Kevin Bohacz is the bestselling novelist of Immortality and a prolific lucid dreamer!
He is also a writer for national computer magazines, founder and president of
two high technology corporations, a scientist and engineer for over 35 years,
and the inventor of an advanced electric car system - the ESE Engine System. He
was also a short order cook for I-Hop, flipped burgers at McDonalds, and
delivered Chicken Delight. All of those careers and more are behind him now
that he is a full time storyteller, a catcher of dreams… and he want’s to thank
you for reading his stories which has made all this possible.
Amazon Link to
Book:
Thanks for letting
us interrogate interview you! Can you give us a
go-for-the-gut answer as to why you wanted to be an author?
For me personally the answer is simple. Why does a bird fly
or a fish swim? It is the essence of their being. Writing is my essence, my passion.
It is my very life. I never have writer’s block. To me writing is like
breathing—it is vital sustenance for my soul.
My first novel, Dream
Dancers was published in 1993. My second novel, Immortality was published in 2007. Three years after Immortality became a bestseller, writing
literally saved my life. I was widowed at a young age. My wife, my best friend
of 17 years died in my arms while we looked into each other’s eyes. In the time
that followed when I was drowning in grief I could hear my wife whispering to
me, “Write my love… Write.” So I wrote. I wrote so hard that my arms grew sore.
I wrote so hard that I gave myself tendonitis but the pain in my arms did not
slow me a bit. My writing saved me from grief that was dark enough to crush the
life from me. I completed my third novel, Ghost
of the Gods in an amazingly short period of time while also simultaneously
working on two other new novels.
Tell us (we won’t
tell promise!) is it all it’s cracked up to be?
I mean what are the perks and what are the demands?
I am very fortunate that I get to earn a living doing
something that I would do for free… and in fact did for free for many years
before I was published. So getting to write is the huge perk. The big demand is
helping my agent market the books to publishers or publishing it myself which
means I get to where every hat imaginable. I am spoiled. I only want to do the
writing thing. My wife, Mazelle was my partner in crime, my partner in
everything. She was my manager, my muse, my editor, and more. She did all the
hard stuff of running the business, which was easy for her, and I did all the
easy stuff of writing, which was hard for her. We were a perfect team!
Which route did you
take – traditional or self-published – and can you give us the nitty gritty low
down on what’s that like?
My first novel, Dream
Dancers was conventionally published in 1993 in a deal closed by the agent
I had at that time. In 2003 when Immortality
was completed I assumed I would be able to get it published since I was already
a published author. I soon found myself waist deep in rejection notices from
both agents and publishers. All the rejection notices basically said, “We are sure this is a wonderful book but
we don’t have the time to read a long manuscript by an obscure author.”
I knew Immortality
was a timely, entertaining, and marketable novel. Some extremely successful
literary professionals including more than one famous writer had read it and
told me they loved it. So here I was a published author unable to open a single
door into the major publishing houses. Three years later I had reached the
point where I either had to give up or publish it myself. Back in 2006
self-publishing carried the stigma of failure but I had no choice. I knew in my
gut Immortality was a fantastic
story. So I started a small publishing company, hired an offset-printer, and
proceeded to manufacture and sell Immortality.
In 2007 Immortality
took off becoming a bestseller. Using my bestseller success as bait, I was able
to sign with an agent who had represented a smattering of NYTime’s bestsellers.
My agent proceeded to shop Immortality
to all the big publishing houses. My wife, Mazelle and I were deliriously thrilled.
This time the responses from publishers were very different from when Immortality was unpublished and I was
un-agented. Across the board the feedback was surprisingly similar, “We love the book but who are you?”
What the publishers were really saying was I had no massive
following. I did not have a million readers chanting in unison, “We want to buy
more books by you…”
Fast forward to 2010,
Immortality was still selling very much like it was in 2008, constantly
hitting the top 10 of its genre and never falling below the top 50. In fact
2010 and half of 2011 was one of my best grossing periods ever. By now my agent
had done all he could and given up six months prior in 2009. He loved Immortality and was very frustrated and baffled
by his inability to close a deal. It was then that I was contacted out of
nowhere by a veteran NYC agent who was a senior member in a super-agent firm.
This agent told me they had read Immortality
and loved it! This agent was convinced they could sell the book. Mazelle and I
were wildly excited and told the agent to go for it. This new agent got the
book read by a different group of more senior editors. This time the responses
really threw me. The feedback I got was essentially, “We love the book but why should we buy it when you have already sold
the heck out of it?”
At this point I felt like I just could not win. Years ago I
didn’t have a big enough following, and now that I had a following, it seemed
the publishers wanted something more. They wanted an unpublished book. I
explained that 95% of the copies of Immortality
had been sold on Amazon, which meant that I had tapped less than 50% of the
potential market for a book in this genre. So while it was a bestseller, the
lion’s share of the meat was still on this bone yet no publisher was interested
in the feast. With fractional market penetration I had made a pile of money but
there was many times more to be made if a big publisher would get behind the
book. Yet it now felt like with regard to attracting a publisher, success was
my worst enemy.
Today, three years later I now have a new amazing NYC agent
from a top firm who has closed deals for other indie authors in exactly the
same “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” predicament as me. I have received
glowing critical reviews, including Publisher’s Weekly who has awarded STARRED
reviews to both Immortality and Ghost of the Gods. There is interest
from Holly Wood in making Immortality
into a movie. I have every confidence that this time we’ll succeed in finally getting
a solid publishing deal.
What’s the
snarkiest thing you can say about the publishing industry (e.g. rejections, the
long wait, etc.)
I think my previous answer is pretty much the answer to this
one too. The publishing business seems to be relegating a lot of talented
people to the giant sucking sound of the black hole caused by the “Goldilocks
and the Three Bears” predicament.
A.
We don’t want to consider your
unpublished book because you are nobody.
B.
We don’t want to buy your successful
self-pub book because you do not have a big enough following.
C.
We don’t want to buy your very successful
book because it is too successful already.
I don’t pretend to know the reasons why the publishing
business is the way it is… I think a lot of it has to do with the chaos that
e-books brought. To some extend we are seeing a slow motion repeat of what
happened to the music industry when the iPod showed up. Publishing was an old
fashion business where they famously nurtured unknown talent because it was in
their best interest to do so. Now it feels like a business that is chasing the
blockbuster and ignoring almost everything else.
To me personally it feels like that old saying about banks: They only want to loan you money when you
don’t need it!
Tell us for real
what your family feels about you spending so much time getting your book
written, polished, edited, formatted, published, what have you?
Sorry, not much dirt here! I hate to tell you but my small
family was totally supportive. As I mentioned, Mazelle was my partner in everything.
By choice we never had children, so it was she and I against the world. Mazelle
was my biggest cheerleader and even though she is gone from this material plane
I feel her cheering me on from some other place that is like a dream.
What was the craziest
or insane thing that happened to you in the book publishing process?
That had to be when Immortality
became a bestseller on Amazon. In 2007 shortly after it was released Immortality took off. The paperback
edition hit bestseller status on Amazon then a kindle edition was released in
2008. By the summer of 2008 Immortality
was constantly ranking #1 in a whole slew of the bestselling genre categories
under Amazon Kindle. It also had a consistent overall ranking across all books
and genres of better than #500, and many times hit #255 or better for weeks at
a time. In concert, the print edition continued to sell briskly and was
constantly ranked in the top 25 in many genres.
This tangible confirmation of my writing took awhile to
fully sink in. My wife, Mazelle was proud of me and constantly kept telling me
so but it really took a couple of years for me to realize that I had done it
and that I could make a living as a writer. Immortality
stayed on the bestseller lists from 2007 through 2013, which was a very long
run.
How about the
social networks? Which ones do you
believe help and which ones do you wish you could avoid?
Immortality was
published in 2007 before social networking had the big effect it now has on
books. So Immortality was already a
bestseller by the time the social networking scene really became a force to be
reckoned with. In a very real sense, as shocking as this may sound, I am a
newbie to the social networking scene! I setup my author’s Facebook page only a
year ago. I setup a personal Facebook page at the same time because I had to in
order to create the author’s page. I deeply regret being so late to the party
and feel I have a lot of catching up to do. My wife became ill with pancreatic
cancer late in 2009 and she left on December
30, 2010. After she was gone I was lost and the last thing I was
interested in was social networking. So I have gone from having a bestseller
that generated sales without me having to do a thing, to four years later
pulling my head from the sand and finding an entirely new world. When Immortality was published, marketing was
99% paid advertising, and unlike for nonfiction novels, it was not all that
effective for fiction.
Book sales. Don’t you just love them (or lack of?)? How are you making the sales happen for you?
It’s one part inertia from the bestseller universe of Immortality and one part doing
everything I can possibly imagine to get attention drawn to my new book, the
sequel Ghost of the Gods. I am
maniacal and I will try almost anything as long as it seems plausible. If it
works I’ll keep doing it and if not then I’ll stop. I have great critical
reviews including STARRED reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and high praise from
Kirkus. I have some advertisements which are running but more to attract publishers
than readers. I have held the Kindle price of Immortality down to $0.99 and have a match book deal going where
you get the Kindle for free if you buy the paperback. I will not keep the price
this low for too much longer and plan to bring the Kindle price back up to
$2.99 in the near future. The same is true for Ghost of the Gods. The initial low introductory price will go up in
the near future.
What is one thing
you’d like to jump on the rooftop and scream about?
Hey, publisher!… Yes, you, there in that tall building…
Would you please buy my bestselling books! People love them and there is still
plenty of money to be made and I promise to feed you more books over the years
so you can make a lot more money. I just want to write. The money does not
matter to me. I only have so many years before I leave this world and I have
something like a million books I want to write, and every day I have to spend
publishing and running a business is a day that I am not writing. So lets dance
until the music stops… Shall we?
Okay, too much
sugar for you today! Here’s a nice cup
of Chamomile tea and come on over and sit under the cabana and watch the waves
roll in. Now…can you tell us what you
love about being a published author and how all those things above doesn’t
matter because it’s all part of the whole scheme of things and you wouldn’t
have it any other way?
I get to spend luxuriously long periods of time doing
nothing but writing. It’s like getting to eat dessert first every day. For me
writing and dreaming are one in the same. So I am literally getting paid to
dream. How can you beat that? Right now I am on a writer’s quest. Almost
everything I own is in storage or given away. I have simplified my life. I have
sold our home and so I am homeless. For many months I have been wandering up
and down the California coast
living in magical oceanfront vacation homes for a month at a time looking for
the best place to dream and write. I have been letting intuition lead me from
place to place. I find that my intuition is far more reliable than my left
brain in these decisions. This quest is exciting, creative, and beyond my
comfort zone. I feel I am in one sense homeless and in another sense at home. I
am uprooted... and this is all very good.... very creative. Pushing beyond my
comfort zone causes all sorts of emotions to bubble up to the surface and those
emotions are then infused into the written pages of my stories.
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