the first 20 years of our lives, and the only difference between me and perhaps you is that my imagination earns me money. But, to revert to my first book, Casino Royale, there are strong incidents in the book which are all based on fact. I extracted them from my wartime memories of the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty, dolled them up, attached a hero, a villain and a heroine, and there was the book.

The first was the attempt on Bond’s life outside the Hotel Splendide. SMERSH had given two Bulgarian assassins box camera cases to hang over their shoulders. One was of red leather and the other one blue. SMERSH told the Bulgarians that the red one contained a bomb and the blue one a powerful smoke screen, under cover of which they could escape.

One was to throw the red bomb and the other was then to press the button on the blue case. But the Bulgars mistrusted the plan and decided to press the button on the blue case and envelop themselves in the smoke screen before throwing the bomb. In fact, the blue case also contained a bomb powerful enough to blow both the Bulgars to fragments and remove all evidence which might point to SMERSH.

Farfetched, you might say. In fact, this was the method used in the Russian attempt on Von Papen’s life in Ankara in the middle of the war. On that occasion the assassins were also Bulgarians and they were blown to nothing while Von Papen and his wife, walking from their house to the embassy; were only bruised by the blast.

As to the gambling scene, this grew in my mind from the following incident. I and my chief, the Director of Naval Intelligence—Admiral Godfrey—in plain clothes, were flying to Washington in 1941 for secret talks with the American Office of Naval Intelligence, before America came into the war. Our seaplane touched down at Lisbon for an overnight stop, and our Intelligence people told us how Lisbon was crawling with German secret agents. The chief of these and his two assistants gambled every night in the casino at the neighboring Estoril. I suggested to the DNI that he and I should have a look at these people. We went, and there were the three men, playing at the high chemin de fer table. Then the feverish idea came to me that I would sit down and gamble against these men and defeat them, thereby reducing the funds of the German Secret Service.

It was a foolhardy plan which would have needed a golden streak of luck. I had £50 in travel money. The chief German agent had run a bank three times. I bancoed it and lost. I suivied and lost again, and suivied a third time and was cleaned out, a humiliating experience which added to the sinews of war of the German Secret Service and reduced me sharply in my chief’s estimation.

It was this true incident which is the kernel of Bond’s great gamble against Le Chiffre.

Finally, the torture scene. What I described in Casino Royale was a greatly watered-down version of a French-Moroccan torture known as passer á la mandoline, which was practiced on several of our agents during the war.

So you see the line between fact and fantasy is a very narrow one. I think I could trace most of the central incidents in my books to some real happenings.

We thus come to the final and supreme hurdle in the writing of a thriller. You must know thrilling things before you can write about them. Imagination alone isn’t enough, but stories you hear from friends or read in the papers can be built up by a fertile imagination and a certain amount of research and documentation into incidents that will also ring true in fiction.

Having assimilated all this encouraging advice, your heart will nevertheless quail at the physical effort involved in writing even a thriller. I warmly sympathize with you. I too, am lazy. My heart sinks when I contemplate the two or three hundred virgin sheets of foolscap I have to besmirch with more or less well-chosen words in order to produce a 60,000 word book.

Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye House, Jamaica

In my case, one of the first essentials is to create a vacuum in my life which can only be satisfactorily filled by some form of creative work, whether it be writing, painting, sculpting, composing or just building a boat. I am fortunate in this respect. I built a small house on the north shore of Jamaica in 1946 and arranged my life so I could spend at least two months of the winter there. For the first six years I had plenty to do during these months exploring Jamaica, coping with staff and getting to know the locals, and minutely examining the underwater terrain within my reef.

But by the sixth year I had exhausted all these possibilities, and I was about to get married – a prospect which filled me with terror and mental fidget. To give my idle hands something to do, and as an antibody to my qualms about the marriage state after 43 years as a bachelor, I decided one day to damned well sit down and write a book. The therapy was successful. And while I still do a certain amount of writing in the midst of my London Life, it is on my annual visits to Jamaica that all my books have been written.

But, failing a hideaway such as I possess, I can recommend hotel bedrooms as far removed from your usual “life” as possible. Your anonymity in these drab surroundings and your lack of friends and distractions in the strange locale will create a vacuum which should force you into a writing mood and, if your pocket is shallow, into a mood which will also make you write fast and with application.

So far as the physical act of writing is concerned, the method I have devised is this. I do it all on the typewriter, using six fingers. The act of typing is far less exhausting than the act of writing, and you end up with a more or less clean manuscript. The next essential is to keep strictly to a routine—and I mean strictly. I write for about three hours in the morning—from about 9:30 till 12:30—and I do another hour’s work between 6 and 7 in the evening. At the end of this I reward myself by numbering the pages and putting them away in a spring-back folder. The whole of this four hours of daily work is devoted to writing narrative.

I never correct anything and I never go back to what I have written, except to the foot of the last page to see where I have got to. If you once look back, you are lost. How could you have written this drivel? How could you have used “terrible” six times on one page? And so forth. If you interrupt the writing of fast narrative with too much introspection and self-criticism, you will be lucky if you write 500 words a day and you will be disgusted with them into the bargain.

By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day and you aren’t disgusted with them until the book is finished, which will be, and is, in my case, in about six weeks.

I don’t even pause from writing to choose the right word or to verify spelling or a fact. All this can be done when your book is finished.

When my book is finished I spend about a week going through it and correcting the most glaring errors and rewriting passages. I then have it properly typed with chapter headings and all the rest of the trimmings. I then go through it again, have the worst pages retyped and send it off to my publisher.

They are a sharp-eyed bunch at Jonathan Cape and, apart from commenting on the book as a whole, they make detailed suggestions which I either embody or discard. Then the final typescript goes to the printer and in due course the galley or page proofs are there and you can go over them with a fresh eye. Then the book is published and you start getting letters from people saying that Vent Vert is made by Balmain and not by Dior, that the Orient Express has vacuum and not hydraulic brakes, and that you have mousseline sauce and not Béarnaise with asparagus.

Such mistakes are really nobody’s fault except the author’s, and they make him blush furiously when he sees them in print. But the majority of the public does not mind them or, worse, does not even notice them, and it is a salutary dig at the author’s vanity to realize how quickly the reader’s eye skips across the words which it has taken him so many months to try to arrange in the right sequence.

But what, after all these labors, are the rewards of writing and, in my case, of writing thrillers?

First of all, they are financial. You don’t make a great deal of money from royalties and translation rights and so forth and, unless you are very industrious and successful, you could only just about live on these profits, but if you sell the serial rights and the film rights, you do very well.

Above all, being a comparatively successful writer is a good life. You don’t have to work at it all the time and you carry your office around in your head. And you are far more aware of the world around you.

Writing makes you more alive to your surroundings and, since the main ingredient of living, though you might not think so to look at most human beings, is to be alive, this is quite a worthwhile by-product of writing, even if you only write thrillers, whose heroes are white, the villains black, and the heroines a delicate shade of pink.”

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My takeaways? Too many to mention. Over to you Kill Zoners. What’d you get from this essay? And what’s the best thriller writing advice you’ve ever received (or could give, for that matter)?

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Garry Rodgers has never met a spy. (Not that he knows of.) In fact, he’s never met anyone all that thrilling except, of course, his wife Rita. But Garry has had a few thrilling adventures during his three decades as a homicide detective and coroner. He’s no stranger to baggin’ the bodies.

Now in mid-stride, Garry Rodgers reinvented himself as a crime writer who’s creating an upcoming series titled City Of Danger. It’s a different (but not too different) new take on old hardboiled detective fiction he’s writing in net-streaming style. Garry also hosts a popular blog at DyingWords.net and psychopathically tweets on Twitter. Check him out.