Jack Hayes - Author
Interviewed by The Stand-Easy Crew
Hello Jack - Hello
Who was the British Prime Minister when you were born?
James Callaghan served out his brief period in office when I was born… which cheekily means you now know my age, you rascal.
In a 'Twitter' style please describe yourself in 140 characters (with spaces).
Mostly Harmless.
Jack Hayes is a great name for an author. Is that your real name or a pen name?
Jack Hayes is a pen name. My real name is probably too long to fit comfortably across the masthead of a novel. Even if it could, journalism is a trade that is filled with ego and I didn’t want anyone coming up to me and saying “You clearly based this character on me.” It didn’t make a difference; I’ve had people erroneously do it already anyway!
Can you name any literary types who have influenced your genre of thriller writing?
There have been many. Most prominent (and more or less in descending order) are: William Goldman, Michael Crichton, Jeffrey Deaver, Dean Koontz, James Grady, Jack Higgins, Umberto Eco, Stephen King (I prefer his Richard Bachman works), Robert Ludlum, William Faulkner, Frederick Forsyth and Alistair MacLean. That list is not exhaustive.
It is not unusual for a journalist make the transition to author, for example, Ben Macintyre and Max Hastings. Aside from the obvious writing skills required to be a journalist, why do you think this is?
I think it’s about the skill to tell a story. If (IF) the thesis that you require 10,000 hours of practice to become good at something is true, it makes sense that people who have an occupation that assists in building that 10,000 hours would become proficient either more quickly or more easily or to a greater degree. Journalists also get into the habit of writing down ideas, carrying notepad and paper (trending towards iPad, these days) with them wherever they go.
I knew a comedian who, when he said something funny in the pub that made us laugh, used to write it down immediately. That is the difference between a professional comedian and a mate who’s just a laugh: a professional writes it down. (Being able to tell a joke is a very similar skill to writing. Authors can learn a lot from the comedy business. The key elements of success, from being able to tell an engaging tale to timing, are effectively the same).
In a percentage, how much of your time is spent on researching an idea for a book and how much time is spent actually writing the book?
This is an impossible question to answer.
You could easily argue that everything I ever do is research of one form or other. I have four Moleskine diaries, thick with newspaper cut outs, ideas, plot twists, character quirks, names, locations and schematics for everything from pop-pop boats to how to make a fridge from clay pottery on a desert island. In addition, I have probably 15 colour-coded lever-arch folders filled with articles, further newspaper & magazine clippings, Web pages and encyclopaedia print outs.
Finally, there’s time spent Googling while writing and the books on my shelves. Oh, and then there’s simply my day job, which provides yet more information… and the people I meet through it. When I finally come to type a novel, it’s tempting to say that I just write it with a little bit of Googling to check whether the Taurus Raging Bull .454 Casull variant has five rounds or six but that wouldn’t really be accurate. So 0% or 99.99% is spent researching. It depends on your point of view.
Amusingly, it doesn’t matter how much research you do, someone will always claim you haven’t done enough. Regular readers of my Twitter feed will tell you how much I love to rant about a review I had for a WW2 thriller called Blood Red Sea. The reviewer (another author incidentally…) launched into a scathing tirade about poor quality research, listing off things like typos as factual inaccuracies. One of his longest sections was devoted to how a Nazi doctor in 1944 couldn’t have talked about his research into DNA because it wasn’t discovered until 1953. It was actually first isolated by Friedrich Miescher in 1869.
There were thousands of articles published between then and the war – by 1928, for instance, Frederick Griffith had demonstrated it carried genetic information. The molecule was being referred to as Desoxyribonucleic Acid at the time (we’ve since dropped the ‘s’ so it’s now Deoxyribonucleic Acid).
The key moment (for my purposes) was actually February 1944, when Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty published an article demonstrating that DNA was the transforming principle for carrying hereditary traits from one generation to the next. Blood Red Sea takes place in October 1944 so I decided it was reasonable my doctor might, with a little help from spies, have knowledge of the research. It is referenced in one flippant line by the doctor midway through the novel – blink and you'll miss it!
My point remains: it doesn’t matter how much research you do, someone else, who’s often done less, will always claim you’re wrong.
What factors determine the subjects you choose for the books you write?
I like to write the kind of books I like to read. That may sound trite – any author will tell you the same – but that sets the bounds on subject matter. It means I tend to stick to Crime, Murder Mysteries, Thrillers, Suspense and Espionage. I do have plots for horror, science fiction and fantasy and they may come along later. Which book I sit down to write at any time is determined by timing – what is in my head and ready to pour out as I start typing.
Has social media been a benefit to you as an author and do you have any tips for budding authors on the use of social media to self promote?
Lower barriers to entry for publishing a book and marketing it through social media are both a blessing and a curse.
Blessings first: my books may not have made it into the public sphere without these revolutions (mine are released by an ebook-only publisher called Endeavour Press). Endeavour can thrive because of the lower costs social media and ebooks allow, along with other factors like first mover advantage and traditional larger publishers being slow to move into the arena. That’s the blessings.
The curse is obvious: lower barriers to entry means increased competition. Twitter can often seem like 20,000 people all stuck in a room shouting through megaphones at the same time. Lots of noise and no-one is listening.
So, how do you get noticed? On to the tips.
These are hard to give. It’s not that I’m reluctant to divulge state secrets; it’s just that I genuinely believe giving tips on this is misleading and perhaps even counter-productive. The market is so fast moving that what “works” changes – quite literally – on a monthly basis.
What made a successful author stand out in March of this year is totally different to now. It’ll change again before the year is up (probably several times). You read a lot of rubbish out there about how to do it. One successful author, for instance, says it’s all down to writing review submissions to Websites that are clearly set out. It’s great that that has worked for them… but if they really think they were the first person to have the idea that clearly written review submissions is the answer then they are deluded.
There are so many people and so many books out (and it’s always increasing) that you won’t come up with a new way to market. If what you do works for you, well done! You had the right combination of timing, skill, hopefully a good book and the key ingredient: luck. Don’t let anyone tell you that luck isn’t a huge component.
Having a good book isn’t enough. And plenty of terrible books go on to be successes.
For those who say “you make your own luck”, well… yes, there’s an element of that. But everyone thinks they can make it if they work hard enough. I honestly believe hard work (or even smart work) isn’t enough. How many creative types died impoverished and alone, only to be “discovered” after they were gone? We’ll never know how many weren’t discovered at all. “You make your own luck” is a particularly pernicious form of “Survivor’s Bias” and not really helpful.
So…what is helpful?
1. Write a good book (it definitely increases your odds over a bad one)
2. Pick a brand name for yourself you think stands out. Jack Hayes works for me. JF Penn is a great one and works for her. Lee Child (short, snappy, sounds like no-one else and stands out). Ngaio Marsh… terrible name… excellent brand. Will you ever confuse her for anyone else?
3. Try to get published the traditional route first. If you can make it that way life is much easier.
4. Don’t underestimate the advantage being published by someone else gives you. Sure, your margin self-publishing an ebook is higher but two heads are better than one… and even a small ebook publisher has many more than two heads there.
5. If you absolutely have to self-publish you need the oxygen of publicity and a business model. Would you start a restaurant without knowing the industry? Read, read, read. Pick a model that you think will work for you. Copy another author’s plan. If that doesn’t work, tweak it or change to what someone else is doing. Like I said, the industry moves fast – so stay on top of it. Better, learn to predict it
6. Actually, this goes right back to the beginning and should be what you think before you write your book: come up with an idea that can be sold in a single sentence.
Point 6 needs a little elaboration. Blood Red Sea sells because in a single sentence the plot is: “What if the Nazis got the atomic bomb first?” That’s the hook. That’ll get you reading it (I hope).
My third book to be published, Overtime, doesn’t have a biting, single sentence hook. It’s a great novel (my mum told me so) but I can’t grab you in with a single sentence because it’s a complicated story about a Russian Billionaire buying an American Football Club to escape being thrown in jail by the Russian President. The issue is that the club is going to go bust because America’s taken a swing to the evangelical right and the club’s constantly having its twenty-something players caught doing drugs or sleeping with hookers. The sponsors threaten to pull out if another story hits the papers. So the billionaire hires a guy called Ritter to keep stories out of the press and if Ritter is unsuccessful, he’ll end up in the Florida Keys as an alligator’s dinner.
Now, I’m not saying you wouldn’t read that, I’m just saying it’s a bugger to condense into 140 characters, including spaces, with a link to Amazon and hashtags. How does this fair: “PR is Easy: Keep News Out of the Press or Die.” Sure, the hook’s not as good as the one for Blood Red Sea… and that’s why you should think about these things before you start writing.
Because I have a penchant for military history I am interested to know what was the title of the last non-fiction military book you read?
Inside the Delta Force by Eric Haney.
I know there’s been criticism of him by former colleagues for embellishing his accomplishments or overstating this or that. They are for the most part irrelevant. It is a fascinating read and awesomely well written. For those who don't know, Eric Haney was one of the early crop of men drafted into the Delta Force.
His book takes you from the initial, gruelling selection process through many of his missions to when he left and afterwards. He details insights on tactics, operations, thought processes and the uneasy relationships between the different Special Forces regiments and the various US espionage agencies. Much of what is written about tactics is, of course, now out of date because these have evolved – as one would expect between the early Eighties and now. Nonetheless, it is a superb book.
Do you have any favourite 'Top Tips'? My personnel favourite is 'Don't drink yellow snow'.
“Nobody knows anything.”
The most widely used quote from William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade means that, in the movie industry, nobody knows what will be a success, and what will be a failure, until it’s out in the market. Goldman ties it to a story of a “green light man” at a studio (the person responsible for saying whether a particular project is a “go” or not) who once confided in him that if in the preceding year he’d rejected every film script he accepted and accepted every one he’d rejected, he would probably have made around the same amount of money.
This is just as true in the book industry. Everybody knows tales of the thousands of rejections meted out to everything from Harry Potter to Chicken Soup for the Soul. One advantage of the ebook revolution is that the gatekeepers of the publishing industry have been diminished in power. Sure, they can still make or break you… but they can’t stop you.If you are genuinely popular, the market will build. Provided, you have a little bit of luck.
And finally:
On a British oven 'Gas Mark' scale, please highlight how uncomfortable it has been taking part in this interview? Gas Mark 1 being the most painful and Gas Mark 9 being the least.
“Is this thing even on?”
Thank you for pulling up a bollard and spinning a few dits with me Jack. Could I please have your kind permission to use this interview on my fantastic website? – Yes, of course you may, providing you quote me in full.
Follow Jack on Twitter @JackHayesAuthor
Who was the British Prime Minister when you were born?
James Callaghan served out his brief period in office when I was born… which cheekily means you now know my age, you rascal.
In a 'Twitter' style please describe yourself in 140 characters (with spaces).
Mostly Harmless.
Jack Hayes is a great name for an author. Is that your real name or a pen name?
Jack Hayes is a pen name. My real name is probably too long to fit comfortably across the masthead of a novel. Even if it could, journalism is a trade that is filled with ego and I didn’t want anyone coming up to me and saying “You clearly based this character on me.” It didn’t make a difference; I’ve had people erroneously do it already anyway!
Can you name any literary types who have influenced your genre of thriller writing?
There have been many. Most prominent (and more or less in descending order) are: William Goldman, Michael Crichton, Jeffrey Deaver, Dean Koontz, James Grady, Jack Higgins, Umberto Eco, Stephen King (I prefer his Richard Bachman works), Robert Ludlum, William Faulkner, Frederick Forsyth and Alistair MacLean. That list is not exhaustive.
It is not unusual for a journalist make the transition to author, for example, Ben Macintyre and Max Hastings. Aside from the obvious writing skills required to be a journalist, why do you think this is?
I think it’s about the skill to tell a story. If (IF) the thesis that you require 10,000 hours of practice to become good at something is true, it makes sense that people who have an occupation that assists in building that 10,000 hours would become proficient either more quickly or more easily or to a greater degree. Journalists also get into the habit of writing down ideas, carrying notepad and paper (trending towards iPad, these days) with them wherever they go.
I knew a comedian who, when he said something funny in the pub that made us laugh, used to write it down immediately. That is the difference between a professional comedian and a mate who’s just a laugh: a professional writes it down. (Being able to tell a joke is a very similar skill to writing. Authors can learn a lot from the comedy business. The key elements of success, from being able to tell an engaging tale to timing, are effectively the same).
In a percentage, how much of your time is spent on researching an idea for a book and how much time is spent actually writing the book?
This is an impossible question to answer.
You could easily argue that everything I ever do is research of one form or other. I have four Moleskine diaries, thick with newspaper cut outs, ideas, plot twists, character quirks, names, locations and schematics for everything from pop-pop boats to how to make a fridge from clay pottery on a desert island. In addition, I have probably 15 colour-coded lever-arch folders filled with articles, further newspaper & magazine clippings, Web pages and encyclopaedia print outs.
Finally, there’s time spent Googling while writing and the books on my shelves. Oh, and then there’s simply my day job, which provides yet more information… and the people I meet through it. When I finally come to type a novel, it’s tempting to say that I just write it with a little bit of Googling to check whether the Taurus Raging Bull .454 Casull variant has five rounds or six but that wouldn’t really be accurate. So 0% or 99.99% is spent researching. It depends on your point of view.
Amusingly, it doesn’t matter how much research you do, someone will always claim you haven’t done enough. Regular readers of my Twitter feed will tell you how much I love to rant about a review I had for a WW2 thriller called Blood Red Sea. The reviewer (another author incidentally…) launched into a scathing tirade about poor quality research, listing off things like typos as factual inaccuracies. One of his longest sections was devoted to how a Nazi doctor in 1944 couldn’t have talked about his research into DNA because it wasn’t discovered until 1953. It was actually first isolated by Friedrich Miescher in 1869.
There were thousands of articles published between then and the war – by 1928, for instance, Frederick Griffith had demonstrated it carried genetic information. The molecule was being referred to as Desoxyribonucleic Acid at the time (we’ve since dropped the ‘s’ so it’s now Deoxyribonucleic Acid).
The key moment (for my purposes) was actually February 1944, when Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty published an article demonstrating that DNA was the transforming principle for carrying hereditary traits from one generation to the next. Blood Red Sea takes place in October 1944 so I decided it was reasonable my doctor might, with a little help from spies, have knowledge of the research. It is referenced in one flippant line by the doctor midway through the novel – blink and you'll miss it!
My point remains: it doesn’t matter how much research you do, someone else, who’s often done less, will always claim you’re wrong.
What factors determine the subjects you choose for the books you write?
I like to write the kind of books I like to read. That may sound trite – any author will tell you the same – but that sets the bounds on subject matter. It means I tend to stick to Crime, Murder Mysteries, Thrillers, Suspense and Espionage. I do have plots for horror, science fiction and fantasy and they may come along later. Which book I sit down to write at any time is determined by timing – what is in my head and ready to pour out as I start typing.
Has social media been a benefit to you as an author and do you have any tips for budding authors on the use of social media to self promote?
Lower barriers to entry for publishing a book and marketing it through social media are both a blessing and a curse.
Blessings first: my books may not have made it into the public sphere without these revolutions (mine are released by an ebook-only publisher called Endeavour Press). Endeavour can thrive because of the lower costs social media and ebooks allow, along with other factors like first mover advantage and traditional larger publishers being slow to move into the arena. That’s the blessings.
The curse is obvious: lower barriers to entry means increased competition. Twitter can often seem like 20,000 people all stuck in a room shouting through megaphones at the same time. Lots of noise and no-one is listening.
So, how do you get noticed? On to the tips.
These are hard to give. It’s not that I’m reluctant to divulge state secrets; it’s just that I genuinely believe giving tips on this is misleading and perhaps even counter-productive. The market is so fast moving that what “works” changes – quite literally – on a monthly basis.
What made a successful author stand out in March of this year is totally different to now. It’ll change again before the year is up (probably several times). You read a lot of rubbish out there about how to do it. One successful author, for instance, says it’s all down to writing review submissions to Websites that are clearly set out. It’s great that that has worked for them… but if they really think they were the first person to have the idea that clearly written review submissions is the answer then they are deluded.
There are so many people and so many books out (and it’s always increasing) that you won’t come up with a new way to market. If what you do works for you, well done! You had the right combination of timing, skill, hopefully a good book and the key ingredient: luck. Don’t let anyone tell you that luck isn’t a huge component.
Having a good book isn’t enough. And plenty of terrible books go on to be successes.
For those who say “you make your own luck”, well… yes, there’s an element of that. But everyone thinks they can make it if they work hard enough. I honestly believe hard work (or even smart work) isn’t enough. How many creative types died impoverished and alone, only to be “discovered” after they were gone? We’ll never know how many weren’t discovered at all. “You make your own luck” is a particularly pernicious form of “Survivor’s Bias” and not really helpful.
So…what is helpful?
1. Write a good book (it definitely increases your odds over a bad one)
2. Pick a brand name for yourself you think stands out. Jack Hayes works for me. JF Penn is a great one and works for her. Lee Child (short, snappy, sounds like no-one else and stands out). Ngaio Marsh… terrible name… excellent brand. Will you ever confuse her for anyone else?
3. Try to get published the traditional route first. If you can make it that way life is much easier.
4. Don’t underestimate the advantage being published by someone else gives you. Sure, your margin self-publishing an ebook is higher but two heads are better than one… and even a small ebook publisher has many more than two heads there.
5. If you absolutely have to self-publish you need the oxygen of publicity and a business model. Would you start a restaurant without knowing the industry? Read, read, read. Pick a model that you think will work for you. Copy another author’s plan. If that doesn’t work, tweak it or change to what someone else is doing. Like I said, the industry moves fast – so stay on top of it. Better, learn to predict it
6. Actually, this goes right back to the beginning and should be what you think before you write your book: come up with an idea that can be sold in a single sentence.
Point 6 needs a little elaboration. Blood Red Sea sells because in a single sentence the plot is: “What if the Nazis got the atomic bomb first?” That’s the hook. That’ll get you reading it (I hope).
My third book to be published, Overtime, doesn’t have a biting, single sentence hook. It’s a great novel (my mum told me so) but I can’t grab you in with a single sentence because it’s a complicated story about a Russian Billionaire buying an American Football Club to escape being thrown in jail by the Russian President. The issue is that the club is going to go bust because America’s taken a swing to the evangelical right and the club’s constantly having its twenty-something players caught doing drugs or sleeping with hookers. The sponsors threaten to pull out if another story hits the papers. So the billionaire hires a guy called Ritter to keep stories out of the press and if Ritter is unsuccessful, he’ll end up in the Florida Keys as an alligator’s dinner.
Now, I’m not saying you wouldn’t read that, I’m just saying it’s a bugger to condense into 140 characters, including spaces, with a link to Amazon and hashtags. How does this fair: “PR is Easy: Keep News Out of the Press or Die.” Sure, the hook’s not as good as the one for Blood Red Sea… and that’s why you should think about these things before you start writing.
Because I have a penchant for military history I am interested to know what was the title of the last non-fiction military book you read?
Inside the Delta Force by Eric Haney.
I know there’s been criticism of him by former colleagues for embellishing his accomplishments or overstating this or that. They are for the most part irrelevant. It is a fascinating read and awesomely well written. For those who don't know, Eric Haney was one of the early crop of men drafted into the Delta Force.
His book takes you from the initial, gruelling selection process through many of his missions to when he left and afterwards. He details insights on tactics, operations, thought processes and the uneasy relationships between the different Special Forces regiments and the various US espionage agencies. Much of what is written about tactics is, of course, now out of date because these have evolved – as one would expect between the early Eighties and now. Nonetheless, it is a superb book.
Do you have any favourite 'Top Tips'? My personnel favourite is 'Don't drink yellow snow'.
“Nobody knows anything.”
The most widely used quote from William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade means that, in the movie industry, nobody knows what will be a success, and what will be a failure, until it’s out in the market. Goldman ties it to a story of a “green light man” at a studio (the person responsible for saying whether a particular project is a “go” or not) who once confided in him that if in the preceding year he’d rejected every film script he accepted and accepted every one he’d rejected, he would probably have made around the same amount of money.
This is just as true in the book industry. Everybody knows tales of the thousands of rejections meted out to everything from Harry Potter to Chicken Soup for the Soul. One advantage of the ebook revolution is that the gatekeepers of the publishing industry have been diminished in power. Sure, they can still make or break you… but they can’t stop you.If you are genuinely popular, the market will build. Provided, you have a little bit of luck.
And finally:
On a British oven 'Gas Mark' scale, please highlight how uncomfortable it has been taking part in this interview? Gas Mark 1 being the most painful and Gas Mark 9 being the least.
“Is this thing even on?”
Thank you for pulling up a bollard and spinning a few dits with me Jack. Could I please have your kind permission to use this interview on my fantastic website? – Yes, of course you may, providing you quote me in full.
Follow Jack on Twitter @JackHayesAuthor