TPP Episode 3 with Cole Chase

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Mark: Hello and welcome to the Thriller Pitch Podcast, where you come for the pitch and stay for the story behind the story. I’m your host, Mark P.J. Nadon, and you are listening to episode three, the sponsor for this episode, still me. If you’re an author and you wanna sponsor a future episode, just head to markpjnadon.ca links in the show notes.

In my Novela cognitive breach, Homeland Security captures an AI architect who suspected of terrorism. When standard interrogation fails, they turn to the Genesis Project Technology Captain David Garner enters her dreams, uncovers a deadly conspiracy involving weaponized AI and a growing connection that could compromise everything.

Cognitive breach is a high stake psychological thriller where the truth hides deep in the battlefield of dreams. Today’s guest is Cole Chase, who [00:01:00] studied advanced commercial fiction at the University of Washington under Stephen King’s editor, the one who famously cut 500 pages from the stand. A former cybersecurity analyst certified and NSA Methods.

Cole brings real world tech savvy to his shadow fast action thriller series. A six book saga about a heavy metal band turn heist crew.

Mark: Cole, thank you. Thank you for being here. Welcome to the show.

Cole: Thanks. I’m glad to be here.

Mark: So we’re gonna get right into it today.

If you wanna pitch me your book.

Cole: I’m ready. I’m here to talk to you about Metal Spies. It’s an action thriller that kicks off a whole series, and one way you could wrap your mind around it is to think about the cast of Oceans 11 taking over a mission impossible movie. Quinn Richards is a con man, the son of a con man. He gets with his ex-army buddies and starts a heavy metal band that they call Shadow Fast.

Because he’s a [00:02:00] conman. Pretty soon it evolves into a heist crew because they find out they can travel to different locales, even other countries or states and do little scams and cons undercover as musicians. So even though they pull off these cons, he lives in a mansion he inherited from his father, and he’s not making enough for upkeep on the mansion.

So he keeps trying to get shadow fast into bigger and bigger scores. I. Well, when he tries that instead of getting into the big leagues, he gets played by the big leagues. And some corrupt politicians hire him for a job simply to entrap them. And shadow fast finds themselves blackmailed by these corrupt politicians, so they must obey.

The politicians have figured out is that there is a tech bro billionaire named Brody Bach, and he has been bribed to the tune of nine figures by actors from the states of Russia and China, and they can tell he’s about to launch a [00:03:00] technological attack on the United States, but they don’t know what it is.

So Shadow Fast has to find out what the attack is and when it is, or they face prison for life. So this kicks us off into a story full of car chases, double crosses, international intrigue, lots of set pieces, quirky characters that readers really love. And, it’s for you if you are a fan of action thrillers and especially if you like kind of team-based ones like.

The ones I’ve mentioned. You know, Oceans 11, Mission Impossible, A-Team. The Losers. If you remember the old movie Sneakers from 1992. It’s that kind of vibe. It’s part heist, thriller, part techno, thriller, and all fun. So you can rock out with your glock out in metal spies.

Mark: So what inspired you to write the book?

Cole: I actually got started, well, first of all, I’ve been a fan all my life of the kinds of things I just referred [00:04:00] to, but what really was the impetus is my daughter, she is a very, very good singer down in Hollywood and unusually for a female. She’s a heavy metal singer. So I was raised in a church culture where I wasn’t allowed to listen to heavy metal, and I was pretty much ignorant of it until I was almost 50.

My daughter Sarah was in all these metal bands and she basically just took me to metal school. And so, yeah, but you haven’t heard this and you haven’t heard this. And I, I found it was really fun and, I, I just kinda loved it. So one of the main characters in the series is an idealized and exaggerated version of my own daughter.

So that’s, that’s what the main impetus was.

Mark: That’s awesome. So Cold Hit, which is the one you were nice enough to, to give to me, is that book four in this series? Is that how the series works out?

Cole: Yeah, I, I wound up, there’s six books in the series now and [00:05:00] I released them as trilogies. So book four actually is the first book of the second trilogy.

Okay. You can read it if you haven’t read the first three. Um, but I probably the best experience is if you go start to finish, but works either way

Mark: And you have the history. Yeah. So I’m curious when you, when you’re writing an action thriller, how you balance that intense action with character development to make the audience kind of care about the action. I’ve found in some stories I get into, there’s like lots of action. The characters at risk, you know, might die all of a sudden, but I’m not, I don’t yet care if they do because as a reader I just don’t have a reason to yet.

Cole: Yes. Yeah. So there’s an evolution through the six books, right?

When I wrote the first trilogy, I had learned that the Tom Cruise, Christopher Mcquarrie Mission Impossibles, they would think up a bunch of set pieces [00:06:00] first and then try to string them together with a plot and I actually took that approach in the first trilogy ’cause I had been writing for corporations for years, and I just really wanted to break out and do something a lot more fun than an executive pep talk.

So the, those first three books were a total blast to write. I put the whole thing together and then looked at, said, okay, but what does this mean and what is going on with the characters? And I was actually a little surprised by what the themes turned out to be. As I mentioned that Quinn is the son of a conman, and what you learned through the course of the books is it doesn’t actually set well with him.

He grew up in it, but he doesn’t know if he wants to be a good guy, a bad guy. They try to have their own little shabby code of honor so that they only pick on, as they call it, assholes, rich people or rich assholes. You know? That’s their. So there [00:07:00] is character development and he has an arc figuring out, am I good?

Am I bad? Where do I wanna be? And then in the second trilogy, there’s actually considerable more character work, but it’s dropped in briefly. Like you, you don’t really get big scenes of people pondering the meaning of life or that kind of thing. It kind of arises from the action.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. I like that you, there was a lot of action.

I enjoyed, really enjoyed that book. And so what scene or moment was the hardest to write? Like creatively or emotionally?

Cole: Well, in the, in the first trilogy, none of it, it was just pure fun. I mentioned it was a nice break from all the corporate writing I’d been doing in the second trilogy the villains are billionaires who made most of their fortune off of privatized prisons, and they run them in a uniquely heartless way, and I wanted to [00:08:00] juxtapose that with scenes of an actual prisoner in one of their prisons and show the difference between how they pitch it to investors and what the real experience of being there is.

And that prison stuff was. Very hard for me to write ’cause as it turns out, I’ve never been to prison. Uh, so I usually, you know, write my books in the order that you read it, but that one, every time I got to one of the prison scenes, I, I didn’t know enough to make it seem real, and I knew what was supposed to happen in the scene, but I just kind of put a pin there and, and move on.

And finally at the end, I had to read several books by prisoners, watched YouTube channels by people who have been in prison and come out and try to straighten out their lives. And then I could go back and write prison action with things that authentically happened and not just some privileged tech worker sitting up here in Seattle guessing what happens in [00:09:00] prison.

So that Yeah, that’s fair. The hardest.

Mark: Yeah, I could see that. Any major rewrites, like did you find the scene or the plot had to change or something had to change. ’cause you just realize that, oh, if they went through this emotionally, they would be this kind of person instead of that.

Cole: Oh, oh. That has happened to me on other projects, not on this one.

So I was a book packager in the nineties, so I’ve been involved with a lot of books besides just the ones I write north of 70 books. So I kind of know how to mark out the territory without major disruption down the line.

Mark: Okay. So if you had to cut a character outta your series, who would you cut and why?

Cole: I kind of did actually when the. When Shadow Fast first starts, there’s only three people in it and then as you read the first series, it’s kind of the origin of the band. [00:10:00] They wind up in total with seven members. And I had one character that I included ’cause I felt like the genre kind of required that character.

And I found in my beta reads that female readers were not responding to this guy well. And I found that as an author, I usually kind of like all my characters, even the bad guys. I understand where they’re coming from and I didn’t even like this character. So in the second series one of my lead characters dies.

It was something I’ve never done before. It was actually kind of fun to do. Readers report, they’re pretty shocked to find out one of ’em never makes it through the second series. So I kind of did what you’re asking about.

Mark: Yeah. So is your daughter a beta reader? Is she as a rock band expert or a metal band expert?

Is she reading the books and, and giving feedback on the metal band stuff?

Cole: She has read some of them. This is not a genre, [00:11:00] that’s her jam. Okay. So a lot of times if I wonder about how something works, I just ask her. But also. I got to tag along with her for a lot of her band stuff. So that’s where, as far as the music stuff and what it looks like from the stage and what you go through, setting up beforehand, all that

i’ve been with her, I’ve been their band’s videographer, so I know that stuff. And you know, for anybody who cares about the heavy metal side of it, you get some insight into it what the gear is and what goes on during the show from the band’s perspective. So that, to me, it was all fun. I’m actually finding that for most thriller readers, they don’t care either way about the heavy metal out of it, but that’s fine.

It’s, it’s not, the main premise is just something that makes it a little distinct.

Mark: It does, it adds a level of realism because when I read it, I remember thinking like, yeah, this feels like authentic, even though I don’t know if it is. It had that feeling that it [00:12:00] was, which not all books do that. Same with the gaming in the beginning of Cold Hit in the gaming scene.

Cole: That was really, I, I don’t know of any other thriller that has a setting. Of an eSports tournament. So I don’t know either. No, that was a blast to write. And I actually got so into inventing the game that the eSports tournament is about, that again, the early readers were like, there’s so much of the, I had to really back off ’cause I was getting too big a kick out of it.

It wasn’t all forwarding the plot. So I trimmed it down as much as I could.

Mark: So how long did it take you to write?

Cole: Good question. So, well, six books. So the second trilogy took me about five months to write because I Wow, I, in some books on cliffhangers, so I didn’t wanna release one and then just leave people stuck for a year wondering what’ll happen and probably not wondering anymore, [00:13:00] just giving up.

So I, I wrote ’em all and then staged them so they could be released three or four weeks apart from each other. I don’t actually know how long it took me to write the first trilogy because I was still a full-time employee during a lot of it. So I just snuck it in on evenings and weekends whenever I could.

So that. That was probably more like a couple of years. So Wow. I like having it as a full-time job now because you can just sink your teeth into it and go, go, go. Yeah. I try to write 2000 words a day, which to some is a lot and to others is not much, but that’s what I can do. So

Mark: I would, yeah, I would be on the side of, that’s a lot myself.

Three books in five months. That’s impressive. That’s a lot of writing.

Cole: Well, it, it adds up to about 180,000 words all told. So, I mean, that’s one of Mark Greaney’s books, if you know him, he writes the, and [00:14:00] those books are about 160,000 and he puts out a couple a year, I think. I, I think that’s the pace that a lot of tra pub authors are going at now, so,

Mark: yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. I guess it depends on the size of the book too. So what kind of other research went into, went into these books.

Cole: Well, so my background is, I always wanted to be a novel writer, so I wound up with a career that went in a million directions. I mean, I’ve, I’ve built yachts, I’ve dispatched buses, I did all kinds of things.

But what really landed as an area for interest for me is around 2000 I got hired by a firewall company, a cybersecurity company, and they addressed their product was for small to medium businesses, and they found that if they had their own tech writers or engineers write the manuals, these small to medium businesses usually have someone [00:15:00] running the network who is just the person who forgot to step backwards when they asked for volunteers, they didn’t mean to have a career as an IT person. They’re just like wearing that hat. ’cause someone has to. So they wanted documentation that read more like a magazine style than a, a technical publication.

So I didn’t actually know anything about cybersecurity, but they really liked my style. So they took it upon themselves to train me. And over a couple of years I actually wound up a certified information system security professional. I got certified by the NSA and certain methodology. So I really knew hacking and the arms race between people defending a network and people trying to sneak onto your network.

So there’s a ton of research that’s already in my background about all the computer stuff. [00:16:00] And one of the things that happens early in Metal Spies is, a fleet of self-driving cars gets hacked and facial recognition software is installed so that it seems like a normal self-driving car fleet, like you might think of Waymo or some that actually exist, except that if, you know, every self-driving car has eight or nine cameras on it and some of ’em have lidar.

I mean, that’s how they know where they are. Mm-hmm. So they’ve been programmed with facial recognition software that if you see this one astrophysicist accelerate at her and basically they’re set up so if they see this one person, they become little murder cars. I love that. And that hack. Was really done at Defcon.

There were people that came and presented on how they could do it. It was in theory, no one was actually murdered, but they showed that it could be done. So all the technological stuff in the books, it comes short of science fiction. It’s things that are really [00:17:00] happening, things that I’ve become aware of from working in big data and cybersecurity for so long.

But that is where most of the research comes from.

Mark: I love that. That’s awesome. So is that is, do your characters also come from your like variety of backgrounds?

Cole: So I’m always trying to kind of freshen things up. So if you think about other ensemble thrillers, like maybe NCIS or so, the hacker, or even Mission Impossible, the hacker’s always this skinny, nerdy white guy with glasses.

But when I worked in big data, some of the smartest people were from all over and one of the guys I worked with was this huge Samoan dude who looks more like Jason Momoa than Simon Ted. And so I made him my hacker in my book. His name is Manny. which is short for Emmanuel, big Samoan dude, and very much inspired by someone [00:18:00] I knew in real life.

And the other characters are, are kind of similar. They’re pastiches of real people I met from my decades in IT.

Mark: To have that experience to draw on. So this, when they say, write what you know, I guess it helps when you’re, you have a, you had a job that cool to, to write what you know and then apply it to action thrillers. I love that.

Cole: Well, thanks. But it, you know, it, it flips the other way too, right? I, I have not been a cop or a soldier. So when it comes to other staples of the genre, like weaponry, like what kind of tactic would you use to clear a building of hostiles? I have to look up all that stuff. Yeah. It’s, it’s the technology stuff where I’m comfortable and I know what I’m doing is feasible and innovative. But car chase, I had to research a car chase just to see, okay, what does, what does a guy do when he really is counting on this car to save [00:19:00] his life? And what, and I was surprised to find out, oh, they turn off the ABS, they turn off the, you know, a, a bunch of stuff.

They want the car as analog as possible. It’s like, oh, okay. You know? That goes in the book. It’s interesting.

Mark: So who is your favorite character to write?

Cole: I have a couple. I certainly liked writing the one inspired by my daughter, but another one I’ve had a lot of fun with is character who winds up being called Night Boy and he’s called Night Boy in part there, there is a real syndrome that is rare but exists. It’s less than 1% of all humans have ever had. It’s called the Holmes-Adie syndrome.. It usually happens mostly to girls, but it does occasionally happen to males. And what it is, is your pupils are not connected properly, and so they just never contract.

Your pupils will always be at the widest [00:20:00] they can possibly be as if you’ve been in a dark room for 20 minutes or something. And it’s kind of a terrible way to live because all daylight is just overwhelming. If you have Holmes-Adie syndrome and you just go out, normally you would be blinded because the sun would burn through your retina and your cones and rods.

So Night Boy has Holmes-Adie syndrome. He has to wear heavy wraparound sunglasses all the time. But the flip side of that is that at night he basically has perpetual organic night vision sight. So he becomes a kind of a scout and a sneak that can do all kinds of things for the band because he can see in the dark and there is a set piece, especially in the second book, Metal Lies that was really fun to write where he has knife fights in the dark, in a industrial market in South Korea. Again, it’s just something I hadn’t seen someone [00:21:00] else do and it was, it was really fun to have a character who has that unique advantage.

Mark: That’s very cool. So in your research, is that something the people with that syndrome, are they able to see better in the dark or was that like a creative liberty you took for

Cole: the book? Oh, no, that’s, that’s true. I mean, you know, probably from your own experience, if you ever go stargazing, or even if you just sit in your own backyard in the dark some night after 20 minutes or so, you are seeing far better than when you first walked out of your lit house.

And yeah. Plopped down, you know, I mean, it, it is a real thing. If your pupils were completely widely exposed than what looks like night to everybody else would look like twilight to you. Mm-hmm. It’s real. Of course the downside is that all somebody has to do is turn around and shine a flashlight in his eyes and he’s completely disabled.

Yeah. So his kryptonite it’s like having a superpower in a way, but it’s, it’s only good for a [00:22:00] very limited circumstances. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. I love that. So a couple more questions for you as we wrap up here. What advice would you give to someone who just published their first or second book?

Cole: A couple things. What I, I mean, I’m, I’ve been in the publishing industry. I’ve done a lot of things, but as far as this pen name writing my own self-published thrillers, I’m not even quite two years in. And one of the things I was surprised to find is writing the book is the easiest part. You, you have to embrace marketing or nobody will ever find your book.

And it doesn’t matter if you hate marketing and you don’t wanna do it. It’s like saying, you know what? I gave birth to this baby, but I hate feeding babies, so I’m walking away. You’re just gonna kill it. So brace yourself. You’ve gotta figure out how to attract a following and keep them informed of what you’re doing.

And that usually the best thing you can do is start your own email list [00:23:00] because it’s the one thing nobody can turn off with a twist of an algorithm. Yeah. And I, if I can give two pieces of advice, even though I was only asked for one Sure. That next book, almost nobody can make it on one book or two books.

Keep going. Yeah. Because what starts to make money for you if, if you’re drive is to be commercially viable, is read through from one book to the next. So set a long-term goal for yourself and set your life up so that you can do it long-term. Uh, would be my advice.

Mark: That’s great advice. Thank you. And where can readers find your books?

Cole: Right now I’m exclusive to Amazon. They are in Kindle Unlimited, so if you’re a member there, you can read ’em all for free. Otherwise it’s on Amazon, both in ebook paperback, and the first three books are also in Audible.

Mark: Awesome. Thank you. Thank you [00:24:00] so much for joining me today. If you don’t mind sticking around for a couple minutes after the show, we’re just gonna record a couple extra questions for our newsletter subscribers, which is only available to them.

Cole: My pleasure. Thanks for talking with me.

Mark: Thank you.

Mark: Thanks for listening to the show. If you enjoyed this episode, you can support the show and get early access to future episodes on Patreon. Links are in the show notes and some guests are also sharing bonus content on our Patreon, like short stories behind the scenes extras novellas. So head over there, you get to support the show and get a bunch of goodies.

Don’t forget to check out my psychological thriller, cognitive breach if you’re into high stakes, dream invading tech conspiracies. If you like the show, please follow rate, share with a a Fiddler fan.

It really helps i’ll see you in the next episode where I sit down with author Faye Arcand, author of the domestic thriller Inside, Outside.

TPP Episode 2 with Jenna Moquin

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Mark: Hello and welcome to the Thriller Pitch Podcast, where you come for the pitch and stay for the story behind the story. I’m your host, Mark P.J. Nadon, and you’re listening to episode two. This episode is also sponsored by me. If you’re an author and wanna sponsor a future episode, just head to markpjnadon.ca links in the show notes.

My book, the Collective explores how far a parent would go to rescue their child. In a world where there’s no one left to help. When Aiden is taken by a religious cult, one that believes parents must sacrifice their kids to fight in an army or donate their organs to save others, his only hope for survival comes from within.

It is a post-apocalyptic thriller, the first in a trilogy, and it has vibes of the road meets the institute.

Today’s guest is Jenna [00:01:00] Moquin. She’s been writing dark fiction and poetry for years with work, appearing in various literary magazines and anthologies. After releasing a collection of short stories and editing a charity anthology, she made her thriller debut in 2024, publishing stocks in the cemetery spot, just six months apart.

Jenna’s stories explore the shadows between everyday life, and she’s currently working on her next twist filled tail.

Jenna. Hello. Thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the show.

Jenna: Thank you, Mark. Thanks for having me.

Mark: I am excited to get into this. Let’s just jump right into the pitch.

Jenna: Great. So the book I’m pitching today is The Cemetery Spot. It is a psychological thriller, came out a little under a year ago.

It features, two sisters April and August who have a very tumultuous relationship and one night April walks in on her sister on a surprise visit, and her sister [00:02:00] August has stabbed her abusive husband, Roy. Who’s lying on the kitchen floor with a knife sticking out of his back. April due to a debt she has from her sister, which is something that’s revealed about halfway through the story, she agrees to help her cover up the murder and bury the body in the woods. But unfortunately they make a lot of mistakes. First time covering up a murder, why wouldn’t you? And as the story unfolds and they start, they realize someone had watched them, and it becomes like a game of cat and mouse.

And throughout the story, April starts questioning, can I really trust my sister? Was she even really telling me the truth about that night?

Mark: Oh, I love that. Yeah,

Jenna: yeah,

Mark: Yeah, I do. I read, like maybe the first six chapters and I was really into it, so I’ll have to get to

Jenna: Oh, cool. I’ll have to get to the rest of the book.

Mark: I, oh,

Jenna: great.

Mark: Quick question comes to mind before we, we get into the whole, behind the story is, I, so I noticed that, Freida McFadden had, commented on, do you know Freida? Like how do you, how did that happen?

Jenna: I do, she’s an old [00:03:00] friend of mine. We met years ago at a writing group in Boston. I was actually an early beta reader for a lot of her self-published titles, like The Surrogate Mother and The Perfect Son, and she’s been such a great help and inspiration for me.

She gives me great writing advice, great publishing advice. She blurbed my very first debut thriller Stalks that came out in 2024. She has a little blurb on it saying she couldn’t put it down. Yeah, I saw that. So I’m very, yeah, I’m very grateful to her. She’s a wonderful woman. Oh, that’s very cool.

Mark: Awesome.

Jenna: Yeah.

Mark: So what inspired you to write this book?

Jenna: I had an idea playing around in my head for a little while. I wanted to write a domestic thriller, but not make it about a husband wife relationship because I feel like that’s very kind of overdone and I wanna do something different. So I thought a sister relationship might be kind of interesting for a domestic thriller.

And then I read this great book years ago called My Sister The Serial Killer by an African author named Oyinkan Braithwaite. I’m not sure if I’m pronouncing her name correctly, [00:04:00] but it was a great book and it was funny, it was suspenseful. And I said, I wanna write something like this. And that was a, that really inspired me to go on with this one.

Mark: And was there a moment in your life that kind of shaped, shaped the story or the characters or anything?

Jenna: Oh yeah, I helped my sister kill her husband years ago.

Mark: Oops. It’s out there now. Hopefully you made fewer mistakes, right?

Jenna: That’s funny. I think it’s mainly just my my own tumultuous relationship with my sister. If anyone who’s had like a same sex sibling, it goes up and down over the years, but you’re always there for each other, even when you wanna wring each other’s neck sometimes. And you love them. You have a relationship with your sibling like no one else in the world.

And I like exploring that in books.

Mark: Awesome. So like how did Exactly, exactly. Siblings, how did the I do, yeah. I have four sisters, yeah.

Jenna: Oh, nice.

Mark: Yeah. Very busy. Very busy household growing up. [00:05:00] Yeah. So how did the writing process go for this book? Was it just like you sat down and started writing the book and it all just kind of came to life?

Jenna: I actually decided to take this idea. I had playing around with two sisters and I put it in for Nanowrimo, and I think it was 2020 or 2021. I Do you, have you heard of Nanowrimo?

Mark: Yeah. Novel writing month, right?

Jenna: Oh, okay. Yeah. And so I decided to do it, and I didn’t win Nanowrimo that year. I only wrote about 25 to 30,000 words in the book, but I kept with it, and then I finished it officially, I think in 2022.

Mark: So did that, so did you have a plot going into n Nanowrimo because you, I. No. No. Okay, so you were pantsing so to

Jenna: speak? Yeah. Okay. Definitely.

Mark: Okay. And then that transitioned eventually to the novel that you have now?

Jenna: Yes, exactly. A couple of the books I’ve written, I definitely don’t know what I’m writing.

I just have like an idea or a vision that I start with and I [00:06:00] just throw it in there. And after I’ve got the first draft down and I’m starting to plot, that’s when I start plotting instead of pantsing. Start off, pantsing, eventually go to plotting.

Mark: Okay. So it was a bit, you start off a bit messy, so to speak, and then it gets a little bit structured as you go along.

Jenna: Yes, definitely. My first drafts were a hot mess.

Mark: And how much research did you do to write the book?

Jenna: I did some research, like I listened to a lot of true crime podcasts to talk about like what people do if, like, they’re trying to hide a body and the little, little things here and there. I read that book, My Sister the Serial Killer.

I also, what a, oh, I also read, a Chevy Stevens novel. Called, what’s the name of that? Oh, Still Missing. And that really inspired me too, ’cause that that’s a book about, without giving a spoiler, it has a very tumultuous family relationship in it that I took, I drew a lot from when I was doing this book.

Mark: Awesome. And was there any points where you almost wanted to give up on the [00:07:00] book?

Jenna: Yes it actually, Fred McFadden is the one, kept me, told me to keep going with it. She’s like, you got a really good story idea here. Don’t, don’t not finish this book. She’s like, you have to finish it.

Mark: That’s awesome. And where That’s awesome.

Where did, where in the story did that happen? I.

Jenna: I really just had like the basic first draft and I didn’t know how I wanted to end it. I had the, the opening part of the book, which she even told me too. She was like, the first half of this book is perfect, but you really need to fix the second half.

And I wasn’t sure how I wanted to end it. I had like three to four different endings in mind, and so I ran it by her and a couple other beta readers and got like feedback on what ending they thought would be best for the book.

Mark: And were the beta readers like contradictory? I know I’ve had beta readers that, you know, one will say, do this, and the other pretty much says the opposite. I know. Do the opposite thing.

Jenna: Oh, I know. The writing group I was in with Freida McFadden, I remember one time they workshopped a chapter and I, there were seven of us in the group. I got [00:08:00] seven different piece of advice on how to go with a story. So I feel that, yeah, that happens. You just gotta, yeah.

Mark: How do you choose? How do you choose whose advice to go with?

Jenna: I think I just go with my instinct. Like I’ll take all of their feedback with a grain of salt and I also kind of think about the type of books I like to read and how I would like it to end. So, and sometimes it isn’t always, it doesn’t always go with like. What I want it to be, whether or not it’s gonna be the type of ending that I think audiences will like.

So sometimes you have to do that. You have to weigh it out.

Mark: And you called this a psychological thriller. Is that mostly what you read?

Jenna: Mostly? Yeah. I also like horror.

Mark: Oh, nice. So how did you go about creating the characters?

Jenna: Well, April and August, they do…I definitely took a lot from me and my own sister.

There’s little pieces of each of us in both [00:09:00] characters. There’s a lot of crossover there. April is the main character and she’s the younger sister. I’m actually the older sister with my sister, but I kind of feel like I’m the younger one sometimes because she’s a lot more mature and responsible than I am.

And so that took a lot from that when I was going back and forth on the characters and how to develop ’em. I like to get inside character’s heads ’cause I feel like that really brings a lot of humanity in for a reader. Mm-hmm. When you get inside a character’s head and you really feel like you’re living the story through their eyes.

Yeah.

Mark: Did you ever stop to consider, I was thinking this when I was reading it, the beginning. Did you ever stop to consider if. Well, I haven’t read the whole thing, so this may be a spoiler, but if the husband should be a, like, would’ve been a good guy, how that would’ve impacted, like at any moment.

Jenna: Okay. Oh yeah, I’ve been, I played around with that a lot.

Okay.

Mark: I won’t make you give up spoilers ’cause who knows what happens in the end with, if there’s any twists or anything. But, yeah, that came to mind. I

Jenna: hope you [00:10:00] like it.

Mark: Oh, so far I’m right into it, so yeah, I definitely have to

Jenna: Oh, cool. Have to

Mark: finish it up. So did you, was there a character who was the most fun to write?

Jenna: Honestly, April, the main character was the most fun to write because I wanted to make her as human as possible. And human beings, we, we all make mistakes all the time. And so I kind of had fun making her a little bumbling throughout the story.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah. She was, yeah, it was good.

How do you go about creating side characters?

Jenna: Side characters I feel can be a little tough. And especially with a psychological thriller, you wanna put in as many red herrings as possible to throw the reader off their track. So I tend to have trouble with side characters because you don’t really develop them as much.

And so if they almost feel like ciphers to me sometimes, but they are very important.

Mark: Awesome. Is there any any characters you had a particularly hard time writing where you just couldn’t quite figure out who they were and you had to like do a bunch of redrafts?

Jenna: There kind of was, and [00:11:00] I don’t wanna spoil it for you, but there’s a character who shows up about halfway through the book that I had a little trouble writing, but the funny thing is, almost everyone who was a beta reader said that this character was their favorite character in the book.

Mark: Awesome. Isn’t that how it goes?

Jenna: Yeah, I know.

Mark: And were there any scenes that were difficult to write for you that you had a hard time either, you know, emo I guess you’d say emotionally or creatively?

Jenna: Yeah. Honestly, without giving away the ending, there’s actually a pivotal climactic scene at the ending between the sisters and another family members that was a little emotional for me to write.

Mark: Okayy. And was there, I know for me in the editing process, sometimes I, I’ll write a scene and it’ll hit me really emotionally, and then I’ll go back to edit the scene and I’m like, oh, it kind of fell flat that second time. Did you, did you have any moments like that happens that Yeah.

Jenna: Oh, [00:12:00] absolutely. That’s what, you know, multiple drafts are for, right? Yeah.

Mark: And how many drafts, what was the process like for this one? How many drafts did you have to go through? You mentioned like getting beta readers and what, what other, you know, who else touched the book? I guess you could say.

Jenna: Pretty much just beta readers.I did a rough draft for Nanowrimo and then sat on it for a little while, revisited it. I hadn’t really figured out the ending yet when I sent it to my beta readers, and then after I got their feedback on what ending should be, how I should do it, I sat on it for a little while longer. I feel like sometimes putting some distance between yourself and the story, you sometimes get even better ideas when you come back and look at it.

Mark: Yeah, for sure. Mm-hmm. Do you have any favorite places where you get ideas like. Nature trail walks or

Jenna: mm-hmm.

Mark: Or the shower. One of my favorite places is the shower. I don’t know why I can come up with so many ideas

Jenna: in the shower. I know the shower is great. I do like walks too. Walks are perfect. Like if you have some writer’s block taking a long walk and just getting outside for a [00:13:00] while.

’cause sometimes just open that up. It’s great. Yeah.

Mark: I used to have a friend that we played Frisbee with. I used to, we used to have like little writing sessions and we’d go out and play Frisbee in between writing sessions. That’s cool. Break. Cool. Yeah. And then we could kind of spitball ideas at the same time, which was nice.

Jenna: Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. You’re getting some exercise always helps. Yeah,

Mark: yeah, yeah, exactly. It’s kind of like breaking up the process, but at the same time giving you a chance to, like, in the back of your mind, you’re still kind of thinking about it. ’cause you, you know, you’re there for that.

Jenna: Exactly.

Mark: Anything you had to cut from the book, any scenes that people were, that maybe you liked and people were like, nah, it doesn’t really work.

Jenna: Yeah, I, I did have some scenes that I felt like were basically me kind of writing out my own relationship with my sister that had nothing to do with the story, and my friends were like, yeah, this is going in her head too much. You might wanna cut that. You know what they mean? That’s what they mean when they say kill your babies.

Right?

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Those tough scenes that you have. Yeah. Yeah. So it wasn’t essentially, it wasn’t moving the plot forward, right. [00:14:00]

Jenna: Right. Exactly. That’s the problem. I mean, if you find yourself, if the reader finds themselves bored, you gotta cut it.

Mark: Yeah. Is that kind of feedback sometimes you’re, that you’re getting from beta readers?

Like these moments were bored. I was bored.

Jenna: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do a lot of stream of consciousness writing and it doesn’t always work in thrillers.

Mark: Do you? Do people feel like it reads like a movie? I know some people when they read, they’re like, I feel like when I was reading this, it played it like a video, like a movie.

Jenna: I did have one reader tell me that I thought that was kind of cool. I have envisioned, envisioned this being a movie several times. I picture Julia Lewis and Melanie Linsky as the sisters.

Mark: That’s awesome. And so if you had to cut a chapter, because we know you already did, but if you had to cut one that’s actually in the chapter keeping in mind that obviously everything is in there for a reason, so hopefully there’s nothing you really wanna cut.

But let’s say there [00:15:00] was a, something you had to cut a character or a chapter, who would it be and why?

Jenna: I thought about this and I, I probably would have to cut just ’cause it’s not that necessary. There’s a scene in the book between April and August and the mom and the mom’s kind of punishing them for something.

It’s really not that necessary. I could probably cut the mom right out. It’s really in there for some character development, which is important too.

Mark: Right, right. And how do you balance that when you’re looking at, when you’re looking at your book, what is I. What’s slowing the plot, but what’s also building character and building scenes.

Because the funny, I mean, with thrillers, it’s like fast paced, right? Like that’s, but there also has to be a reason to want to care about the character, right? So you also have to fill in that stuff. How do you balance that?

Jenna: It is a tough balance and that’s something that I think a lot of thriller authors struggle with is where do I put the backstory?

Where do I put this so that they know this about the character? It’s really tough. I feel like with thrillers you might, you start with something that grabs the reader a hook or some, you [00:16:00] know, scene that’s like, oh my God, I can’t believe that happened. So they keep reading. Mm-hmm. And then I think it’s good to introduce backstory on the main character, somewhere between page 40 and 50.

I just feel like that’s a really sweet spot to start introducing some backstory or some background to what’s going on.

Mark: Okay. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That’s pretty far into the book. I wasn’t, okay. Have you ever had feedback that you, that like I look at the buildup was felt late, I guess.

Jenna: I have had that. I’m really bad with slow burns.

Like I, I like I’ll edge a lot until I get to the big payoff. And so that’s one of my big problems with finishing a book.

Mark: Okay. And that’s just in the editing process that you’re looking at kind of adjusting these things? Yeah. Okay. So , we’re just gonna kind of wrap up a little bit. I want to ask this kind of a selfish question.

What advice would you give to someone who just published like a first or second novel? [00:17:00]

Jenna: Start working on your next book. Seriously. The more books you have out there, the better. And honestly, the more books you have out there, the more income they start bringing in as well. So you finish your book, it’s time to start the next one.

Mark: Just go right to the next one. Okay.

Jenna: Yeah, exactly. Keep writing, especially while those juices are still flowing. Yeah, yeah,

Mark: yeah, yeah, for sure. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And do you believe in series versus trilogies versus, standalones?

Jenna: I do prefer standalones both reading them and writing them, but I know that they’re very popular with readers.

So I have thought about doing a series, nothing in the works.

Mark: Maybe We’ll, we’ll hear about that in the future.

Jenna: Well, the, my debut thriller thriller Stocks that came out in 2024, I have been working on a sequel for it. I’m just not sure if I wanna do a sequel or if I wanna revamp it as a standalone thriller.

’cause it could kind of work either way. Okay.

Mark: And where can listeners find your [00:18:00] books?

Jenna: So Cemetery Spot is is on Amazon. I have it on Kindle Unlimited, so it is exclusive to Amazon, for KU. But a lot of my other titles I’ve cross published on draft to digital, so they’re available on Kobo Hoopla, Barnes and Noble Apple Books.

It’s really just my two psychological thriller full novels that I have on Kindle Unlimited for now. Okay.

Mark: And you have a new one coming out, right? Soon?

Jenna: Yes. So Island is, um, a book I’ve been working on for a really long time and I’m releasing it in January. Are you familiar with the British 1970 Sci-fi series?

The Prisoner? I am not. Have you ever seen that? No. It, it’s a wild show. And I watched it years ago and I thought it was one of the most amazing things I’d ever seen. It’s very cerebral. It’s very twisty and it plays with your mind. And I wanted to write something kind of like it. It’s like a Alice in Wonderland type.

Someone who’s just like thrown into this. She doesn’t know where she is and her trying to [00:19:00] figure out what’s going on there.

Mark: I love those kind of stories.

Jenna: I guess it’s, it’s, oh yeah.

Mark: Yeah. I love those kind of like, almost like amnesia. It can be like, almost like amnesia. I mean, it’s not in that case, but like, you know, there’s just something going on.

What’s going on? You know why am I hear, I love that too. That little bit of reveal. Yeah. It’s a lot of fun. Mm-hmm. To kind of get into that little at a time.

Jenna: Oh, cool. I’m excited. I know I had a lot of fun writing it. In fact, I said to one of my friends, this book is my favorite book out of every book I’ve written.

So I’m really excited about that one. I also have another book coming out next May. I just signed with a British publisher called Baum Books. It’s called The Red Possession. This is a horror novel. I. It’s sort of like a modern day exorcist about a woman who’s battling menopause and a demon that’s trying to possess her at the same time.

Oh, wow.

Mark: Wow. That is quite a story. And that one’s written already. I guess they’re both written there. Yeah.

Jenna: Island’s, I still need to do a little bit of work on it and some editing. It’s basically done, but the Red Possession [00:20:00] is done. I’ve already signed the contract. It’s just not coming out till next year due to the publisher’s schedule.

Mm-hmm. Okay. And so that should be going over a pre-order probably soon. That one’s, that one’s a lot fun too, too.

Mark: Congratulations. That’s, yeah. Thank you. Thank you. So we are gonna wrap this up. I got a couple extra questions for you if you don’t mind sticking around after the show. Sure.

Couple follow up for our newsletter subscribers, kind of behind the scenes stuff, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate you taking the time. Is there anything else you wanna mention about your book question? Anything we didn’t get to?

Jenna: Let’s see if anyone wants to sign up for my newsletter, I am.

My website is jennamoquin.com. I’m also on TikTok Bluesky and Instagram. I have a substack. I’m just starting it out, so if you’re on Substack, I’m on that too. Thank you so much for having me. This was a lot of fun. Awesome.

Mark: Thank you. I will link to the, to all that in the show notes so people can find you easily.

Jenna: Great.

Thank you.

Thanks for listening to the show. If you enjoyed this episode, you can support the show and get early access to future [00:21:00] episodes on our Patreon links in the show notes. Some guests are also sharing bonus content in our Patreon, like short stories behind the scenes extras and novellas. So check it out over there.

If you’re into post apocalyptic stories about sacrifice, survival, and family, the collective might be for you. If you like the show, please follow, rate or share it with another Thriller fan. It really helps me out. I’ll see you in the next episode where I sit down with Cole Chase, author of the Shadow Fast Thrillers, and we talk about his book Metal Spies.

TPP Episode 0 Introduction with Mark P.J. Nadon

[00:00:00]

Hello and welcome to the Thriller Pitch Podcast, where you come for the pitch and stay for the story behind the story. I’m your host, Mark Nadon, and you are listening to episode one or Zero.

Since this is the introductory episode, I’m gonna be solo today. Because I want to talk a little bit about what you can expect from the podcast moving forward.

Kind of the format why I made it, and a little bit about me near the end, so if you love thrillers that are action packed, edge of your sea, keep you up late at night, high stakes stories, you have found the right place. So stick around.

So I started this podcast because I’ve been on both sides of the experience. I’ve been a reader who wants to devour books and find new thriller authors that I might really enjoy. And I’m an author trying to get [00:01:00] my books into the hands of readers without algorithms and ad spends and everything limiting the ability to get in front of people.

I think there’s a lot of great books out there and they are going unnoticed. So the podcast is my way to help thriller authors get noticed. It’s all about the pitch rather than the algorithms telling you who’s in the top 20 and who deserves to be seen and purchased.

So here’s how it works. Episodes are gonna drop weekly, they’re gonna be about 20 minutes long or so. We’re gonna start with a two minute pitch where the author is gonna talk, hook, genre, and heart of the story. Then we’re gonna get into the story behind the story. What scenes got cut?

What inspired the author to write the book? What were some of the most emotionally devastating moments to write, and what kind of research was involved in this book? All those stories that readers [00:02:00] love to know more about.

 As for me, I’m a former military reservist, ultra marathon runner, fitness coach, lover of dogs, and of course a thriller writer. I write stories in multiple sub genres of thrillers because I have always been fascinated by the darker side of, of the human experience.

I like to explore how people find resilience in some of the darkest moments of their lives, and a lot of my stories reflect that.

I’ve written books that are military thrillers to post-apocalyptic thrillers, fantasy thrillers, dystopian thrillers. I have been in the trenches of self-publishing. I know how difficult it is, and this podcast is one way for me to help authors break through all the noise and reach their audience directly.

Most episodes will be sponsored by authors. It’s one more way for me to connect Thriller [00:03:00] authors and readers, and if you are interested in being a sponsor for the show and sponsoring an episode, you can check that out at The Thriller Pitch Podcast – Mark P.J. Nadon. That’s the same place. If you’d like to be a guest of the show, you can put in your application to do so.

If you sign up for my newsletter, you’ll get behind the scenes author Insights. Uh, extra bonus questions, book recommendations, all things that I’m not sharing anywhere else.

You can sign up for my The Thriller Pitch Podcast – Mark P.J. Nadon  Links of course, will be in the show notes.

If you like the show, the best thing you can do is rate it and share it with a friend who you think might enjoy thrillers. We’re gonna grow this show. One great pitch after another.

Thanks for being here. I can’t wait to share these books with you.

If you’d like to follow me, you can do [00:04:00] so on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, all under my author name, but the Thriller Pitch Podcast is gonna be dropping content there.

You can also find my books at Amazon and pretty much everywhere and books are sold. Hope. Thank you and bye for now.

TPP Episode 1 with Andrew Warren

 [00:00:00]

Mark: Hello and welcome to the Thriller Pitch Podcast where you come for the pitch and stay for the story behind the story. I’m your host, Mark P.J. Nadon, and this is the very first episode of the show. Well Not the first interview I recorded, but the first one I’m releasing because I think it’s a great place to start.

This episode is sponsored by…me. I’m always open to author sponsorships because I wanna spotlight as many great books and pitches as I can. If you’re interested, visit my website, markpjnadon.ca my own book, The Genesis Project follows Blake, a former special forces soldier who’s recruited into a top secret government program using immersive virtual tech to treat post traumatic stress [00:01:00] with a goal of sending soldiers back into combat.

But when participants of the program murder a US Senator and another kills his wife, Blake starts asking questions. The answers don’t add up, and his search for the truth puts his own family in danger. It’s a military psychological thriller available on Amazon, and everywhere, books are sold.

Today’s guest is Andrew Warren, author of the International Bestselling Tokyo Black and the Thomas Caine thriller series. A lifelong fan of spy fiction, thanks to a childhood of viewing Goldfinger, Andrew writes thrillers about lone operatives, navigating the shadows, never sure who to trust. With a background in film and television, his books deliver cinematic action, exotic locations (You may want to visit Japan if it wasn’t on your list already), and heroes walking the razor’s edge between right and wrong.

Andrew, thank [00:02:00] you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

Andrew: Thank you for having me, man. I’m excited to, to meet you and chat about the book. Yeah, I’m very excited.

Mark: So let’s just get right into it. Give me the pitch for your book. The CIA

Andrew: betrayed him. Now, he’s their only hope to stop a war. Thomas Caine was the CIA’s deadliest killer until the agency betrayed him and left him for dead in the deserts of Afghanistan. Now he survives off the grid in Thailand’s criminal underworld.

But when a feud with a local gangster lands him in jail, his old CIA Masters return with an offer he can’t refuse. Rot in a hellish Thai prison or accept one last mission In Tokyo, Japan. Forced to hunt the neon lit city for a CIA assets runaway daughter Caine soon crosses paths with a sinister faction of the Yakuza crime syndicate and finds himself drawn into a terror plot that could ignite a devastating war between the US and China.

But Caine knows a double cross when he sees one. [00:03:00] He’s convinced someone in the CIA is manipulating him from behind the scenes. Trust is a luxury Caine can’t afford, and as he seeks redemption for his bloodstained past, he must decide who has earned his loyalty and who deserves his vengeance. Tokyo Black is a high octane, fast-paced, spy thriller, packed with gun battles, car chases, fascinating characters and international intrigue.

If you crave the thrills of a Mission Impossible or James Bond movie in book form, take a trip to Tokyo with betrayed assassin. Thomas Caine in Tokyo Black.

Mark: That’s awesome. I love that. Thank you.

Andrew: Oh, thanks man.

Mark: Very exciting. And it kicked off really strong.

Andrew: I had to turn the marketing brain up to 11 there.

Mark: Yeah, that was really good. And really solid start. I didn’t get to finish the story. Thank you so much for sending me a copy of it, and I didn’t get that. Oh, my pleasure. To quite finish it, but I think I’m far enough into it to ask questions without giving spoilers as we go along. So that’s probably the perfect dive in point

Anyway. So let’s get into what sparked the story. [00:04:00] What, where’d you get the idea from?

Andrew: You know, it’s one of those stories like. It’s like a classic author story where you’ll, you’ll hear and you’ll be like, there’s no way That’s true. That’s just something you made up for interviews. But I swear it’s true.

You know, I had always wanted to write a book for years and years and years. I, like many writers, I had tons of half finished, works on my hard drive and stuff. And, I was working at a job that I. Really didn’t particularly like, just wasn’t a good fit for me. And it wasn’t like a great point in my life.

Like I had gone through a divorce and I didn’t like this job and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. And, I had been to Japan in the past and really enjoyed it and I really wanted to go back, take another trip there. But for all kinds of reasons, I just couldn’t do it. Like, at that time, like between, work and money and schedule, it just wasn’t gonna work out.

And one night. I just woke up at like three or four in the morning and I just had this like bolt of inspiration that I could write a book set in Japan. That would be sort of a virtual vacation for me. And I’m like, okay, I can’t [00:05:00] go, but I can project myself there mentally. And that’s kind of my escape, from this job I don’t like and all this other stuff.

And it instantly like just started brainstorming and all these things kind of came to me in a flash, like, well, what kind of book would it be? I’m like, well, a spy thriller just seems like a natural fit, and I love spy throwers. I love reading them. And for a location like Tokyo, it seemed like that would work well and.

All these details, like the character’s name and the, the, the title of the book and the basic plot, like I kind of scribbled down these notes and 90% of the book I think came to me like that one night. This flash of inspiration. Of course those were broad strokes, but that’s where it all started. So I started writing it.

In the mornings before work, I would get up an hour early and, and write as many words as I could before I left. And I got, I got pretty far, but I’d say I got maybe like halfway through and then like lost a little bit of steam. And then a couple years later I was working at a job that I really did like, and things were good and I, I had a new, girlfriend and she was in my apartment and she [00:06:00] picked up the manuscript, it was like on my desk and started reading it one day.

And she got really into it and started asking all these questions like, well what, what’s this character really thinking and what’s, what’s gonna happen to this guy? And I was like, I, I don’t know. I have to finish it. And I think that sort of enthusiasm that she had and the fact that she was engaged enough to like ask about it, kind of lit the fire again.

And I worked, I worked, at that time, I worked freelance, so I would have gigs that lasted a certain amount of time and they would end. And I was in a very unique spot where the gig I was on, I knew was ending. And I knew I had another gig two or three months down the road, already booked and lined up.

So I had this gap and I didn’t have to worry about, ’cause the two jobs were booked. And I was like, all right, I’m gonna use that time and I’m gonna finish the book and I’m just gonna pretend that this is my job. And so I would get up at like 9:00 AM write, take lunch. Write. And through that chunk of time, I, I finished the first draft of the book.

And then of course, , it was my first novel, so I had to go through a few more revisions and, and drafts and things. But that was [00:07:00] kind of how it all started.

Mark: Awesome. So from start to finish, you’re looking at like three years or so,

Andrew: probably for the first one. Yes. And most of that isn’t writing.

Most of that is just me procrastinating, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, uh, you know, I think until it’s really, until you finish a book, like it’s kind of hard to know. It’s like, seems like this insurmountable mountain. Yeah. You can’t really see the end of it, and you just, it’s very easy to kind of lose your way or, or get disheartened now that I’ve done it, I if, if I’m having a rough day or if I can’t figure something out, I’m like, all right, just keep working at it, you know, you’ll get it, you know, and I can kind of see the light at the end of the tunnel. But back then, I, I, you know, I, I’d never done it. I didn’t know if I could do it, so it was a, it was like a huge.

Thing like looming over me, but those little like bursts of encouragement would go a long way, and, and keeping me go.

Mark: That’s awesome. Hey, three years is actually pretty good, I think. I think so. It took me like 30, 30 years.

Andrew: Yeah. Like every, I [00:08:00] mean, I mean, I say three years, but like I said, I’ve been trying to write books my whole life. So you could say it was 40 years. It just depends if you wanna look at it. But, I think almost everyone I’ve spoken to, like their first book is like that. It’s a very kind of choppy. Thing broken up over these chunks of time, yeah. And then you do your next one. Now you know you can do it and so you can kind of go through it, start to finish a little bit easier.

Mark: So is Tokyo Black the first book you finished from start to finish?

Andrew: Absolutely. Yeah. First novel I’d written, screenplays, which I also think helped, like that was another, I was a film major in college and so, once I left college, I’d written some screenplays and finishing those. Also, I think kind.

Pushed me further than I had been previously. You know, like I think just completing things is really important as a writer. It really, the more things you finish, the more you kind of learn and the more you improve and the better equipped you are to tackle the next project.

Mark: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. ’cause it took me, I think it took me like 10 years to write my first one, which will never see the light of day.

But more recently it takes me about like four [00:09:00] months. So yeah, exactly. That’s roughly what it takes you as you start doing it. Yeah.

Andrew: And I think, you know, I used to, I used to be really bummed about all those half finished projects, but now when I think about it, I’m like, well, I guess those were the practice I needed, to get to the point where I could finish one.

So, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And this book is traditionally published, right? It is now. I originally self-published it way back in the day, so around the time that I finished it, while I was writing, I really didn’t have know what I was gonna do. I hadn’t really decided like if I was going to, like, I don’t even know if I knew about self-publishing when I started it.

I certainly did before I finished it, but I hadn’t really decided what route I was going to take. And I worked in the entertainment industry and so at that point I had optioned a couple screenplays, which never got made, but I had optioned them and I had optioned some pitches for TV shows and things, none of which ever bore any fruit.

But I’d kind of been through that. Process and it’s a very long, frustrating process in its own way. And there’s lots of gatekeepers and lots of [00:10:00] dead ends and false starts. So by the time I finished the book, I kind of had decided that I didn’t want to go through that process again. You know, like, or at least not for this, I was like, I’m just gonna have this be a thing of my own.

Around that time, Barry Eisler had started self-publishing with Amazon for his rain books. And, he, I, I really liked him. He was one of my favorite authors. And so I was like, I’m gonna do that, and if nobody buys it, that’s fine. Like, I wasn’t really looking at it as a, a moneymaking venture. I was like, I’m just gonna put it out there and it’ll just be for me and that’ll be it.

And so. So I did it, and it did reasonably well. Not phenomenal. I couldn’t quit my job or anything, but it sold and people liked it. So I kept on writing. And the, the second or and third books were, were all pretty successful. And so I would always kind of drop in and out. Like I would work freelance for a little while and then I would stop and focus on writing for a little while and I’d go back and forth.

And then recently, like at the, around the end of last year, a publisher approached me, Boldwood Books. They’re a UK based publisher, but they also publish in the US and all over the world. [00:11:00] And they were starting a new division focused on thrillers and they had seen the books and were interested in them.

And so we had a bunch of phone calls, talked back and forth, and we struck a deal. So they bought my backlist and now they’re currently republishing it. And I just literally two days ago on my birthday, no less, I turned in the manuscript for the next like brand new book in the series. So they’re republishing the series all leading up to this new novel that’s coming out in November.

Mark: So what, how many have you, how many are they republishing? I think there’s like three out there, right? Is it three? Oh, there’s

Andrew: three now, but there’s going to be five. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Yeah. So the one that I, the new one I turned in will be book six. I’m contracted with them for several books after that. And the original series actually consisted of four novels and two novellas.

And the novellas were written at different points in time, but they actually were two parts of the same story. So we just combined those to [00:12:00] form one book now since we’re republishing everything, and it kind of made more sense to do it that way. Okay. So that’s the fifth book. So, so it’ll, it’ll be, they’re republishing one through five and then book six will be the brand new one in November.

And then there’s a couple more contracted after that that I haven’t even thought through yet. So we’ll get there.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Well, hey, if you’re lucky, you’ll just wake up and have that, you know.

Andrew: Yeah, exactly. Hopefully I know that just hopefully

Mark: it just hits you. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s an international bestseller, right? This, Tokyo Black, it was

Andrew: so, you know, Amazon, you can earn those bestseller tags like basically. Their algorithm is constantly changing, but I, I believe the way it used to work, and I think the way it still works, is you have to hit number one in one of your categories and hold it for a certain amount of time.

Amazon’s very secretive about their system. Yeah. I don’t know if anyone knows exactly how long it has to hold it, but Tokyo Black, earned that tag in, in multiple countries and held it for a couple days. So it was a international bestseller. So. [00:13:00]

Mark: Awesome. Congratulations.

Andrew: thank you.

Mark: That’s not easy to do.

Andrew: It was really exciting. I, I was blown away when that happened, so.

Mark: Yeah. So was there a moment in your life that shaped the book, like a feeling or a memory?

Andrew: Well, like I said, creatively, a big part of Tokyo Black specifically was. How much I loved visiting Japan. Like Japan made a huge impact on me when I went there and so much so that if you like, as you read the book and, and you’ve started, so you know, like the character in the book has been to Japan in the past and is coming back.

I did it that way on purpose because that was kind of my headspace and I was like, okay, I think this would be the easiest way for me to get inside this character. ’cause that’s how I feel I was there and I wanna go back. In my research, even just researching the book, I saw how certain things had changed and certain places I’d been were different, or the businesses had changed, or things had been torn down.

And so I wanted to kind of convey that sense of time, you know, [00:14:00] like he’d been there in the past. And then I also wanted to make it kind of an important place for him, where something happened to him that changed the course of his life, and now he’s going back there and his life is changing again, you know?

Mm-hmm. All of those things were kind of feelings that I had, but then taken and fictionalized, and put into a much more exciting, context than, than my life. But that was really where it stemmed from. And, and since writing that book, I’ve been back to Japan, you know, many times. And in fact, the new book that I turned in is also set in Japan, and it’s him going back to help some of the characters that he meets in this book.

And it again, is kind of like a reflection point of all the things that have happened to him since Tokyo Black. Because as you go through the series h is life definitely changes and goes through some ups and downs,

Mark: so. Yeah, that’s probably the best research project of we have in discuss Right.

When you, you travel for research.

Andrew: Yeah. I mean, I’ve been lucky. You know, I, I do tend to, when I travel, I kind of view where I am, like through the lens of, oh, like what would a book here be like, you know, what would I do at this location? [00:15:00] And of course there’s a few books that are set in places that no one would wanna visit.

Like South Sudan in the middle of a Civil War is not a place i I plan to go, or Siberia, is in one of the books. But I, I enjoy the research and I’d say the two things that I, I always try to do with all the books in the series that are most important to me is to, A, make them cinematic.

You know, like, I often call them action movies for the mind. ’cause I, I, there’s all different. Levels of realism and drama in, in spy fiction. And I definitely lean more towards the melodramatic, high octane thriller versus like a realistic John LeCarre kind of thriller, and then the other thing is I really want the locations to come alive because I wrote that first book as a virtual vacation for me.

That’s the experience I want to give the reader. Like, I want them to feel like they’ve gone on a trip to this place. And it’s, and it’s not necessarily about hitting them with a bunch of details, it’s more about, for me, it’s more about capturing the mood kind of, and the vibe and just [00:16:00] giving them that experience, and so those two things I really focus on for each book.

Mark: Awesome. Yeah, I really felt that when, when I was reading the book, I was like, man, oh, I

Andrew: appreciate that man. Yeah,

Mark: yeah. So like to talk about research, how did you do that? Like when I was reading your book and I’m looking at these places and the different, groups that were involved and, and all these names and things, I’m like, wow, that it’s just amazing what’s all in here.

I’m like, what’s happening? Sometimes I have, uh, ’cause my brain is always going a million miles an hour, so I have time, a hard time sometimes keeping track and it’s just like, wow. There’s just so much.

Andrew: Some of it. I mean, like I said, a lot of it were, were things I remembered from my time there. And of course I had pictures.

I went, I immediately went back and dug up all my pictures and, and I jotted down the impressions that I remembered of those places. And then Google, I mean, Google just researching online you can do so much, and, and also, I watched a lot of movies. Like I watched a lot of Yakuza movies and Japanese movies because I kind of wanted to.

Bring a little bit of that vibe to [00:17:00] it. I even played, quite a few video games set in Japan. There’s a video game series called Yakuza, which is all set like in, in, Kabuki-cho, but they, they fictionalize and call it something else. But, so I played those games quite a bit and just anything I could find to pull in.

In fact, I even, I don’t, I’m not sure how far you’ve gotten, but there’s a. A piece of software, like a virtual character that a another person uses to, to mask their identity. And that all that came from. One of the very first things I did was I just googled weird things about Japan. Like that was what I typed in.

’cause I was looking for just odd details. And the first thing I found was this thing called Hatsune Miku, who is a virtual. Performer, like, so essentially this company made this software that if you’re a, a songwriter and you don’t have a singer to perform your songs, you can write the song in this animated character with a, with a digitized voice performs the song that you write.

And this character became so popular that [00:18:00] now. It’s like this huge multimedia empire based around this virtual singer, and she does concerts. And so I like saw this video of this hologram, like she looks like an anime character, but then there’s actual real musicians around her on a stage like performing this concert.

And there’s people in the audience like waving these sticks and I was like that. That’s amazing. So like I worked that in, I, I tweaked it and changed it, but I was like, I gotta work that in, and just finding these things that interested me and just putting them into the book.

Mark: What about like the prison and how this, the CIA functioned and all of that?

Andrew: Oh, well, funny, the reason why I made the character like a betrayed. Assassin and he’s like, kind of on the outside just ’cause I don’t have a ton of experience with the CIA. A you know, a lot of writers in the genre either were in the military or, or, worked in intelligence and I don’t have that background.

So I was like, all right, I’m gonna make this character on the outside so that I don’t have to dive too far, into that world. Like I can just kind of skim the surface of that world. And then from there, I, [00:19:00] I did do research. I reached out to people, online and, and who, who did have backgrounds like that and kind of asked them general questions.

There’s an author named Matt Fulton, who is like a research guru who just does everything about the CIA. So like, I’ll always hit him up like, Hey, do you know, like what this guy’s office would look like? And he’ll be like, oh, and he’ll have like pictures and like videos that he sent. Like he just, he’s just totally immersed in that world.

He runs a podcast too about, spies and actual, like spies and, and intelligence operations. So stuff like that. So I just tried to, I tried to make sure that I wasn’t really. Focusing on the stuff I didn’t know, like I, I tried to focus on the st the world that I knew and the world I was most interested in, which for me was the, the international location and the action and, and the pacing and that kind of thing.

And then the stuff with the CIA, I just tried to be like, okay, what’s like the, what’s the minimum I need to include in the story to make it work? And I’ll, I’ll just try to keep that, a smaller part of the book.

Mark: Yeah. Okay. No, that’s awesome. How did you, how did you find those [00:20:00] people?

Andrew: Some of them, I, I had just read their books.

I, I love reading and especially once I decided to self-publish. Originally I was looking at a lot of authors, who were doing the same thing just to kind of see, okay, well how did they do it? Like, what do their covers look like? What do their blurbs look like? How do they format their books?

It was, it’s, it, the self-publishing world is kind of a big community that you can definitely dive in and meet people and ask help. There’s tons of Facebook groups about it. So that was one way. And then the rest, a lot of times, like if you’re talking to one person, they’ll be like, oh, you should hit up this guy about this particular fact.

Like he’s, he knows a lot about that stuff, and so like you kind of start building this web of contacts.

Mark: cool. So going back to character, how do you balance a character? ’cause you’re writing spy thrillers, which like you said is high octane. It’s moving fast. How do you balance, building like character and, and having people I care about the character versus being all plot driven.

Because I’ve noticed in, in [00:21:00] a lot of high action like books or movies, sometimes you don’t like a James Bond, you don’t really care about the character so much. It’s Right. It’s the high octane, the action that you’re in there for. Yeah. It’s the surroundings. Right.

Andrew: Well, it’s interesting, so bringing up James Bond, I’m a huge James Bond fan, like, I don’t know if you can see, there’s an Italian Goldfinger over my shoulder. And so, but not, I’m not just a fan of the movies, although I love the movies, but I’m also a fan of the books and, Ian Fleming’s writing. And so I would say I. Ian Fleming is probably one of the two or three writers that influenced my style the most.

’cause I read him very early. My dad was also a big Bond fan, and he had all the original books, like on our bookshelf when I was growing up. And as soon as I started liking the movies, I, I was like, oh, there’s books. And I started all the books and I, I’ve read them all, many times. So I absorbed his style, like very young elements of his style.

And I, so when I was planning this. There’s, there’s kind of a theory that Fleming, when he created James Bond, created like [00:22:00] the prototypical, like post World War II British hero, at that time, England’s position in the world was sort of uncertain. The US was on the rise and Europe was on the decline in terms of political impact.

So he created this very. Like prototypical British hero that could kind of, allow the country to live out its fantasies. At that time, like back in the fifties when he wrote those books, like a lot of people didn’t travel the world, people didn’t get to go into a casino. Like most people didn’t have those experiences, and so he was kind of.

Projecting the fantasy of his countrymen at that time and writing books like to satisfy those readers. So I, when I started Tokyo Black, when I was in my outlining and planning phase, I very consciously tried to put myself through the same process. And I was like, okay, like for the United States right now in this point of time, like what do I think is sort of the.

Prototypical type of hero, and to me, I think the US is more, I always think of us as kind of rebellious. We, we formed by breaking away [00:23:00] from another power. And so like maybe this character is kind of fighting against the, the CIA, even though he works with them and he’s a betrayed guy and it’s more about.

He feels a lot of guilt and uncertainty about what he’s doing. ‘Cause we’re a post-Watergate, post Iraq Nation, and we we’re not always sure that we believe in what our government is doing and what the right thing is. And so I just tried to go through a thought process like that in creating this character.

And then in writing the books, I think it’s really important to just make sure that no matter how outlandish and how crazy the action gets. The hero isn’t perfect. You know that he has flaws. And so for Caine, he has a lot of doubts, a lot of introspection. He sometimes thinks about things and is like, I’m not, this is the right thing.

I don’t know if I should be doing this. Is this the right way to go? Or, or, I shouldn’t be doing this. This is crazy. Why am I helping this person? I should cut loose and run. I try to include those thoughts in his thought process. Which I do think comes from Fleming. ’cause if you read the [00:24:00] original Bond books, the character’s a lot more introspective than the character in the movies is, like the character in the movie portrayed most of the time, maybe recently this changed, but most of the time portrayed as just uber confident.

Uber competent can do anything. But in the books he’s a little bit more, he has doubts, and he’s a little bit more of a human character. So I tried to just include little elements of that and kind of what I always compare it to is, so when I was growing up in the eighties. The two big action stars were Stephen Segal and Jean Claude Van Dam.

So my favorite was Van Dam, because if you watch a Segal movie, like he would never take a hit. Like he just goes through wipes the floor. Doesn’t even break a sweat. Whereas Van Dam would kind of get the crap beat outta him and then come back at the end and, and for a finale. So I think audiences root more for the character that has to struggle a little bit or, maybe everything doesn’t always work out or takes some hits, gets hurt a little bit, like to me that that helps bring the audience in a little.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, for sure. So did that come [00:25:00] as you were writing or did that come before, did plan it out?

Andrew: I mean, I, in terms of the thought process I was telling you about the character and what he would be, that came before the writing, but. I just always try to keep that in the back of my mind as I’m writing.

And a lot of it has just become internalized now. Like that’s his character, Caine is a very introspective character. His thoughts are part of the book. He’s sometimes, I, sometimes I portray him almost like he has these, like two sides. There’s this killer’s voice that’s always whispering in the back of his head that he can’t really decide if he should listen to or not.

He is not sure. Is that. Is that the better side of me, or is, or is that the bad side of me? And so those elements are, have just become woven into his character. So I don’t, I don’t necessarily like plot them out, but they’re just kind of there in my head when I’m writing him.

Okay. But the process of what kind of character will this be? Like, that was something I did before I, I wrote it out.

Mark: How much do you do of the outline versus just jumping in?

Andrew: It’s [00:26:00] changed as I’ve gone, so for Tokyo Black. I had a very, very detailed outline. Not, I mean, not as detailed as some, like for instance, I think like James Patterson’s outlines are like 20 pages long.

Like it definitely wasn’t like that. But I did have a scene by scene outline. It was maybe four or five pages, and it was extremely complete. I deviated from it. Quite a bit. I get at one point, I think I always say almost every character other than Caine in the outline died at some point. And I kept changing it, reversing it, and now most of them don’t die, but then as I went through the books, I would say I started to see okay, I’m writing these long outlines, but I’m, I’m. Kind of getting to this point, and then they all diverge quite wildly, so I started loosening up the outlining process a little bit. And I would say now I typically have maybe, maybe like the first act outline to that degree.

And then the rest I just write sort of general descriptions of what [00:27:00] happens, like a few paragraphs for act two, a few paragraphs for Act three. And I try to keep it a little bit looser because I think. For me now, I can get kinda lost in the outline and I kind of feel like it, that’s really putting off the work of the book at this point.

Yeah. So there’s certain things that I know I need to know, like I need to know, like why is the villain doing what they’re doing, and what is the villain’s plot? And if I have those key details filled in, I can feel out the rest of it.

Yeah, that makes sense. What about yourself? Are you, are you more of an outlier or more of a panther or.

Mark: I have also switched. I was pantsing. Mm-hmm. Well, I went back and forth. I went from an outliner, didn’t get very far right. I went to Pantsing and then have come back to outlining. But the same thing I have found when I write the characters or when I’m writing the outline, the characters take over and then when I actually write the book.

Like you said, it just, it goes right off the rails.

Andrew: Yeah.

Mark: So it’s like I didn’t know the character enough to have an outline, and then once I actually know the character well enough, [00:28:00] it, it changes everything

Andrew: as I, but the, the other thing I’ve found is a lot of the times the, you know, so for instance, like I’m on my sixth book writing Caine, so I know him quite well, but sometimes a background character will just.

Becomes something very different, you know, than what you imagine they would be. Mm-hmm. And that takes the story in a whole different direction. I remember on the second book the villain, I, I outlined the villain a certain way. And from the very first scene, he just was something totally different. You know, it just came out completely different.

I was like, oh, wow. Like, where’d this come from? And it, it utterly changed the book, you know, and, and for the better, I think. But like, a lot of times. You just can’t really foresee, the things that are gonna change the plot and change, like how things go. So,

Mark: yeah, no, absolutely. My characters always mess with my stories once I get to know them, it’s a good thing.

I think that’s where the, the best stuff comes from, you know? Yeah. It’s, it’s a lot of fun. I mean, I, I don’t mind it, I don’t mind ditching part of the outline, but that I just put less time into it now. Yeah. With still outlining, because Paning is, is [00:29:00] where. I would you, it’s easy to write like act one and then lose track.

It gets harder. Yeah. It gets where you’re supposed to go because I’m like, okay, you kind of write yourself into a hole. And I know some people are great at that, they don’t mind. But yeah, didn’t work for me. I need a little bit more guidance than did the straight pantsing so.

Andrew: Right on.

Mark: All right, well we’re gonna do some wrap. I can ask questions forever here. But we’re gonna wrap it up a little bit and, if you could give a piece of advice for someone who just published like book one or two, what would it be?  

Andrew: Wow. Okay. I think it’s, it, it’s really, I think it, I think the most important, well, it, it sort of depends like what your focus is.

But like, let’s say, I’ll, I’ll tackle this from the perspective of if you’re looking to make this either, either a full-time gig or like a significant side hustle where you know you want this to be like a business. I think the most important thing is to have a plan, because I talk to a lot of authors who, on [00:30:00] the, who are basically all they’re thinking about is the first book, you know, and getting it out there and, and they’re thinking that that book is gonna be enormously successful.

And the reality is that doesn’t often happen. Even, even the success that I had with my first book, I don’t think would be enough to build a, a career off of, so you have to. Plan, you, you have to like look at that as one brick, but also know you’ve gotta be planning other bricks.

So like, figure out, how can you turn this into a series or, or do you want a series if you wanna do standalones? Like how can you make all the standalones kind of fit together so that you could market them like, like kind of always have that marketing hat ready to put on so that you can build and build and build.

Because what I think what happens to a lot of writers that I talk to is they put out their first book. It doesn’t do like enormously well, like so well that they can, quit their job or something and then they get discouraged. And I, I kind of call that lottery thinking like, they’re like, oh, this book’s my lottery ticket, and it’s gonna [00:31:00] win and then I’m done.

And even for very successful authors, it just doesn’t usually work that way. It’s really more about building a body of work. So. Do you have a writing process? Like, can you, do you have time set aside whether you’re, if you’re working like another job, can you devote, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour a day to writing?

What will the books in this series be like, how can you keep this story going, and what other things can you do? What can marketing can you do, what do the covers in your genre look like? You know, if you’re self-publishing or if you’re. Plan on going traditional route, like what publishers would be a good fit for this material?

You know, I think a lot of authors just don’t think through all those details and they just put out the first book and then get discouraged. So I would say yeah, it’s great if your first book does well, but be planning, like, plan your next book and your book after that, and your book after that and, and look at it more like a business.

And don’t let temporary setbacks discourage you from moving forward.

Mark: That’s awesome. Thank you. Of course. What kind of time do you put into like marketing versus writing?

Andrew: When I was, when I was  [00:32:00] self-publishing, quite a bit. Well, I quite, to me it seems like quite a bit.

I’m sure there’s people who do more, but I would schedule, I would schedule time, basically I do like maybe an hour, two hours a a week. So like an hour on Monday and an hour on Friday, and I would like do like Facebook ads and Amazon ads, and I. Look at the ads, see how they’re doing.

Just make, do all that business stuff. You know, like, do I need to increase my bids? Should I launch more ads? Do I need to look at other platforms? Things like that. Also, I think building my newsletter, do I have a plan? What am I gonna send this this week? Am my newsletter, what am I doing to grow my newsletter?

Like, am I, am I signed up for group promos on book funnel or things like that? I think having a newsletter, actually, back to the question we were talking about before, I apologize. But having a newsletter is also a super important thing that a lot of authors, I think, kind of skip over or don’t realize how big a deal it is.

Because the reason I was able to launch my books as well is I did, is because I kind of plan in advance and had built up a newsletter of readers before the books came out, so I [00:33:00] had an audience already that I could. Blast. Like, Hey, the book one is out now, Hey, book two is out. So, I would say probably two, two to three hours a week I was spending.

Now that I’m with a publisher, I, they’re handling that, so I don’t do it as much, but I do find that that has freed me up to still use that time to pursue other kinds of marketing. So, for instance, talking to you or being on a podcast, that’s a kind of marketing . I would say now I kind of just focus more on marketing my brand versus like an individual book, like me as an author versus selling book one of this series.

Mark: Okay. Yeah. Cool. And where can readers find you? Oh,

Andrew: I’m at Andrew Warren books.com, or of course I’m on Amazon. A lot of readers don’t know this, but on Amazon, if there’s an author that you like, if you, go to their author page, you can follow them. There’s a little button that says Follow.

And then Amazon will, send you emails when they have new books coming out, or when they have books on sale, or if they have a pre-order, like, and that way they’ll, they’ll kind of send it right to you. So yeah, follow me on Amazon. [00:34:00] I’d be, I’d really appreciate it. And visit me at andrewwarrenbooks.com.

Mark: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on the show. If you don’t mind sticking around for, a couple of bonus questions at the end for, the newsletter subscribers. I just have a few extra for you. Yeah, happy to do it. All right, well, thank you. Thank you.

Thank you for listening to the show. If you enjoyed this episode, you can support the show and get early access to future episodes on Patreon, links in the show notes. Some guests are also sharing bonus content on our Patreon, like short stories, behind the scenes extras and more, so jump over there to get that content.

If you like the show, please follow, rate or share it with another Thriller fan. It really helps. I’ll see you in the next episode. I’m gonna be sitting down with Jenna Moquin, author of the Psychological Thriller, The Cemetery Spot