A Conversation With Dean Koontz on Giving Yourself Five Years to Make It as a Writer (Killer Writers)
Dean Koontz has for decades been one of my favorite authors, and I got the pleasure of talking with him from his Southern California home in a room lined with shelves of books, his books, an environment of every writer’s dreams. His story is a trajectory, which at first glance appears to be an easy, overnight success, but his career, as I learned, was anything but that.
(A Conversation With David Baldacci.)
“Dean, tell us the story of how you got started writing. Didn’t your wife say, ‘Okay, you have this amount of time’ or something? Is that a true story?”
“Yes. I was writing and selling, but not making a living, and I was teaching school. I sold a number of short stories. I guess I might have sold a paperback novel for not much money, and one day my wife said, ‘I know what you want to do is not teach school. You want to write fulltime.’ So, she said she would support me for five years…”
“This was her idea, then?”
“Yes, and if I made it in five years, then we’d be fine, and if I didn’t, then I’d have to go back to teaching school.”
“From the businesspeople I speak with and the business books I’ve read, five years is the time they give all startups to see if they can become profitable and solid. That five-year mark was highly intuitive of her.”
“I sometimes say, I tried to negotiate her up to seven years, but she has Sicilian blood, so she wins every negotiation.”
I laugh. “So, I assume you worked like crazy for those five years.”
“It was a daunting five years. This was long before I was a bestseller or anything, so the years included the number of things I had to write, and, struggling, to get paid more for them.”
“How did it work out, then? Obviously well, because here we are.”
“At the end of five years, my wife was working. She quit her job, and we were working together on my career because her background was in accounting, and my background is I can’t balance my checkbook.”
“That’s amazing. And kudos to you both for knowing your strengths!”
“It was like kismet, and we found that together we could make this work in the future.”
“How has it been to work with your spouse, especially when she’s handling the accounting?”
“She often says the mistake was quitting her other job because she works more hours when she’s working with me than she ever did working for somebody else.”
“Funny. That brings up a point, though, because I get emails from people writing to Killer Nashville—the writers’ conference that I produce—asking for advice. And they think that, ‘Okay, I’m going to write a book. That will take six weeks. And I’m going to have it out in, you know, six months,’ and I tell them it’s totally unreasonable. So, your wife, many years ago, was being very logical, at least with the five years.”
“Yeah, she knows that you don’t build a writing career in a year, and even though I was selling and continued to sell, I was working in basically the bottom of the market. So, it was a slow, arduous climb.”
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“That’s interesting, because when I discovered you as a reader, you seemed to be a super-seller right from the start.”
“I know from the outside, my career was this big, smooth arc. But I began writing in ’68. And my first bestseller was in about ’85. So, when you think about all the time there was between those years, it takes a while, or it did for me. There are writers who walk on the scene, and they’re a hit from their first book. I didn’t know a lot about what I was doing, so I was struggling my way. Bad agents. A lot of things complicated it. But ultimately, here we are.”
“So how does a writer, like someone reading our conversation here, become a success such as yourself?”
“I don’t know because every step of my way I’ve been told ‘You’re doing the wrong thing.’ I use Odd Thomas, as a perfect example. When I delivered that script, my publisher at the time hated it. You have to remember; I was already a number one bestseller. But he despised the book. He wouldn’t even talk to me about it, and had my editor tell me he hated the book. I had said, ‘I think I’d like to write more with this character.’ So, the publisher, through my editor, came back and said, ‘Okay, I might let you write more of this, but you have to give me other novels first. So, then the book was put into advance copy. It went out to reviewers and all that. I think that book got more than 100 reviews and all but two of them, I could have written myself.”
“It was that well-received?”
“The reviews were kind of a thing, where people would say, ‘Did your mother write this review?’”
“They were that good?”
“And booksellers loved it. It went on to go through, I think, 14 or 15 printings, and I ended up writing eight Odd Thomas novels that have sold worldwide over 40-million copies and produced about 500 editions.”
“And your publisher and editor hated it. Sort of tells us that if someone in power doesn’t like it, it might not be a fact that we should set the quality of our work by.”
“Here was the key publisher in my life who said, ‘This is terrible,’ and that has happened to me again and again, and it doesn’t mean I don’t respect those people.”
“Sounds like it means you’re ahead of your time, or maybe you have a pulse on the market the publisher and editor didn’t have.”
“I think it means that if it’s a little bit off from what they’re used to seeing, and almost everybody’s going to be a little off, unless they’re slavishly imitating somebody else, then that’s why you have a situation where something like Harry Potter couldn’t find a home. I have a whole lot of stories like that, where authors write books that people say, ‘Oh, this is not publishable,’ and then bang! The right person finds it and says, ‘I like this.’ And then amazing things can happen. So that’s why it’s very hard to say when you need to give up, and it’s very hard to say how you become successful.”
“The key then may be to write the book you think you need to write and leave it at that.”
“It’s a struggle. My career has never been easy. We got to an altitude, but it wasn’t very easy. I wish I could say it was a piece of cake, but unfortunately it was not that. I won’t use the word for what it was, but I’ll go back to the stories of time before my ‘success,’ which people find hard to believe. I had several paperback bestsellers that were selling a million copies in paperback, and my publisher at the time was saying, ‘That’s good, that’s great, but you’ll never be a hardcover bestseller, because you don’t write the kind of books that can be hardcover bestsellers.’”
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“That’s really strange. So, what is the criteria of a hardcover bestseller? If you’re selling books, seems to me that would be the criterion. You’re making me wonder if any of those publishers and editors had a clue.”
“I never understood that. Finally I said, ‘Look, you have to make the effort, at least at a minimal level, or I’m going somewhere else.’ And she made a minimal effort, and it got to the bestseller list. And then it went through a bunch of printings. So then there was a book after that called Lightning, and then a book called Watchers.”
“Loved that book.”
“They kept climbing higher on the bestseller list, but the publisher kept resisting it.”
“This is so strange, but I’ve also heard numerous similar stories from other writers. It’s like there is a preconceived notion of someone as a writer and who they are and they are boxed in that false confine.”
“I came to a book called Midnight, and it became number one, and she called me—you know you’re on the list about 10 days ahead because they print the book review section ahead of the newspaper—and said, ‘I have great news. You’re going to be number one on the New York Times.’”
“As my wife says, ‘Success is the best revenge.’”
“Well, before I could say ‘Whoopee,’ or anything, she said, ‘But wait. I want you to know this will never happen for you again because you don’t write the kind of books that can be number one.”
“Oh, my gosh! Where was her brain?”
“We then had together five books that all reached number one, and every single time she told me that it would never happen again.”
“Obviously the class optimist.”
“At that point, I said, ‘I think I have to find another publisher who may believe it can happen.’”
“I don’t blame you.”
“That has sort of been the way my whole career has gone. I think in part, it’s because I do things they’re not expecting.”
“Isn’t that what a writer is supposed to do? It’s interesting, because I’m a filmmaker, as well, and in film it’s okay to direct or write all different styles and genres of films and no one seems to blink an eye. But when a literary writer goes off the lather-rinse-repeat cycle the bean counters go nuts saying ‘you can’t do that’ or ‘you need to change your name’.”
“I don’t deliver the same kind of book every time. And so, there’s a kind of reaction to it like that. My current publisher hasn’t given me that pushback. They’ve been very good about it. But up until this publisher, I got it all the time. I have friends who are bestselling writers, and I don’t think they had as hard a time as I did, but I also know that every month we’ll talk about how difficult it is to maintain. And that’s just the way it is. You have to be in for the struggle. If you’re in for the struggle, it ends up being a lot of fun. So, if you love doing it, the struggle doesn’t matter.”
“Have you ever felt trapped by your own fame?”
“It’s the downside of this. Right now, it seems, because of social media everybody wants to be famous.”
“Should they?”
“No, they shouldn’t. The downside of it is worse than the upside.”
“That’s interesting. Because you are famous. And you’re recognizable.”
“Now, I will say, being a novelist, you don’t run into a lot of people who come up to you in public and say, ‘I read your book. I hated it,’ and spit on your shoes. Mostly they come up to you to tell you how much they love what you do, how you changed their life, and all of that. But you do lose anonymity. You can be in a restaurant thinking nobody knows who you are and having dinner with your wife. And then, toward the end of the evening, two or three people come up to that table to say how much they like your work, and you realize, ‘I was under observation.’ So, I better not have been picking my nose or doing anything else, and that’s kind of a strange thing to lose.”
“It’s intrusive if you’re having a private moment, but in many ways, that’s flattering, too, isn’t it?”
“Not that I love to pick my nose, but it’s kind of a strange thing to lose anonymity. And then there are a few people out there that are not nice people, and that’s why you need to have security at a certain point in a career.”
We won’t go into security here because I don’t think most of us are at that point where we need it. But I think the important thing from our conversation is the trajectory that writers take (from being unpublished to needing security), the conflicting visions they have along the way with those who are on their team, and that, in the end, as Dean Koontz has done brilliantly, the writer needs to stick to his own vision and his own heart because this, as Dean proves, is where bestsellers come from. The takeaway here is: Be patient and never stop believing in yourself. Give yourself at least five years. And follow your own heart. These are your stories, and they are going to be as different and brilliant as you are.
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Dean Koontz (Photo credit: Douglas Sonders)
Dean Koontz is the author of many #1 bestsellers. His books have sold over 500-million copies in 38 languages, and The Times (of London) has called him a “literary juggler.” He lives in Southern California with his wife Gerda, their golden retriever, Elsa, and the enduring spirits of their goldens Trixie and Anna. https://www.deankoontz.com/