Dean Koontz, QUICKSILVER and THE BIG DARK SKY
[0:02]Hi, I'm Zivi Owens, the creator and host of the award-winning podcast that you're listening to right now.
[0:07]Thank you so much.
[0:08]Called moms don't have time to read books.
[0:10]It is a daily podcast 365 days a year and each day we talk to an author about all of the things related to their career,
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[0:34]and my children's book, Princess Chairman.
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[0:42]and that is what we're going to do.
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[0:58]Dean Coons is the author of Quicksilver and The Big Dark Sky, a novel.
[1:03]International best-selling author Dean Coons was only a senior in college when he wanted Atlantic
[1:08]Monthly Fiction Competition, and he has never stopped writing since.
[1:11]He is the author of Quicksilver, Elsewhere, the other Emily, devoted, and 79 New York Times best-sellers,
[1:19]14 of which were number one, including one doorway from heaven, from the corner of his eye,
[1:24]midnight cold fire, the bad place, hideaway, dragon tears, intensity, sole survivor,
[1:30]the husband, odd hours, relentless, and more.
[1:33]I wonder if he could name all of these books.
[1:34]I should have asked him that.
[1:35]He's been hailed by Rolling Stone as America's most popular suspense novelist,
[1:39]and his books have been published in 38 languages.
[1:42]I don't think I could name 38 languages, and have sold over 500 million copies worldwide.
[1:47]Born and raised in Pennsylvania, he now lives in Southern California with his wife,
[1:50]Gurda, their golden retriever, Elsa, and the enduring spirits of their golden's Trixie
[1:54]and Anna.
[1:55]Welcome, Dean.
[1:56]Thank you so much for coming on Momstone.
[1:58]Have time to read books to discuss Quicksilver, which is already out, and The Big Dark Sky,
[2:03]coming out in July.
[2:05]Well, thank you for having me there.
[2:07]Oh, it's my pleasure.
[2:08]We've sold like 350 million copies of your books, and that's the most insane amount of
[2:14]books I have ever heard of anybody selling.
[2:17]How do you sit down each time and then try to come up with something totally different
[2:23]and not feel overwhelmed by the success of the past?
[2:26]Or maybe I'm making this up, and you don't feel overwhelmed at all?
[2:29]Well, first of all, we say 500 million.
[2:32]Oh, so 500 million.
[2:34]Oh, my gosh.
[2:35]That's so wonderful.
[2:36]I wonder play this.
[2:37]Oh, that's okay.
[2:38]Might even say half a billion.
[2:40]That's crazy.
[2:42]But yeah, it's always a challenge when you sit down with it.
[2:46]You're always afraid you're not going to have anything to write at least initially.
[2:51]I usually have an idea in my head, and sometimes that's where I start with,
[2:55]and then another idea comes along in the day or two, and it captures me and I just have to write it.
[3:02]As the older I get, now that I'm 185, I find out that if it isn't something that seems
[3:11]almost impossible to pull off, then I'm not interested in it.
[3:15]It has to be more difficult, not less, and that's strange because when I was very young and
[3:22]starting out, I thought, oh, there's only so many tricks you have to learn,
[3:27]and once you've learned them, every book will get it easier.
[3:30]Well, I found that wasn't true.
[3:31]They get harder and harder, and it's more difficult to get the more fun it becomes to write them,
[3:38]because it's a challenge. It's always kind of inspirational to think you could go fall,
[3:44]fly it on the face, and make it get it yourself, and so therefore you're starting out to do that.
[3:53]I love that. Now, fiction is a way to just not make a fool of yourself.
[3:56]That's great. So Quicksilver starts with the backstory of Quinn Quicksilver,
[4:04]QQ to his friends or something like that, and he had been left on the road and then deposited
[4:11]in an orphanage, and we come back later in his life and find out what the scene had really looked
[4:16]like to the three men who found him, which was very interesting and not what I was expecting
[4:21]when they relived to that situation either. Tell me more about this book and what it really meant to
[4:27]you and what made it such a big challenge that got you very excited about it.
[4:32]Well, first of all, anytime you tell a book in a first-person voice, you have to create a unique
[4:38]voice for that character. Otherwise, why do it? I wanted Quinn Quicksilver to be very funny
[4:46]and very naive, and I've done that with war in a character named Autonomous, and I didn't want it
[4:52]to be so like Autonomous, you thought it was an Autonomous novel, so there was a challenge in that,
[4:59]but I also wanted it to be a novel about free will, and why the world is the way it is. Why evil
[5:08]exists and why the world could not exist as a free place if there was no evil. In other words,
[5:16]how do you explain to a reader who may be very upset with the world we're living in and
[5:22]for good reason? Why it is that way? And if it was not that way, if there wasn't evil, if there
[5:30]wasn't setbacks in our lives, we would be creatures without freedom because we would have no choice
[5:36]to make. We'd be robots, and how do you get that through and story and talk about that in a serious
[5:43]way without boring butt off everybody or offending anybody? And Quinn's story was a way to approach that
[5:51]with a lot of you, but also suspense, danger, and all those elements that make us want the
[5:57]term pages of the novel. But it started for me with just that image of a little baby in a
[6:05]bassinet sitting in the middle of the desert highway at early in the morning and found by three
[6:13]people on the way to work. And I didn't even know what the book was about when that hit you
[6:18]came in my head. But it was so irresistible that I had to do something with it. Wow. And then
[6:24]from there we move on to Montana for your next book, The Big Dark Sky. What was your flash of lightning
[6:31]for this book? I've long been fascinated with what Jung called synchronicities. Those coincidences
[6:39]in life that are so amazing, they seem to be more than coincidents. What Jung eventually came with
[6:46]came up with as a psychologist was that coincidences aren't precedences. Their lives are full of
[6:54]them. And we dismiss them as coincidences. And we dismiss them so much that we only recognize them
[7:01]when they're extreme. I mentioned a real, a number of real coincidences in the book.
[7:07]The one of which was a church in Oklahoma backing that I'm forgetting now whether it was a 50s
[7:13]or 60s, but they'd had choir practice for 15 years every Sunday night at the same hour.
[7:21]And no one had ever been late. And then this one Sunday, all 15 choir members were late for each
[7:29]for a different reason. One overslept, I don't know if it happened over slept. One of them got a
[7:36]migraine headache. One of them had a car breakdown. Nobody got there on time. The nearest
[7:42]anyone did was a woman who was about five minutes late. Two minutes after they should have
[7:48]all been there, the church blew up in a gas explosion. Now there's a coincidence that makes you
[7:54]stop and think. And I've been collecting these most of my life because I find them fascinated.
[8:00]And I always thought fascinating. And I always thought there is a novel in this. My first thought
[8:06]for decades was the novel would be the reverse of the bridge over San Luis Rey by Foreign
[8:12]Wilder in which he has a character try to explain why this bridge in the 1600s fails and these
[8:20]people fall to their death. What about these people? Why these people? And he means to find that
[8:27]there's meaning in this and why he ends up finding this. There is no meaning. I thought maybe
[8:32]be more interesting to say. Now that we understand quantum mechanics and that to really do not
[8:38]seem to be any coincidences in the world, quantum mechanics show you how intricate he integrated
[8:45]everything is. The butterfly effect is one thing that most people know. That's the idea that if the
[8:51]flock of butterflies stirs in the flight with its wings disturbs the air it affects the weather
[8:57]you Chicago. Maybe you live in the intestinal way. But also everything affects everything else
[9:04]in ways that are apparent mysterious and strange. So by the time I got to write this, I thought
[9:09]no it's more a book about how C.J. Young and his theories actually are supported by quantum mechanics.
[9:20]And there would be this whole cast of characters who seem to come together by coincidence.
[9:26]But when you get to the very end, it almost could not have worked out any other way.
[9:31]And it was the challenge right that because it was one of those books you could look like
[9:36]in dating. And I looked like a idiot many times. So would it ingest one more. It's always worth
[9:42]through this. Wow, very interesting. I'm going to look at all the coincidences in my life with a
[9:50]new eye at this point. You've been writing as you said for, well maybe not a hundred and eight
[9:55]or whatever you joked about, but for many years. And I'm curious as
[10:00]to the changes you've seen in the publishing industry and where we are now and then your decision
[10:04]to be published by an Amazon publishing company. Well, it has been a radical change in publishing.
[10:12]Many times, I think it's been publishers shooting themselves in the foot. They have done things.
[10:17]I can remember when I was hearing from my publisher that almost gleefully that they were going
[10:24]to destroy the mass market paperback business, because the price point was to about
[10:30]eight or ten dollars for a mass market profit on that was not as high as they wished.
[10:36]And they were going to shift everybody in the $16 trade paperbacks.
[10:41]In my first thought was, no, you're not going to get millions and millions, tens of
[10:46]minutes, people who are buying mass market to pay twice as much. You're not even going to get half
[10:52]to do that. And as a consequence, you're losing all of that display space used to go into
[10:59]supermarkets, drug stores, everybody went there because paperbacks, which were actual little
[11:05]posters that such you in that got you to do impulse buying and find new writers. It's not the same.
[11:12]So look at those little tiny postage stamp things on a screen as it is to see those real
[11:18]books and real outlets. But there was success in that. It pretty much destroyed the mass market
[11:24]retail industry in the hopes that it would lead to this more profitable trade paperback.
[11:31]So we went from 500 distributors of mass market paperbacks to five over a period of years.
[11:39]That really has hurt writers. It's hurt the publishing of business. It's harder to launch
[11:44]later now. And ebooks have made up for some of that, but only for maybe 20% of it. And unfortunately,
[11:54]now, all writers doing poker have to live with that. So I've also seen changes in which
[12:01]a lot of what's driven that publishers want to promote is what's chosen by book clubs, run by
[12:08]celebrities, or run by network television, or whatever. But there's a sameness in all of that
[12:16]that only appeals to a certain variety of readers, certain wage of creators. And it leaves
[12:23]out a lot of people who want something else. And I think that's had a negative effect. Yes,
[12:28]the writer is fortunate enough to get chosen and not do extremely well. But I once noted that
[12:34]if they're not chosen by that book club again, they don't have a subject generally speaking,
[12:40]then they have one more. And then that's it. That means the readers weren't that a number of the book
[12:47]or they would have stayed with that writer. You'll get a book. So as a consequence, these changes
[12:53]and a number of others have been profoundly effective on the business. And at one point,
[13:00]I was, I was at that point of age. I'm sure age had something to do with it. My publisher
[13:07]probably said, oh, well, what's he got in a bed? Or three month books, four more books, five more
[13:11]books. And as a consequence, I saw promotion publicity all that just disappeared. And I still
[13:20]owed a couple of books. So I said to my agents, I didn't have agents for 14 years. But then I got
[13:26]agents a few years ago. And I said to him, look, we've got to try something. Let me pay back
[13:34]that my publisher for the two books I haven't delivered yet. And let's go out there and see what
[13:40]interest there is and what another publisher might do to promote. So we went out and we got eight or nine
[13:50]offers. Most of them, all but one of them is from traditional American publishers. And there
[13:57]was, there were offers as good as the one that came in from Amazon. They were so all over the
[14:02]lot. But one thing that mattered to me was what is your marketing plan? Some of the US publishers
[14:10]didn't even bother to give a marketing plan. The biggest other marketing plan was two pages.
[14:16]When Amazon's offer came in, which was as good as a couple of others that were at the top,
[14:23]it came with a 30-some page market plan. And it was a brilliant marketing plan. I looked at that,
[14:29]and I said, okay, now here's the downside. Amazon sales are not having for best sellers,
[14:37]even though Amazon sells 60% of all books sold in the country. So they're not going to be at best
[14:42]sellers anymore. But what's more important, we get into this to communicate, to reach out to people.
[14:49]I never got into it thinking it would become as big as it did. And as a consequence, I said,
[14:56]I want to reach as many people as I can reach and it looks like Amazon, Thomas, and Mercer,
[15:01]would be much better with doing that. And they have been. So it was eye-opening. It was very
[15:08]strange to a lot of people that I've stepped out of that. But Amazon, Thomas, and Mercer,
[15:13]are doing very well-produced books. Their hardcover books are better made than the hardcover
[15:20]books that were being made by my former publisher. They're prettier. They have decorative end
[15:27]papers. They do little design for part breaks. They have designs on boards of the books.
[15:34]That all went away in New York publishing a long time ago. So as a book collector, I'm having
[15:40]as a writer. And it's kind of strange to be at this point in my career. But I'm so glad I found this
[15:47]safe harbor. Very interesting. So I have a memoir coming out. And it is, I did go with Amazon myself,
[15:55]Little A, which is a fiction and memoir imprint of Amazon publishing. And it's been a very interesting
[16:01]conversation, especially with the bookstores. Because it's not just the bestseller list, but some
[16:06]indie bookstores also don't want to carry Amazon publishing books. Which I keep saying to the owners
[16:11]is just shooting themselves in the foot. Because if someone comes into buy my book, you're not
[16:15]going to have it. And then they're going to go buy it from Amazon. So why don't they just carry it?
[16:21]There's a hatred of Amazon sometimes in the business that's irrational. I understand it because
[16:27]they came out of nowhere essentially from most thinking and became dominant in book business.
[16:34]But if you're in the book business, it seems to me, you want to stop and think, why? Why did that happen?
[16:41]It wouldn't happen if we were competing in the right way. But there isn't a lot of self-analysis
[16:49]I'm afraid. And I have a lot of friends in the independent book business. Because I sold a lot of
[16:55]books through that. And I find it sad, but understandable. They feel the deal with the competitor.
[17:03]But I've even known some of them would handle Barnes & Noble book that Barnes & Noble published,
[17:09]even though it's a competitor. But they wouldn't handle it that much. But some do. We have a number
[17:15]of independents that carry my books. And everything changes. And I had to make that change
[17:22]or watch my career, which had been more successful than I have been acting. Just be sort of
[17:29]winnowed away. And beyond my control. And I didn't like that. It was working as hard as ever.
[17:35]And I believed in what I was doing. So I needed to be somewhere that they shared that
[17:41]sentiment. And I found in that team that Thomas and Mercer, the most creative, efficient,
[17:48]enthusiastic group of people I could have hoped to have found. And it makes a difference when
[17:53]you're with people who think what you're doing matters to them. And they want to get it out there.
[17:58]And it's not simple. You have to, as a writer, try to find that place. A lot of writers are too
[18:03]afraid to do it. Because they think there'll be no going back. And maybe there isn't. I don't know
[18:09]if this fails. I might be personally not brought up in most publishing. But that's very sad because
[18:17]with other publishers and with especially a lot of bookstores, we have a lot of success together.
[18:22]We still could have added these with change. But I can't change. I have more than I could do
[18:29]by just writing my books. Interesting. Well, I've also started my own publishing company,
[18:34]which we have books coming out starting in January. And it was sort of based on the premise of
[18:40]changing things up from the way things had been done before. And marketing is a huge, a huge,
[18:46]I mean, if not the biggest thing aside from uniting authors together that we're doing,
[18:51]because of the way it's been done historically. So if you were going to start your own firm right now,
[18:56]what would you do to make a difference? Well, I've got to have to start my own firm in 185.
[19:03]There's things if I had been younger, I thought about doing this. But right now, it has to do
[19:12]with marketing. It has to do with understanding the audience. I think this is the biggest thing
[19:18]I would do. One thing that I learned over the years, and it's not saying this
[19:26]to make angry anyone in your publishing, but there is a complete, nearly complete lack of
[19:34]understanding who the audience is. They publish for a wedge of the audience, and they publish a
[19:43]lot of things with a kind of contempt. And they shouldn't do that because that, and lately,
[19:50]they don't even publish for that audience very much. They've narrowed it, narrowed it, and narrowed it.
[19:56]And as a consequence, where they used to, even if, with-
[20:00]the certain contempt published for 90% of the public.
[20:05]I think they now published for 35% of the public.
[20:08]And yeah, and you can't do that.
[20:11]You can't be classes about it.
[20:13]You can't have contempt for other tastes.
[20:16]And I'm not even talking political right now.
[20:19]I'm just talking other tastes.
[20:21]But that I've noticed over the years is a big deal
[20:25]in publishing.
[20:26]So I think the thing that the successful publisher
[20:29]has to look at is who is that audience?
[20:32]And you know, I never had until very late my career
[20:37]could never persuade a publisher to do marketing research
[20:41]to find out who did my books.
[20:43]For many years, my publishers told me 80% of my readership
[20:48]was male.
[20:50]I knew that wasn't true because it's two things.
[20:53]We were getting thousands of letters
[20:55]a year from readers and about 60% of them were from women.
[21:00]When I went to book signing, 60% to 70% of the people
[21:04]who would stand in line for five hours
[21:06]to get their books on it were women.
[21:09]And I could never make my publishers focus on that
[21:13]in marketing and publicity because it was their idea
[21:17]of what I would only men read or largely read.
[21:22]So without understanding bigger markets,
[21:26]and then having certain contempt for it
[21:29]so that you win out of down publishing to those aspects.
[21:33]I don't know how you go on business.
[21:35]So if I were starting it, that would be what I want to do
[21:38]is what am I publishing?
[21:40]Who are the readers for this?
[21:42]And I don't care what jobs they have,
[21:46]what political opinions they have.
[21:48]I don't care anything about them,
[21:50]except whether they like to read.
[21:52]And let's make sure we give it to them.
[21:54]And that doesn't mean writing down to the audience
[21:58]because I found that by my nail and everything,
[22:01]I was also not the people who don't know it at you,
[22:03]but I was also thought that my vocabulary was too big.
[22:08]My ideas were to complex in my stories to get a mass audience.
[22:13]Well, we got one at anybody because the public is smarter,
[22:17]more aware and more interested in challenging stories
[22:22]than is often thought.
[22:24]And diminishing them, they know it.
[22:28]When they're sold stuff that diminishes,
[22:31]they buy it in fewer numbers that diminishes them.
[22:35]And I think we've seen that what's happened
[22:37]in book sales group from my lifetime.
[22:39]Very interesting, truly, truly interesting.
[22:42]Thank you for that.
[22:43]I know that wasn't what you were prepared to necessarily
[22:45]talk about by that.
[22:47]I'm interested.
[22:48]So I appreciate it.
[22:50]So what is your next book?
[22:51]And how long does it take you to write each of these books?
[22:55]Well, now I work at my desk 60, 70 hours a week.
[22:59]So yet, I'm almost doing double duty care.
[23:03]Sometimes even longer at the end of the book,
[23:06]I've got a couple of books in inventory
[23:09]that I think are not the best things
[23:11]I've done when I was called The House of the End of the World,
[23:14]which is very scary, but very emotional
[23:18]and deals with loss and grief
[23:21]and how do you overcome that?
[23:23]But it's also a page starter
[23:25]because that is necessarily a thing.
[23:28]And I just delivered a book called After Death,
[23:32]which is a pretty daunting title.
[23:35]We'll see if I can publish it once to stay on that.
[23:38]And I had great fun writing that.
[23:41]It was quite a challenge.
[23:43]I don't want to say what it's about,
[23:44]but it's about something people have been anticipating
[23:48]for 30 years going to happen.
[23:50]And there's great hope about what it will mean.
[23:53]And I've been thinking about it for the 30 years.
[23:56]I'm thought it isn't going to be anything like
[23:58]what those who are dreaming of it think,
[24:01]what is it going to be like?
[24:03]And that's sort of what this book is about.
[24:05]And again, it's a highly emotional personal book
[24:09]with a lot of action in that.
[24:11]And now I've got two books in work
[24:14]and I never do that,
[24:16]but I've been gravitating back and forth
[24:18]because I don't know which I like the most.
[24:21]And I think I've pretty much decided which one to go with.
[24:24]So I've never been here.
[24:25]I've got the big dark sky,
[24:27]the house of the world after death,
[24:29]three books in the end of the right.
[24:31]I've never had more than one in the end of the right.
[24:34]And the reason for that is I'm dealing with people
[24:38]who are so enthusiastic and creative
[24:41]in the publishing company that inspires you
[24:45]and it gets you to want to write more and better.
[24:47]And that's all you can help work.
[24:50]Wow, that's wonderful.
[24:51]So what do you do when you're not writing?
[24:55]Sleep, I drink a good red wine.
[24:58]So I can sleep, I read at spend time with my wife
[25:03]and my dog and friends.
[25:05]We're not travelers, I don't have a lot of hobbies anymore.
[25:10]I collect books, I used to collect a lot of antiques
[25:14]and the antiques sculptures, art, background, items.
[25:18]I don't have any books, but any more of them.
[25:20]So I've sort of stopped collecting.
[25:23]So it's, you know, we just relax.
[25:27]I find the order I get more time
[25:29]that's important as time with friends or time with my wife
[25:32]and my dog and just being able to have a little time
[25:36]to breathe.
[25:37]So that's as good as it gets.
[25:39]Amazing.
[25:41]Well, thank you so much.
[25:42]This has been really interesting.
[25:44]I really respect all your opinions a lot
[25:46]and you have such a unique vantage point on the industry.
[25:48]And I'm really grateful you shared it with me.
[25:51]And thank you.
[25:53]And I'm excited for all your books.
[25:54]Very cool.
[25:55]Well, good luck with your enterprise.
[25:57]I have a good works for me.
[25:59]Thank you.
[26:00]We'll see.
[26:02]All right, take care.
[26:03]Take care.
[26:04]Bye-bye.
[26:06]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time
[26:08]to Read Books.
[26:09]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zebi Owens
[26:12]and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[26:14]Also sign up for my newsletter at zebiowens.com
[26:17]and sign up for my virtual book club
[26:19]and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[26:21]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan,
[26:23]at Tech's True Sound for the Sound Editing.
[26:25]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[26:27]for providing this fantastic intro and outroom music.