Troy Lambert is a serial Thriller writer. With 30 novels under his belt and many more edited by him, Troy knows what makes a story work. Today he and I talk about how he got into writing, how he learned the ropes around writing and how he has kept his career going for so long.
Find more about Troy Lamber at TroyLambertWrites.com
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TRANSCRIPT STARTS HERE:
Kat
Okay. Welcome back, everyone. Today I am with Troy Lambert as the author, not as the Plottr ambassador. So, hi, Troy. How are you doing?
Troy
Fantastic. How are you doing?
Kat
Good. I’m excited to talk to you today because you wear two different hats. We’ve had you on two different times, but this time we get to see your face, not the Plottr logo. So you are Troy Lambert, mystery and thriller author, correct?
Troy
Correct. Yes, among other things. But we’ll stick with that for now.
Kat
We’ll stick with that one right now. We won’t ask your wife. What she’ll add to that? So tell us a little bit about how you got into writing.
Troy
I’m one of those people that always wanted to be a writer. Like, I wrote books. I wrote my first book when I was like, six, when I was like, 14. In high school, I told all my high school counselors and everybody that I wanted to be a writer. And they all, because they were very smart, told me that that was an impossible dream, that there was nothing that wasn’t. They’re like, you write good stories, you’re creative, but you need to find a way to make money. That’s a whole road we could go down. But anyway, so essentially, I tell people I wasted, I believe them. And so I went out and tried to find various careers. I went to college for various different things, and 30 years later, at the end of a string of hair nets and name tags and various careers, I basically went, I should probably figure out this writing thing because otherwise I’m not sure what I’m going to do with the rest of my life. I wasn’t always a great employee because doing things I was told rather than something creative didn’t really work well for me, and neither did that work for my employers, although there are a few exceptions to that. And I had actually had some great experiences that helped me in my writing later. But all of that to be said, that’s how I got into it. Well, when I decided that it was around the 2009 time period, and indie publishing was becoming a thing that was a little less dirty, we’ll just say it was like before that, if you self published, you were the pariah. But, I mean, at that point, Mark Coker started Smashwords. KDP was on the rise, so people were realizing there is another path to publication other than traditional publishing. And there were a lot of small presses at that time that emerged kind of taking advantage of kind of a digital first type publishing model and that type of trend. So it was a good time for me to make that decision. Obviously, there have been a few changes since I started doing that. The industry is unfortunately just a little well, unfortunately or fortunately, it depends on how you look at your business and the business of publishing. So I immediately went to the default mode because I’d had all those jobs. The one thing that they taught me was I had certain amount of business skills and business savvy because I had to go through all those jobs. So when I approached writing, it was very much from not only a passion standpoint, but an economic standpoint. Like, how can I sell books and make this work?
Kat
Was it to quit the job? Can I do this?
Troy
Yeah, the biggest thing was basically to not have a day job, if at all possible, which for the most part since then, I’ve not really had a day job. Like I’ve had a couple of part-time things or whatever that I did temporarily, but for the most part my day job has been writing.
Kat
Wait, did you quit before you became published?
Troy
No, there was a transition.
Kat
Because a lot of people will wait, right? They’ll straddle that.
Troy
I straddled for a while. But part of that was I was working a day job where basically my job was to write. Now, there were other aspects of that job, but one of my jobs was to write because I got involved in the museum world, basically. And we were in northern Idaho and we had the EPA approach us and they were like, we have all these mine sites that we need to survey and we need tons of information from them. And the museum where I worked at had tons of the historical records from those mine sites and I knew where the rest of those records were because part of my background is even when I was a kid, I’m a researcher, right? You give me a topic and I get a hold of it like a bulldog with a bone, and I’m not letting you go until I get the answer right. Which is good for a mystery writer.
Kat
Yeah, I was just going to say.
Troy
Sometimes it could be very distracting, but for the most part it’s a good thing, right? And so what I discovered was I was like, we have all this information, I know how to write. And so there’s probably a way we can leverage this for the museum and for me. So I wrote a job description for a head of the research department and what was called a museum operations specialist for the museum. Oddly, it lined up almost identically with my own resume. Really strange how that worked, basically. Then I basically moved into that role. And what it taught me, the beauty of working freelance or doing journalism or things like that for writer is, first of all, you’re going to learn to write tight and to a deadline, okay? You’re going to have word count, but you’re going to have deadlines I mean, and the deadlines are hard deadlines. You miss the deadline, you don’t get paid, right? So for many of us, that’s a great motive. And technically, even if you’re writing fiction yourself, if you don’t finish the book, you don’t get paid. So it teaches you that mentality. It also taught me that my words were actually worth money. Like your tax dollars were paying me to write words. That was pretty cool. But I also found that writing was a skill because many times as writers, people think of this as like, this is a hobby or this is a passion thing or whatever the case may be. But I found that my writing was actually a skill. And there were people that were around me that had master’s degrees and 4 million letters after their name, right? But they couldn’t write. They couldn’t have written one of those reports. I could have given them all the same information. I had all the same tools, everything else. And they couldn’t have written those reports, but I could. And so it taught me that that skill was unique and that I could make money doing that. And so for me, that was the biggest lesson out of that whole thing. So that mentality and that inspiration enabled me to shift from working for someone to thinking about working for myself and how I can leverage this for myself.
Kat
That’s really great. I mean, I look at a lot of writers and we all have to sort of have our own journey, right? But if you haven’t been out in the world and done that deadline thing and the figuring out something for your boss thing, that’s kind of going to be a bit detrimental when you’re all alone in your office or wherever you write and no one’s there to say anything except for you. I find it a struggle for a lot of people. So even like young people who ask me, like, no, I’m just going to try to do it now. Like whatever entrepreneurial thing they do, I’m almost like, but you should probably do it at the same time because it’s just skills that you’ll find. I was talking to one the other day, a writer. It’s funny because you almost feel more productive when you are working two jobs because your brain is working on two different levels. Whereas you wake up as a full-time writer and you feel like you have the whole day until it’s 08:00 at night and you’re like, wait a minute, what happened to the day? So these are really valuable skills of learning the deadline, learning to write tightly, right, learning to research within a certain amount of time, all within your day job. And then I’m sure you wanted to go home and write. Your brain is just constantly active instead of sort of like, I got all the time in the world.
Troy
And also the other thing is that let’s say you come. Out of your writing program. Let’s say you went to college for writing, which most of the time for people is a terrible idea.
Kat
You’ve got lots of rules in your head.
Troy
It’s not even necessarily the rules. The reason is they teach you to write beautiful prose, but they tell you nothing about the publishing industry and how to actually make this work or a story. Walk out into the real world and you’re like, okay, what now? Like, what next? Right? There’s nothing. You have no background. The other thing is that you learn a lot by just being with people that are smarter than you. There’s just an incredible value to that. It’s really difficult to explain because that person is going to have some nugget that maybe inspires your story, but maybe if nothing else, gives you a business idea that says, hey, this is something that you should do, right? So coming out and just being going straight into the entrepreneurship part of things is first of all, super challenging in today’s market because you need some background, you need some information, and people constantly underestimate the amount of education it takes to be a writer full time. What I mean by that is going back to that doesn’t mean you need a college degree, but what it means is you need to be immersed and constantly working on your craft and improving the craft of writing because you’re never going to master it. You’re forever going to write horrible first drafts. They might not be as horrible as you go forward, but they’re still going to be bad first drafts. But there is so much more to it. Regardless of your path of publication, whether it’s traditional, whether you do self publishing, whether you’re like me and you do some kind of hybrid type thing, whatever the case may be, you still have to have a very thorough understanding and knowledge of the publishing industry, and it’s constantly changing. So you have to keep up. There’s not an alternative. You know what I mean? You need to be constantly educating yourself. That means conferences. That means hanging out with people in mastermind groups that are your peers or above, preferably. There is a place for you to mentor younger writers, and that is like this year I’m the president of Idaho Writers Guild. I’m giving back to the community, mentoring other writers, mentoring other people, and helping run an organization that helps them, right? So you’re thinking as you’re teaching, but I also need those groups that are my peers and above that challenge me and say, hey, this is what you’re doing, but this is how you could go to the next level because there’s always the next level. Always next level.
Kat
Yeah. You never want to be the smartest person in the room all the time. And I am smartest in that you know the most about that one topic, teaching, of course reiterates, one of my writers the other day asked me a question, and I said, that’s a very good question. Let me go figure that out. But I want to go back to you said skill a couple of minutes ago, and I think that what some writers miss, especially if it has been a passion since they were a kid, and they do have a talent for storytelling, for seeing stories in the world and in their minds. I’ve come across quite a few, especially young writers, who don’t think they need anything other than their talent. And I always try to very gently say, yes, you do. So you’ve said skill quite a bit, and you said that you have to be honing your craft. So what does that mean to you? And for when you’re working with writers?
Troy
So I usually use the analogy of sports or like some kind of a game, right? You can have an innate talent. Let’s say I have an innate talent for basketball, right? But if I don’t ever go practice the fundamentals, if I always just have a talent for it, I might be an okay player on the playground, but I’m never going to make it to the NBA. You know what I mean? Because I’m never going to learn those fine skills because you can see the difference. Go and watch your local high school basketball game, then go and watch a professional basketball game. The other night, my wife and I went and saw our local hockey team here, right? Which is they’re very good in their league, but they have missed passes that, you know, if it was NHL, somebody would score because somebody missed that pass. But it doesn’t happen in the lower leagues because that missed pass is okay, right? So as a writer, what happens is there’s a progression that you have craftwise and business knowledge, right? Where you go from being a hobbyist and an amateur to kind of a proam. You’re kind of in the middle. You’re making a little money off your writing. You’re not making a living off of it yet. And some of the reason for that has to do with that honing your craft, that fact of understanding that each story has a trajectory and has a path, that there are reader expectations and that you need to basically your reader is your customer in some ways, and you need to reach that readers and meet their expectations. So at the end of the book, they’re satisfied. But as a writer, it’s about more than that, because today, for you to gather a bunch of readers, you also need a relationship and an emotional connection with those readers. So you’re never going to get that from an AI-generated book, for example, to bring up the elephant in the room that everybody’s talking about that. There’s like two major announcements about today.
Kat
Everyone’s freaking out about it.
Troy
Everybody’s freaking out about that. But the couple of things that AI cannot do is first of all, intent is the number one. Like you sit down to write a story, you have intent, right? The AI has no intent. It does what you tell it to do. The second thing is it’s putting words in certain orders logically, based on what it has learned. It’s not doing them emotionally. And when you ask it for a twist, the twist doesn’t always make sense. Why? Because the AI doesn’t understand story the way you should understand story, right? So the ability to create that special twist at the end of your book that really hooks your reader and it also changes them emotionally is a skill that you must learn. And the longer you do this, the more proficient you become at that skill, provided that you are actually analyzing what you are doing if you are just writing lots of stories over and over again. A friend of mine started she’s a great writer now, and she’s in her 30s, which is fantastic because a lot of writers don’t come on into their own until their 40s, right? But part of that is she started writing fanfic online when she was twelve. And has written billions of words online, but also at the same time, she studied craft. She studied people along the way. So she has an amazing following for fan fiction, actually. And the reason is her stories are actually good because she refined them over time. So this is a skills development career. You must develop skills along the way. You can have talent. And talent is very helpful. But I know some writers who have less talent than others, but greater skill, and those writers are making more money and making a living at it.
Kat
Yeah, I’m trying to get across to some of writers that I talk to. I think a lot of the talent is in your head. And what is very frustrating to writers sometimes is getting it from your head to the paper is a really different process. Like, I was just writing this morning and I was like, I had this whole conversation in my head in the car. Two minutes later I’m at my computer and it’s different, there’s something missing. So I’ll have to put my finger on that later. But that’s the frustrating part. And that’s where your skill comes in, right? Because you’re going to, like you said, get your rough draft out there, it’s down, it’s on the paper. And I know there’s something wrong, but I know there’s something wrong because I’ve studied the craft of it and being able to say, okay, there was a twist there. And here you mentioned twists. And those aren’t just for mystery thriller writers, right? Like a twist for everything is for every book, right? So what do you mean when you’re talking about a twist? Like, why would a women’s fiction writer still need a twist in their story?
Troy
Well, a lot of that is there’s a couple of different phrases that we toss around. This is part of your skill as a writer, is learning the vocabulary. And a part of it is like at the end of each chapter that you create should be a hook. And the purpose of the hook is one thing to get the reader to turn the page to the next chapter. Now, you’re also going to use micro-hooks throughout your book, right? But the reason we need a twist is because life is twists. What a twist does for you really is, and the reason it works in women’s fiction and other fiction as well, is a twist is not about the events that happened. And this is a common mistake that writers make, is they think a clever twist is about throwing in a new suspect or throwing in a new thing. And no, a twist is about changing the emotion of the story and changing your character arc. So the character was thinking one way. The reason we talk about the midpoint in a story is the character was thinking one way. And for most of the time, the first half of a book, the character is reacting to things that happen to them, right? The midpoint and that twist and that change in the story is when the character is no longer reacting. And now they are taking action. They become proactive, right? Basic writing type things. But for them to switch, to make that switch, something needs to happen, right? And usually that is some kind of a twist. Their expectations were wrong. They discover that they’re actually something different. They thought that they needed something or that they wanted something. And they get to the middle of the book and they discover that’s not actually what they need, not actually what they want. And that’s the twist. And all that does is it turns your character around and makes them turn and face a different direction. And usually that also makes your antagonist face a different direction. They were pursuing, now they are being pursued. And this works in romance as well. Like romance, one of your romantic interests is the lead. The other one is actually the antagonist. Usually that’s the antagonist in your story, right? And that’s what creates that tension. And the twist is when the one that was the lead and was resisting or whatever the case may be, that flips. And now they’re pursuing, right? And you can see it in romance as you watch them, you can see it happen. My wife and I just watched that. It’s kind of a romantic comedy. You People that’s on Netflix or something last night, I thought, this is a classic romancing the beat for phase plot. As I was going through it, I could see each of those things happening.
Kat
But it’s satisfying, right, as the viewer?
Troy
Oh, yeah. It was absolutely satisfying because even though I knew I’m like, they’re going to break up right here, but at the same time, I wanted to see how the writers made that happen, why that happened, and because I was invested in the characters then I cared that that happened. And I wondered how they would bring them back together after that, right? So it’s still even though I know what’s coming and I know they’re going to get back together, but I want to know how. I want to know why. I want to know what their motive was for changing their mind after this huge radical change that caused them to split. Then what is the next radical change that causes them to get back together? I’m still invested in the story. I’m still invested in the characters, even though I know what’s going to happen. So your characters, especially, are really, in a large part, what drives your story forward. And it’s about the character twists, not the event twists.
Kat
Right. Yeah. I think one of the greatest twists is the Breakup with Jennifer Aniston. And he’s a comedy actor? The dude guy. We all know him, right?Yeah, I think that was one of the greatest twists, and that was before I was studying craft, because it’s really about him, like you said, it’s about the character, and it’s about him learning that it’s not about keeping her, it’s about loving her enough to let her go. And it’s just like it’s such a good twist because it changes him in a small like the small realization, and it changes how he treats every single person, right? I use that as an example because we tend to overthink things as writers, like the want and the need and the whatever. He wants the girlfriend to stay, but it’s not for the right reasons. And so that changes. And I think we make it so complicated when we’re trying to define what all these things are. We have to make it some philosophical something or other.
Troy
Well, yeah, it has to be some kind of philosophical discussion. It doesn’t have to be because it’s like, real life like, real life is very simple. The only difference between fiction and real life is that fiction has to make sense and it has to end in a satisfying way. Real life doesn’t always necessarily like, each chapter of your life doesn’t always necessarily have to do that, right? But one example I use is, like, Bohemian Rhapsody. Like, my wife and I went and saw that movie in the theater, right. And the guy who plays Freddie Mercury, I can’t remember his name either, but he’s absolutely amazing. And there was a moment, you know, how there’s the normal just kind of rustling in the theater and the normal kind of chatter, and then there was a moment when he’s talking to the one girl, I think it’s Elizabeth, I can’t remember her name, but anyway. And he’s talking to her on the phone, but he can see her window from the phone. And it’s a very emotional moment. Because you can tell that this is the moment when they really realize that this is not ever going to work. He’s not into her in that way, and she wants something different than what he’s offering. And he’s on the phone, but he can see her window, and he says, well, good night. And as he hangs up the phone, her light in her window goes dark. And the entire theater was silent, like dead silent for, like, a good 10 seconds. And it was like every person in the theater reacted the exact same way to that moment. Now, if you knew the story of his life, if you know the story of Queen, and if you understand story structure, you knew this was coming. Like, this was not a shock, right? But it’s still everyone held their breath for one moment because everyone hit that realization wall at the same time. It was a beautiful moment because you wouldn’t have gotten that at home, necessarily. When you’re watching it in a theater, you see the reactions of everyone else, too. But it was super amazing just to go, wow. Which is one of the reasons to go see some of these movies in a theater, is not to necessarily see it on the big screen or to burn $20 on snacks that you could have made at home for five. But it’s because you can feel and experience the reactions with other people and see that crowd and see their reaction to things. It’s a great way to study story because you can see instead of a reader telling you how they reacted to something, you can actually see it happen to someone. It’s amazing.
Kat
You can feel it with others, right? What is landing with people and what’s not? Because in the end, there’s two different skills, whether it’s writing and cinematography, but the storytelling, what works, what people like on Rotten Tomatoes and don’t like. It’s all about the story is the story hitting the beats that is satisfying to the reader, right? Let’s talk a little bit about your books. Did you always start writing out mystery, and how much did you work at mystery skill writing before you actually just pushed it out there?
Troy
When I was in college, I actually tried to write sci-fi, because when I was growing up, I read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy, and that was a lot of my escape. But I also read a lot of mysteries. It’s just like I was extremely well, I read everything I could get my hands on from the time I was really young. Everything they would let me check out of the library, there’d be sometimes I go to check something out and they’re like, that’s something that you’re not going to finish, that it’s too complicated for somebody your age. And I’m like, no, it’s not. Just give me the book. I read Black Beauty when I was in fourth grade. It was an amazing story. But anyway, but I read all of the Hardy Boys books, like all of them that were out at the time, the little hardback ones. There were like 50 some at the time. I read all of those, but I also read a lot of Isaac Asimov and stuff like that. And I started to get into Stephen King and those type of things. So I didn’t start out with the intent necessarily to write mystery and thriller, but what I found was that that just ended up being my author voice. I tried other things and there are some of my stuff that has little paranormal elements in it or whatever. But what I found was, first of all, when I came down and I realized what my first novel was and what it needed to be, I was like, okay, this is a psychological thriller. That’s exactly what it is. It’s mental, but it’s a thriller type thing.
Kat
When did you figure that out? Like, while you’re writing it?
Troy
Yeah, while I was writing. Well, okay, the first thing so when I first started out, the conventional wisdom was you released a collection of short stories so everyone can get used to your writing and then you release your first novel. This was just a thing. It was a thing that everybody said, this is what you have to do. And I was like, I don’t want to. And they were like, well, this is what you have to do. Anyway, so that was the conventional wisdom at the time. This was how to get into indie publishing, which worked to an extent. But what I found was when I gathered up a lot of the short stories that I had, they all had that same similar, dark, kind of sinister, psychological, thriller, mystery type theme. They were all different. Like, one of them I’m like, I’m rewriting, I took the story, I was going to put it in an anthology that I’m in with a person, with another gal. And then I was like, I need to rewrite this story because it doesn’t make sense this way anymore the way it did before. But it’s still the same story. Like, there’s a bank heist, it’s a thriller, there’s cops, there’s bad guys. And so as I started to put that together, I was like, okay, this is my thing, right? But then I wrote my first novel. And then there was a friend of mine owned a small press and he was like, I want you to submit some short stories and this one has to be about dragons. Well, I submitted a short story about dragons and it’s a thriller with dragons. I mean, that’s what it is. You can’t take it out of there. I worked as an editor for a publisher for a long time, and I was the managing editor of a steamy romance series. So I wrote the first book.
Kat
You looked like the quintessential editor for steamy romance.
Troy
Right? I mean, pretty much, right? I would always tell people, I have three kids. I’ve got to figure it out.
Kat
I know how this happens.
Troy
I know how this works. It’s all right. But anyway, so I wrote the first steamy romance because I wanted that series to be a mix, that there needed to be a plot. I’m like, I don’t want your straight erotica. It was around the time that 50 Shades came out, so we were getting submissions of 50 Shades of every color that you could imagine. And I’m like, what in the something’s wrong with you? And people were trying to write erotica. I had no business writing erotica. There were things they were saying and words and terminology and descriptions that I was like, no. Anyway, so I was like, I want this to be split. Plot and romance, heavy romance. So I wrote the first one in that series, which is a mystery thriller, steamy romance. There’s a murder. There’s a cop and his wife. There’s a dead body and lots of hot sex. But I mean, the premise, the idea was still the same. People have read my fiction before, will read that, and they go, that’s your author voice right there. And so the more I discovered that was just what it is. I can do comedy, but it’s always in the context of some kind of adventure or some kind of thriller. I did a rewriting of Don Quixote called Tilting at Windmills, right? It’s an action adventure comedy. It’s kind of one long junior high joke, you know what I mean? So everything that I do came back to that same thing. So I just eventually discovered this is my default. This is my author voice. So I need to just lean into that, right? So people that are deciding their genre, I recently had someone that submitted to every category of a writing contest, like nonfiction, fiction, poetry, everything. And I’m like, what do you write? What is your thing? Even my poetry has that dark, underlying theme, you know what I mean? There’s a voice there, and that’s helpful to develop a brand as you’re going forward as well. But it was kind of a thing that just worked. And then because I loved research so much, I would research all these different things. Like, I know all these different ways to just these various different ways to kill people and things like that. Hide bodies, stuff like that.
Kat
No one wants to check your Google search.
Troy
Well, yeah, at parties when somebody says, oh, yeah, we’ll see how they slit his throat there, and you’re like, no, that’s actually not how that works. And then you explain it to them. Then they go, I’m just going to go over here. First of all, I don’t need to know that. Second of all, oh, did you know that? Now that I hear it, it makes sense, but I didn’t need to hear it.
Kat
I don’t actually want to know this. I want to touch on one thing because I think it’s interesting that you first call yourself like, mystery thriller writer, and then you have other elements that you bring in. And I think that’s not necessarily a mistake, but one thing that people might not really understand is you can be above all, a romance writer. Maybe you always write something in which a relationship is happening, but if you’re coming up against just writer’s block, what do I write about this time? Incorporating in another genre can really help your story because you put a dead body in there and everything changes, right? You have this adventure, some balloon lands in the middle of your spy, balloon gets shut down in your backyard, everything changes. Like trying that out. And what I find interesting, you were writing stories, you were putting in the words, and then you saw what your voice is and then you move forward from there. So putting words on paper in different ways is probably a really good way to go about finding your pinpoint genre, right? Like your niche genre.
Troy
I mean, part of it is the other thing is being in touch with the short story market. First of all, you can make a little bit of money there. You can’t make a lot. You can’t, I shouldn’t say that, you can. It’s just a lot of hard work. But the short story market is a really interesting place to test out your ideas and test out your thoughts without having to write a full novel. Okay, so what would happen with I mean, think about, like, we look at some classic TV shows like Moonlighting. What is that? Well, it’s a romance with a lot of murder and dead bodies and cases. So it’s a romantic mystery type blend, right? But it works super well. So if you find yourself, like, I feel like you’re in a rut. If you’re writing regency romance, there’s a limit to what you can throw in there, right? There’s a limit to what readers are going to put up.
Kat
Regency fantasy.
Troy
Yeah, I mean, there’s kind of a readers are going to put up with a certain amount of genre blending there, but not a lot, almost any other romance genre. Or if you just want to switch romance genres, I’ve talked to tons of people who’ve written historical romance or regency romance and gone, you know what? I’m done with all the rules. I want to go play somewhere. Well, go write yourself a romantic comedy and throw in some jokes there and throw in some fun and see what happens, right? There’s nothing wrong with playing around within your genre as long as it somewhat resonates with your brand. And so that’s a part of the thing, too, is your brand as an author is you. It’s not your series, not your books, not your character. Now this is for me. Some people will like they focus on one series, that’s their series forever, or the same type of series, right? And that’s what they do forever. And that’s it, right? That’s where they are. That’s it. That’s fine because that becomes their brand. But for me, it should be more your brand is you and who you are. And that’s a persona that you put out in public, too. You don’t have to air all of your dirty laundry and tell the world all your secrets either, right? In fact, please don’t. Yeah, but I mean, your brand is you, so you can tell your readers, hey man, you like to laugh. Now some of your regency readers are not going to come over to that side. That’s all right. You’re not always going to get crossover, but you can get some. So you’re not starting from zero. But there’s nothing wrong with playing with your genre and exploring who you are and what you want to do. To have a sustainable author career, you’re going to have to add some variety over time. You’re going to have to find new and innovative ways to keep yourself interested in your work as well as your readers. But I mean, you have to be interested in it too, otherwise your readers will notice kind of what’s the point? Yeah, your readers will notice. They’ll notice that you’re mailing it in and it’s just not as good because you’re not emotionally invested. Your reader is not emotionally invested.
Kat
Right. So how long have you been writing now?
Troy
So really since 2009. Really? About 2011 is when I went full time.
Kat
Almost 15 years. Yeah, at least over a decade of full time writer. That’s very cool. And things have changed quite a bit. I mean, you got in on that kindle part, right? And I was talking with someone the other day, like lamenting a little bit because I was around. I just had knee deep in diapers with my kids at the time and wasn’t very active in researching the market. Kudos to you. There is a certain point at which writers who were smart or just saw the market or were lucky or whatever it is and got in. At that point she was saying, oh, they were so lucky, they really made their career at that point. And I said, yeah, but this is a career that every year you are having to put yourself out there. And the good thing is that your books are evergreen. They’re always there. You can keep pulling them out. People are still going to find them a decade later, but you have to put it out in front of them. They might have had a burst, but they still have to go out there. They still have to tell new readers about their books, right? So it’s still a full-time job. Correct? Or correct me if I’m wrong.
Troy
No, it’s still a full-time job. And for it to be sustainable, you have to continue marketing. Like, I have that original series that I wrote. Like, I haven’t updated the cover since 2013. I don’t sell those books at all. Well. I need to bring them out, redo the covers, make them more relevant for today. And it’s one of my things on the agenda for this year, right? But just because you have a backlist doesn’t mean that it’s not that those books never sell. Sometimes when they do, I’m like, oh man, please don’t read that. My writing has changed, right? And it’s not that they’re bad. It’s just that for me so I just have to get over that and bring them back into relevance in today’s market. But you constantly have to do things like that. You’re constantly updating your books, you’re updating the back matter. You’re changing how you’re doing business. We’re moving from people being exclusively on Amazon to lots and lots of people selling books direct to readers through their own website. It’s a great idea if you can make it work and develop that trust, right? And as Amazon and Facebook and all these other places go through all these changes, it’s good to have your own place for people to come to so that you kind of own that it’s your territory, it’s secure, it’s your own thing.
Troy
Right, right. Because before we were very dependent upon other markets and other people. And then things are constantly coming out, this whole AI thing, and talking about like, AI audio narrators and stuff like that, how people are. Some people are extremely opposed, some people are extremely in favor. And then yesterday it comes out that a major audiobook provider for indie authors basically has a clause in their contract that Apple can use your audio from your audiobook to train AI. Narrators unless you opt out of it. Now, this is news yesterday, the market has changed. So I have to decide, am I leaving my books on that platform? And is that okay with me to allow that to happen? Right? So there’s an immediate change in my career, my income, my next moves for my audiobooks. It changes everything if you decide to move. Announcement moving is a big deal.
Kat
Is a big deal.
Troy
And then you go, well, where do you move from there? There are a limited number of options of people who have a good foothold in the market for audiobooks, right? So this is part of the like, this has nothing to do with writing, but it has everything to do with a writing career. Everything turns on a dime. Like I say, it’s a part of this constant education and learning thing that’s a part of an author career to have something sustainable for years. You aren’t going to be Stephen King and release novels and finally get to a point where you just release one or two here and there and everybody’s just waiting for whatever you release next. And truth is, that isn’t happening. For him either. He has a huge marketing team and they’re doing all kinds of things to bring his books out because everything’s changing.
Kat
Yeah. Even the traditionally published well, I think it was no, it wasn’t Jane Freeman, but somebody the other day wrote a whole article about even traditionally published, you have one book deal. Don’t expect that they’ll pick up your next book, even if it’s in the same series, the same genre, you’re going to start all over again. Everything is changing. And as much as us writers only want to sit down and write, it’s no longer viable. That’s not going to be your life, right?
Troy
Well, think about what we saw, like when there was the big merger talk, right? And so there’s these two publishers in front of Congress for three weeks, and what they told us, if you listen carefully, is we have no idea.
Kat
No idea!
Troy
We don’t know how to sell books because here’s what happens, okay?
Kat
They don’t know the market, which is amazing.
Troy
You get a traditional publishing deal, right? You get your book to them and you’re like, yay, my agent got this through an editor, and I got published by a traditional publishing house, and I’m not selling any book.
Kat
They know what they’re doing, right? Wait.
Troy
Nobody in their marketing department like that book. And so if the marketing department doesn’t like it, you aren’t going to get the money and attention that you need to get your book anywhere in the charts. And it’s going to sit in language the same as somebody’s self published title. They uploaded to Amazon last Thursday with no marketing because the book that isn’t marketed doesn’t sell. And it doesn’t matter what the publisher name on the spine is, right?
Kat
Because they don’t know your ideal reader.
Kat
Which is amazing to me. They don’t understand it. They don’t understand all different sub-genres that are happening. They don’t understand social media. They don’t know and you’re not a big name. They also said something like, if you’re not a big name, you’re not going to sell. Like, if they have that mindset, why even publish other people’s books? What is going on?
Troy
And if you think about it, the only publishers that are like big publishers and they’re not even traditional, they’re not even part of the big five is the ones that are owned by Amazon. Now, why do those you can do really well with those publishers if they like your book, if the marketing department likes your book, why? Amazon understands the subgenres. Amazon has all the readers everywhere, so they know exactly where to send your book so that people will buy it, right? Now, can you learn those things on your own? And yes, there are things you can do so to help your career be sustainable. But anymore, you have to be thinking about those things as well as what you’re writing. I wrote a great book. Congratulations. Step one, many yeah.
Kat
Whether you go indie or trad.
Troy
Wether you go indie or trad, it’s still the same thing. The way you’re going to get the marketing department in the traditional publishers to notice your book is you’re going to market it yourself until it sells a whole bunch of copies. And then somebody in the marketing department is going to go, what’s this book we published a year? Oh, it actually is selling. And then they’ll put their power behind it.
Kat
What do we do about it? Oh, wait, yeah.
Troy
What do we do about it now? Now that it’s selling? And then they’ll put their power behind it. But if nobody notices it in their department, they’re not going to put their power behind it. And you’re going to be in the same boat as every indie publisher that’s out there. Only when it comes to royalty time, you’re getting 11% maybe of what the cover price is, and I’m getting 70.
Kat
Yeah, that’s true.
Troy
My website, I’m getting 100. Well, not 100, but I’m getting 85% maybe, something like that. But you know what I mean? I’m making money from my work.
Kat
Yes, exactly. The closest to 100% you can get. You do a lot of things. You write, you’re still writing your books. You help authors with Plottr as well. You are the guy that teaches us how to plot. So let’s talk just as we wrap up a little bit about how you help authors. Are you still out there helping them edit and things like that?
Troy
So I do editing. I don’t do as much editing as I used to, which means that I book, like way out, because I can’t do it as much. So I refer people to other editors in general more than I.
Kat
So what are your thoughts on why we should use an editor? Because there’s also a little bit of a trend in indies of I don’t need an editor, I know exactly what I’m doing.
Troy
So here’s the deal. In indie publishing, let’s say you use Pro Writing Aid and AutoCrit, or maybe Marlowe, whatever the latest thing is, right, to edit your book. Can you get it edited well enough for some readers? Sure. And if you’re a skilled marketer, you can sell mediocre book, and that’s fine if that’s what you want. That’s not what I want. And so there are certain steps you can take to work on editing your book so that costs you less for an editor, but you need other human eyes on your book before it goes out into the world, regardless of what that looks like for you and for me anymore. What I do when I do edit for people is I do an evaluation first, a manuscript evaluation. And the reason is you will tell me all I need is a copy and line edit of your book. Yes. And I will go, no, that’s not what you need. Or I might say, yeah, that is what you need, and, hey, that’s great because I can do that one fast, and I like that. That saves me all kinds of trouble and time, right? But for the most part, that rarely ever happens. Usually you have some passive voice going on. You have some showing or some telling not showing. You have all kinds of other stuff happening in your book that you don’t see anymore because you’re too close to it. And so you need those other human eyes on your work to make it better. And don’t go into Marlowe and pro writing aid and all those things and just accept all the changes that they offer. No, please don’t do that, because they’re wrong. They’re wrong. They’re going to put commas in the wrong place. They’re going to substitute words that you did not mean for it to substitute. And it’s going to read just like a machine editor.
Kat
It’s going to read like AI, right? It’s going to read terribly.
Troy
It’s horrible because even people are using AI heavily, and I know a lot of people that are using it, but even those that are using it heavily understand that the AI generates ideas, outlines. It helps you with certain types of writers, block or whatever, but you are still the writer. You still have to take what it spits out and make it into your story.
Kat
Yeah. Don’t cut corners.
Troy
Can it help you? Sure. Maybe like any other tool, it can be a help, but like any other tool, it can also be your downfall. Because when you start to trust a machine too much over your human instincts, your human emotions and stuff like that, just like with anything else, you’re going to have problems. Nobody yet. Even with Tesla’s, full self driving mode, just goes back to make theirselves a sandwich in the backseat while our car drives them around. We’re not there yet. And a big part of the reason is that thinking and that decision making and that intent, right? We’re just not there yet, right? With machines. And hopefully by the time we do, and they’re sentient writing their own novels.
Kat
At least they’ll be able to keep us on the road, but I’m not sure they’ll be able to still edit your book. What I like about editing and working with an editor, and I tell everyone all the time, I know that it’s an investment, it is. But it’s cheaper than going back to college because it’s really and not that I have my own feelings about going to get an MBA, and it’s great for some people, but what you’re doing is really looking. At the story from the point of view of a reader like fresh eyes and somebody, especially, who has experience and understands storytelling and understands what should be happening. You’re getting a whole education right there. It’s really a relationship. It is not meant to judge you. It is meant for you to learn more and more and more. And like you said, there are times you might get to the point where all you need is a line edit because you understand and you can see the mistakes and you can follow through. Maybe if you’re smart enough, that’ll happen in a few edits. I still really love to send off short stories and get feedback on them and pay for the editing and to see what they’re seeing, right? If you, Joanna Penn, people who are up there are still working with editors, that’s what I tell my writer.
Troy
It’s a hint. First of all, you’re getting a lesson. You’re getting a writing lesson every time because you’re getting somebody else’s perspective. There’s also things that writers just do, right? Like, you will repeat certain words and phrases in your book. Your editor will point unbelievable. Your editor will point that out, right? And you go, oh, man, I used some way too much.
Kat
I loved beautiful that day.
Troy
I loved beautiful.
Kat
Everything was beautiful.
Troy
Everything was beautiful. So you’re like, in my next book, I am not going to repeat that word. I’m not going to do that again, right? And you’re right. You won’t. You’ll just pick a different word, and you’ll repeat that one over and over throughout your book. And your next book, you’ll pick a different one. And I mean, I’m telling you, 30 books in I’m like I have cycled through some words, right? Sometimes I come back to one because I kind of like that, apparently, and I come back to it and repeat it again, right? And your editor catches those things and can tell you patterns, can tell you things that you’re doing that you’re like, oh, I didn’t even realize I was doing that, or I didn’t realize I missed that until you said it. And it’s not something that an AI is going to catch. It’s not something that your editor and Word is going to catch. It’s something that a human reader is going to catch. And you need those eyes, whatever that looks like for you. You need those other eyes on your manuscript.
Kat
Yes, absolutely. I love that. So your website will be in the show notes below it’s. TroyLambertWrites.com, there’s a lot more here on your website that we didn’t even touch on, so I encourage everyone to go to .TroyLambertWrites.com You’ll find out even more. You have some cool book trailers here as well, which we didn’t even get into those.
Troy
Yeah, those are super fun. Super fun.
Kat
They’re very cool. So I’ll have people go over there. But thank you so much, Troy, for coming and talking to me. I feel like we could talk for another 3 hours.
Troy
Yeah, we could do several of these on different topics if we would stay on topic. It would be really good if we could do that next time. We’ll stay focused. That’s what I say every time.
Kat
Exactly. Thanks, Troy.
Troy
All right. Thank you.