My ALLi author guest this episode is Mark Baker, who writes historical fiction, fantasy, and travel memoir. After a career in technical writing, Mark turned to independent publishing because he refused to let traditional genre conventions dictate the stories he wanted to tell. He also writes a popular Substack about literature and storytelling.
Listen to the Inspirational Indie Author Interview: Mark Baker
About the Host
Howard Lovy is an author, developmental editor, and writing coach with a long career in journalism and publishing. He works with writers at many stages of their careers, with a focus on helping them develop their ideas and strengthen their work while preserving their unique voices. He lives in Northern Michigan.
About the Guest
G. M. (Mark) Baker lives in Nova Scotia with his wife, no dogs, no horses, and no chickens. He believes that stories have a fundamental biological purpose: to make us wise and brave. He writes about kind abbesses and melancholy kings, elf maidens and shipwreckers and shy falconers, great beauties and their plain sisters, sinners and saints and ordinary eccentrics. In his newsletter, Stories All the Way Down, he discusses history, literature, and the nature of story. Learn more about his work on his author website.
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Read the Transcript
Mark Baker: Hi, my name is Mark Baker. I write fiction and travelogue under G.M. Baker so that you won’t get confused with the technical books I used to write under my own name. I live in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, and I’m not someone who is very keen on the whole way that literature has become genre-based.
But most of what I write would be considered historical fiction. And then a couple of things that would be considered fantasy, even though in my mind they’re fairy tales, which I think is a different thing. I also have a Substack called Stories All the Way Down that actually does better than my fiction, so.
Howard Lovy: Oh, that’s great. Well, the two probably go well hand in hand. And I think suffering from multiple genre syndrome is probably common among many indie authors, and that’s kind of the reason why we’re indie, you know. We refuse to be categorized.
Classic Children’s Books Shape a Young Reader
But let’s start at the beginning. Tell me where you grew up and what was your childhood like in terms of books and storytelling?
Mark Baker: Well, I was born in England and sort of grew up on Rosemary Sutcliff, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Ransome. I’m not sure how many of the audience will recognize some of these names, but I think Swallows and Amazons…
Howard Lovy: I know a few of them.
Mark Baker: Swallows and Amazons I think is one of the greatest books of the 20th century. I think there’s a number of children’s books that don’t get the recognition they deserve as top-flight literature. I mean, Anne of Green Gables I think is another example of that. And certainly The Wind in the Willows. Of course The Wind in the Willows was a huge influence. And Tolkien and Lewis. Tolkien I came to a little later. When he first blew up was when I was in university. And so suddenly everybody had The Lord of the Rings.
Howard Lovy: I guess they call you an OG Tolkien fan. Led Zeppelin started using them in their lyrics, you know?
A Family Moves from Manchester to Rural Nova Scotia
You were born in England, but you eventually ended up in Nova Scotia. When did that happen?
Mark Baker: My father was a professor of English, and he got a job at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, which is a town of about 4,000 people, but when the university’s in, it kind of doubles. And it also has this institute called the Coady Institute, which is kind of an education institute, mostly bringing people in from Africa to teach them economics and these kinds of things, and sending them back.
That operated during the summer. They used to try and do it during the Canadian winter and found the Africans weren’t terribly interested in that.
Howard Lovy: Talk about not just culture shock, but climate shock.
Mark Baker: Yeah, exactly. So that switched to the summer. So there were always students in town. There was always a big student population as well, but it was a tiny place.
Howard Lovy: Did that come during your childhood, or were you already grown when you moved to Nova Scotia?
Mark Baker: I was 11 when we moved. It’s a curious thing. I have three younger siblings, and the extent to which each of us retained the English accent is very, very different.
I have one sister who after six months in Canada just sounded like a Canadian. And my younger brother, who was basically a babe in arms when we came over, still sounds English. I don’t know how that works, but there you go.
Howard Lovy: Oh, that’s interesting. So I can detect a little bit of a hybrid Canadian-English accent in your voice. It’s very unique. So that must’ve been kind of a culture shock for you as a child. Did that affect your view of the world?
Mark Baker: I mean, it was a huge transition because I’d been living in Manchester. I’d grown up in cities. And suddenly we’re living out in the countryside in Nova Scotia on a dirt road in an old converted schoolhouse, and taking a half-hour bus ride into town for school. Completely different world.
Completely different history. Well, not entirely, because that part of Nova Scotia was settled by the Highland Scots. When the lads in Scotland decided that sheep were more profitable than crofters, they put them on ships and sailed them over to Cape Breton and Eastern Nova Scotia.
And so, I mean, in that town, half the people are called MacDonald, and the rest are called Campbell and Cameron and Mackenzie and MacIsaac. The first thing when you were introduced to somebody is they would ask you, “Who’s your father?” That was how it was, ’cause they were all family connected, and I had not known anything like that. It was such a completely different way in which people related to each other.
Close-Knit Villages Find Their Way into the Novels
I’ve always kind of wished I could have grown up that way, in such a connected community. And I think it maybe does reflect in some of the things that I’ve written. I haven’t really written any city books. They’re all little isolated country places. That hadn’t actually occurred to me till we had this conversation, but I think that probably does have something to do with it, because it’s such a different way of relating. And everybody knows everybody.
We were on a party line with 10 other families.
Howard Lovy: I’m old enough to remember party lines. That’s right.
A Technical Writer Keeps Returning to Fiction
So did you always want to become a writer, or did you study something else eventually?
Mark Baker: I can’t even remember when it started. I know my first short story was published when I was 19.
So I’d been writing all through my teens. In one move or another in a great itinerant career, I did discover a box of old science fiction manuscripts that I had written in my teens and burned them, ’cause they were quite embarrassing in many ways.
Howard Lovy: Yeah. I had the same moment when I looked at old poetry I had written in college and discovered that I am not a poet.
Mark Baker: Yeah. No, it was always writing. I’ve had this funny career where I’m always trying to get out of writing and do something else, and as soon as I do, I get bored. ‘Cause I think I like doing all kinds of other things, but I only like doing them until I’ve figured them out, and then I kind of want to write down how to do it, and then I’m done.
It’s not interesting anymore. I made my living as a technical writer. Whenever anybody says to me, “Oh, I want to be a writer. What should I do?” I say, “Go into technical communication.” It’s a nice, safe, 9:00 to 5:00 job. It pays technology-level wages. You’ll be able to retire early.
And then you can go and write the novels and whatever else it is that you want to write. But if you want to actually pay the bills, that’s the safe way to do it.
Howard Lovy: But for your creative life, did you always have a novel in your desk drawer that you were working on while you were doing your 9:00 to 5:00?
Mark Baker: Well, with gaps. All those awful science fiction things that I wrote in my teens. And then there was kind of a gap. I was doing newspaper work at one point. And then I kind of stumbled backwards into technical communication. And the thing about that, particularly when I was getting into it in the early ’90s, is the technology was moving so fast.
It was all so new. And there were no standards; nothing was properly encapsulated. So you work all day, you study all night just to keep up so you can be useful at work the next day. So there was a long period there where I really wasn’t doing anything other than that.
And that was fascinating stuff. I loved that part of my career. But as that did start to sort of get a little repetitive, that’s when I started coming back slowly to the fiction. And I had quite a long period, sort of in my, ooh, 40s, I guess, getting into my 50s, where I was coming home at night, and instead of studying, I was writing novels.
A Trained Historian Digs into the Deep Ground of History
Howard Lovy: Well, it sounds like you got into the habit of doing research, and what you write, historical fiction, involves a great deal of research. Is that fun for you?
Mark Baker: It is, yes, to a point. I say that because I think there’s two ways to approach historical fiction. A lot of people will come to it because they like reading historical fiction, but they don’t have a background as an historian.
I trained as an historian. I have two degrees. Two and a half degrees, if you count dropping out of a PhD program. So I studied history. That was my university subject. And so I kind of come at historical fiction with what I think of as the deep ground of history.
Like, understanding how different past societies were. And I mean, the whole experience in Antigonish, again, with all those family connections, that’s the deep ground of history. Whereas if you grew up as a historical fiction fan in a city, you’re never going to get that stranger-comes-to-town thing, right?
Howard Lovy: Right.
Mark Baker: You’re never going to get the “I’ve never traveled more than five miles from the place I was born” thing.
I remember in a workshop reading, somebody was writing an historical novel, and they’d written a scene where a stagecoach gets stuck in the mud, and they had the stagecoach spinning its wheels. Which, right, it’s the most natural thing in the world if you’re not thinking it through. You’re used to anything that gets stuck in the mud spinning its wheels, right?
Howard Lovy: The wheels, right.
Mark Baker: And they’re not thinking about it. But as soon as I saw that, I said, “There’s nothing driving those wheels.” The only thing that’s going to slip in the mud is the horses’ hooves. You have to have that deep ground, because otherwise you don’t know what to research.
Cuthbert’s People Unfolds in Anglo-Saxon England
Howard Lovy: Tell me about the settings of some of your novels.
Mark Baker: Sure. Well, there’s really only one series, and that’s what I call Cuthbert’s People. It wasn’t meant to be a series. It was meant to be one novel, The Wistful and the Good. And that’s one of those things that takes like 15 years, and the protagonist changes and all of that.
It was not meant to be about Elswyth of Twyford at all. She came in as a minor character and just took over, as they do. That is set in Northeast England, in the village that is now called Alnmouth, which we think historically was the place called Twyford in the Anglo-Saxon age.
And it is a day’s walk south of Lindisfarne, which was this great rich monastery on a tidal island, so that it was an island at high tide, and there was just a way across the sands at low tide, and it was built out there sort of to protect it. Nobody thought of protecting it from the sea, apparently.
And the great initial Viking raid hit Lindisfarne in 793. It was the 9/11 of the Anglo-Saxon world. And it just shattered things. And so that’s sort of the background event. But I was dealing with the lives of these Anglo-Saxon thanes’ daughters.
A thane is sort of… the closest thing would be a knight in the later medieval kind of thing.
Teenage Heroines Defy the YA Label
Howard Lovy: Are these all adult or young adult? I think you have a combination of young adult and…
Mark Baker: This is one of these things: the whole business of genre being divided by audience.
When I was growing up, there were kids’ books and there were grown-ups’ books, but there weren’t these multiple divisions where everybody has to read in their own age. Like, Kipling in Puck of Pook’s Hill has his two heroes, kids acting out A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is where Puck comes from, right? That was how it was when I was growing up. At a certain time you just graduated, but there wasn’t this gradation.
And these thanes’ daughters, they are 15 or 16, and they’re on the cusp of marriage. Because these are rural people, it doesn’t take much to set up a household, and your life expectancy is probably 35 to 40. So you get on with it. So yeah, they are teenagers in the YA sense of the word, but they’re not socially adolescents. They’re grown-ups. They’re dealing with grown-up problems.
When this was being shopped around to agents and publishers, as it was for a long time, it was like they couldn’t figure it out. Age-wise, this is YA, but it was too long for YA. It dealt with things that aren’t modern teenage problems, so it couldn’t be YA…
Genre Rules Push Him Toward Indie Publishing
Howard Lovy: Is that why you eventually decided to go indie? It just couldn’t be categorized by the traditional publishing route?
Mark Baker: Yeah. It took me a very long time to figure out how genre really works. Because you think genre: oh, it’s set in the past, it’s historical fiction. No, historical fiction as a genre is much narrower than that. It is certain themes. It is certain periods. It is certain classes. Like, there’s a whole division of it that’s about Tudor monarchs, the Tudor court.
Howard Lovy: Right.
Mark Baker: There’s a whole division that’s about World War II. If you’re writing about the Anglo-Saxon period, then there’s a whole division of it centered around Bernard Cornwell’s books that’s about warriors. But I was writing about young women in Anglo-Saxon England. And I was writing about them 100 years earlier than the main timeframe.
And so, I mean, I had agents twice, I had publishers twice, and on every occasion, initially they say, “Oh, it’s wonderful. We love it. It’s great. The characters are fantastic. It’s well-written. We just need to do a little bit of editing.” By which they turned out to mean completely change it so that it fits the genre definitions that we think we can sell.
I mean, from a business point of view, that makes perfect sense. It’s not a high-margin business, right? They have got to sell stuff that they know how to sell and can sell cheaply.
Howard Lovy: But that’s just not what you wanted to write, though. That wasn’t you.
Mark Baker: Yeah. The longest one of these was with a medium-to-small publisher, and it was a tortuous process. But I got to the point where I said, “I understand completely why you want those changes, but if I do that, it won’t be the book that I set out to write. I won’t even recognize it.”
An Indie Author Searches for a Channel to Readers
Howard Lovy: As an indie, though, do you run into those same challenges? Are your readers confused, or do you have your own niche set of readers who follow you and don’t care that it doesn’t follow these conventions?
Mark Baker: I get so many reviews that say, “This is not the kind of book I normally read, but…”
I think half of them are that. But it does make marketing difficult, and I’m not good at marketing. I haven’t done a lot of it. But what I have been doing is trying to find out what is going to work for what I’m doing, because, yes, there’s a readership out there, but there isn’t a defined channel to those readers.
People always say, “Oh, the traditional publishers don’t do marketing.” Yes, they do. They maintain those channels. And if you fit into one of those channels, yes, there’s other things they expect you to do, but their maintenance of that channel is a huge part of what they do and a huge part of how they can move your book.
Substack and Novel Readers Overlap Only Partly
Howard Lovy: Maybe that’s where your Substack comes in. A lot of authors are doing that. They’re finding their own readers by keeping in touch with them through things like Substack.
Mark Baker: That definitely helps. It’s interesting.
There’s an overlap between those two audiences, but they’re not the same. There’s a fair number of people who are fans of the Substack who aren’t interested in the book. And there are, I’m sure, people who read the novels who aren’t interested in essays at all. And then there’s the people in the middle.
You always get the advice, “Oh, well, you have to have a newsletter.” And I don’t think it’s bad advice, but it’s interesting if you expect that everyone who reads the novel’s going to want to read the newsletter and everyone who reads the newsletter’s going to want to buy the next novel. It doesn’t work that way in my experience.
Howard Lovy: Interesting. Well, that’s good, though, isn’t it? Unless the Substack becomes a chore rather than a point of connection.
Mark Baker: Yeah. I do love doing the Substack. And as I say, it’s more successful than the novels by numbers.
Of course, you have to pay money for the novels, so there’s that. But it’s a different outlet, and it gets me into some really interesting conversations. So I think of myself as a novelist and essayist. And so that’s the legitimate part of it. I’m not doing it just to sell novels.
If that’s what I was doing, I’d do it differently.
Road Trips on Route 66 Become a Travelogue
Howard Lovy: Right. Now, besides your fiction, you also did a travel memoir that grew out of road trips you took with your wife along Route 66 and other American roads. What inspired that? That’s kind of a whole different kind of writing for you.
Mark Baker: Well, Steinbeck, essentially. As with so many people, you read The Grapes of Wrath, and there is that journey along Route 66, the Mother Road. And we’ve been road trippers for a long time. I’m a minor car nut, and so I’ve had a Miata, and we used to go on Miata club trips on weekends and long weekends and things like that.
But while we were both working, you can’t do Route 66 properly unless you can take a month and a half to do it and sort of do the whole thing. So this was something we planned to do when we retired, and then it got put off and put off and put off again. And we finally did it in 2018, which was fortuitous, because we did a second trip in 2019. That was on the Loneliest Road, Highway 50. And that was because our fourth grandchild had been born in San Jose, and so we went out to see her. And then, of course, COVID hit, and nobody was going anywhere after that. So I basically took the diaries that I’d kept through those two trips and turned them into this travelogue, which is kind of a reflection on travel as quest and travel as pilgrimage.
Because there’s some element of both those things. Doing a road trip is work, right? It’s like drive, get to the hotel, unpack, sleep, get up, pack, back in the car, on you go again. It’s not sitting on a beach sipping piña coladas. It’s work, and it’s tiring, especially when you’re doing it in your early 60s.
But there’s a drive behind it. It’s a thing to accomplish and things to see, and so yeah, it started as a quest and ended as a pilgrimage, I think.
Howard Lovy: That’s great. And not only did your marriage survive going on road trips together, you also got a couple books out of them.
Stories Make Us Wise and Brave
So I want to finish with something that you wrote in an essay called “Stories Are To Make Us Wise and Brave.”
Mark Baker: Ah, yes.
Howard Lovy: You argue that stories aren’t simply entertainment or vehicles for ideas. They give us experiences that help us develop wisdom and courage, and I think that’s an interesting way to think about the purpose of fiction.
How has that influenced the books you write, and what do you hope readers take away from your stories?
Mark Baker: That’s a reflection that sort of came later, so it didn’t really influence the books as I was writing them, or at least not until the latest one. But my point on that was I think that’s the biological basis of stories.
It’s why we have a need for stories. And one of the interesting things, I think, is through most of history you had a pretty immediate need to be wise and brave, ’cause the world was a dangerous place. And if you weren’t wise and brave, you could starve to death or be eaten by wolves and stuff like that.
So we have that hunger to learn how to live in the world. And I’m not sure that still has the same force it used to, which I think is really interesting in how it affects the kind of writing that people do. I think if you look at genre fiction, they’re looking more at the adrenaline rush, as opposed to wisdom and courage as sort of the central theme. I would say you go back into older books and there’s a different feel to them, and I think that has a lot to do with it. And I think that’s probably why I don’t easily fit into modern genre categories, but I think I only figured that out much later.
Howard Lovy: Well, you mentioned Tolkien when you were young, and I got heavily into it as a teenager, and I would imagine myself in those situations: What would I have done? Things like that. And that’s what I tell my clients about reader immersion, imagining yourself in these situations.
Mark Baker: Yes.
Howard Lovy: All right. Well, this has been fascinating, Mark. Thank you for taking us along your writing journey. And best of luck to you in the future.
Mark Baker: Oh, thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.
Howard Lovy: Thank you, Mark. Bye.
Mark Baker: Bye-bye.
