7 Answers from an Author: Roger Crossland
On occasion, I will post a short interview with an indie author (or someone in the publishing business). This week, self-published author R. L. Crossland is featured.
With the benefit of thirty-five years’ service, active and reserve, as a U.S. Navy SEAL officer (two hot wars, one cold), Roger Crossland has found projecting his grasp of naval intrigue one hundred years into the past an agreeable challenge.
Captain Crossland has written internationally on the subject of maritime unconventional warfare and includes U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings and the New York Times among his credits. His historical crime novel, Jade Rooster, received the Admiral David Glasgow Farragut Award for naval literature in 2008.
1) How long did it take you to write your book, and what do you miss about it now that it’s finished?
Fourteen years altogether, with some years where I temporarily abandoned the book in despair in response to an anti-history market.
2) What’s one book (fiction or nonfiction) that changed your life?
Northwest Passage by Kenneth Roberts. That book (really two books under one cover) led me to read all his others set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Roberts was a journalist who used that life to project characters who lived and breathed. He won a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, which cited his historical novels and the insights they provided into early American history. Later I discovered James Michener, James Clavell, and Eric Ambler, who together clinched the deal.
3) What’s one thing you wish you had learned about the writing, publishing, or marketing/promotion process sooner than you actually did?
Agents now see themselves as gatekeepers for the major publishing houses, and they look at you only through a major publishing company’s eyes. Technically an agent should only work for his client, but I question whether that approach still rules.
4) If you could go back in time and talk to the writer you were at the start of your writing journey, what would you say?
I published my first magazine short story mystery in 1973. My second short story in 1974 triggered an invitation by the magazine publisher to write a novel along the same lines. Unfortunately, I had just been admitted to law school and knew I wouldn’t have time to take up that offer. It would be years before I had time to write fiction again.
I would tell [the younger] me to be aware that the major conventional book publishers have changed over the five decades. Before the '60s, publishers were more interested in books that would make their houses’ literary reputations than fatten their bottom line. Up until 1979, book inventories could be depreciated and then not taxed at their full sales value. That allowed publishing houses to take greater risks with their books.
Now the magic word is “algorithms,” which is Greek for “let our computers analyze the features of current successful book and let’s find new books just like them.” That has changed the nature of agents. Agents today have little life experience. My first two agents—in the '70s—Julie Fallowfield (Harper Lee, John Steinbeck) and Julian Bach (Pat Conroy), had buckets of life experience and hardly saw publishing houses as gods. Today, too many are twentysomethings with English degrees and no life experience, who are really editorial surrogates for the major publishing houses that desperately want to rid themselves of editorial costs.
5) What’s one thing writers can do right now to improve their writing?
I need to re-collect a group of beta readers. Over the space of fourteen years, too many of my beta readers have fallen by the wayside.
6) What’s one thing authors can do right now to promote their book?
Somewhere I read an article suggesting writers find a sponsor for their book. In researching my book, I learned that in the Pacific Fleet, sailors were particularly fond of a particular brand of bourbon. I researched the matter further and realized that brand still existed and they took pride in how intertwined with history it has been.
I wrote them and suggested they take an ad in the back of my book’s paperback edition. They regarded my suggestion favorably.
7) What’s your next move?
I have an outline of my next book mentally sketched out now. The key work in historical novel writing is arriving at a plot that is “plausible.” I need to know if four or five key approaches I wish to take are based on factual issues at the time.
I need to get some logbooks from National Archives and spend some time in other specialized libraries. I need to verify my ideas on certain controversial plot pivots are indeed plausible. With historical novels, plausibility is all-important.
Click here to view Roger's website: www.dreadnaughts-bluejackets.com.
Click here to learn more about the book: The Abalone Ukulele.
____________________
Kim Catanzarite is a writer, editor, and instructor for Writer’s Digest University. Her sci-fi thriller, They Will Be Coming for Us, published June of this year to strong positive reviews. She is currently interviewing an author for the next 7 Answers column.
Author R. L. Crossland
