Episode 128 - Lessons from Filmmaking for the Indy Author with John Gaspard
April 12, 2022
John Gaspard discusses LESSONS FROM FILMMAKING FOR THE INDY AUTHOR. He talks about Weighing the Financial Risk ... Taking Your Time and Getting Some Distance ... Assessing Your Audience's Reactions ... Assessing What You Really Need ... Fixing It Later ... and Building Out the Story. Do any of those topics pique your interest? Check out my YouTube playlist, 2 Minutes of Indy, where you can find a brief video clip from the interview on each of those topics!
John Gaspard is author of the Eli Marks mystery series as well as four other stand-alone novels, "The Greyhound of the Baskervilles,” “A Christmas Carl,” "The Sword & Mr. Stone," and "The Ripperologists." He also writes the Como Lake Players mystery series, under the pen name Bobbie Raymond. In real life, John’s not a magician, but he has directed six low-budget features that cost very little and made even less – that’s no small trick. He’s also written multiple books on the subject of low-budget filmmaking. Ironically, they’ve made more than the films. John lives in Minnesota and shares his home with his lovely wife, several dogs, a few cats and a handful of pet allergies.
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"It's really best to take time and sit back, get some people to look at it, get just some time for yourself to take a step back and then come back in and look at it again and see if it's really as good as it can be." —John Gaspard
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[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is John Gaspard. Hey, John, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] John: I'm doing quite well, thanks for having me.
[00:00:08] Matty: It is my pleasure. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, John is the author of the Eli Marks Mystery Series, as well as four other stand-alone novels, "The Greyhound of the Baskervilles,” “A Christmas Carl,” "The Sword & Mr. Stone," and "The Ripperologists." He also writes the Como Lake Players' Mystery Series under the pen name Bobby Raymond. In real life, John's not a magician, but he has directed six low-budget features that cost very little and made even less. That's no small trick. He's also written multiple books on the subject of low-budget filmmaking, and ironically, they've made more than the films. John lives in Minnesota and shares his home with his lovely wife, several dogs, a few cats, and a handful of pet allergies.
[00:00:49] So we're going to be talking today about lessons from filmmaking for the indy author. But before we dive into that, I had mentioned in the bio that John is not a magician and I think we need to explain why I would say that and how that sort of applicable to our conversation today.
[00:01:06] John: It makes perfect sense and it's probably the most frequently asked question of me, because my primary book series, the Eli Marks Mysteries, it’s an eight-book set, and the main character, Eli Marks is a professional magician. You don't have to be into magic to read the books, just like you don't have to be into burglary to read Lawrence Block's burglar books. It's just something that character brings to the story. But it is very accurate, and it was important to me from the beginning that I get the world of the professional magician, who does close-up magic at parties or kids' shows or trade shows or stage shows, whatever, I wanted to get all that and I am not a magician. I can do a one card trick.
[00:01:44] So I did a lot of research early on and continue to do research to make sure that everything that I put in the books is correct. And I've not only gotten no complaints from magicians, but I got a very nice email from Teller of Penn and Teller, who said that he read one of the books and he was very impressed with how the magic was presented accurately, that usually in books, it isn't, and that I got all the details. So I like to just let people know I'm not a magician, I just know more than most people.
[00:02:13] Matty: And do you have any more tricks now, other than your one card trick, based on the research that you've done?
[00:02:19] John: No, I know how a lot of tricks are done but, as is common in learning magic or learning about magic, at a certain point a lot of people, me included, want to stop knowing how things are done, simply because the answer is so stupid or so simple or so obvious, that it takes away some of the magic. However, that being said, even if I know how something is done, magicians can still floor me with their skill and their panache and their ability to perform it. Even if you know how the linking rings are done, when you see someone like a J Marshall perform that particular routine, you're just blown away by the magic he creates.
[00:03:02] Matty: Well, that's a nice segue, that whole idea about pulling back the curtain and seeing how the tricks are done. We're going to pull in another aspect of your bio, which is your work on filmmaking and specifically, your expertise in low-budget filmmaking, and talking about how that can apply to the indy author.
[00:03:18] So I wanted to start right out with talking about the role that economics plays in a creative endeavor. That's always a little bit tough, but many of us are trying to make at least a partial living from this gig, so talk a little bit about that.
[00:03:32] John: Yeah, there's a real crossover between low-budget independent filmmaking and self-publishing, or just being a writer, in that you have to decide early on, am I in this just to make money, or am I in this because I love doing it and making money is a nice part of it? In the old days with filmmaking, you had to make money because movies cost so much, and there was such a strict pathway to getting things out, and you as a filmmaker or as the one at the very end getting money. As things have gotten cheaper in filmmaking, you can now make a complete feature on your phone and use some free software to edit it, and you could literally make a feature for very little to no money.
[00:04:14] The same is true of book publishing now. You need a couple important tools, but for the most part, you can do it for very little or nothing, and you just need to decide, so you don't drive yourself crazy, do I have to make money or do I not?
[00:04:29] And I know that there is a certain percentage of authors who it's their living, it's what they do. That's how they make their living, and they have to make money at it, and they have to follow certain paths in order to do that. But for I think the majority of us out here, we like making money on it. We don't have to; the cost of entry is very cheap and just having our books read is sometimes as important as making money.
[00:04:53] I mean, I'll note that the first book in the Eli Marks series, "Ambitious Card," I'm trying that as a free book for this year to see what it's like. And I'm delighted anytime I see that every day, 30 or 40 people download it and that's fantastic. Would I love them to go on to the rest of the series? You bet, but it's still fun to know that Eli's first story is getting out there and people are reading it.
Weighing the Financial Risk
[00:05:14] Matty: So I imagine for some people, this is definitely a yes or no question, the do I need to make money, or do I not need to make money? I think for some people it's going to be many shades of gray in between. Like I have a day job, I don't need to sell my book to pay the bills, but if I were selling enough, I could leave my day job and do this full time. How do you make those assessments in the middle ground?
[00:05:38] John: It's going to be different for every single person. I'll just use the movie analogy, because that's the one that I'm most familiar with. Back in the, let's say the middle nineties, there was a revolution in low-budget filmmaking, with movies like CLERKS or EL MARIACHI or HOLLYWOOD SHUFFLE, which were made for under a hundred thousand dollars and achieved great success and certainly earned their money back and more. And that inspired a lot of people to go out and try to make movies to recreate that.
[00:06:08] The problem was that a hundred thousand dollars is not a lot of money in the movie world, but if you're a person and you're spending a hundred thousand dollars making a movie, that's a lot of money. It's a whole lot of money. And people put their homes at risk to do that. And there were a lot of really sad stories of people who had bought into this idea that yes, every movie is going to have that sort of return like a CLERKS or EL MARIACHI.
[00:06:34] So when I got into it with my partner, we made a couple low-budget features, each for around $30,000. And we were both in a position where, if we never got that money back, we were fine. I produced mine with some money earned from writing for a TV series. He called his budget, his "bass boat," which is he told us wife, I'm not buying a bass boat, but I'm putting money into this movie, and it's lost the same way. So we weren't at risk that way. A lot of other people were, and it was really hard to hear their stories because we were at the time crossing paths with a lot of them.
[00:07:10] Nowadays, with filmmaking and with book publishing, you're probably not putting yourself at that much risk. And so you can enter in and go, I don't really care about making money, I just want to get out some great books. And then all of a sudden it starts taking off, and you change your mind and go, okay, I do want to make money at this. And that's a mindset that's just going to change for everybody as they go along.
[00:07:32] When I started, I had a traditional publisher and they were very excited about the Eli Marks series and I thought, oh, okay, this would be great. And, they didn't have a lot of luck with it, and I bought it back and I've had a lot more luck with it since then. I've never lost money on it, but I've never bet the house on it, because it takes the fun out of it for me. So it's a long twisty answer.
[00:07:52] Matty: When you had talked about the fact that today, it would be possible with a cell phone and free software to make a feature length movie, that obviously doesn't factor in the time. And so in any kind of creative endeavor, there's the actual money you're laying out, then there's a timer laying out. And one of my concerns, especially with indy authors, is that oftentimes they don't value their time sufficiently, when they're making financial decisions about what they want to do. Are there analogies there between filmmaking and ownership?
Taking Your Time and Getting Some Distance
[00:08:24] John: There are. One of the things you have that is the most readily available to you is time. And we always encourage people in independent filmmaking, take as much time as you need to write and rewrite the script. Don't race into that. You're always running against the clock when you're shooting, even if you're shooting an ultra-low-budget movie, maybe more if people aren't being paid, do you think we'll have all the time in the world. People don't want to spend all that much time that, an actor will give you a couple of days if they liked the project, but if you don't seem to know what you're doing or you're wasting time, they're not going to like that. But so you don't have a lot of time there.
[00:08:59] But in pre-production in writing, you have ton of time and also in editing, as long as you are not paying for the editing equipment, you have plenty of time to really hone things and finesse things. As with publishing your own book, there is a tendency to go, I need to get this out right now. I'm done writing. I'm done editing. I have a cover. Boom. I'm going to put it out. Same thing when the movie's done. I'm going to put it out. And it's really best to take time and sit back, get some people to look at it, get just some time for yourself to take a step back and then come back in and look at it again and see if it's really as good as it can be. Because certainly movies, you only get it out there once. I suppose, with books, you could republish it, but you want to make sure that you've taken the time to get it as good as possible, but that's true of movies and books.
[00:09:45] Matty: And is there any similarity between how you've gotten, I'll call them beta viewers, I'm not sure, test audiences for films? How you find those people initially, and then how you assess their input between movies and books?
[00:09:57] John: A lot of us have a kind of an ARC team, a street team that will look at books. In the case of the Eli Marks series, I have normal readers and I also have magicians who look at them, just to make sure that I haven't gotten anything wrong, because although I'm pretty good now, there are still things that I can get a term wrong or something.
Assessing Your Audience's Reactions
[00:10:16] With movies, really the best way to do it, and it isn't enormously expensive, is you rent a theater and you invite a crowd. We did a movie a few years back called "The Cookie Project," which was seven stories that were all joined together about a guy delivering cookies. And we just rented a theater and made it open to the public. The theater got to keep all the concessions. And for 90 minutes, this audience watched the movie, and I didn't have them fill out comment cards because you can really get a sense without comment cards of what was working and what wasn't.
[00:10:49] That's really the best way to do it with movies issues. Get it in front of an audience and then sit in the back and you can tell, okay, they didn't get that. Oh, we've lost a lot of people getting up to get popcorn right now, this must be a slow part, and you assess it that way.
[00:11:03] Matty: And if you're applying that lesson to the author world, do you think that there's any way you can achieve the equivalent of being able to watch an audience?
[00:11:14] John: Oh boy, I think it really comes down to having a trusted team who are willing to read what you've written and be honest with you, who aren't trying to spare your feelings. I'm not sure family is always the best place to go there. And if they don't understand the genre, they're the worst place to go.
[00:11:33] But also just, you know, if you give yourself some time, if you take a month after you finish what you think is the last draft, I found it very helpful because I write in Word, that I'll just sit back and turn on the reader on Word and it will read the book to me. And you get a whole different sense then. Of course, you're not a professional narrator, but you get a sense of, oh boy, I just, I'm using the same kind of words over and over, or, why that was really a jump in logic or why did he say that? And you get a sense for it, which you're not going to get if you finished it on a Tuesday night and you read it again on Wednesday afternoon. You really need that time.
[00:12:12] Matty: Yeah, the closest that I can come up with to the equivalent of watching an audience watch a movie is, I asked my editors to do this, and I think you could ask beta readers to do it as well, is if they're working in an editable document, like a Word document, then just to put in any quick reactions they have to the material. Like LOL or an emoji, or I'm so confused, or this guy's a big jerk, or whatever. And even if they are reading it in something that doesn't enable them to edit it, you could ask them to say, if you're really having a good time highlight it in green. If you're really having a bad time, highlight it in yellow or whatever. Just something where you're not asking them to do, to think about it really, you're just asking them to capture their responses. And when my editors have done that, I found that very helpful.
[00:12:57] John: That's very smart. Yes, that's very nice.
Assessing What You Really Need
[00:13:00] Matty: Another thing that you had mentioned about filmmaking is this idea of an initial investment. Actually, I think you mentioned this in relation to your books, that you had never lost money on your books, and it made varying amounts of money depending on the circumstances. But there's also the argument that if you're treating your indy authorship like a business, then it requires an investment like you would in a business, so you may be paying for an edit before you've sold any book. And so you start out on the venture in red. Any lessons to be learned there between books and movies?
[00:13:35] John: Yeah, always look at what you really need as opposed to what you think you need, because as soon as you start putting money into it, that's money you have to earn back, if you're insisting on earning back money. If you're going to spend money, make sure you spend the right money. For example, your cover in both movies and books, that key art is very important. It's becoming more and more important for movies, because they're so much like books when it comes to how people find them on streaming services. You don't have a very large image, depending on streaming services, they might run a trailer for you to see it.
[00:14:13] And so you need to spend the right amount of money getting that key art image. What used to be called the poster, but it's not really a poster anymore because it's sometimes postage stamp size. The same issue you have with your book. If you have not put the right amount of money into that cover, if you've gone to a friend of a friend who says they have a degree in graphic design, but they don't understand the book business or the movie business, then you're just throwing money away at that point. You want to make sure you're spending the right money.
[00:14:44] But as with books, there's not a lot of money you need to put out right at the beginning. And there's sometimes a tendency to go, I've got to encompass the whole universe here, which means I need to go and pay for three or four different seminars and keep buying seminars to help me. I need to keep buying books on how to write books. And a lot of that is just, you're doing stuff, so you don't have to actually do what you set out to do. I'm sure a little bit of education up front is great, but if that's all you're doing and you're never getting the work done, then you're just throwing the money away.
Fixing It Later
[00:15:19] You want to have a good art for the movie, and you want to have it well put together, which means in production on movies, you have to make sure that it looks good and it sounds good. In many cases it needs to sound better than it looks, because an audience will tolerate some visual goofiness, as long as they can hear what's going on. If you have a bad sound and good picture, they're going to turn it off eventually, because it's, I don't know what's going on here. But if it's not the greatest image but the sound is really good, they'll stick with it. And that's something that's worth paying for during production. It's worth paying for a good editor who knows how to take your million hours of footage, because you can shoot so much now for so little and turn that into a compelling movie that people are going to watch.
[00:16:08] And it's the same with books. You have to make sure that you've got the right number of words in the right order and an editor who's going to help you do that. And you've got to have a really strong visual hook on the cover. They're both completely analogous.
[00:16:22] Matty: I guess one way that they differ, and I don't know that I'd ever want to present this as a recommendation to authors, but it's an escape valve I guess, that if you have no money and you want to get your first book out and you do have to make your cover on Canva or something, then you can always fix it later. You're not totally tied into it, probably the way you're tied into an image that's associated with a movie. You have more flexibility, because you can get it in front of a different audience of people and say, look now I made some bucks from my book, and so I'm investing it back into what I would have liked to have done early on.
[00:16:58] John: Yes, the only downside to that is if you're like in the case of the Eli Mark's Mystery Series, I had a traditional publisher for the first four books. I bought them back and published four more after that. And I re-did all the covers when I got the rights back. And the books are then replaced in the Amazon or Barnes and Noble or whatever system, but all the reviews are from the original one. So if you're getting reviews that say, this book is terribly edited and I couldn't understand what's going on, and the cover is ridiculous, and then you go ahead and fix it, you're going to have to really erase that history somehow and completely redo it. Otherwise, you're going to have the old reviews with the new book.
[00:17:40] Matty: Yeah, I do want to get to the editing part, but I had a couple of questions about the earlier processes before we hit that, and one is the idea of funding. There was like you had made money from other work and your friend had his bass boat fund. And it does seem like funding through platforms like Kickstarter, for example, is becoming more of a thing. Is there an analogy there between what's happening in filmmaking and what's happening in the book world?
[00:18:10] John: I have friends who have funded movies or web series using Kickstarter, and I've seen people who have, authors who have put up GoFundMe and Kickstarter for money to help them edit or get a cover. The lesson that I took away from particularly one friend who raised a decent amount of money for his web series was, the level of work involved in getting the Kickstarter up and running was so mammoth that he felt his energy would have been better put to find a way to make the movie without that money. Because it was so much effort involved in creating a Kickstarter campaign and fulfilling a Kickstarter campaign, that it was like doing a feature film all on its own.
[00:18:57] So you have to be aware of that going in and maybe there's other ways to do it. I don't know of any experiences of people who've used it for book publishing and a lot of people have, I don't know if they found that there's the same effort involved, and it might've just been a time better spent doing something else.
[00:19:14] Matty: I did talk with Joshua Essoe, this was back in episode 56, about crowdfunding for authors and he used Kickstarter, and I think, if I recall his comments correctly, he concurred with what your friends said, that it turned out to be way, way more effort than he did a lot of work.
[00:19:29] John: It's a whole lot of work.
[00:19:31] Matty: Anything else that we haven't hit about editing, the editing process specifically, and analogies there?
[00:19:39] John: It is so important in filmmaking, we always call editing "the last rewrite" because you have the movie you wrote and then you have the movie you shot, which is not necessarily the way you wrote it, the movie you were able to shoot. And then the editor sits down and creates the final rewrite based on the footage given. It is so important and can be so invisible a process, that people don't necessarily understand how important it is, how hard it is and how important it is to have a really skillful person doing it.
[00:20:14] As with when you're editing your own book and you're going through and your eyes glaze over and you've read this paragraph 1 million times, the same thing can happen when editing a movie and you need a particular mindset, who can ignore the fact that he or she has seen this sequence40 times, and is able to continually look at it with fresh eyes, as if the audience is seeing it for the first time.
[00:20:40] In the movie, ALL THAT JAZZ, with Roy Scheider playing Bob Fosse, there's a couple scenes where they show him working with the editor, he's editing a movie like the movie LENNY, which Bob Fosse is making at the time, he was doing everything else in that movie. And it shows him pushing the editor out of the way and sitting down and you see the earlier scene that he edited and then you see the later scene and even the editor sits there and looks at it and says, yeah, that's amazing, he made it better.
[00:21:07] And a really good editor with film footage, can take something and make something out of nothing, or really fix a problem. They can absolutely create a performance. There's a lot more that they can do than an editor of a book, because the editor of a book isn't really writing it, they're just helping you fix it. So it will fall back on you to make the changes.
[00:21:31] You hear stories about the editor of CATCH-22, said it was really called CATCH-18, and he said, you've got to change it because there's a book coming out with 18 in the title, I think, MILAN 18 or something. And so they changed it to CATCH-22 at the last minute.
[00:21:46] That's a big fix, but it isn't a major re-edit, as opposed to where you hear about a movie where there's a movie called EVE'S BAYOU, that a filmmaker named Kasi Lemmons made, and there was a major character in that movie that was cut out in editing. And I talked to her about it, and I said, why? And she said, they insisted, the studio insisted, they didn't like the character. They didn't think he was adding anything he's in 50% of the scenes. And I said, but I didn't see him. She said, he's there, he is there. If you look in the corner of the screen over here, they shot it in such a way that they were able to take a major character out.
[00:22:22] You can do that in movies. A little harder for an editor to work with you on a book in doing that. They can advise you, but then you have to go back and do it yourself. In movies, you have a whole another set of eyes doing it, which is, that's part of the whole filmmaking process. That's why filmmaking in one major way is quite different than writing a book. You can sit down and write a book. You can edit it yourself. You probably, if you're good at it, you make it work, you maybe do your own cover, you could do all that yourself.
[00:22:50] Very few examples of someone sitting down and making a movie from start to finish on their own. They may write it. They may direct it. They may oversee the editing, but they didn't shoot it, unless you're Steven Soderbergh. They didn't come up with the costume designs, they didn't do the acting. There's just, it's so much more of a team sport. That's the major difference, is you have to be able to work with other people, but you get so much more out of it because everybody's bringing something to it.
[00:23:14] Matty: That makes me realize that a sort of basic question that I didn't ask yet is that, although it's pretty clear what the analogy is for the movie editor, book editor, cover designer, you can see where the analogy is there, but the author is playing a number of roles. They're the screenwriter, they're the director, they're the producer, I guess. Is that how you think about it?
[00:23:37] John: Yeah, they're doing all those. They are casting, they're acting, they're costume designing. They're doing everything. You're doing every single piece of it. Which if you thought about it for a second to be sort of overwhelming, but people don't really look at it that way, but yeah, you're in charge of every single thing.
[00:23:52] When I wrote for a TV series, a European TV series called LUCKY LUKE, in the nineties, which is what paid for one of the two movies. And my screenwriting partner and I wrote a couple of scripts. And at that point you hand it off, and maybe a year later they sent us a tape.
[00:24:09] And we had just written, you know, interior, bar, day, Luke walks in and sets his guns on the bar or something. When you get it back and it's this beautiful bar that they've created, a Western style bar, it's full of extras. There's music playing as he comes in and sound effects, there's a million things that they added to that, that are suggested in the script, but someone has to bring them to life. And that's what the movie-making team does with you.
[00:24:38] When you're writing the book, that's you. That's all on you. And that can be a little intimidating for someone, when you pick up a book and go, how did someone come up with all these words? For my case, because I'd done movies before I started novel writing, I was used to working on projects where you'd start with something and two years later, you'd have a finished product. I was used to incremental growth that way, where nothing ever happened quickly. And you get used to a project where the end is a long way off. And you steel yourself for that. If you've never done it before, and if sitting down and typing just a few words and you look at the word count and go, oh boy, I have a thousand words and I've got to have 70,000, this is never going to happen. But it is going to happen, just like with making a movie, you just have to not freak out. This thing is just going to take time.
[00:25:30] Matty: I think that example of the scene in the bar is a great one to describe a concept that I keep trying to come up with the right words for. So I write a series that started out as suspense and became mysteries, and then the mysteries became more and more complex with each installment of the series. And for a while, my plotting kept up with the complexity. And then I got to book five and it no longer kept up with the complexity and the listeners are tired of hearing me say, yes, I'm still reworking, you know, it's with the editor again, with the editor now for the second time. And so I'm working on the next one. And I vowed, I've had this vow before, but this is the first time I've stuck with it, I vowed that I was going to write, I was calling it an outline, but it isn't really an outline, it's basically the story, except in present tense and with no embellishments. And so I wrote that, and it was 5,000 words, and I got to the end, and I said, this one scene I had in here, this totally doesn't make sense. I'm just going to trash it, but now it's only 250 words, so it's not really very painful to trash it. And so now I have 18, 20,000 words of summary or screenplay. I'm thinking that's a good analogy, and then when I'm sure that's solid, then I'm going to go back and add the extras and add the beautiful decor. But I never thought about that, of there being that kind of film analogy there.
Building Out the Story
[00:26:54] John: Yeah, I went through it personally a couple of years ago. A screenwriting partner and I had written a screenplay called THE SWORD AND MR. STONE, which was about an insurance adjuster who gets pulled into a modern-day search for Excalibur. And it was a good screenplay we'd written maybe 20 years ago, we'd won an award with it, we'd been flown out to Hollywood to talk about it. And as it happens with most scripts, it never went anywhere, but it was a good story. It's a solid screenplay. And I looked at it and thought, that would make a fine novel. How tough would it be to just take those 30,000 words in a screenplay and make it a 70,000-word novel?
[00:27:31] It was easier than writing a brand-new mystery, that's true. But there was still that translation from the slim description that was in the screenplay, that was just enough for the production designer to know what to do, as opposed to painting a full picture for a reader. The scenes that were movie scenes are shorter than novel scenes. There's less dialogue in movies than there was in books. There was that whole process of taking that screenplay and suddenly making it into a novel that someone would read, and it took a while to do, but having that as a starting point, was a huge help because I knew exactly. I not only knew what the end was, but I knew what the last line was, because it was already there.
[00:28:12] There's a book that I recommend people read, whether you're into film or novel writing by William Goldman, called ADVENTURES IN THE SCREEN TRADE. And it's about 30 some years old now. It's a bit out of touch in some ways when Goldman wrote PRINCESS BRIDE, he wrote ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, the movie. Hehe wrote BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, and the book is recounting how he got into Hollywood.
[00:28:37] But along the way, he talks about writing his first novel, which was called NO WAY TO TREAT A LADY, in which he did something similar to what you did, in which he just wrote down a brief description of each chapter of the book, maybe a bit more detailed than you had. And then he'd go on to the next chapter, and before you knew it, it was done and he showed it to somebody and they said, this is fantastic, let's publish it. And he said, oh no, it's not a book yet. They said, yeah it is.
[00:29:01] Matty: Surprise!
[00:29:02] John: Yes, surprised you didn't know that. And the way he got to it, of course he didn't know he was writing a book and that made it easier.
[00:29:08] But at a further point in his book ADVENTURES IN THE SCREEN TRADE, he'd written a short story, and I think he turns it into a screenplay, and he sends the short screenplay, so it's probably a 20-minutes short. He sends the script to a bunch of actual Hollywood people, George Roy Hill, the director, and I think, Dick Sylbert, the production designer and somebody else, and has them get back to him, what do you think? And it's really fascinating to see how his short story, how he made that into a screenplay and then how the people who would be on the team making it, if it was a movie, respond to him with, here’s what in the screenplay that works in your adaptation and there's no way I can shoot this. What you've written is not shootable. It was fine in a short story. And it's a great way to just see how those two worlds can co-exist and the differences that are there.
[00:29:57] I was talking to someone, a writer recently, and he mentioned that he thought it was fun that I got great screenplays, and he said, the nice thing about screenplays is you can write as much dialogue as you want. And as I mentioned earlier, there's not that much dialogue in a screenplay really, certainly compared to a novel. But if you look at a script for screenplay and you see a scene and if it's more than two pages long, that's a long scene. A lot of scenes are just a couple of lines, we're onto the next scene.
[00:30:22] Matty: So is that because there's truly not as much dialogue in movies as we think, or is it because somebody else is responsible for filling in the dialogue?
[00:30:30] John: There's not as much as you think, certainly compared to a novel, because they just don't have the time. Which is one of the reasons why it's very tough to write, like an hour-long mystery TV thing, because everything in it has to be there for a reason. And in a novel, you can throw in a lot of red herrings when it comes to a mystery. In a 60-minute mystery, as a movie or a TV show, just about everything there is there to serve a purpose, that they might cover it up by making, for example, the TV show HOUSE is a great example of this. They will list a series of symptoms that the patient is having at the beginning and buried within that is one key thing where they've buried it in with the list, but if you're reading like an Agatha Christie, she will have pages of dialogue with people. And there might be one small kernel that's important within there, but she's just buried in pages of dialogue, which you can do in a book. You just can't do that in a movie, because you don't have the time. You got to get it done in 90 minutes or 120.
[00:31:34] Matty: Some of your conversation about all the people who are involved in getting a movie onto the screen suggests just something that seems on the surface like it would be a big difference from authorship, but maybe it's not, and that is, how much control do I want on what I'm creating? How many hands do I want to have on it? What has your experience been between those two formats?
[00:31:53] John: Yeah, it's again, completely analogous to the two worlds. When I was traditionally published with the first four books, I had an editor slash publisher who wanted changes, and if changes weren't made, I had to have a pretty darn good reason. They had control over what the cover was, even a control over what the title was although they didn't change titles. There was just so much control that they had. And that all changed two years ago when I bought the rights back and all of a sudden, that was all my problem, in a good way and a bad way. I had to deal with all of that.
[00:32:27] The same thing is true of movies. If someone is putting up $2 million to take your screenplay and turn it into a movie, they're going to do what they want. You've signed away the rights to it. If you've written it for them, you certainly signed away, because it's a work for hire, and they're going to do what they want. And you hear stories all the time about writers who were upset because of the way their script was turned into a movie or the director takes his or her name off of it because the movie was taken away from them in editing. If you're going to a wider audience, sure, but you're also paying for it because you don't get to say, this is what I want. You can maybe if you're lucky, be part of the team that's making it and have a voice, but if you're not the producer, if you're not signing the checks, unless you have it in your contract that you have final control over it, you just don't.
[00:33:23] Matty: I also like when I can tie in other episodes, but another one I'd want to point people to is episode 107, which was THE SEVENTH PROCESS OF PUBLISHING SELECTIVE RIGHTS LICENSING with Orna Ross, and Orna talked a little bit about how once you've made that decision to license your work to someone else, then you've just got to let it go and try to move on to the next thing, and not continue to invest yourself in the same way every time they make a little change.
[00:33:46] John: When I sold the TV scripts, I had a friend who had been a TV writer for years, you've written for THE ODD COUPLE and LAVERNE AND SHIRLEY and all. He had good credits. and I said, I'm going off to watch them shoot one of my episodes. And he just took me aside and said, I got to warn you. They're not going to shoot what you wrote. They're not going to shoot what you wrote, because that had been his experience in Hollywood. They're not going to shoot what you wrote.
[00:34:09] We got very lucky because this was a European funded production and, the guy who was producing and directing, it was also starring in it. And if you approve the script was moved and that's what he shot. And so we were lucky. He did shoot exactly what we wrote, but that's a very rare occurrence. That's very rare.
[00:34:27] And then sometimes because they just can't, you've written something that they can't shoot. They lose a location. It's raining. They have to go inside, shoot it a different way. You have to change it. That's moviemaking is a machine and there's just no stopping it once it starts. So as Stephen King always says, they say, are you upset of the way they changed your books? And you'll just point to the books of a while ago. They don't change the books. They make movies out of them, but the books are still here.
[00:34:52] Matty: I've never heard that quote, but that's a great quote. So we have hit on the creative process a little bit. The production process. And I'm also curious about the distribution process. And I think there's a lot that authors can learn from other industries. I think an obvious example is the direction that music is taking. So the fact that fewer and fewer people albums or CDs on their shelves and more and more people are subscribing in the same way that subscription models are becoming much more of a thing among readers as well, what lessons should we be looking to the film industry for, in terms of distribution direction or do's and don'ts.
[00:35:31] John: It's actually the other way around, I think film distribution has learned certainly independent film distribution has learned a lot from self-publishing because people have self-producing movies now. When I first wrote one of my filmmaking books, which would have been in the middle nineties, I had to get a publisher. There was no way to get it out there. And he did his editing magic and got it into all the bookstores and handled all distribution. And I had nothing to do with that at all. I just handed him the look and I was done.
[00:36:03] Obviously with books, now you finish writing your book and you got it all edited and you're happy and you press a couple buttons and it's on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and Kobo and Google Play and all that, and you're distributed and you're out there. The movie business was sort of like the book business where you've sent in your movie. When we finished our feature BEYOND BOB and we got a distributor, we sent it off to them. And a few weeks later they sent us a box of VHS tapes. That's what we are, and said, here's your movie. And we're putting it in video stores all over the country, and you had no control. Now because streaming has become so ubiquitous and there are so many options for streaming of movies and TV shows, there are now aggregators where you can take your movie, take your finished movie and you post it on their site and you say, you have rights worldwide or U.S. or whatever. Go see what you can do. And all of a sudden, your movie is on Amazon prime or Tubi or Hoopla it's in libraries.
[00:37:04] It's a little harder for an independent to get on Netflix, but you can certainly get on Amazon Prime. and a lot of other services I've never heard of, but people must be using because that's where the movies are. And it's very similar to the book process. You finished the movie, you upload it. They do a quality check. They take the artwork you provided, they take all the synopsis stuff you provided and off they go. And then you get a little report that says it's been submitted to these 20 streamers and these 15 have selected it. And so far, eight of them have downloaded it and are offering it. That's really similar to putting out a book.
[00:37:44] Matty: It's kind of refreshing to hear, often. providing a model rather than following him up. I always hear things we should be doing, not things that were already leading the charge on.
[00:37:54] John: Yeah, well, movies are always a little slower to catch up on things. They only do stuff because they have to change. They don't want to do.
[00:38:02] Matty: Interesting. I think another episode I'm going to point people to is episode 53, which was what authors can learn from TV and movies with Tiffany Yates Martin, where we mainly talked about the PRINCESS BRIDE. It's always nice to have a William Goldman tie in, but we mainly talked about the PRINCESS BRIDE among other things. And if after this conversation, people are interested in more of a dive into the creative side, the writing side, then that would be a resource for them to go to.
[00:38:26] But John, thank you so much. This has been so interesting.
[00:38:29] John: Yeah, this has been great. Thank you so much for having me on board.
[00:38:32] Matty: Oh, it's my pleasure. And please let people know where they can go to find out more about you and your work online.
[00:38:37] John: The simplest place to go for the books is EliMarksMysteries.com. If you want to check the movies or the movie books, they're at FastCheapFilm.com. You can see all the movies there and a couple of those, a couple of free filmmaking books. Then the bigger books are there as well.
[00:39:01] Matty: Great. Thank you so much.
[00:39:02] John: Thank you, Matty.
[00:00:06] John: I'm doing quite well, thanks for having me.
[00:00:08] Matty: It is my pleasure. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, John is the author of the Eli Marks Mystery Series, as well as four other stand-alone novels, "The Greyhound of the Baskervilles,” “A Christmas Carl,” "The Sword & Mr. Stone," and "The Ripperologists." He also writes the Como Lake Players' Mystery Series under the pen name Bobby Raymond. In real life, John's not a magician, but he has directed six low-budget features that cost very little and made even less. That's no small trick. He's also written multiple books on the subject of low-budget filmmaking, and ironically, they've made more than the films. John lives in Minnesota and shares his home with his lovely wife, several dogs, a few cats, and a handful of pet allergies.
[00:00:49] So we're going to be talking today about lessons from filmmaking for the indy author. But before we dive into that, I had mentioned in the bio that John is not a magician and I think we need to explain why I would say that and how that sort of applicable to our conversation today.
[00:01:06] John: It makes perfect sense and it's probably the most frequently asked question of me, because my primary book series, the Eli Marks Mysteries, it’s an eight-book set, and the main character, Eli Marks is a professional magician. You don't have to be into magic to read the books, just like you don't have to be into burglary to read Lawrence Block's burglar books. It's just something that character brings to the story. But it is very accurate, and it was important to me from the beginning that I get the world of the professional magician, who does close-up magic at parties or kids' shows or trade shows or stage shows, whatever, I wanted to get all that and I am not a magician. I can do a one card trick.
[00:01:44] So I did a lot of research early on and continue to do research to make sure that everything that I put in the books is correct. And I've not only gotten no complaints from magicians, but I got a very nice email from Teller of Penn and Teller, who said that he read one of the books and he was very impressed with how the magic was presented accurately, that usually in books, it isn't, and that I got all the details. So I like to just let people know I'm not a magician, I just know more than most people.
[00:02:13] Matty: And do you have any more tricks now, other than your one card trick, based on the research that you've done?
[00:02:19] John: No, I know how a lot of tricks are done but, as is common in learning magic or learning about magic, at a certain point a lot of people, me included, want to stop knowing how things are done, simply because the answer is so stupid or so simple or so obvious, that it takes away some of the magic. However, that being said, even if I know how something is done, magicians can still floor me with their skill and their panache and their ability to perform it. Even if you know how the linking rings are done, when you see someone like a J Marshall perform that particular routine, you're just blown away by the magic he creates.
[00:03:02] Matty: Well, that's a nice segue, that whole idea about pulling back the curtain and seeing how the tricks are done. We're going to pull in another aspect of your bio, which is your work on filmmaking and specifically, your expertise in low-budget filmmaking, and talking about how that can apply to the indy author.
[00:03:18] So I wanted to start right out with talking about the role that economics plays in a creative endeavor. That's always a little bit tough, but many of us are trying to make at least a partial living from this gig, so talk a little bit about that.
[00:03:32] John: Yeah, there's a real crossover between low-budget independent filmmaking and self-publishing, or just being a writer, in that you have to decide early on, am I in this just to make money, or am I in this because I love doing it and making money is a nice part of it? In the old days with filmmaking, you had to make money because movies cost so much, and there was such a strict pathway to getting things out, and you as a filmmaker or as the one at the very end getting money. As things have gotten cheaper in filmmaking, you can now make a complete feature on your phone and use some free software to edit it, and you could literally make a feature for very little to no money.
[00:04:14] The same is true of book publishing now. You need a couple important tools, but for the most part, you can do it for very little or nothing, and you just need to decide, so you don't drive yourself crazy, do I have to make money or do I not?
[00:04:29] And I know that there is a certain percentage of authors who it's their living, it's what they do. That's how they make their living, and they have to make money at it, and they have to follow certain paths in order to do that. But for I think the majority of us out here, we like making money on it. We don't have to; the cost of entry is very cheap and just having our books read is sometimes as important as making money.
[00:04:53] I mean, I'll note that the first book in the Eli Marks series, "Ambitious Card," I'm trying that as a free book for this year to see what it's like. And I'm delighted anytime I see that every day, 30 or 40 people download it and that's fantastic. Would I love them to go on to the rest of the series? You bet, but it's still fun to know that Eli's first story is getting out there and people are reading it.
Weighing the Financial Risk
[00:05:14] Matty: So I imagine for some people, this is definitely a yes or no question, the do I need to make money, or do I not need to make money? I think for some people it's going to be many shades of gray in between. Like I have a day job, I don't need to sell my book to pay the bills, but if I were selling enough, I could leave my day job and do this full time. How do you make those assessments in the middle ground?
[00:05:38] John: It's going to be different for every single person. I'll just use the movie analogy, because that's the one that I'm most familiar with. Back in the, let's say the middle nineties, there was a revolution in low-budget filmmaking, with movies like CLERKS or EL MARIACHI or HOLLYWOOD SHUFFLE, which were made for under a hundred thousand dollars and achieved great success and certainly earned their money back and more. And that inspired a lot of people to go out and try to make movies to recreate that.
[00:06:08] The problem was that a hundred thousand dollars is not a lot of money in the movie world, but if you're a person and you're spending a hundred thousand dollars making a movie, that's a lot of money. It's a whole lot of money. And people put their homes at risk to do that. And there were a lot of really sad stories of people who had bought into this idea that yes, every movie is going to have that sort of return like a CLERKS or EL MARIACHI.
[00:06:34] So when I got into it with my partner, we made a couple low-budget features, each for around $30,000. And we were both in a position where, if we never got that money back, we were fine. I produced mine with some money earned from writing for a TV series. He called his budget, his "bass boat," which is he told us wife, I'm not buying a bass boat, but I'm putting money into this movie, and it's lost the same way. So we weren't at risk that way. A lot of other people were, and it was really hard to hear their stories because we were at the time crossing paths with a lot of them.
[00:07:10] Nowadays, with filmmaking and with book publishing, you're probably not putting yourself at that much risk. And so you can enter in and go, I don't really care about making money, I just want to get out some great books. And then all of a sudden it starts taking off, and you change your mind and go, okay, I do want to make money at this. And that's a mindset that's just going to change for everybody as they go along.
[00:07:32] When I started, I had a traditional publisher and they were very excited about the Eli Marks series and I thought, oh, okay, this would be great. And, they didn't have a lot of luck with it, and I bought it back and I've had a lot more luck with it since then. I've never lost money on it, but I've never bet the house on it, because it takes the fun out of it for me. So it's a long twisty answer.
[00:07:52] Matty: When you had talked about the fact that today, it would be possible with a cell phone and free software to make a feature length movie, that obviously doesn't factor in the time. And so in any kind of creative endeavor, there's the actual money you're laying out, then there's a timer laying out. And one of my concerns, especially with indy authors, is that oftentimes they don't value their time sufficiently, when they're making financial decisions about what they want to do. Are there analogies there between filmmaking and ownership?
Taking Your Time and Getting Some Distance
[00:08:24] John: There are. One of the things you have that is the most readily available to you is time. And we always encourage people in independent filmmaking, take as much time as you need to write and rewrite the script. Don't race into that. You're always running against the clock when you're shooting, even if you're shooting an ultra-low-budget movie, maybe more if people aren't being paid, do you think we'll have all the time in the world. People don't want to spend all that much time that, an actor will give you a couple of days if they liked the project, but if you don't seem to know what you're doing or you're wasting time, they're not going to like that. But so you don't have a lot of time there.
[00:08:59] But in pre-production in writing, you have ton of time and also in editing, as long as you are not paying for the editing equipment, you have plenty of time to really hone things and finesse things. As with publishing your own book, there is a tendency to go, I need to get this out right now. I'm done writing. I'm done editing. I have a cover. Boom. I'm going to put it out. Same thing when the movie's done. I'm going to put it out. And it's really best to take time and sit back, get some people to look at it, get just some time for yourself to take a step back and then come back in and look at it again and see if it's really as good as it can be. Because certainly movies, you only get it out there once. I suppose, with books, you could republish it, but you want to make sure that you've taken the time to get it as good as possible, but that's true of movies and books.
[00:09:45] Matty: And is there any similarity between how you've gotten, I'll call them beta viewers, I'm not sure, test audiences for films? How you find those people initially, and then how you assess their input between movies and books?
[00:09:57] John: A lot of us have a kind of an ARC team, a street team that will look at books. In the case of the Eli Marks series, I have normal readers and I also have magicians who look at them, just to make sure that I haven't gotten anything wrong, because although I'm pretty good now, there are still things that I can get a term wrong or something.
Assessing Your Audience's Reactions
[00:10:16] With movies, really the best way to do it, and it isn't enormously expensive, is you rent a theater and you invite a crowd. We did a movie a few years back called "The Cookie Project," which was seven stories that were all joined together about a guy delivering cookies. And we just rented a theater and made it open to the public. The theater got to keep all the concessions. And for 90 minutes, this audience watched the movie, and I didn't have them fill out comment cards because you can really get a sense without comment cards of what was working and what wasn't.
[00:10:49] That's really the best way to do it with movies issues. Get it in front of an audience and then sit in the back and you can tell, okay, they didn't get that. Oh, we've lost a lot of people getting up to get popcorn right now, this must be a slow part, and you assess it that way.
[00:11:03] Matty: And if you're applying that lesson to the author world, do you think that there's any way you can achieve the equivalent of being able to watch an audience?
[00:11:14] John: Oh boy, I think it really comes down to having a trusted team who are willing to read what you've written and be honest with you, who aren't trying to spare your feelings. I'm not sure family is always the best place to go there. And if they don't understand the genre, they're the worst place to go.
[00:11:33] But also just, you know, if you give yourself some time, if you take a month after you finish what you think is the last draft, I found it very helpful because I write in Word, that I'll just sit back and turn on the reader on Word and it will read the book to me. And you get a whole different sense then. Of course, you're not a professional narrator, but you get a sense of, oh boy, I just, I'm using the same kind of words over and over, or, why that was really a jump in logic or why did he say that? And you get a sense for it, which you're not going to get if you finished it on a Tuesday night and you read it again on Wednesday afternoon. You really need that time.
[00:12:12] Matty: Yeah, the closest that I can come up with to the equivalent of watching an audience watch a movie is, I asked my editors to do this, and I think you could ask beta readers to do it as well, is if they're working in an editable document, like a Word document, then just to put in any quick reactions they have to the material. Like LOL or an emoji, or I'm so confused, or this guy's a big jerk, or whatever. And even if they are reading it in something that doesn't enable them to edit it, you could ask them to say, if you're really having a good time highlight it in green. If you're really having a bad time, highlight it in yellow or whatever. Just something where you're not asking them to do, to think about it really, you're just asking them to capture their responses. And when my editors have done that, I found that very helpful.
[00:12:57] John: That's very smart. Yes, that's very nice.
Assessing What You Really Need
[00:13:00] Matty: Another thing that you had mentioned about filmmaking is this idea of an initial investment. Actually, I think you mentioned this in relation to your books, that you had never lost money on your books, and it made varying amounts of money depending on the circumstances. But there's also the argument that if you're treating your indy authorship like a business, then it requires an investment like you would in a business, so you may be paying for an edit before you've sold any book. And so you start out on the venture in red. Any lessons to be learned there between books and movies?
[00:13:35] John: Yeah, always look at what you really need as opposed to what you think you need, because as soon as you start putting money into it, that's money you have to earn back, if you're insisting on earning back money. If you're going to spend money, make sure you spend the right money. For example, your cover in both movies and books, that key art is very important. It's becoming more and more important for movies, because they're so much like books when it comes to how people find them on streaming services. You don't have a very large image, depending on streaming services, they might run a trailer for you to see it.
[00:14:13] And so you need to spend the right amount of money getting that key art image. What used to be called the poster, but it's not really a poster anymore because it's sometimes postage stamp size. The same issue you have with your book. If you have not put the right amount of money into that cover, if you've gone to a friend of a friend who says they have a degree in graphic design, but they don't understand the book business or the movie business, then you're just throwing money away at that point. You want to make sure you're spending the right money.
[00:14:44] But as with books, there's not a lot of money you need to put out right at the beginning. And there's sometimes a tendency to go, I've got to encompass the whole universe here, which means I need to go and pay for three or four different seminars and keep buying seminars to help me. I need to keep buying books on how to write books. And a lot of that is just, you're doing stuff, so you don't have to actually do what you set out to do. I'm sure a little bit of education up front is great, but if that's all you're doing and you're never getting the work done, then you're just throwing the money away.
Fixing It Later
[00:15:19] You want to have a good art for the movie, and you want to have it well put together, which means in production on movies, you have to make sure that it looks good and it sounds good. In many cases it needs to sound better than it looks, because an audience will tolerate some visual goofiness, as long as they can hear what's going on. If you have a bad sound and good picture, they're going to turn it off eventually, because it's, I don't know what's going on here. But if it's not the greatest image but the sound is really good, they'll stick with it. And that's something that's worth paying for during production. It's worth paying for a good editor who knows how to take your million hours of footage, because you can shoot so much now for so little and turn that into a compelling movie that people are going to watch.
[00:16:08] And it's the same with books. You have to make sure that you've got the right number of words in the right order and an editor who's going to help you do that. And you've got to have a really strong visual hook on the cover. They're both completely analogous.
[00:16:22] Matty: I guess one way that they differ, and I don't know that I'd ever want to present this as a recommendation to authors, but it's an escape valve I guess, that if you have no money and you want to get your first book out and you do have to make your cover on Canva or something, then you can always fix it later. You're not totally tied into it, probably the way you're tied into an image that's associated with a movie. You have more flexibility, because you can get it in front of a different audience of people and say, look now I made some bucks from my book, and so I'm investing it back into what I would have liked to have done early on.
[00:16:58] John: Yes, the only downside to that is if you're like in the case of the Eli Mark's Mystery Series, I had a traditional publisher for the first four books. I bought them back and published four more after that. And I re-did all the covers when I got the rights back. And the books are then replaced in the Amazon or Barnes and Noble or whatever system, but all the reviews are from the original one. So if you're getting reviews that say, this book is terribly edited and I couldn't understand what's going on, and the cover is ridiculous, and then you go ahead and fix it, you're going to have to really erase that history somehow and completely redo it. Otherwise, you're going to have the old reviews with the new book.
[00:17:40] Matty: Yeah, I do want to get to the editing part, but I had a couple of questions about the earlier processes before we hit that, and one is the idea of funding. There was like you had made money from other work and your friend had his bass boat fund. And it does seem like funding through platforms like Kickstarter, for example, is becoming more of a thing. Is there an analogy there between what's happening in filmmaking and what's happening in the book world?
[00:18:10] John: I have friends who have funded movies or web series using Kickstarter, and I've seen people who have, authors who have put up GoFundMe and Kickstarter for money to help them edit or get a cover. The lesson that I took away from particularly one friend who raised a decent amount of money for his web series was, the level of work involved in getting the Kickstarter up and running was so mammoth that he felt his energy would have been better put to find a way to make the movie without that money. Because it was so much effort involved in creating a Kickstarter campaign and fulfilling a Kickstarter campaign, that it was like doing a feature film all on its own.
[00:18:57] So you have to be aware of that going in and maybe there's other ways to do it. I don't know of any experiences of people who've used it for book publishing and a lot of people have, I don't know if they found that there's the same effort involved, and it might've just been a time better spent doing something else.
[00:19:14] Matty: I did talk with Joshua Essoe, this was back in episode 56, about crowdfunding for authors and he used Kickstarter, and I think, if I recall his comments correctly, he concurred with what your friends said, that it turned out to be way, way more effort than he did a lot of work.
[00:19:29] John: It's a whole lot of work.
[00:19:31] Matty: Anything else that we haven't hit about editing, the editing process specifically, and analogies there?
[00:19:39] John: It is so important in filmmaking, we always call editing "the last rewrite" because you have the movie you wrote and then you have the movie you shot, which is not necessarily the way you wrote it, the movie you were able to shoot. And then the editor sits down and creates the final rewrite based on the footage given. It is so important and can be so invisible a process, that people don't necessarily understand how important it is, how hard it is and how important it is to have a really skillful person doing it.
[00:20:14] As with when you're editing your own book and you're going through and your eyes glaze over and you've read this paragraph 1 million times, the same thing can happen when editing a movie and you need a particular mindset, who can ignore the fact that he or she has seen this sequence40 times, and is able to continually look at it with fresh eyes, as if the audience is seeing it for the first time.
[00:20:40] In the movie, ALL THAT JAZZ, with Roy Scheider playing Bob Fosse, there's a couple scenes where they show him working with the editor, he's editing a movie like the movie LENNY, which Bob Fosse is making at the time, he was doing everything else in that movie. And it shows him pushing the editor out of the way and sitting down and you see the earlier scene that he edited and then you see the later scene and even the editor sits there and looks at it and says, yeah, that's amazing, he made it better.
[00:21:07] And a really good editor with film footage, can take something and make something out of nothing, or really fix a problem. They can absolutely create a performance. There's a lot more that they can do than an editor of a book, because the editor of a book isn't really writing it, they're just helping you fix it. So it will fall back on you to make the changes.
[00:21:31] You hear stories about the editor of CATCH-22, said it was really called CATCH-18, and he said, you've got to change it because there's a book coming out with 18 in the title, I think, MILAN 18 or something. And so they changed it to CATCH-22 at the last minute.
[00:21:46] That's a big fix, but it isn't a major re-edit, as opposed to where you hear about a movie where there's a movie called EVE'S BAYOU, that a filmmaker named Kasi Lemmons made, and there was a major character in that movie that was cut out in editing. And I talked to her about it, and I said, why? And she said, they insisted, the studio insisted, they didn't like the character. They didn't think he was adding anything he's in 50% of the scenes. And I said, but I didn't see him. She said, he's there, he is there. If you look in the corner of the screen over here, they shot it in such a way that they were able to take a major character out.
[00:22:22] You can do that in movies. A little harder for an editor to work with you on a book in doing that. They can advise you, but then you have to go back and do it yourself. In movies, you have a whole another set of eyes doing it, which is, that's part of the whole filmmaking process. That's why filmmaking in one major way is quite different than writing a book. You can sit down and write a book. You can edit it yourself. You probably, if you're good at it, you make it work, you maybe do your own cover, you could do all that yourself.
[00:22:50] Very few examples of someone sitting down and making a movie from start to finish on their own. They may write it. They may direct it. They may oversee the editing, but they didn't shoot it, unless you're Steven Soderbergh. They didn't come up with the costume designs, they didn't do the acting. There's just, it's so much more of a team sport. That's the major difference, is you have to be able to work with other people, but you get so much more out of it because everybody's bringing something to it.
[00:23:14] Matty: That makes me realize that a sort of basic question that I didn't ask yet is that, although it's pretty clear what the analogy is for the movie editor, book editor, cover designer, you can see where the analogy is there, but the author is playing a number of roles. They're the screenwriter, they're the director, they're the producer, I guess. Is that how you think about it?
[00:23:37] John: Yeah, they're doing all those. They are casting, they're acting, they're costume designing. They're doing everything. You're doing every single piece of it. Which if you thought about it for a second to be sort of overwhelming, but people don't really look at it that way, but yeah, you're in charge of every single thing.
[00:23:52] When I wrote for a TV series, a European TV series called LUCKY LUKE, in the nineties, which is what paid for one of the two movies. And my screenwriting partner and I wrote a couple of scripts. And at that point you hand it off, and maybe a year later they sent us a tape.
[00:24:09] And we had just written, you know, interior, bar, day, Luke walks in and sets his guns on the bar or something. When you get it back and it's this beautiful bar that they've created, a Western style bar, it's full of extras. There's music playing as he comes in and sound effects, there's a million things that they added to that, that are suggested in the script, but someone has to bring them to life. And that's what the movie-making team does with you.
[00:24:38] When you're writing the book, that's you. That's all on you. And that can be a little intimidating for someone, when you pick up a book and go, how did someone come up with all these words? For my case, because I'd done movies before I started novel writing, I was used to working on projects where you'd start with something and two years later, you'd have a finished product. I was used to incremental growth that way, where nothing ever happened quickly. And you get used to a project where the end is a long way off. And you steel yourself for that. If you've never done it before, and if sitting down and typing just a few words and you look at the word count and go, oh boy, I have a thousand words and I've got to have 70,000, this is never going to happen. But it is going to happen, just like with making a movie, you just have to not freak out. This thing is just going to take time.
[00:25:30] Matty: I think that example of the scene in the bar is a great one to describe a concept that I keep trying to come up with the right words for. So I write a series that started out as suspense and became mysteries, and then the mysteries became more and more complex with each installment of the series. And for a while, my plotting kept up with the complexity. And then I got to book five and it no longer kept up with the complexity and the listeners are tired of hearing me say, yes, I'm still reworking, you know, it's with the editor again, with the editor now for the second time. And so I'm working on the next one. And I vowed, I've had this vow before, but this is the first time I've stuck with it, I vowed that I was going to write, I was calling it an outline, but it isn't really an outline, it's basically the story, except in present tense and with no embellishments. And so I wrote that, and it was 5,000 words, and I got to the end, and I said, this one scene I had in here, this totally doesn't make sense. I'm just going to trash it, but now it's only 250 words, so it's not really very painful to trash it. And so now I have 18, 20,000 words of summary or screenplay. I'm thinking that's a good analogy, and then when I'm sure that's solid, then I'm going to go back and add the extras and add the beautiful decor. But I never thought about that, of there being that kind of film analogy there.
Building Out the Story
[00:26:54] John: Yeah, I went through it personally a couple of years ago. A screenwriting partner and I had written a screenplay called THE SWORD AND MR. STONE, which was about an insurance adjuster who gets pulled into a modern-day search for Excalibur. And it was a good screenplay we'd written maybe 20 years ago, we'd won an award with it, we'd been flown out to Hollywood to talk about it. And as it happens with most scripts, it never went anywhere, but it was a good story. It's a solid screenplay. And I looked at it and thought, that would make a fine novel. How tough would it be to just take those 30,000 words in a screenplay and make it a 70,000-word novel?
[00:27:31] It was easier than writing a brand-new mystery, that's true. But there was still that translation from the slim description that was in the screenplay, that was just enough for the production designer to know what to do, as opposed to painting a full picture for a reader. The scenes that were movie scenes are shorter than novel scenes. There's less dialogue in movies than there was in books. There was that whole process of taking that screenplay and suddenly making it into a novel that someone would read, and it took a while to do, but having that as a starting point, was a huge help because I knew exactly. I not only knew what the end was, but I knew what the last line was, because it was already there.
[00:28:12] There's a book that I recommend people read, whether you're into film or novel writing by William Goldman, called ADVENTURES IN THE SCREEN TRADE. And it's about 30 some years old now. It's a bit out of touch in some ways when Goldman wrote PRINCESS BRIDE, he wrote ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, the movie. Hehe wrote BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, and the book is recounting how he got into Hollywood.
[00:28:37] But along the way, he talks about writing his first novel, which was called NO WAY TO TREAT A LADY, in which he did something similar to what you did, in which he just wrote down a brief description of each chapter of the book, maybe a bit more detailed than you had. And then he'd go on to the next chapter, and before you knew it, it was done and he showed it to somebody and they said, this is fantastic, let's publish it. And he said, oh no, it's not a book yet. They said, yeah it is.
[00:29:01] Matty: Surprise!
[00:29:02] John: Yes, surprised you didn't know that. And the way he got to it, of course he didn't know he was writing a book and that made it easier.
[00:29:08] But at a further point in his book ADVENTURES IN THE SCREEN TRADE, he'd written a short story, and I think he turns it into a screenplay, and he sends the short screenplay, so it's probably a 20-minutes short. He sends the script to a bunch of actual Hollywood people, George Roy Hill, the director, and I think, Dick Sylbert, the production designer and somebody else, and has them get back to him, what do you think? And it's really fascinating to see how his short story, how he made that into a screenplay and then how the people who would be on the team making it, if it was a movie, respond to him with, here’s what in the screenplay that works in your adaptation and there's no way I can shoot this. What you've written is not shootable. It was fine in a short story. And it's a great way to just see how those two worlds can co-exist and the differences that are there.
[00:29:57] I was talking to someone, a writer recently, and he mentioned that he thought it was fun that I got great screenplays, and he said, the nice thing about screenplays is you can write as much dialogue as you want. And as I mentioned earlier, there's not that much dialogue in a screenplay really, certainly compared to a novel. But if you look at a script for screenplay and you see a scene and if it's more than two pages long, that's a long scene. A lot of scenes are just a couple of lines, we're onto the next scene.
[00:30:22] Matty: So is that because there's truly not as much dialogue in movies as we think, or is it because somebody else is responsible for filling in the dialogue?
[00:30:30] John: There's not as much as you think, certainly compared to a novel, because they just don't have the time. Which is one of the reasons why it's very tough to write, like an hour-long mystery TV thing, because everything in it has to be there for a reason. And in a novel, you can throw in a lot of red herrings when it comes to a mystery. In a 60-minute mystery, as a movie or a TV show, just about everything there is there to serve a purpose, that they might cover it up by making, for example, the TV show HOUSE is a great example of this. They will list a series of symptoms that the patient is having at the beginning and buried within that is one key thing where they've buried it in with the list, but if you're reading like an Agatha Christie, she will have pages of dialogue with people. And there might be one small kernel that's important within there, but she's just buried in pages of dialogue, which you can do in a book. You just can't do that in a movie, because you don't have the time. You got to get it done in 90 minutes or 120.
[00:31:34] Matty: Some of your conversation about all the people who are involved in getting a movie onto the screen suggests just something that seems on the surface like it would be a big difference from authorship, but maybe it's not, and that is, how much control do I want on what I'm creating? How many hands do I want to have on it? What has your experience been between those two formats?
[00:31:53] John: Yeah, it's again, completely analogous to the two worlds. When I was traditionally published with the first four books, I had an editor slash publisher who wanted changes, and if changes weren't made, I had to have a pretty darn good reason. They had control over what the cover was, even a control over what the title was although they didn't change titles. There was just so much control that they had. And that all changed two years ago when I bought the rights back and all of a sudden, that was all my problem, in a good way and a bad way. I had to deal with all of that.
[00:32:27] The same thing is true of movies. If someone is putting up $2 million to take your screenplay and turn it into a movie, they're going to do what they want. You've signed away the rights to it. If you've written it for them, you certainly signed away, because it's a work for hire, and they're going to do what they want. And you hear stories all the time about writers who were upset because of the way their script was turned into a movie or the director takes his or her name off of it because the movie was taken away from them in editing. If you're going to a wider audience, sure, but you're also paying for it because you don't get to say, this is what I want. You can maybe if you're lucky, be part of the team that's making it and have a voice, but if you're not the producer, if you're not signing the checks, unless you have it in your contract that you have final control over it, you just don't.
[00:33:23] Matty: I also like when I can tie in other episodes, but another one I'd want to point people to is episode 107, which was THE SEVENTH PROCESS OF PUBLISHING SELECTIVE RIGHTS LICENSING with Orna Ross, and Orna talked a little bit about how once you've made that decision to license your work to someone else, then you've just got to let it go and try to move on to the next thing, and not continue to invest yourself in the same way every time they make a little change.
[00:33:46] John: When I sold the TV scripts, I had a friend who had been a TV writer for years, you've written for THE ODD COUPLE and LAVERNE AND SHIRLEY and all. He had good credits. and I said, I'm going off to watch them shoot one of my episodes. And he just took me aside and said, I got to warn you. They're not going to shoot what you wrote. They're not going to shoot what you wrote, because that had been his experience in Hollywood. They're not going to shoot what you wrote.
[00:34:09] We got very lucky because this was a European funded production and, the guy who was producing and directing, it was also starring in it. And if you approve the script was moved and that's what he shot. And so we were lucky. He did shoot exactly what we wrote, but that's a very rare occurrence. That's very rare.
[00:34:27] And then sometimes because they just can't, you've written something that they can't shoot. They lose a location. It's raining. They have to go inside, shoot it a different way. You have to change it. That's moviemaking is a machine and there's just no stopping it once it starts. So as Stephen King always says, they say, are you upset of the way they changed your books? And you'll just point to the books of a while ago. They don't change the books. They make movies out of them, but the books are still here.
[00:34:52] Matty: I've never heard that quote, but that's a great quote. So we have hit on the creative process a little bit. The production process. And I'm also curious about the distribution process. And I think there's a lot that authors can learn from other industries. I think an obvious example is the direction that music is taking. So the fact that fewer and fewer people albums or CDs on their shelves and more and more people are subscribing in the same way that subscription models are becoming much more of a thing among readers as well, what lessons should we be looking to the film industry for, in terms of distribution direction or do's and don'ts.
[00:35:31] John: It's actually the other way around, I think film distribution has learned certainly independent film distribution has learned a lot from self-publishing because people have self-producing movies now. When I first wrote one of my filmmaking books, which would have been in the middle nineties, I had to get a publisher. There was no way to get it out there. And he did his editing magic and got it into all the bookstores and handled all distribution. And I had nothing to do with that at all. I just handed him the look and I was done.
[00:36:03] Obviously with books, now you finish writing your book and you got it all edited and you're happy and you press a couple buttons and it's on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and Kobo and Google Play and all that, and you're distributed and you're out there. The movie business was sort of like the book business where you've sent in your movie. When we finished our feature BEYOND BOB and we got a distributor, we sent it off to them. And a few weeks later they sent us a box of VHS tapes. That's what we are, and said, here's your movie. And we're putting it in video stores all over the country, and you had no control. Now because streaming has become so ubiquitous and there are so many options for streaming of movies and TV shows, there are now aggregators where you can take your movie, take your finished movie and you post it on their site and you say, you have rights worldwide or U.S. or whatever. Go see what you can do. And all of a sudden, your movie is on Amazon prime or Tubi or Hoopla it's in libraries.
[00:37:04] It's a little harder for an independent to get on Netflix, but you can certainly get on Amazon Prime. and a lot of other services I've never heard of, but people must be using because that's where the movies are. And it's very similar to the book process. You finished the movie, you upload it. They do a quality check. They take the artwork you provided, they take all the synopsis stuff you provided and off they go. And then you get a little report that says it's been submitted to these 20 streamers and these 15 have selected it. And so far, eight of them have downloaded it and are offering it. That's really similar to putting out a book.
[00:37:44] Matty: It's kind of refreshing to hear, often. providing a model rather than following him up. I always hear things we should be doing, not things that were already leading the charge on.
[00:37:54] John: Yeah, well, movies are always a little slower to catch up on things. They only do stuff because they have to change. They don't want to do.
[00:38:02] Matty: Interesting. I think another episode I'm going to point people to is episode 53, which was what authors can learn from TV and movies with Tiffany Yates Martin, where we mainly talked about the PRINCESS BRIDE. It's always nice to have a William Goldman tie in, but we mainly talked about the PRINCESS BRIDE among other things. And if after this conversation, people are interested in more of a dive into the creative side, the writing side, then that would be a resource for them to go to.
[00:38:26] But John, thank you so much. This has been so interesting.
[00:38:29] John: Yeah, this has been great. Thank you so much for having me on board.
[00:38:32] Matty: Oh, it's my pleasure. And please let people know where they can go to find out more about you and your work online.
[00:38:37] John: The simplest place to go for the books is EliMarksMysteries.com. If you want to check the movies or the movie books, they're at FastCheapFilm.com. You can see all the movies there and a couple of those, a couple of free filmmaking books. Then the bigger books are there as well.
[00:39:01] Matty: Great. Thank you so much.
[00:39:02] John: Thank you, Matty.
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with John! What lessons did you take from John’s indy filmmaking experience that you can apply to your indy author writing craft or publishing voyage?
I’d love to hear your thoughts!
However, I don’t get notifications of comments posted here, which means I may miss some, and my website builder doesn’t enable commenters to respond to a specific comment, which makes it hard to engage in any kind of dialogue. So I’m recommending that you post any comments on YouTube. Just scroll to the top of this page and click the YouTube link to leave a comment on this or on any other aspect of the show—and to chat with your fellow creative voyagers!
Links
http://www.elimarksmysteries.com
https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/eli-marks-podcast
https://www.fastcheapfilm.com
https://www.facebook.com/JohnGaspardAuthorPage
https://twitter.com/johngaspard
Referenced episodes:
Episode 053 - What Authors can Learn from TV and Movies with Tiffany Yates Martin
Episode 056 - Crowdfunding for Authors with Joshua Essoe
Episode 107 - The Seventh Process of Publishing: Selective Rights Licensing with Orna Ross
From intro:
Erin Wright’s ebook box set cover: https://erinwright.net/my-books/bundles-boxsets/miller-brother-bundle/
J. Thorn’s How-to Book Challenge: https://howtobookchallenge.com/
For links to Matty's upcoming and recent events, click here.
https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/eli-marks-podcast
https://www.fastcheapfilm.com
https://www.facebook.com/JohnGaspardAuthorPage
https://twitter.com/johngaspard
Referenced episodes:
Episode 053 - What Authors can Learn from TV and Movies with Tiffany Yates Martin
Episode 056 - Crowdfunding for Authors with Joshua Essoe
Episode 107 - The Seventh Process of Publishing: Selective Rights Licensing with Orna Ross
From intro:
Erin Wright’s ebook box set cover: https://erinwright.net/my-books/bundles-boxsets/miller-brother-bundle/
J. Thorn’s How-to Book Challenge: https://howtobookchallenge.com/
For links to Matty's upcoming and recent events, click here.
