May
24
Steven Savile has been riding high in the Amazon.co.uk Top 20 for months with his thriller Silver. It’s sold in huge quantities and I was drawn to it because it’s a conspiracy thriller, rather like my own Catch Your Death, but in a different vein. Think Dan Brown on steroids. It starts with a young woman setting herself on fire in Trafalguar Square – then it really gets hot! Steven doesn’t do much publicity so I was delighted that he agreed to answer some questions. Read on to find out about his long, twisty writing career, what he did (and didn’t do) to propel Silver up the charts, and what’s next in the series.
You have an interesting past as a writer – can you tell me more about that?
Oh goodness me, what a big question to start off with. Okay, basically I started out writing quite young, like most people, but didn’t get serious about it until my early 20s, in which case I was reliant upon friends and family putting up with my ‘madness’. My first sale came 19 years ago this month, actually, to Exuberance, a magazine in the UK. Paid fifty quid for a story ‘Coming For to Carry You Home’ as in Swing low, sweet chariot. It was a horror story, but with a hokey faux Stephen King style homely voice. I remember it getting a brilliantly awful review, something along the lines of take a dollop of Clive Barker, add in a soupcon of Stephen King, a dash of Graham Masterton and spice with a little Richard Laymon and you’ve got the recipe for Steve Savile’s story… brutal but quite true. Starting out it’s so hard to find your own voice and just be the best YOU you can be.
I then sold like wildfire, but you’d never believe it to see what actually appeared. I sold a novel to a publisher in the UK that never came out because of the paper price hike and the whole rainforest deforestation thing. I sold 4 stories, including a serialised 50,000 word story to Frighteners and Fear, our two big newsstand magazines. The day the first one, In Darkness, We Sleep, was due to appear the parent company Newsfield International went bust, so somewhere there was a warehouse with thirty thousand copies of my big break mouldering away…
Then I wrote a novel, Laughing Boy’s Shadow, which was bought by Tanjen, a small press in the UK that had bookstore distribution, who went bust before it came out. I sold it to Gargadillo in the US, who went bust before it came out. I sold it to Indigo in the US who went bust before it came out. I sold it to Dark Tales as a follow up to Secret Life of Colours, who went bust before it came out. I sold it Aleph in Sweden, making it’s first print appearance actually not in the English language. Subsequently I self-published 250 copies of it via my website and sold out in 2 weeks. That was back in 2001/2, so pretty much a decade ago. I recently sold it as a gorgeous limited edition hardcover/paperback in the US with Horror World, run by the fabulous Nanci Kalanta, who read the manuscript, cried, and two years later when she was setting up her small press asked me if she could do it. It’s probably my most treasured possession. I love what she did with it. This month I retitled it Outcasts and put it up on the kindle in the UK/US at a bargain 99c/70p because it’s a book I really do love and it feels like the little story that could…
During lots of ups and downs I made friends with a tremendously talented writer, Steve Bowkett, who happened to make note that his publishers, Hendersons, were looking for writers to work on a teen horror line. So I phoned up the editor on his recommendation, we chatted and she said ‘Ah, you sound fab, but we’re full on the horror… do you think you could write a pre-teen romance?’ so… I obviously said ‘I can do that!’ and was greeted by ‘great, we need the outline on our desks by 5pm tomorrow because we’re commissioning now.’
I took the then girlfriend and all of her friends out for a beer or three and asked them a gazillion questions about what they thought was ‘hot romance’ when they were 11-12 and came up with a pitch. Delivered it via fax from the local post office at 4:55 the next day and got a phone call at 5:30 saying ‘this is brilliant. We love love love it… but it’s too much like Steve Bowkett’s story, can you give us another idea for tomorrow morning?’ so I did… and they loved it. But the series was dropped before the books came out. However, it established a good working relationship with the editor, who then hired me to write a kid’s guide to the internet in 1995 (pre-explorer/netscape stuff) that never came out, and then hired me to write my first two published books, a kid’s adaptation of Return of the Jedi and a Jurassic Park II: Lost World data file. So in 1997 I was all set to be a kids writer.
The big change in fortune came around 2001 when I won the Writers of the Future award for Bury my Heart at the Garrick, a fantasy version of the last week of Houdini’s life.
That led to this. I’ve worked in lots of different franchises now, things like Dr Who, Stargate, Primeval, Torchwood, Warhammer, Slaine, all things I either loved as a kid, or came to love as an adult… and on the side continued to write my original stuff, culminating in Silver, which came out in hardcover last year, and Immortal, which is due any day now…
What medium do you prefer writing for?
Well, I’ve done all sorts, including writing the story for the new Battlefield game, but I’m a book guy. I love books. I love the total immersion they offer.
Do you write full-time or do you have a day job?
I went full-time in 2006 right around the time Inheritance, my first Warhammer novel came out. It’s not been an easy ride, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’ve had the usual slew of not particularly interesting jobs, including double-glazing salesman, burglar alarm salesman, investment officer for Northern Rock, Disability officer for the Benefits Agency, and obviously the coolest job, working for the Ministry of Defense for a couple of years out of university…
You have a long-time collaborator in Steven Lockley. How does having a writing partner help you?
Steve and I are more like long-time friends – we have known each other since the early 90s. We first collaborated on something, Freeze Frame, back in 1998-99. It hasn’t been published, but mainly because it’s the first 15,000 words of a 40,000 word cycle of stories. We’ve done half of the second story, and may well get our backsides into gear and finish it and the final third story in the next year or so and see what happens from there. We’ve done a series of supernatural mysteries, kicking off with Of Time and Dust, and Missing, with Deadlines to come. There are about 12-15 stories imagined for Sally, the main character. We have fun with her. Aside from that we’ve outlined a few novels, done quite a lot of ‘creation’ stuff. It’s great having someone to bounce ideas off, and Steve and I work well together. He is great for laying the groundwork and will send me 500 rough words that I’ll turn into 1000 finished words. And whatever we end up with is different from what either of us would do alone. That’s what is important.
Silver is a big seller. How did you go about promoting it?
I didn’t really. I’ve only just updated my website (http://www.stevensavile.com) for the first time in 8 months. It was 17 months before that for the previous update. I’ve added a newsletter function and a blog and am trying to be much more conscious of connecting with readers than I have been before. With Silver the only real piece of ‘cleverness’ in terms of the UK ebook was that I wrote a self-contained story featuring Noah Larkin, one of the characters, and offered it for free – all people had to do was email in to get it. I had a few hundred people do just that. Then once I was ready to do the UK ebook I sent a single email to these guys and said ‘you might like to know…’ it was just enough to break the top 100 thrillers… but the success came from the book itself and word of mouth and all those good old fashioned things writers have no control over. I just wrote what I think/hope was a good book.
Of course, when it first came out in the US I did the blog tours and signings and such, but that effort seemed to have minimal effect, so I work on the logic that the best promotion for your book is another book… and keep on writing.
Who is your writing hero?
I have several. Clive Barker was the man who made me want to write. Jonathan Carroll opened my eyes in another way to the magic of the every day and how stories could and should be a mosaic, all little things interlacing in some unexpected way… TM Wright’s Manhattan Ghost Story never left me. Brilliant. Douglas Coupland’s Generation X and Microserfs are the stories of my generation and every new Coupland is an ‘event’ in the Savile house. I drop everything to go sit in the cafe and read and just enjoy his new books. Nick Hornby is another one. These guys know people. People are what make stories work.
Can you tell us something about Gold, the follow-up to Silver?
Hmm, well, the first thing is that if folks sign up to that bright shiny new newsletter feature on my website they’ll get to see snippets and secrets as it builds. I’m hoping to deliver it to my editor in the US in October. It’ll turn everything you think you know about what’s going on in Silver on its head. People who say ‘this is no Dan Brown’ are quite right… but they don’t know just how right yet… we meet Solomon in the first 50 pages of Gold (which run concurrently to the end of Silver) and in those 50 pages have a major AHA! moment in which it all comes clear… If Silver was an ‘attack on faith’ Gold is an attack on the thing we all worship over all else… inspiration for it comes from the last video that Osama bin Laden broadcast, urging the faithful to rise up and attack the nodes of economy because the US is a paper tiger… and that’s all I’m saying.
What words of advice do you have for anyone considering self-publishing their novel on Amazon?
Right now we’re looking at a fairly level playing field, I think. For once you have a chance of finding an audience for your work without being dependent upon the old structures. While Amazon are playing nice you want to look at establishing some shelf-space. You need to be professional about it though. Think of yourself as a brand. I know it’s a dirty word for creatives, but if you look at my website, you look at the blog, the newsletter, the book covers, there’s a very definite visual theme running through all of this stuff, so you can look and go ‘ah that’s by the guy who did Silver…’ it creates brand identity and faith in that brand. If you enjoyed Silver the odds are you’ll enjoy Immortal, and Outcasts… that’s what the visuals are saying.
Think long and hard about pricing. I went low. A lot of colleagues claim that by doing so I devalued my brand – but it was a deliberate move. I priced it in impulse price territory where even if you don’t like it you’re unlikely to feel that you wasted your 70p. I make 21p a copy sold. On my latest paperback in the UK I make about 50p a copy sold… so I need to sell 2-1 on the ebooks basically to bring home the same income. I could price it at 1.49 and bring in a quid, doubling the royalty on normal paperback, but right now people in the UK are still new to the kindle and are shopping for bargains. The sweet point on prices will rise, I’m fairly sure, but today, low=attractive.
