HARVEY HAVEL
https://www.linkedin.com/in/harveyhavel/
Q: Please tell me about yourself – what kind of a person you are, your beliefs, your nature, your follies, anything.
A: I consider myself a hard-working writer who hasn’t found much commercial success as of yet. I do believe in writing regularly to deliver the best possible literature to my readers at the lowest possible cost. I take writing very seriously, and I do find it difficult most of the time, but as they say, “if the writer doesn’t suffer, the reader will.” I think I’m a little too obsessed with working on my books, but after thirty years of doing it, it’s no surprise that I don’t know how to do much of anything else. Basically, I consider myself a good egg socially. I have never been married and don’t have any children, which now feels odd, but a writer’s life doesn’t afford for that kind of thing, at least not at this stage. I still have hopes and dreams, though. Perhaps these are the only things that keep me working.
Q: Tell me about your writing journey, when and how did it all start?
A: When I was roughly 19 years old, a friend of mine from college, his name Jason Morfoot, told me about an eclectic and passionate group of artists who wrote a lot poetry and literary fiction, smoked a lot of pot and dropped acid, and traveled around the country together in a neon-painted bus. The story fascinated me. He was talking about the Beat Generation of Writers – Jack Kerouac. Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Neil Cassidy, etc. So, I thought that that was the kind of life I wanted. Of course, another factor involved not knowing at all what to do with my life after college. Most of my friends in college were Economics majors. I had no real intention of working on Wall Street. I thought writing would be a good fit, because I had always enjoyed reading and writing. Ever since that time, I have been passionate about it, and it has continued to hold my interest.
Q: Tell me about all the difficulties faced in getting a publisher to publish your book.
A: Getting published is notoriously difficult. It is very hard to sell a book, and publishers, no matter what great qualities a book has, always need to make their money back on their investment. That’s the bottom line, and unfortunately, it is this type of thinking that rules the book market. Money comes first and the quality of the writing second. Actually, here in the US, that bottom line rules all markets to a nauseating degree. While I was published by a traditional house at one point, most of my books have been self-published, which, for me, is a much better option. I have full editorial control over what I write, and I get all of the royalties. The problem? How does a self-published author sell his books? A daunting question that I haven’t figured out yet. But if you’re looking to make a living off of writing books, whether these books are traditionally published or self-published, a career in writing is probably not for you. But if you are willing to bleed, sweat, and shed many tears, you automatically qualify. But to get back to the question, I no longer place much hope in getting my titles traditionally published. More than most industries, when it comes to writing, who you know and not what you know, even at advanced stages in one’s career, is what matters most, more so in the literary profession than most others. The odds are forever stacked against a new author unless he has literary contacts.
Q: Do you believe that marketing is essential for the success of a book?
A: Marketing is absolutely essential, but it is also very expensive. The key is to know how much one can afford and what marketing tools work. That alone can take lifetimes. But without marketing and promotion, books cannot be sold, because no one will ever find them in the vast sea of the billions of other books out there. If one thinks about it, every year there are roughly 20,000 titles offered by traditional publishing houses and 1 million titles that are self-published. The only way to get anyone to notice a title is by marketing it. The corporate publishers have a huge advantage in that they are able to hire full time marketers and promoters who are constantly making contacts and who are well-connected with media to market the books they are required to sell. Interestingly enough, though, self-published authors usually have to shell out their own money for marketing and promotion, so self-published books are a market that the corporate publishers won’t ever get. But again, even with the best marketing possible, selling books is a risky business. Just to bring a title to the surface will take marketing and promotion. Marketing and promoting a book will usually cost more than producing the book itself.
Q: What marketing ideas did you deploy for marketing your book?
A: I usually use a combination of email marketing, Facebook advertising, and sites such as Bookbaby, Freebooksy, and LibraryThing to give away free copies of my books to those who are willing to write reviews for them. I also have a large database of readers who have been interested in my books over the years.
Q: Do you interact with your readers? What do they say about your book?
A: I love interacting with my readers, and generally, they have very positive things to say about my work. I try to give them free copies of my books all the time, if they’ll accept them, but I generally get a thumb’s up from most of the readers I come into contact with.
Q: What suggestions would you like to offer potential authors?
A: A lot of it comes down to money, unfortunately – how much you have and how much you can afford living as a writer without earning anything from it. It is a tremendous sacrifice. But a writer in poverty, while a romantic trope, really can’t go very far unless he gets struck by lightning. Better to get a job or a career and write on the side than to put all of one’s eggs in one’s basket and hope for the best. I don’t recommend this. Although it is always possible that an author has an immediate best-selling book on his hands, in my experience, only a handful of authors get the fame and fortune they initially dream of an deserve. Being an author takes years of work, and I don’t even have a clue how to succeed in this business yet. Either do most other authors. I would look at a career in writing with skepticism, unless, of course, you are willing to take the plunge. If you do, God be with you and brace yourself.
----------------------------------------
Harvey Havel has been a short-story writer and novelist for over thirty years. His first novel, Noble McCloud, A Novel, about a young, struggling musician was published in November of 1999. He now has nineteen books which include novels, short stories, and two collections of essays on current affairs and political matters. His latest book is a serialized novel, The Queen of Intelligence: A 9/11 Novel, has just been released through Kindle Vella on Amazon.com in 2021.