Inspirational Indie Author Interview: Kevin G. Chapman. Attorney-Turned-Author Finds Success with Patience, Planning, and Award-Winning Thrillers

My ALLi author guest this episode is Kevin G. Chapman, an attorney and independent author who has released a book a year for the last eight years. He explains how patience, planning, and a passion for storytelling have helped him balance a demanding career with writing award-winning mysteries and thrillers. Kevin also talks about his approach to plotting intricate stories and why taking your time can make all the difference. 

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Inspirational Indie Author Interview: Kevin G. Chapman. About the Author

Kevin G. Chapman is an attorney specializing in labor and employment law and an independent author. His Mike Stoneman Thriller series, includes Lethal Voyage, Winner of the Kindle Book Award, and Fatal Infraction, the #1 Police Procedural of the year (Chanticleer Book Review CLUE Award). Kevin’s stand-alone mystery/suspense/romance, Dead Winner, won the CLUE Award as the #1 Suspense/Thriller of the year. Kevin’s most recent book is The Other Murder, a unique mystery and a twisted look at how the modern media covers the news and looks for the truth it wants to find. Kevin is a resident of Central New Jersey and is a graduate of Columbia College and Boston University School of Law. Readers can contact Kevin via his website.

About the Host

Howard Lovy has been a journalist for 40 years, and now amplifies the voices of independent author-publishers and works with authors as a developmental editor. Find Howard at howardlovy.com, LinkedIn and X.

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Read the Transcripts

Howard Lovy: My guest this episode is Kevin G. Chapman, an attorney and independent author who has released a book a year for the last eight years. He explains how patience, planning, and a passion for storytelling have helped him balance a demanding career with writing award-winning mysteries and thrillers. Kevin also talks about his approach to plotting intricate stories and why taking your time can make all the difference.

I'll let Kevin G. Chapman tell his story.

Kevin G. Chapman: Hi Howard, thank you so much for having me on the show. Kevin G. Chapman here. I am an independent author. For the last eight years or so, I've been focused on writing mysteries and thrillers, so it has been a nice journey for me. I have a day job still in life, but I've been writing on the side and coming up with about one novel per year for the last eight years.

It's been a lovely journey and very happy to be connected to the Alliance of Independent Authors, which have been a really helpful resource.

Howard Lovy: That's wonderful, a book a year. I wish I could manage that, and while holding down, what sounds like maybe a pretty demanding day job, too. Let's go back in time a little bit and tell me where you grew up, and was reading and writing always a part of your life?

Kevin G. Chapman: I grew up out in the state of Washington in a small town, so that was quite a wonderful upbringing for me. I used to write poetry as a teenager, which was a good little sidelight, but went off to college in New York and did a lot of literature there and did a little bit of creative writing. But then went off to law school and was fully immersed in a nascent career as a lawyer that has lasted now for almost 40 years. That has kept me very busy.

Howard Lovy: Tell me why you chose law. What was the appeal?

Kevin G. Chapman: I always wanted to be a lawyer. It's one of those things when you're a kid, you think about what would you want to do with your life, and I always thought that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a lawyer in a courtroom trying cases. That just seemed like the most fun.

I don't really do a lot of courtroom work now as it turns out, but being a lawyer has been something that has been very rewarding for me and happy that I chose it. Frankly, as a lawyer now, what I do is I tell stories.

Those stories have to be factual and are constrained by the actual information that I have, but nevertheless, you're putting together a narrative, a story to tell to the finder of fact, whether it's a jury or a judge, or in my case, I'm an employment lawyer, so it's often an administrative agency or an arbitrator.

But you have to know how to tell a story and write the story and that's really what got me interested again later in life in trying to write fictional stories, which is not that different, but you're not constrained by the facts, which makes it much easier.

Howard Lovy: There's a reason why they call it legalese, though, and that's because it's practically a different language.

Did you always long to take it off the legal brief and make up your own stories? Did you always have a manuscript in your desk drawer, or did that come later?

Kevin G. Chapman: Really, it was in 1991, when I got laid off from the law firm job that I was in, that I found myself with a whole bunch of time on my hands and not a lot of ways to fill it, and I decided that I would start writing a novel. That was a lot of fun, and it filled up a couple of months while I was looking for a new job. Then later on, I finished that novel, and it was self-published back in the days before the internet, when there was a company called Ex Libris, which I think still exists.

For a substantial fee, they would publish your book for you, and print copies for you, and ship them out to you, and then you were on your own as far as what you were going to do with them. They didn't help you sell them, and there was no Amazon. But that was my first foray into actually trying to write a novel.

Howard Lovy: Why did you choose self-publishing? Why didn't you try the traditional route at first?

Kevin G. Chapman: I was writing this book, and I got the manuscript, pretty much finished, but made a few inquiries about trying to find a literary agent back then and got absolutely no response or nibbles, and my wife actually decided to publish it for me as an anniversary present.

So, that was very nice of her.

Howard Lovy: Wonderful. So, when you sat down to write your first book, was that motivated by, I've met all these fascinating interesting people in my legal practice and I'm going to fictionalize them, or was it something completely different?

Kevin G. Chapman: It was pretty much different. It was a private investigator story, and it was just something I had kicking around in my head, and I decided that it would be a good idea to take the time that I suddenly had available to me and start working on the story.

Because, like I said, I'm a closet writer all the time. I write all the time, and suddenly I had no professional writing to do. I've written articles and analysis on legal subjects, which I've always enjoyed. But that was the first try at fiction.

Then I got a new job, and I've been in that job now for coming up on 30 years, and along the way, I did a little dabbling, and I started writing the Great American Novel. In the early 2000s. It was something I thought, I needed to get this out of my system. I need to sit down and write a really serious novel about identity and self-determination and free will and politics and relationships between men and women. It was a really gargantuan project that I tried to put my arms around, and I did. I wrote that over the course of about 10 years from maybe 2002 until about 2012.

Along the way, the Association of Corporate Council, which is the organization that supports in-house lawyers, which is what I am. I work in-house for a corporation. The New Jersey chapter was doing a short story writing contest, and I said, ooh, this would be fun since I've been working on this novel forever and ever.

The topic had to be law or crime, and since I was writing about law all the time in my professional life, I decided, let's try crime.

So, I went back to my PI novel that I had written a decade before, and I wrote a short story that featured a New York City homicide detective who I called Mike Stoneman.

Howard Lovy: Great literary name, by the way.

Kevin G. Chapman: I loved that name when I came up with that. Yeah, I wrote the short story. It was 8,000 words, and then the people who were running the competition announced that there would be a 5,000-word limit on the stories. So, I edited and edited to get it down to 5,000 words and submitted it, and it won the contest, which got me a free year's membership in the association and a free admission to the annual awards dinner or whatever.

It was fun, but I was still working on finishing up and then trying to market this other novel, which was called, A Legacy of One.

I did a couple of book signings and had it in one local bookstore, but never got any traction as far as getting sales or finding a literary agent who was interested in it.

Howard Lovy: This was your Great American Novel?

Kevin G. Chapman: This was the Great American Novel, A Legacy of One. But then, after I finally got that done, and it was out of my system, and the last of my kids graduated from high school, and I suddenly was in an empty nest, and I had a lot of time on my hands that I didn't have before, I decided I wanted to go back to that short story, that Mike Stoneman story, and take that and work it up into a full blown novel.

That became the first book in what is now the Mike Stoneman series. It was called Righteous Assassin, and I really started working on that in 2016, and then it finally got self-published in 2018, and that was really the beginning of my continuously working on writing fiction since about 2016 until now.

I really regret that I didn't go out and make a real hard pitch to find a literary agent then. I didn't really understand exactly how the publishing world worked. I had failed with A Legacy of One.

This is a very different genre. I might have been able to get a literary agent interested, but I just went ahead and self-published it in 2018. Of course, Amazon would now exist and self-publishing became much, much easier, and then I was off to the races. I did that book and then I started working on the next one, and really have just not stopped since.

Howard Lovy: So, you never look back and you don't want to write those letters to an agent or publisher now?

Kevin G. Chapman: I did, I tried. Actually, when the third book was in production I tried again to go out and find a literary agent and was told that the major publishers were just not going to be interested in me because I'm too old and they don't really want old guys who don't have 30 or 40 years ahead of them, and because I'd already self-published the first two books in the series, that traditional publishers were not going to be interested in picking up books that were in a series that had already been self-published.

I took that, and after I had finished the first five books in the Mike Stoneman series, and I was working on a new book that was a complete stand-alone novel that had nothing to do with the series, I tried again to get a literary agent interested.

Got a lot of nice letters back from agents telling me that they thought the book was really good and that the writing was really good, but they didn't think that I would be able to get a major publisher to be interested. So, fine. So, I've given up on that idea at this point, and I'm just happy to be a self-published author and to be on my own schedule.

It's been a nice ride, and I'm about a year away, I think, from actually making a profit. I'm getting close.

Howard Lovy: Oh, wonderful. I'm 59 years old, so I'm personally offended by the whole age thing. Were they that blatant? You are too old, or did they use some kind of euphemism?

Kevin G. Chapman: No, I had a couple of agents who told me that one of the reasons why they were not going to be able to get a major publisher interested was that I was too old. They're looking for somebody who has a future for 20, 30 years and that they're going to be able to crank out novels that the publisher is going to be able to make money off of, and they're just not interested in starting to promote a new author who's already in his sixties, then I was in my late fifties, that wasn't part of their business model.

I get that. They're in the business of making money, and if they don't think that I as an author am going to be enough of a moneymaker to make it worth their while, and that's a business decision, I will just have to go and write a novel that sells a million copies independently, and then they'll regret that.

Howard Lovy: And they will. Yeah, I guess you could argue that publishing should be in the business of publishing quality books, but we won't parse that.

So, tell me more about the character of Mike Stoneman. They say that your first novel is actually about yourself. That's the cliche anyway. Is there a little bit of you in there or who's that based on?

Kevin G. Chapman: There's a little bit. I will say I got that out of my system when I wrote A Legacy of One. There were a lot of characters in that book that were me or variations of me or variations of friends of mine. So, when I got to Mike Stoneman, I was a little bit past trying to put myself in the character, but there are certainly aspects of Mike Stoneman who are me.

Mike Stoneman, for example, is a poker player and I'm a poker player. So, I enjoy little references to poker terminology, and there's a couple of scenes of Mike playing poker in various books. Mike's a Mets fan and I'm a Mets fan, and so there's little things like that that we share, but Mike is a career detective, been on the force for 25 years, he's just turned 50 years old in, in book three, so he's now about 52, has been single his whole life, until he starts becoming involved with his romantic interest in the first book in the series, and they have a late-in-life romance. All of which is nothing like me.

I got married when I was 21. So, it was a very different kind of experience there. But Mike is a crusty veteran. He likes teaching the younger detectives, and that's maybe something that I love; doing seminars and teaching people the legal issues that I have to deal with.

Mike is a guy who takes no crap from anybody, and the younger detectives are a little afraid of him. He's old and crotchety and not necessarily very approachable, and that's his sort of core character, but he's also really good at his job. He's been doing it a long time. He's got a lot of great instincts. He knows back and forth the procedure and evidence handling and crime scene protocols and teaches that to the young detectives.

And it's the relationship between Mike and a new detective who was assigned to be his partner in the first book that forms the first real character relationship that becomes important in the stories.

He's assigned to work with a young black detective who hasn't been on the force for that long, 30 years old, very different generation from Mike, very different attitudes about a lot of issues.

One of the points of tension in the first book is that Mike feels that Jason Dixon, his new partner, is essentially an affirmative action hire. Doesn't think that Dixon deserved to get the promotion to detective. Thinks that he's gotten special treatment, and Mike is hell bent on making sure that he doesn't cut Jason any slack and make sure that he earns his advancements and that he pays his dues along the way, which creates a lot of tension between the two of them, which is ultimately, by the end of Righteous Assassin, and then into the next book to, Deadly Enterprise, they form a real partnership, and a real friendship, and that relationship is a big part of all the stories.

Howard Lovy: You've got generational issues, some racial issues in there. It's good to hear of an older character being the hero of the story, too.

The process of planning a thriller can be intricate. There could be a lot of moving parts. So, can you walk us through how you develop these plots?

Kevin G. Chapman: Each story for me starts with an idea that is either based upon real events or is based upon some concept that I have had for the story, and then I start at the end. I try to figure out, where is the story going to finish? I feel like I need to know the ending before I can really go back and figure out how my characters are going to get from the beginning to that ending that I have decided what's going to happen, and then I'm a meticulous outliner.

I will essentially storyboard the book from the first scene to the next scene all the way through until the end, and I'll have an outline that's 25 or 30 pages long that goes through each chapter and each scene within each chapter and just gives a summary of, this is what's going to happen in this scene, and this is what's going to happen in this scene, and do a timeline that takes me from the beginning to the end so that everything happens in a logical sequence.

Once I finish all of that, then I can sit down and start writing dialogue and text.

Howard Lovy: That would put you firmly in the plotter as opposed to pantser category.

Kevin G. Chapman: Oh gosh, yes. I can't even imagine trying to sit down and start writing without having a very clear idea of where it's going.

Now, sometimes the writing process leads the characters in certain directions and certain things will happen that I didn't necessarily have on the outline, but it just worked out that way in the course of writing, but those are all minor things, little details, subplots that come up from time to time.

But I have started off most of my books with a concept that's from real life. So, one of the books, book two in the series, Deadly Enterprise, is about a drug and prostitution ring that was being operated in Brooklyn by New York City cops who were obviously not doing things that they were supposed to be doing, and that's a real story. It really happened. I clipped out the clipping from the newspaper, so to speak. It was digital, but you get the idea, and I put that in a folder, and I said, Ooh, this would make a really good plot for a Mike Stoneman story.

Then when it came time to start working on that book, I pulled it out and I said, okay, how do we make this work and how are my characters going to get involved and what's going to happen. But the kernel of the story was taken right from real life.

Then I had another book that was going to be set on a cruise ship. I really wanted to write a story where my characters took a cruise. Again, this is something I do. My wife and I cruise all the time, and we know our way around the cruise ship really well. So, I could write a story set on a ship and have a chance to really describe it for people who've never done it and put my characters in a very unusual environment for a crime story.

For that one, I didn't necessarily take the murder out of a real-life event, but I took the setting out of my real-life experiences and then said, let's write a story that I can put inside this set of circumstances.

So, it's all fiction. It's all out of my head, but there's usually a kernel there that comes from somewhere in real life that allows me to build on things that I'm already familiar with. Although, there's always still a lot of research that has to be done before I can get into the details of things.

Howard Lovy: You would be horrified to look at my process. I know where a chapter is going to end or how it's going to end, but how it gets there, it's from the muse to my brain to my fingers, and we'll see what the characters do and say.

Kevin G. Chapman: Listen, if you know your characters and you have a concept of how they would behave in certain circumstances, you put them in those circumstances and then you just write and you say, okay, what would Mike do next? What would Jason do next? How would this work between the two of them?

And yeah, you can do that. You can get it. But as long as you know where you're going, you can certainly get your characters there, and sometimes the route's a little circuitous, but you will figure out how to get them to the point where you need to get them.

Howard Lovy: Would you say your books are plot driven, character driven, half and half?

Kevin G. Chapman: I think they're mostly character driven. I really like the plots. The plots are always interesting. There's always twists that you're not expecting, and I think that each book's plot is very different, which I make it a real point to try to make them different.

Ultimately, it's about the characters. Mike has a love interest, as I said. He starts going out with the county medical examiner in the first book, Dr. Michelle McNeil. She's in her mid-forties, a little younger than Mike, but still beyond the point where she's thinking about marriage and kids and things.

She's also been single her whole career, and they bond a little bit, and they've worked together on cases a little bit. It was really fun for me to take them and put them in a situation where they're both, I don't want to say older, but they're certainly mature adults, and they're behaving like teenagers in high school.

They're having this little flirtation and Mike's got to get up the courage to ask her out on a date. Here's a guy who interrogates mobsters and has gun battles with criminals, but he's terrified of asking the medical examiner out for dinner. So, that was fun, and I think a different take on the character.

And Jason Dixon has a love interest that he acquires along the way. And there are relationships between the detectives and their colleagues back at the precinct and their captain, who was a little bit of a stereotypical Irish cop who's the captain of this precinct and who's Mike and Jason's boss and he yells at them a lot. He's a by the book guy. So, whenever they go off the page, he's always trying to make them pay for it. But all of these characters are the core of the story.

It's like writing for a television series where each character has got to have a part. You expect certain characters to show up at some point, and so what are they going to do and how are they going to add to the story?

If it's not for the characters, you're not going to keep reading. You always want to know what's going to happen and how this murder is going to get solved or how this particular criminal is going to get caught or not get caught, but it's all about the characters and how they interact with each other and the overall arching storyline of their relationships and where they move to from book to book that keeps people coming back for more. That's what I certainly hope for.

Howard Lovy: Your formula seems to be working. You've won some awards. You were chosen for a review in Foreword Reviews in January.

So, tell me how you promote these. Do you have your own kind of little fan club, or what do you do for promotion?

Kevin G. Chapman: As an independent author, you have to do a lot of different things. I got good advice from a couple of people early on about trying to develop a newsletter and develop a group of subscribers who you can correspond with.

I have a monthly newsletter, so I don't bombard my newsletter subscribers with offers and information all the time. But I did a lot of promos with different organizations that result in people being added to the newsletter list.

So, I had a couple of short stories, including that very first short story that I wrote back in 2012, which is called, Fool Me Twice: A Mike Stoneman short story. So, I would give that away for free in exchange for people signing up for the newsletter. I've had a couple of other short stories and one little novella that I've been using as reader magnets to get people to sign up for my newsletter.

I'm up to about 4,000.

So, 4,000 people is nice. About half of them open my emails every month when I send out my newsletter. That's a core of people who I can count on to be interested and to help me spread the word. I try to get them to forward my social media. So, if I have a post on Facebook or Instagram, I try to hopefully get those people to repost and amplify that for other people.

I do the same kind of advertising that I'm sure a lot of independent authors do, although the hardest thing about being an author is marketing. Marketing is not intuitive to me, and it takes a lot of time, and I really don't want to spend hours and hours working on the metrics for my Amazon ads or my Facebook ads, and so I finally broke down and found a publicity company that I could pay them and they could handle all the running of the ads, the creation of the images and the placing of the ads, and the monitoring of the ad performance.

All of that, I farmed out to a third party to have them do it for me, which was a great idea, and it has allowed me to focus on the writing more and less on the marketing, or at least less on the advertising. It has been a net neutral financially. I have received a lot more sales because advertising works. Can you believe that? Advertising actually works. So, if I spend $20 a day running ads over the course of a month, and I spend whatever that works out to $20 a day times 31 days, like $600 a month on advertising, and my revenue goes up from $30 or $40 a month to $700 a month or $800 a month. That's huge.

I'm not making a lot more money, because I'm paying for the advertising, and then I'm also paying the publicity company to run the advertising. But I saw, for example, the number of Amazon reviews for Righteous Assassin was about 150 or so when I started running ads, running Amazon ads and Facebook ads through this publicity company, and it's now at 850 reviews on Amazon. That's over three years. That's good. More people have the book, more people have read the book, more people have posted reviews for the book. It's not that I've made a lot of profit in that process, but I've broken even on the advertising and the result of having that many more people who have read the first book in the series, in theory, over the long haul, is going to be a good thing.

Howard Lovy: Outsourcing to an ad company works for some things, but there are other ways where you need to do it personally. Engaging with readers, your newsletter, your social media. Does that take up a good amount of your time? Is that a priority for you?

Kevin G. Chapman: It's something I try to do a little bit of all the time. I try to get posts on my Facebook page, my author page, and other social media outlets at least once a week, sometimes more if there's something going on, if I'm running a promo. And the newsletter once a month. It's not that much time. I can fit that in here and there to put things together for my newsletter.

One of the things I try to do for the newsletter is do author swaps. So, I have a list of 80 or so other independent authors and I send out a note to them every month and say, hey, do you have anything you'd like me to run in my next newsletter? So, if somebody else is running a free offer or 99 cent promo offer, I'll put that into my newsletter for my subscribers and they'll do the same thing for me for their subscribers, and so you cross pollinate with other independent authors.

I've made a lot of really good friends amongst the indie author community, and we help each other, we do beta reads for each other, we kick ideas around, and we exchange information about editors and book designers and the publicity companies.

So, that's been a really helpful thing to do to help each other because we're all in this together. We're not really competing against one another. Even those of us who are in the same genre seldom have a book that's being launched at exactly the same time where we're suddenly trying to outdo each other.

We want all of our readers to read all of our books.

Howard Lovy: Now, meanwhile, you also have your day job. Are you winding that down or is that still full time? Is this eventually what you want to do full time?

Kevin G. Chapman: The writing career is, in theory, my retirement plan. I'm a few years yet away from actually retiring from my day job.

But it would be nice at some point to be able to say I'm now a full-time writer. If I can get to the point where I've got 10 books that are out there circulating, getting some purchases, giving me a revenue stream that's slightly more than my expenses, and that becomes my retirement, I can live with that. That'll be great.

But right now, I have a very good division between my days of work and then my evenings of not work, and writing and doing other things that I'm doing in my life. I'm fortunate that I've reached the point in my career where I can separate those two things pretty effectively and have the time to do my writing and to focus on my wife and travel and things that we really enjoy doing.

I'm not quite retired yet, but I can see it's there on the horizon somewhere.

Howard Lovy: Tell me how that goes because I'm right behind you and that's the kind of “retirement” that I want. A little traveling, a little writing, make a living off of that.

What about the content of your books? Are you going to stick with thrillers or branch off into something else?

Kevin G. Chapman: Oh, I'm very firmly committed to the mystery and thriller genre at this point. I've got seven published, well, now eight with the new one that's just published this month, and my goal right now is to finish ten books in the Mike Stoneman series. I did the first five. There was an overarching storyline that went from book one to book five, then I took a couple of years off from the Mike Stoneman series.

I wrote two books that were completely standalone stories, mainly because I didn't want to write books that were set during COVID. I just didn't want to have detectives interrogating suspects wearing masks and social distancing, and it just couldn't deal with it.

So, I waited, and I've picked up my character's timeline three years later in 2023 and I'm going to take them now through five more books.

Once I've got ten books in the Mike Stoneman series, I think that's probably enough. It'll get me to a place that I want to get to in my character's story arch, and I'm thinking about maybe spinning off one of the characters into its own series after that.

That's where I'm going, but I'm definitely going to stick in the mysteries and thrillers. That's what I enjoy. It's what I enjoy. It seems to be popular enough that I can get people to read it, and I get an unnatural amount of joy when I read a review that some random person from Australia wrote about a book of mine, and it gets posted on Amazon or Goodreads, and I say, oh, it is so nice that this person found me, read the book, liked it, wrote a nice review for me.

That joy will keep me going for a week, just every time I do that.

Howard Lovy: Yeah, absolutely. Somebody who's not a friend or family member, just a stranger who read your book and enjoyed it. That's why we're in the business. That's wonderful.

One last question. What kind of advice do you have for other people who want to write into their retirement? What do you advise they do?

Kevin G. Chapman: I'm actually at the point now where I'm giving some of this advice to younger authors who are coming up and they find me and ask me questions, which is great for me, I love doing that.

The biggest piece of advice I have for new authors coming up is, take your time. Don't be in a rush.

One of the big mistakes I made was being in such a hurry to get the first book published and get it out there and put it up on Amazon and say, oh, I've published this book, that I rushed it out. It was not quite as good as it could have been. It's gone through a little bit of a rewrite since then, there's a second edition that I ended up putting out, but I wish I had written the first two, at least, before I published the first one, and was in a better place to market them, and a better place to move on from there.

But that goes to every piece of the writing process, from the first draft, to taking your time and getting beta readers to give you feedback, and taking your time to do revisions, and getting it to a good editor, and then taking your time to do revisions after the editor is finished with it, and taking your time with the publication.

We were just talking about Forward Reviews, which is actually a print magazine as well as an online magazine that is read a lot by librarians and book publishers, and getting a review in that publication requires that you send them a manuscript at least four months prior to the publication date.

Same thing for Library Journal, which is a very influential publication. I haven't yet gotten a review in Library Journal, but you have to give them four or five months lead time in order for them to publish a review of yours, of your book, and it took me a long time to figure out that just because the book is done and the manuscript is ready to be published, doesn't mean you have to publish it that day.

You can say, all right, now I'm going to schedule a publication day that's six months from now. Which is how the big publishers do it, right? If you're publishing with a major publisher, they want your manuscript to be done and they're not going to publish it for six or eight months, because they want to run publicity and they want to get buzz and they want to get the early reviews.

So, you've got to learn to do that, but as an independent author you're just so focused on getting the next book out that you don't always take your time, and taking your time is so very important.

Even with things like making sure that there aren't any typos in the text, not that typos are terrible, but if you're reading a book and there's constantly little things that you notice with commas in the wrong place or close quotes that are missing, or some word that's not the right word.

And if there's five or 10 of those in the course of a novel, it bugs me, and it makes me think less of the author.

And one of the things I try to do is take the finished book after it's done, it's been to the editor, it's been proofread. I send it out to a group of my sort of core readers, eight or 10 of them, and I say, here, read this. and find the typos. That's all I want them to do. Eventually they'll write reviews of the book, and they always appreciate being able to read the book. But if I have ten people read it, and each of them finds one typo, then great! I've now cleaned up that manuscript and made it as perfect as I can make it.

It's never, ever completely perfect, but you can weed out those obvious mistakes that somehow you missed it, my editor missed it. But that takes time. I've got to give them a month or two to read it and send me back their notes about the typos, and that's the time that I've sent the manuscript out as an advanced reader copy to the early reviewers and try to get them to publish reviews, but that all takes time.

That's my biggest piece of advice is be patient. Don't rush everything. You don't have to.

Howard Lovy: Yeah, that's excellent advice. Write something that you enjoy writing about, do it well, and make sure you think about all aspects of it, before you release it into the world.

Kevin G. Chapman: Yeah, that's absolutely right.

Howard Lovy: Wonderful. Thank you, Kevin. I appreciate you giving us your wisdom and a little sneak peek into your process and a little glimpse into Mike Stoneman and your other characters. Thank you very much for appearing on the show.

Kevin G. Chapman: Thank you. If I could get a little plug in, the new book is called Double Takedown. That's book six in the Mike Stoneman thriller series, which has now been rebranded as a Mike Stoneman mystery, because it's really more of a mystery than a thriller at this point. But Double Takedown is now out. It's available in select bookstores. It's on Amazon. It's available on bookshop.org, which supports local independent bookstores, and you can find information about it on my website, which is kevingchapman.com.

You can read or listen to the audiobook version of the first chapter, and I love to have people pick up Mike Stoneman, even if you pick it up with book number six, you can do that. They're all independent standalone stories, hoping that people will have a chance to go and find Mike.

Howard Lovy: Sounds good. Thank you, Kevin.

Kevin G. Chapman: And Howard, thank you so much for having me on the show. It has been a pleasure talking to you.

Howard Lovy: My pleasure, thank you.