The River City Series author Frank Zafiro interview on Author Ecke
The latest Author Ecke with Frank Zafiro, a very accomplished author. The River City series is a must read. Come to find out Frank and I have some thing in common. It's a small world and just not a Disney.
Transcript
Hey everybody.
Speaker:Welcome back to Author Echo.
Speaker:We have Frank Zafiro.
Speaker:He is our guest today and he's gonna introduce himself.
Speaker:We're gonna talk about, not maybe just one, but he's written a lot of books.
Speaker:So we're gonna of get into that and see what it accomplished author
Speaker:over years, how he's done it.
Speaker:How has he maintained that?
Speaker:Drive to do it some more.
Speaker:Great.
Speaker:All yours, man.
Speaker:First off, thanks for having me.
Speaker:I guess the most concise way to introduce myself would be to say that
Speaker:I was a police officer for 20 years and today in Spokane, Washington, that's
Speaker:on the eastern half of the state there.
Speaker:Retired in 2013.
Speaker:During my career, I was fortunate enough to either do or command the
Speaker:unit that did pretty much every job that a police agency does.
Speaker:And so that, that gave me some great experiences.
Speaker:As you might imagine when it came to writing about about police work.
Speaker:I write gritty crime fiction from both sides of the badge.
Speaker:My flagship series is the River City series, which is a thinly veiled Spokane,
Speaker:and those are police procedurals.
Speaker:With a, with an ensemble cast of police officers and detectives, although the
Speaker:core character really is an officer actually now detective Katie McLeod.
Speaker:These are procedurals, which for those that aren't familiar, is
Speaker:basically where the emphasis is.
Speaker:Not so much on who did it but whether or not, and how the cops might catch them.
Speaker:And so that's my flagship series.
Speaker:But I do write hard boiled from.
Speaker:Si from the viewpoint of the criminal in my spoke Compton series and
Speaker:private detective series in the Stephan Kopriva Mysteries, which
Speaker:is a spinoff of River City.
Speaker:So if you like mystery, aside from cozy or traditional life, I've probably
Speaker:got something in your sub genre.
Speaker:Excellent.
Speaker:My, my son was stationed up in.
Speaker:The we used to call it Fort Lewis.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Learned, Call it there.
Speaker:So that's around that neck of the woods.
Speaker:Really beautiful.
Speaker:I used to work for Microsoft and I grew up to Seattle every once in a while.
Speaker:So beautiful up there.
Speaker:Thanks for your service, by the way.
Speaker:So Great.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Great.
Speaker:So what possessed you to write about your work?
Speaker:Cause it had.
Speaker:Bring back some some images and things that you've dealt
Speaker:with in your police career.
Speaker:I've always been a writer.
Speaker:Even as a young kid, 10, 12 years old, that's how I felt about myself.
Speaker:Kind of a musician might feel, even if they're not in a
Speaker:professional band or anything.
Speaker:And I've been writing my whole life.
Speaker:I had a little bit of a gap from about 96 to 2004.
Speaker:I came on the job in 93 because during that time period I was going
Speaker:back to school using the Army College Fund to get my undergraduate degree.
Speaker:Were you an mp?
Speaker:What'd you do in the Army?
Speaker:Were you an mp?
Speaker:I was a linguist, actually.
Speaker:I was a czechoslovak linguist.
Speaker:And I wore headphones in spite on the Check Army radio transmissions
Speaker:back in I was stationed in southern Germany in Bavaria.
Speaker:So this is strange.
Speaker:I was in the second number Calgary regiment.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And I used to guard the Czechoslovakia border all the way up in German border.
Speaker:Then I went back and I was a 19 Delta cab scout, and then I did the Coburg
Speaker:sector of the East, West German border.
Speaker:Wow.
Speaker:Awesome.
Speaker:Thanks for your service.
Speaker:Of the folks you're listening to you as well, so you basically
Speaker:were right there, the fold gap.
Speaker:Oh yeah.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So I've seen people talk about communism.
Speaker:I've seen it yeah.
Speaker:Unfiltered lens.
Speaker:What con communism is.
Speaker:Without a doubt.
Speaker:It was a weird time a glorious time in some ways to be in that
Speaker:position because it was in the era of Goche as a Soviet leader.
Speaker:And while I came in, in, in the Army in 86, and that was pretty much the Cold
Speaker:War was still pretty frosty at that point.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:But by the time I left in March of 91 the checks had the Velvet Revolution
Speaker:and installed a poet as president.
Speaker:The Berlin Wall had come down, East and West Germany were
Speaker:negotiating to, to rejoin.
Speaker:All of the other eastern block nations were in some stage of breaking away
Speaker:from the Soviet Union, which was in the middle of glass and Paris Stroka,
Speaker:which was reform and openness.
Speaker:Essentially 91.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah, and I left in 91.
Speaker:Interestingly.
Speaker:You talked about seeing communism.
Speaker:Here I was a American soldier who was had a top secret security clearance
Speaker:and was spying on the checks in say, 88, 89 in 91 when I got out.
Speaker:I drove my Nissan Sentra with US Army plates.
Speaker:Oh yeah.
Speaker:I've been into the check to cia.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Moved to, pulls in past places where I had memorized Army units were stationed.
Speaker:It was oddly surreal and then stayed in, pulls in for a few days
Speaker:and saw just what it was like there.
Speaker:And it was it hadn't had a chance to change from what it had
Speaker:been under the communist regime.
Speaker:It was mere months I guess a year and a half since the Velt revolution.
Speaker:But it was not.
Speaker:It wasn't a a westernized city yet.
Speaker:It was still very much a communist city.
Speaker:It was weird.
Speaker:Things can happen fast, but I feel like those were good things.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:My wife German, so I.
Speaker:We go back, but you can still go into former East Germany and still
Speaker:see that they're night and day.
Speaker:They're rebuilding.
Speaker:They started rebuilding East Germany in 1990 where the German
Speaker:started right after World War ii.
Speaker:It was remarkable.
Speaker:So thank you again for your services.
Speaker:That's kinda coincident you were the guy that was gonna call.
Speaker:The everybody including my unit and say, Hey, the T 72 s are
Speaker:rolling through the fold day gap.
Speaker:Not a good day.
Speaker:Hell outta here . Not a good, We were counting on You guys
Speaker:still give us a heads up.
Speaker:Oh, simply a speed bump.
Speaker:So you started, when did you write your first novel that was publish?
Speaker:That was published I wrote Under a Raging Moon, the first book in the River City
Speaker:series, the first draft of it in 1995 after I'd been on the job for two years.
Speaker:Oh, wow.
Speaker:And you can really see both the.
Speaker:And I can see this now quite a few years later, you can see the immaturity of the
Speaker:person that wrote it the attitudes of a two year cop who was in love with the job.
Speaker:And you can all and certainly if I pulled out that early draft, you would
Speaker:see the skill level that I was at the time which was not ready for prime time.
Speaker:And so I I wasn't able to get it published and then I started college
Speaker:and then I'd mentioned the 96 to 2 0 4 sort of gap in my writing.
Speaker:And I was writing a lot during that time, but I was writing college papers.
Speaker:I was learning a new job in police work just about every
Speaker:other year cuz I got moved around and got promoted and so forth.
Speaker:And so it wasn't until about 2004 when I was a sergeant by that time and I had this
Speaker:kind of, Day shift, office gig, basically.
Speaker:I was in the volunteer services unit overseeing that, and that's
Speaker:when I had the luxury essentially of getting back to fiction.
Speaker:And it was also pretty fueled by the fact that I ran into another
Speaker:cop who was also a a writer who was in the early stages of his work.
Speaker:A guy named Colin Conway who.
Speaker:Worked with quite a bit in the, since then and we we started encouraging each other.
Speaker:We started re reading each other's works talking about writing
Speaker:all the time and so forth.
Speaker:And so I started kicking out a lot of short stories and it,
Speaker:and then pulling out the novel and getting to work on it again.
Speaker:And so it shouldn't really be a surprise after being on the job for,
Speaker:at that point, I guess 11 years that What came out was law enforcement
Speaker:stuff crime related stuff, because that was what know, I was living
Speaker:did, and that's what I wrote about.
Speaker:I was a little nervous about saying Spokane and my real name because I didn't
Speaker:know how my bosses were gonna react.
Speaker:So how did they react?
Speaker:How did the other, not only.
Speaker:Your bosses, but your peers how did they take that you were
Speaker:writing these crime novels?
Speaker:My bosses surprised me because both times I went to them cuz I had to go basically
Speaker:say, Hey, this is a an off duty job.
Speaker:It's a separate career.
Speaker:I needed to get permission essentially by policy.
Speaker:But there was no reason for him to say no.
Speaker:I wasn't too worried about it, but I was worried that.
Speaker:Anybody read a couple of the grittier stories, maybe one where the cops
Speaker:weren't the greatest in how they were portrayed, that they might come
Speaker:to me and say, Okay, enough of that.
Speaker:And I didn't wanna be in the position where I couldn't say,
Speaker:No, I'm gonna keep doing this.
Speaker:So I changed Spokane River City and started using a pen name Frank s Farro.
Speaker:And then so does Spokane, a river running.
Speaker:Oh yeah.
Speaker:Oh, , Spokane River.
Speaker:Oh, but it's the Looking Glass River in River City, . River
Speaker:City is so close to Spokane.
Speaker:It's it's half a bubble off of an alternate reality.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I only changed a few things.
Speaker:Obviously anything that says Spokane, I had to come up
Speaker:with a different, Name for it.
Speaker:And then I changed I massaged a few locations and so forth.
Speaker:But they they were pretty receptive.
Speaker:And then a few years later when the newspaper reporter at the newspaper
Speaker:fared it out that I was doing this, she wanted to write a story about it.
Speaker:And I said, Hey, that's great, but.
Speaker:Can we keep it quiet that I really do this here in Spokane?
Speaker:And she's No, you don't get it.
Speaker:That's actually the story It's that's why we wanna write about you.
Speaker:I can't that's why people might be interested is cuz you do work here.
Speaker:And I'm like, ah.
Speaker:So I went and talked to the chief then and that was a Chief
Speaker:Kirkpatrick and she was wonderful.
Speaker:She was like fly, bird fly.
Speaker:Don't you know, be free.
Speaker:That was great.
Speaker:My, my colleagues have former colleagues now.
Speaker:Just been all over the map, much like family is.
Speaker:Some people are super supportive and interested, other people are generally
Speaker:supportive, but it's not their thing.
Speaker:Some people aren't even aware of it or could care less cuz it's just not
Speaker:in their wheelhouse or in their orbit.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:But those people who are interested and have been supportive that I used to
Speaker:work with have been super supportive and there's still people I can reach
Speaker:out to if I come across something that I don't have an expertise in.
Speaker:And recently that series I, I wrote with, I wrote a series with
Speaker:Colin Conway here in the last five years, six years the Charlie three
Speaker:16 series, which is a procedural series, and it is set in Spokane.
Speaker:And there were some, there were.
Speaker:Homicide related things that I just didn't have quite the expertise on.
Speaker:And I was able to reach out to a detective that I knew.
Speaker:And actually we created a character with his name as an homage.
Speaker:And Oh wow.
Speaker:. I do the same thing, by the way.
Speaker:It's kinda cool too.
Speaker:I don't know.
Speaker:I can do a lot of research, but, so I'm, get some perspective of something.
Speaker:So I reached out actually to a Air Force boom operator.
Speaker:Cause I wanted to have an air refueling scene in the book.
Speaker:So I say talk me through.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I mean if you're writing a book that people expect to be yeah.
Speaker:Then you need to be right.
Speaker:But yeah none of my colleagues.
Speaker:Negative about it.
Speaker:Nobody gave me a hard time, or I got teased a little bit,
Speaker:but that's just friendly.
Speaker:But I didn't have any negative experiences ever.
Speaker:They were all great with it and occasionally people would come up
Speaker:and be like hey, I got one for you.
Speaker:You can use this in one of your books.
Speaker:And they'd tell me something and either a story or, or something
Speaker:funny that somebody said or did.
Speaker:And most of the time their instincts were pretty good.
Speaker:I've used quite a few of them actually.
Speaker:You didn't give any money.
Speaker:You mean you give em Royal through?
Speaker:No, I gave him credit where credit was due.
Speaker:And then I took credit for writing and they gave him a ticket.
Speaker:That's great , so what, where do you write?
Speaker:Do you have a favorite time or how do you write, You outline it or
Speaker:what's your strategy providing?
Speaker:I used to do it a lot differently.
Speaker:I used be a pantser, a me, Here's an idea, let's roll with it.
Speaker:And I used to have to write when I had time and that time tended to come
Speaker:in blocks, not very regularly, just because of the kind of schedule I had.
Speaker:But fortunately I, I retired in 2013 and I did.
Speaker:Consulting and teaching after that.
Speaker:But I've been fully retired from everything except my writing
Speaker:career since the end of 2017.
Speaker:And so that allows me to structure my day.
Speaker:However I like.
Speaker:And I like to get up early.
Speaker:Early can be me too, between five and six 30, depending
Speaker:on where I'm at in the cycle.
Speaker:Trying to get back to that 5:00 AM.
Speaker:Timeframe.
Speaker:Now I'm, Do you do PT in the morning?
Speaker:No.
Speaker:usually don't.
Speaker:I usually I'll go to the gym in the afternoon, either early or
Speaker:late afternoon, depending on if my wife's going with me or not.
Speaker:But but I like to do the creative writing in the morning.
Speaker:And that's something that my, my buddy call Colin really impressed on me.
Speaker:He'd been doing that for a while and he'd done some reading about it and
Speaker:he of formed a, formed an opinion that Whenever in the day, your
Speaker:creative energy is the highest, and for most people it's in the morning.
Speaker:And that's true for me.
Speaker:Yeah, you should give that creative power to yourself.
Speaker:Don't use it to do work for other people.
Speaker:Don't use it to do work that doesn't require creative energy.
Speaker:Use it for.
Speaker:What requires the most creative energy, That's your own work.
Speaker:And so that's what I do.
Speaker:I work on my, I agree.
Speaker:Whatever's new, whatever I'm working on right now, I'll
Speaker:do that in the morning hours.
Speaker:And then any editing or other kind of marketing work or whatever
Speaker:I tend to do that in the late morning and afternoon and evening.
Speaker:That's great.
Speaker:I do too I get up, I do walk in the morning and then I come back cuz I think
Speaker:about what I'm gonna write as I'm walking.
Speaker:That's a good strategy.
Speaker:And then I come back and I live in Texas, so the weather
Speaker:is beautiful 95% of the time.
Speaker:Whereabouts in Texas?
Speaker:North of Dallas, Little town called.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Beautiful.
Speaker:And so I sit out back and hack away for about an hour and half, two hours.
Speaker:And then what else do I wanna be able to do?
Speaker:And so I enjoy that aspect of it.
Speaker:So yeah I'm a dancer.
Speaker:I.
Speaker:I quit doing that.
Speaker:I I had to because I wrote, I've written about 15 of my books with other
Speaker:authors with four different authors.
Speaker:And you can't pants, you just can't pants it when you're not
Speaker:when you're collaborating.
Speaker:No bad cause nothing you think about.
Speaker:And if you go on that walk in the morning and you think about something, you come
Speaker:back and you sit down and then you open up the file that the guy just sent you.
Speaker:Or whoever your partner is for the book.
Speaker:It's, and they went off on a completely different tangent.
Speaker:Your law you got, you've gotta have at least a bullet point.
Speaker:Outline.
Speaker:And I've been doing that with those.
Speaker:I didn't do it much with the, with a couple of the series that I did, the
Speaker:the Onya series with Jim Wilky and the brick and cam bricks and cam jobs
Speaker:series that I did with Eric Beater.
Speaker:Those were very loosely outlined.
Speaker:We basically said, Here's the premise.
Speaker:Let's roll with it till we get about to the three quarter mark.
Speaker:Basically pants it like you're talking about.
Speaker:And then at the three quarter mark, we're gonna have to decide
Speaker:how we're gonna wrap this up.
Speaker:And I mean that worked really good for seven different books.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:But but we were a technique as a strategy.
Speaker:And we were writing a dual first person narrative with alternating chapters.
Speaker:And so there was a lot less of a chance that somebody was gonna write something
Speaker:in their chapter with their character that was gonna completely screw you up.
Speaker:in your chapter with yours.
Speaker:Occasionally it happened, but we corrected when it did.
Speaker:It's a little different when you're writing a like the
Speaker:Charlie three 16 series, a third person, multiple viewpoint.
Speaker:Procedural that has a lot of interlocking parts.
Speaker:And so what Colin and I will do is we will brainstorm it together, we'll
Speaker:outline it together, and the outline is basically a series of separate
Speaker:paragraphs broken up by scene.
Speaker:And so we both know where things are going.
Speaker:We both have the map, and then we figure out who's gonna write.
Speaker:And that has eventually landed on, you write this character scenes, I'll
Speaker:write this character scenes from their point of view when they have
Speaker:the pov, although who writes which character has changed between books?
Speaker:I can't remember.
Speaker:Too many of the examples right now, but the one that always comes to mind is that
Speaker:he wrote the Chief of Police in one of the books, and I wrote it in one of the other
Speaker:books, and I can't remember the other two who wrote it, but that's changed from
Speaker:book to book occasionally, but always the same person throughout the entire book.
Speaker:And then as we're writing it, so if you and I were doing it, And we got to that
Speaker:point where we'd mapped it out and we got, Okay, and you're gonna write character A,
Speaker:D, and E, and I'm gonna write B C and F.
Speaker:And then I'd sit down, I'd write, say chapter one, send it to you.
Speaker:You'd read chapter one, give it a quick edit, and then write
Speaker:chapter two, Send it back to me.
Speaker:I'd read what you did to my chapter one and respond to it.
Speaker:Editing wise.
Speaker:I'd edit chapter two that you wrote, and then I'd write chapter.
Speaker:And then that process would just continue all the way through 80, a hundred
Speaker:thousand words, whatever it ends up being.
Speaker:The beauty of that and why it's worked for us is it accomplishes two things.
Speaker:One is that when you get to the end of that first draft, it's really at
Speaker:least draft 1.5, maybe 2.0, yeah.
Speaker:We've already been through it.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And the other thing.
Speaker:That a with such heavy and we have pretty heavy handed editing.
Speaker:There's no hands off.
Speaker:It's all every word is as if it was your word.
Speaker:There's no don't edit mine.
Speaker:So hard type of stuff going on.
Speaker:So what you end up with at the end of that first draft isn't my voice or your voice.
Speaker:It's a third.
Speaker:Voice, That's the voice of the book.
Speaker:It's the voice of the series.
Speaker:It's our voice, essentially.
Speaker:Because that editing process is so all encompassing and so constant, even
Speaker:during the creation of the first draft.
Speaker:And that's worked really well.
Speaker:And in fact, it's worked so well that I outlined my own books at
Speaker:that, to that same level now.
Speaker:I have a pretty good bullet point.
Speaker:For all of them anymore.
Speaker:And that's just what works.
Speaker:It keeps me on track and a lot of people who pants like you do and
Speaker:maybe this is your feeling about it as well, will say that it, they get
Speaker:bored with it if they know exactly where it's going, that the map is off
Speaker:putting and takes the fun out of it for.
Speaker:and I understand that it I could see that happening for me too.
Speaker:At least that was how I felt.
Speaker:But what I've learned is that there's so many details that you're gonna
Speaker:delve into if the scene just says Capriva confronts his mother yeah.
Speaker:That's all it says on there.
Speaker:I know what that means.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I got all that work to dive into Discover, just all I know is he is
Speaker:gonna confront her about whatever.
Speaker:That's so that's how and when I get the writing done.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I do I'll think of something and I will do is I have a little section
Speaker:at the back of the end of the book that I say stuff and I'll just put,
Speaker:Okay, I wanna put this in the book.
Speaker:So that, or I'll mind map it, I'll mind map some of the stuff.
Speaker:Cause I, to me, I like to make sure if I say that text is gonna do this, that
Speaker:he has to do that somewhere in the book.
Speaker:Just can't drop it out of the book.
Speaker:Cause i's gonna notice that.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So I always have to follow and I always look back to make sure that
Speaker:I do that, but I never, I didn't know how collaboration worked.
Speaker:That's pretty interesting.
Speaker:And that's just how we do it.
Speaker:Collaboration works as many ways as there are collaborators, I suspect.
Speaker:The key to it is that you have to be on the.
Speaker:The same page.
Speaker:Oh, sure.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:You have to trust each other.
Speaker:Has to, doesn't have to be an equal relationship.
Speaker:I There's the whole Clive Cussler with Soandso James Patterson with Soandso.
Speaker:That's a that the power dynamic there is Bill Wi Billio with somebody, right?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:That's not a, an equal power dynamic.
Speaker:But when you do have.
Speaker:An equal relationship like I've had with all of my co-authors, then it
Speaker:does just become a matter of trust and a willingness to accept that any
Speaker:edits that I make or that you make are in the best interests of the book.
Speaker:You're not trying to prove you're better writer or edit yours or something.
Speaker:Yeah, that's crazy petty who's just trying to entertain.
Speaker:So when you write, when you co-author, do you write.
Speaker:Your own book at the same time.
Speaker:Can you do two at once?
Speaker:I have in the past.
Speaker:I, I don't got away from it the last few, when Colin and I were working
Speaker:on the Charlie three 16 series, that the first four books in that series.
Speaker:But I certainly did prior to that.
Speaker:And it was just because it was such a different experience and
Speaker:different world that it was, I was able to compartmentalize them.
Speaker:Or maybe I was younger, I don't know, but I I won't.
Speaker:Carl and I have a couple, three more books.
Speaker:Come on, man.
Speaker:Don't say that . I'm not gonna do, I won't be writing anything else while
Speaker:we're writing I'll do other work.
Speaker:There's plenty of other work as an independent author to, to keep you busy.
Speaker:Oh, there is a ton.
Speaker:You talked about it earlier.
Speaker:You have to strat strategize your day to when you, Cause there's
Speaker:multiple things you need to get done.
Speaker:Then you still have the family and everything else.
Speaker:But when you gotta take time to write, you have turn to
Speaker:market to time to design things.
Speaker:What's the cover gonna look like?
Speaker:How am I gonna send this thing out?
Speaker:So I think, do I release it?
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:How do I promo it?
Speaker:What all those things come up.
Speaker:And then of course, all the creative things that you're dealing with.
Speaker:What do you where the series is going, what whatever book you're not writing,
Speaker:but you're planning how that's gonna go.
Speaker:All the stuff that, So do you plan the next book?
Speaker:So I did one, I'm almost done with the second, and I'm already thinking about
Speaker:the third and how I'm gonna continue.
Speaker:It's not necessarily series, but the same folks.
Speaker:Same team.
Speaker:But I add folks to the team and now I can branch those off to do some, Cause
Speaker:they do, they have a different skill set.
Speaker:So do you do that too, or, Yeah.
Speaker:I actually think that's pretty cool that you're doing it that way.
Speaker:It's the a very similar way to what Colin does with this 5 0 9 series.
Speaker:It's a rotating cast of who the lead is.
Speaker:So there might be six or seven detectives in this unit, and they're
Speaker:all in just about every book in some capacity or another, but they
Speaker:take turns being the lead in terms of who's who, whose book it is.
Speaker:And so you get to see these characters through.
Speaker:The eyes of other characters and they don't all see each other in the same way.
Speaker:So that, that's pretty cool.
Speaker:I do have I do have a pretty good idea with my series.
Speaker:Most of my series that are still open the ONA series that I mentioned
Speaker:in the Brick and cam jobs series, those are both closed series.
Speaker:They've, they're.
Speaker:Cycle is complete.
Speaker:Whereas the River City series is ongoing, the Capriva mysteries are ongoing.
Speaker:My SPO Compton series is ongoing.
Speaker:So I know I just am, I have the fourth book in the Copo Compton
Speaker:series coming out in October.
Speaker:Nice.
Speaker:Congratulations.
Speaker:I know what books five and six are gonna be.
Speaker:I've got 'em pretty well mapped out.
Speaker:I just, How me Can you do a year?
Speaker:It varies.
Speaker:It varies.
Speaker:I've done as few as one and as many as I'd have to go double check, but I
Speaker:think I've done five or six in a year.
Speaker:It some of those might have been co-authored, so you're writing half a
Speaker:book, but all the rest of the work is just as much as if you wrote it yourself.
Speaker:Good for baby three, which is probably a lot of people are saying no, the one's.
Speaker:That's a whole different conversation.
Speaker:I have a friend who's very successful and he's, I think he does three, three
Speaker:or four a year in his, I think it's three a year in his main series.
Speaker:And his readers are used to it.
Speaker:They're used to when those new books come out.
Speaker:I really started.
Speaker:Hard push to be as productive as possible at the beginning of 2021 and tried to get
Speaker:as much work out as possible, but with the caveat of not sacrificing quality.
Speaker:Cuz there's an old saying you can have it.
Speaker:Yes, I agree.
Speaker:Fast, cheap, or good, I think is how it goes, right?
Speaker:Pick two.
Speaker:You can have quality, quantity or.
Speaker:It could be inexpensive, but you can't have all three.
Speaker:And I never wanted to, the quality to suffer.
Speaker:So if that means I put one or two less books out a year to make sure that quality
Speaker:is, that's where I'm, that's where I'm at.
Speaker:You can have fast food or you can have good food fest.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Or maybe it takes a little time in the kitchen to make
Speaker:a really good, healthy meal.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:That means you know that you gotta wait a little bit, then you wait a
Speaker:little bit because it's worth it.
Speaker:I originally had a pretty.
Speaker:Pretty aggressive schedule for publishing.
Speaker:And I met some of those goals, but I had to push a few of them back a little
Speaker:bit to, to, just to ensure number one, that I wasn't wearing myself out.
Speaker:I did get pretty f.
Speaker:Ragged there for a bit, trying to meet basically a book a month is
Speaker:what I was trying to complete.
Speaker:That's tough.
Speaker:Holy smokes.
Speaker:Yeah, I was too.
Speaker:It was too much.
Speaker:And even though I had a slight head start when I started,
Speaker:it's just too it was too much.
Speaker:And I felt like the quality wasn't going to be there if I kept up that pace.
Speaker:Because I wasn't, I got to the point where I wasn't enjoying it
Speaker:quite as much, and that's gonna bleed through into the writing.
Speaker:If you don't have a sense of wonder and a sense of how much you love what you're
Speaker:writing that, that's gonna bleed through.
Speaker:And the readers are gonna pick up on it.
Speaker:And I just, I didn't want that to happen at all.
Speaker:So even though I'm still putting out a lot of books pretty quickly, I've slowed
Speaker:down enough to make sure that what I'm, that I'm very satisfied with the quality
Speaker:that those, So where can everybody?
Speaker:Get your books pretty much any digitally, pretty much
Speaker:anywhere you download eBooks.
Speaker:Actually, let me correct myself there.
Speaker:I am, I'm Amazon exclusive at the moment you can get the eBooks on Amazon.
Speaker:You can get the paperbacks through Amazon.
Speaker:If you're a Kindle Unlimited reader, you can read 'em all for free on Amazon.
Speaker:And you can get all those links and see the books that I've got
Speaker:out of the different series on my website, which is frank ferro.com.
Speaker:If you're not sure where to start I did put something on the sidebar there that
Speaker:if you like the police procedurals, try these series if you like, hard boil.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:Try these.
Speaker:If you like PI novels, try these because everybody has their
Speaker:own flavor that they prefer.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:I would agree.
Speaker:Most interesting.
Speaker:I learned quite a bit from this little conversation we had.
Speaker:Our path might have crossed or I might have read something that
Speaker:you put out and you might have read something that I put out.
Speaker:I'm sure it had marking on it at one time.
Speaker:So that's great, Frank.
Speaker:I appreciate again, your service.
Speaker:Thank you very much.
Speaker:Double service.
Speaker:So thank you very much and both check out his books.
Speaker:If you are into the the police for pi, for those perspective, check it out.
Speaker:He's gotta have something for you.
Speaker:And if to start, you start at the beginning, but eventually you'll
Speaker:wanna start where the whole crus of this thing started from.
Speaker:So thank you very much.
Speaker:I appreciate you taking the time today.
Speaker:Thanks for having me.
Speaker:I really do appreciate it.
Speaker:Thank you.
Speaker:Thanks Frank.
