That's how novelist, journalist, blogger, and non-fiction writer Duane Swierczynski introduces his new anthology, Damn Near Dead--an anthology full of hardcore senior citizens. While our guest writer is pretty young, I predict he will be a hardboiled senior too--he's crammed four different writing careers inside one life already.
Welcome to the fourth installment of my interview with Swierczynski, part of my deceptively simple feature: Five Easy Questions.
In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a serialized set of weekly interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing...
Jason Boog:
Besides editing Damn Near Dead, you've also written an impressive list of non-fiction books. What's the difference between the non-fiction and fiction publishing process? Do you have any advice for a fledgling writer with a great non-fiction idea looking for a publisher?
Duane Swierczynski:
My non-fiction books came about in an odd way. The only nonfiction book that I sold in a "traditional" way was The Perfect Drink for Every Occasion, which was a failed magazine story idea that I turned around and worked up into a multi-page book pitch...
Which is how you're supposed to do it. Work up a great pitch, then sell it to a publisher.But the other books came about kind of randomly. Back in 2000, my agent, David Hale Smith, had an editor friend who was looking for someone to do an The Encyclopedia of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted. David thought of me, and introduced me to Gary. We hit it off. But after signing a deal to write the FBI book, Gary left the publishing company -- leaving that book in a kind of limbo for a while -- but then turned around and asked me what I knew about bank robberies.
That turned into my first published non-fiction book, This Here’s A Stick-Up. After that, Gary asked what I knew about con games. This turned into The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Frauds, Scams and Cons. I had blast writing them, and learned a ton that I'll be using in my crime novels for years to come.
Meanwhile, we sold the drink book to Quirk Books, based here in Philadelphia. That did well, so they offered me a sequel -- on beer. How could I refuse? And along the way, they asked if I'd help with another project they were developing, The Spy’s Guide: Office Espionage.
Before I knew it, I had six non-fiction books under my belt.
So I'm not sure I'm the best source of advice on this one, other than: make sure you find an editor who likes you. For my Perfect Drink pitch, though, I did work hard to give a feel for the resulting book, with sample pages and an enthusiastic pitch.
This was a hard sell--every publishing company and their grandmothers have a dozen drink books on the backlist already. But I lucked out because Quirk was a new publisher, with no backlist; hence, no dozen drink books on their backlist.
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