My ALLi author guest this week is Benedict Brown, a crime fiction author who started out writing for children. He loved the creative freedom that came with writing books for kids. He found out the hard way that it's a very competitive market for traditionally published children's authors. That's when he discovered self-publishing and he turned to a life of crime … well, crime fiction. It was there that he found success. Benedict Brown tells us his story.
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Inspirational Indie Authors Podcast: Benedict Brown Interview
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Inspirational Indie Authors Podcast: About the Author Benedict Brown
Benedict Brown is a Welsh-Irish-Englishman originally from South London but now living with his French/Spanish wife and decidedly European infant daughter in Burgos, a beautiful city in the north of Spain. He writes overlooking the Castilian countryside, trying not to be distracted by the vultures, hawks and red kites that fly past his window each day. He grew up in a crime fiction family and had made a few half-hearted attempts at writing one over the years before coming up with the idea for his detective Izzy Palmer. You can find Benedict on his website.
Inspirational Indie Authors Podcast: About the Host Howard Lovy
Howard Lovy has been a journalist for more than 30 years, and has spent the last eight years amplifying the voices of independent publishers and authors. He works with authors as a book editor to prepare their work to be published. Howard is also a freelance writer specializing in Jewish issues whose work appears regularly in Publishers Weekly, the Jewish Daily Forward, and Longreads. Find Howard at howardlovy.com, LinkedIn and Twitter.
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Hi Howard,
Just dropping in to let you know, you’re not the only one who turned away from storytelling for children and the vast market for them.
I started authoring ‘read-aloud’ novels for the 4 to 12 bracket over 20 years ago. My series features a baby emperor penguin who learns how to talk. Thus, on his way from Antarctica to New York City to find the woman who saved his life, he makes his way across the labyrinth of mountains, plains, rain forests and oceans encountering a plethora of animals and sea creatures who either want to help him or eat him . But Pengey Penguin is as smart as a Cambridge Graduate and as polite as a seasoned butler. He easily escapes from the bad guys, especially the humans who see gold in a talking penguin.
The library quality books are treasures for the families who bought them but, after fifteen years of promoting and selling I had to give way to the industry and it’s flood of publicity and merchandising that drowned Pengey and me out of the market. After all kids don’t buy books… it the young parents who are overwhelmed with the mish-mash.
The Many Adventures of Pengey Penguin, a little unassuming 200 page book acquired a sub-title, “A Bedtime Story For The Soul”. I spent most of my life savings promoting the book and its sequel but recently Amazon scrubbed over a 120 – 5 star reviews from it, virtually sinking my ship.
I also tried screenwriting for many years earning many awards and coming very close to having feature films made from my work. None materialized but I saved all of my scripts.
This year I used the story line from one of my most popular scripts. It was about 18,000 words. I turned it into a 90,400 word novel. I call it, The Glass Alibi. It was an instant e-book hit on Smashwords. But then I realized it had to go up on Amazon. Bloody buggers, but you cannot beat the market they control. I released it about three weeks ago so it’s difficult to know how it’s faring up in crime-thrillers… one of the most crowded fields in the publishing world. The story is a hard-boiled humdinger-of-a-dew-flicker, so I have hopes with my deranged characters, cool headed PI and storytelling abilities. I also have a marketing team that knows how to massage Amazon. We’ll see how it pans out.
Best of luck on you new venture.
Cordially,
John Burns – Author