…with D.V. Bishop
Bringing to bear years of varied experience, David walks us through the trenches and pitfalls of an industry that makes trad pub look like child’s play–including the kind of working conditions you can expect, and the kind of money you might be able to earn.
Oh, and Scott gets to ask his burning question at the end: why do some big-budget tv franchises turn out so, so poorly?
Show Notes
- 30+ year career.
- Started out writing for comics, then moved to tie-in novels, then wrote for film and television· Is currently an award-winning historical crime novelist·
- David has worn a LOT of hats·
- How do you get started as a screenwriter?
- David talks about the paths into that field for television versus film.·
- Explanation of a brutal, competitive, cut-throat industry·
- How does film and TV compare to trad publishing? Much harsher!· Limited negotiation and power in script writing / IP work·
- Rights and creativity and anything created is signed over forever·
- How has the landscape of publishing changed in the past 30 years? Mostly good or mostly bad?·
- The advent of self publishing, the rise of electronic submissions, the accessibility of information·
- The financial side of script-writing: what does it make, what can you expect?·
- Wait…. You guys make HOW MUCH?! O.O·
- Good pay if writers can endure the crushing pressure and difficult environment·
- If you want to break into film, you need an agent, and probably also a lawyer, and a manager.·
- Tie in novels: how much they earn (enough to support you, not enough to retire or quit)·
- Novelisations of films: Tough gig, potentially good money·
- ALWAYS sign a contract first·
- The pitfalls of trying to learn screenwriting / doing your own book adaptations as an author·
- Scott’s burning question: why are some big budget shows SO awful? What went wrong?·
- And finally: Why David is happy to be back writing novels, why he enjoys it, and why he genuinely aspires to be a well-supported midlist writer.·
- “Either you’re the skyrocket and then the hope is you can sustain that thereafter, or else you have to be the little engine that could and you just have to keep chugging away and putting out the books and raising the quality and raising awareness and getting out there and pimping your book and hustle, hustle, hustle.”
Links
Website for D.V. Bishop
Twitter and Linktree for DV Bishop
Transcripts (by Sunyi Dean)
[00:00:01.500] – Sunyi
Hi, I’m Sunyi Dean.
[00:00:03.070] – Scott
And I’m Scott Drakeford.
[00:00:05.260] – Sunyi
And this is the Publishing Radio Podcast. In 2022, we both launched debut novels in the same genre with the same publisher in the same year. But despite having very similar starts, our books and subsequently each for careers went in very different directions.
[00:00:21.480] – Scott
That pattern repeats itself throughout the industry over and over. Why do some books succeed while others seem to be dead on arrival? In this.
[00:00:30.350] – Sunyi
Podcast, we aim to answer these questions and many more, along with how to build and maintain an author career.
[00:00:38.000] – Scott
Everyone signing a contract deserves to know what they’re really signing up for. In an industry that loves its secrets, we’ll be sharing real details from real people. We’ll cover the gamut of life as a big five published author, from agents to publishing contracts, finances, and more. All right, welcome to the publishing rodeo podcast, where we only occasionally say things that we regret. We have with us today David “D. V.” Bishop, and we’re going to talk a whole bunch of things, writing career and TV and film. But before we get into that, I’ll have David tell us a bit about himself, his career, and set the stage.
[00:01:25.220] – David
Thank you for having me, by the way. Lovely to be here. Yeah. So my name is David Bishop, and I’ve been writing for a very long time. I grew up in New Zealand. I’ve got a very well-travelled accent, as a consequence of which I’ve lived in the UK 33 years and in Scotland 23 years, and yet there’s not a trays of Scots in my accent whatsoever. But anyway, I grew up in New Zealand, and a veracious reader, as I think pretty much every writer I ever met was a veracious reader when they were younger. And then straight from high school, I did a six-month course as a journalist and became a daily newspaper journalist, which I did for, I guess, four and a half, five years. And then I immigrated to the UK in 1990, which is probably before either of you was born. Not quite there we go. Not quite, yeah. And then I fell in with a bad crowd. I got involved in comics. I became a comics editor. So I worked on the Judge Dredd magazine, which for people who don’t know Judge Dredd, he’s a future lawman character, played in a regrettable mid-nineties film starring Sylvester Stallone, which I really recommend.
[00:02:32.050] – David
I mean, it’s lovely production design, but that’s about it. And then more successfully by Karl Urban in a film from 2012 called Dredd, which I do recommend as very good. So I was the editor of the Judge Dredd magazine for five years, and then I became the editor of 2018. For those people who don’t know comics, 2018 is effectively the mothership of British comics for the past 46 years, I think it’s been running, and it helped launch or springboard the careers of pretty much every major British comics creator. Gosh, okay, Alan Moore, Dave Gibbs, Brian Bolland, Grant Morrison, Mark Miller, Frank Quiteley, many, many, many, many more. The list goes on. So essentially, 2008 is a weekly anthology comic of science fiction and fantasy and a few other weird things wandering now and then. That’s been the stepping stone for a lot of creators to make their way as professionals on comics creators. So I worked on that on those two titles through the 90s. And during the 90s, I also started to write tyle books. So because the Stallone film was coming, a company called Virgin Books, who at that point published Doctor Who fiction and erotic fiction, which was they described in their Writers Guide as books to be read one handed.
[00:03:51.720] – David
Obviously, this was literally said that in the Writers Guide. This was life before 50 Shades, but basically it was 50 Shades before it became hugely successful. And they wanted to do Judge Dredd tie novels, and they needed anybody who knew anything about Judge Dredd to write novels for them. And Virgin was very unusual in the 90s, in that they had an open door policy. You didn’t need an agent to approach them or to pitch them. If you wanted to write a Doctor Who novel, you could literally just send in your idea for a Doctor Who novel. If you wanted to write Erotica, you could just send in your idea for erotica, whatever floated your boat at the time. So as a consequence, Virgin Books, because you didn’t have to have an agent to get work with them, they attracted a lot of young writers who were breaking into the industry. So people like Mark Gattis, who’s now best known for things like League of Gentlemen and Sherlock with Stephen Moffett and many other things as well, and writers like Paul Cornell and quite a few others as well, and Andy Lane, et cetera. So they were desperate for anybody who could write Judge Dredd.
[00:04:53.800] – David
And I always wanted to write novels. The first novel I wrote, if we don’t get my childhood fan fiction, where I wrote myself into famous five Enid Blyton mysteries, or James Bond 3.5 when he was 13 years old and he was fighting crime. But anyway, so I got to write Judge Dredd novels for Virgin. And this is so long ago, I wrote them on an electric typewriter. That’s before I even had access to a personal computer. This is how long ago we’re doing. I didn’t even have carbon paper, for God’s sakes. There was literally only one copy of the manuscript. This is how De Kenzie and it all was. So yes, I used to get up at 5:00 in the morning and write for a couple of hours, and then go in and edit comics for the rest of the day. And so I wrote my first novel in 10 weeks and handed it in, physically got into the taxi, went to the publisher’s office and handed them the big box with the manuscript inside it, just like in the movies, honestly, it was just like, and you handed it to them.
[00:05:47.550] – David
And that’s when my first dream was shattered, because they literally just took it from me. I went, Oh, okay. And they just stuck it on the pile of all the other manuscripts that was set behind them, because, of course, we didn’t have email at that point. These days, it would just arrive in their inbox and just get tagged, must read later, and then be ignored for another six weeks because publishing works in its own peculiar time frames. So, yes, I wrote three Judge Dredd novels of Virgin. I eventually got to write a Doctor Who novel, which is my dream job. It was called Who Killed Kennedy, which is all tied into the fact that Doctor Who launched the day after Kennedy was assassinated back in 1963. And so that was the whole premise of the book. And then I quit comics in the year 2000, moved to Scotland, went freelance as a self-employed writer, and started writing everything you could lay your hands on. So I wrote more Doctor Who, more Judge Dredd novels. I wrote a Nightmare on Elm Street novel. I wrote audio dramas with Doctor Who and Sarah-Jane Smith and Sapphire and Steel and God, something else, and computer games and comics and graphic novels and a lot of journalism as well.
[00:06:51.630] – David
So I did a ton of writing, but I wanted to write for telly. I wanted to write for TV, and I’d had a couple of opportunities because I’ve been successful in other areas. And so I got opportunities to write for TV and made a complete hauler of it. I would be the polite description of what I miss, we’d call it that. And so I thought, Right, if I want to write for TV, I need to go off and get some training because I know I can write and I know I can tell stories but there’s peculiarities to screenwriting for film or the television that are very specific. So I did a Masters in Screenwriting Part Time, which I funded through writing my various writing gigs. And then off the back of that, I started writing radio dramas for the BBC and then TV dramas for the BBC for a continuing drama series over here called Doctor’s, which is on in the afternoons. And yeah, so I did screenwriting for about five years, and I got burnt out on prose because I was writing so much stuff through the naughties. I once calculated I had 600,000 words published in the year 2004 in various media, and then only half of me in the next year, which actually sounds like a bigger than 600,000.
[00:08:01.120] – David
But anyway, that’s numbers for you. Because I was studying my MA at the time, and I got completely burnt out because I was shitting out tie in novels is what it boils down to, because if you’re going to write for tie-ins, generally speaking, you’re going to have to write fast, and a lot of tie-ins these days you just get your fee. It’s work for hire. You get a flat rate. Some books you get a royalty, some books you don’t. But we can talk about that later if you’re interested. So yes, I did a lot of times and I got burnt out. And also a lot of my tie-in avenues were the contracts were winding up, the publishers were getting out of the business. So I went to screen writing for a few years and did that and got as far as I seemed able to do, or had the enthusiasm to do, frankly, because one of the problems with screenwriting is it’s not like you can self publish your screenplay and people are going to rush out and buy it on Kindle. It’s not really a marketplace for that. So whereas if you write a novel and no traditional publisher wants to publish it, and those small press wants to publish it, and they want to publish it, well, you can still self publish it yourself and try and do things with it.
[00:09:06.800] – David
So I was writing screen plays, and they were being read by my agent and two other people, and that would be six months of your life. And they would just go, Yeah, no. And then that six months of your life just goes in the bin and you can move on to the next six months of your life. And I found that quite soul-destroying because I’d spent so long under contract, writing for contract, knowing that it was going to come out, it was a guaranteed piece of work. And with Tally, it was all guaranteed work. Once you got the gig, then that was it. You had six weeks to write five drafts of the script, and then you were done. Move on. So, yeah, I got to a point with screenwriting where I was disillusioned with the polite description. So I thought, Right, well, let’s go back to what I actually love doing, which was writing prose fiction. And now I write historical thrillers, which are set in Renaissance Florence, featuring a queer detective called Cesare Aldo. He enforces the law for the most feared criminal court in the city, and yet at the same time, his sexuality means that he’s outside the law at the same time.
[00:10:03.230] – David
So that’s the dilemma that Aldo has and all his situations that he gets into. I guess last week, as we’re recording this, I won the Crime Writers Association historical dagger, which is this, not that it’s going to show up on the podcast, but this weird, stabby trophy that they gave me, which is very shiny, very sharp and very heavy. And even if you didn’t stab somebody with it, blunt force trauma could be done.
[00:10:28.910] – Sunyi
I saw that on Twitter. Congratulations! I’ve not read a huge amount of Judge Dredd, although I did use to own a bunch of the comics, a bunch of 2000 AD stuff. But I did play for years and years in Slay Industry RPGs, which are based very strongly of Judge Dredd to the point where I almost think it’s violating copyright, but yeah. So we’re tangentially familiar with that setting.
[00:10:54.680] – David
Well, that’s like the first RoboCop film came out and was blatantly the writers were quite honest about the fact that they were just-. It’s just, when you walk someone says, I am the law. All most of Robocop’s dialogue is just straight out of Dredd. So there you go, which meant they killed the film for five years afterwards. So yes, that’s me.
[00:11:17.080] – Scott
Yeah, that was a very good summary. You’ve done that before, I think.
[00:11:23.580] – David
Just possibly.
[00:11:25.600] – Scott
Yeah, right. So, I mean, you answered a lot… Partially answered a lot of questions I came into this with in your introduction. But I am interested in, I suppose, both TV and film and IP freelance work, which you’ve done. And I know some people in our industry do, other writers in our science fiction and fantasy space. Some of them have gotten quite involved with, especially freelance and IP work. But to be honest with you, I have no idea, and it sounds like there are quite a few drawbacks and not as broad of a market for TV, etc, and film, but I have no idea how one even gets started in that other than… Some people have said, Well, if you’re interested in IP, just tell your agent and they can go out and hunt for something. But maybe we start with TV and film. If one were interested in going basically the opposite direction you did, and diversifying the type of work and number of things they had their fingers in, and going from novels to TV or film, how would one even get started? How does that work?
[00:12:41.230] – David
Yeah, it’s a good question. I mean, like any creative industry, there’s a load of gatekeepers. It’s really what it boils down to. So you have to make a choice. How are you going to go about something and how you are going to approach it. So, I mean, in my case, I went off and did a masters in screenwriting. Yeah. And we can talk about later whether or not you need a degree of any sort whatsoever to write.
[00:13:05.210] – Scott
Talk about it now.
[00:13:06.290] – David
Oh, okay. All right.
[00:13:07.280] – Scott
We’ll do that now. Well, I mean, because that’s really my question, right? With novels, the path to becoming an author sucks, but we know what it is, right? You write something, you try to get an agent, and then your agent tries to sell it, and you can fail at any stage, but the path is somewhat known. But you obviously did a master’s degree in this area to get work, and it sounds like it worked. But is that what you have to do? Is that how you get your first break in TV and film writing? Or do you just have to know the right person? I just have no idea how it works from step one to becoming part of a writer’s room. Yeah.
[00:13:54.090] – David
Okay, so there’s a fundamental difference in the TV marketplace in the UK versus the US. Okay. So I’ll talk about them separately. Yeah. So the US, you have the writer’s room system. And traditionally pre-COVID, how it used to be was you wrote a bunch of screen plays. Actually, this is true of both sides of the Atlantic. You write a load of original screen plays to demonstrate your talent, your skills, and your unique voice as a writer. And then if you’re lucky in TV, you’ll be hired to write so you sound like somebody else. So you have to demonstrate your originality and your fresh voice and your new perspective, and then you have to ventriloquise other people’s characters and other people’s stories and how actors speak if you’re going for TV writing.
[00:14:44.350] – Scott
Yeah, sure.
[00:14:44.750] – David
So there’s a fundamental difference between film and TV. So TV, you are writing to production for the most part, but you write what’s called a calling card script. So you will write a screenplay of the length of the show that you want to write for. So if you were writing for, I don’t know, a network show in the US on CBS, for example, then it’s going to be in 5x. It’s going to be 42 minutes long of screen time with commercial breaks to get it up to an hour. And so there’s certain parameters and expectations of what’s going to happen and how it’s going to be structured. So let’s say you wanted to write for, name me a current hit US TV show that’s not on a streamer.
[00:15:23.640] – Sunyi
you’re asking the two people who don’t watch a lot of television!
[00:15:26.020] – Scott
I have young children and so does she. The only one I can think of that I watch that’s like a guilty pleasure show that’s not on a streamer but is on a network is, God, what’s the name? The Rookie?
[00:15:41.640] – David
-that’s with Nathan Fillion.
[00:15:44.740] – Scott
-that’s the one.
[00:15:45.640] – David
Yeah. Okay. So for something like that, let’s say you definitely wanted to write for The Rookie. The Rookie was your favorite show you’d love to write for The Rookie. Yeah, sure. Now in America, what you can do is you can write a spec script actually for a show like The Rookie. The weird thing is you don’t write a spec script for the show that you want to write for. You write one that’s in the vicinity of the show you want to write for.
[00:16:06.040] – Scott
Because that would be IP infringement, right?
[00:16:08.690] – David
The first thing they would say is, We can’t read your rookie script because then we get in trouble. I mean, in the old days with Next Generation and Voyager and things, they actually used to look at some of those scripts before Paramount, I guess, said, No, for the love of God, please stop looking at spec scripts for the actual show. This is a nightmare of legalities. So, yes, you write a show that’s a lot like The Rookie but not The Rookie that you invent of your own. Or you write something that’s, I don’t know, you write for Blueblood or something else, another CBS procedural cop lawyers show, and that’s your agent will then try and use that to get you gigs in US, Writers Room. In the UK, it’s different. We don’t have… There’s a little bit of the Writers Room system, but not as it is in the US. So what we have, there’s a big… Obviously, the Writers Guild are on strike in America at the moment for a whole bunch of reasons, one of which is the threat of AI and creativity, which is his own separate conversation. But another one is the American production companies have been trying to move away from the writer’s room system, where writers are employed full-time to work on a show as whatever it is, script producer, whatever the name that you get.
[00:17:17.770] – David
And then on top of that, you get your script fee as well. So you’re in the writer’s room, you break all the episodes of a season as a collective and throwing ideas out. And then hopefully you get one of the episodes to write as a script yourself. So you get the pay for that and you get paid to be on staff as well at the same time as other jobs involved. And what they’ve been trying to do in the US is bring in a mini room system. So they will just get, we’ll just employ you for two weeks to smash out ideas for six scripts, and you may or may not get the gig at the end of that. You may just get your two weeks of pay, and then you get kicked to the curb. And we get the ownership of the ideas that you said in the room. So we’ve employed you for those two weeks and we get all of your creativity. And that’s the UK system, which is you can spend a day or two days or two weeks in a mini room banging out ideas for the season of whatever the show is.
[00:18:09.050] – David
And then at the end of that, you might not get a job. They might not employ you to write a script. So you can have spent those two weeks or however many days in the room pitching ideas, helping them shape the season, and that’s it. They just kick you out of the room and you’re gone. And so it’s a system called the Miniroom, and it’s basically the way most British TV dramas that are not single author written, what’s called an author drama. So there’s one person writes the whole thing. That’s the exception. That’s quite British, and you almost never see that in the US. I think the exceptions is Babylon Five famously, whole chunks of that were written by J. Michael Strasinsky.
[00:18:45.370] – Sunyi
Really random tangential question that probably only interests me. Why the heck are UK shows like 6-8 episodes a season? Because that really threw me when I moved here and I was like, I’m used to my seasons being 22 episodes long.
[00:18:59.780] – David
Yes. Yeah. Because we don’t have a writer’s room system, so you don’t have eight people in the room who work their way through the entire thing. Because it’s only one person writing all of the episodes, that would just break them. Six episodes, eight episodes might be the whole year that they’ve spent writing those episodes, because you often have one person writes the whole story like a novel effectively. It’s a novelistic approach, because we never had the writer’s room system that they had in the US that enabled them to produce 22 episodes a season, as it was, or in the olden days. So you needed to have that many writers in order to get the job done. In the UK, the tradition for drama was single writer, six episodes, eight episodes.
[00:19:41.590] – Scott
Yeah. So in your example, they pull somebody in to suck all of their creativity out for two weeks and then roll with that. Who takes it from there? Who goes from whatever weird ideas and half-assed drafts that are produced in a two-week span and turns it into an actual script/show?
[00:20:06.390] – David
All right. So in the mini room example, no scripts are written in the room. It’s just ideas. They just break story. They break story down to scenes and sequences and acts, and the writers will pitch and having decided what the shape of the season is and where each character is going to progress over a season.
[00:20:23.880] – David
Then they will then often… you will have to stand up at the end and pitch your idea for an individual episode. So I actually did this in a mini room in the UK, and I made such a mess of it. Honestly, I could hear the words coming out of my mouth. I was apologizing before I started pitching. I just went, This is not going well. Everybody’s been really supportive. And then at the end of that, we all had to walk back to the train station and everybody just walked ahead of me. I was the one in the herd with the broken leg that was being left behind. Everybody just walked ahead of me. I had a four hour train journey to get home just like, Oh, God, that didn’t go well. I said, I am never hearing from them again. That’s the end of that job. And yeah, I got paid for my two days in this case and I never heard from them again, because I just… I literally spent two days kicking around these ideas and all of that. And at the end of it, everybody pitches their ideas for an episode, because I was new on the show.
[00:21:23.640] – David
I didn’t have an established rep with other people. This was what’s called a pre-teen show, so it’s aimed at seven to twelve year olds effectively in the UK, because the thing that would be on Nickolodeon, I guess, or one of the Disney Kids channels, Disney Junior or whatever it’s called now. Anyway, so yes, and the other people on the episode, on the Writers Room, I looked them up. I made the mistake of looking at IMDPU before I arrived, and I discovered nobody had less than 45 episode credits to their name, and I had two. And I just went, Oh, and I just psyched out so badly. Anyway, to answer your question, Scott, what will happen is they will assign, if you pitch a story successfully, they will commission you to write a draft of it. And then if your draft shows enough promise, they will ask you for another draft and they’ll give you notes and it’s an iterative process thereafter. When I was writing for Doctors on that, if you didn’t get it right by the second script, you could very easily be fired off your story that you pitched. I worked on another show called River City, and I got fired off that.
[00:22:31.570] – David
I wrote a 75 page first draft, and then my scripted it phoned up. And the first thing they said to me was, Sorry. That’s never the first word you want to hear out of the mouth of your scripted on a TV, because it’s not going to go well after that. And then they took me through the notes for my script about what the exec producer wanted to change. And the only thing I can remember is that apparently he said he wanted the characters to be heightened but grounded. And I just thought, I have no idea what that means. And then I knew I was going to be fired, but they were contractively obliged for me to write two drafts. So that was on a Thursday, and I had to hand my page one rewrite, 75 page draft. I had five days to write a new draft, handed in on Tuesday, so they could find me on Wednesday. And that was my weekend. That’s what I spent the weekend doing writing a script so I could be fired and get my kill fee, which was half the fee I would have got if the episode had gone into production and you just get replaced by more experienced writer.
[00:23:32.790] – David
So it’s a particularly cut throat industry in the UK.
[00:23:36.430] – Sunyi
So, I mean, obviously we spend a lot of time in this podcast joking about how bleak tried publishing is, but that sounds like several levels are hell worse to me. And I just wonder, you’ve come from that background, now you’re coming into novels from various angles and how you find trad publishing compares to that. Do you just look at it and go, Yeah, I’ve seen worse every day?
[00:24:00.340] – David
Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. It’s so polite. Everybody’s so polite.
[00:24:06.200] – David
It’s just like they’re so nice. I mean, if you’re being ghosted, it’s not nice. If the radio silence kicks in and you’re just like, I can’t get any replies to anything, and your agent can’t get any replies, then that tells its own story. But even when you’re getting completely shit canned, it’s done perfectly politely. Whereas, film and TV, it’s the other ends of the spectrum. It absolutely can be. I’m sure there are plenty of Me Too stories in publishing, but by comparison to the likes of Weinstein, some of the other predators that have been prowling. And yes, there are in some of the publishing, certainly there are in and got for it. But yeah, by comparison, trade publishing is so nice and polite and gentle, certainly in the UK. I can’t speak for the US because I haven’t worked in directly in the uk.
[00:24:54.160] – Sunyi
I would agree. I mean, every day I see someone getting upset on Twitter about some rejection of the queer trenches. I do understand that because the trenches put your brain in this terrible place. But I do think that industries like if you’re trying to be a musician and you get a rejection, the rejection is you get booed off the stage or people walk out of a show if you’re a comedian and stuff like that. I do think actually writing probably trad publishing for novels, we have some of the gentlest rejections of any creative industry.
[00:25:25.940] – David
Yeah. Yeah. I would agree. The headline is very polite, which is why, of course, then when you get to, I don’t know, you make the mistake of opening up Goodreads when you’ve got your new book has just come out and then you just see a load of, I don’t know, DNFs next to your name and you’re just like, Oh, God, that is the equivalent of somebody walking out of your show, DNF. It’s the straight correlation there. So no, I mean, by comparison to Telly, writing for Telly, no, the train of publishing is incredibly slow. I mean, there are that glaciers have retreated faster than publishing.
[00:26:03.060] – Scott
Literally these days. Yeah.
[00:26:04.890] – David
Well, literally these days. No, they’re on speed dial. But no, no, no. I think trade publishing… I mean, the weird thing was when I was doing all my time work, I didn’t have an agent. I didn’t have a literary agent for books until 2019. And my first novel, August this year will be the 30th anniversary of my first novel being published. But all of the time books I did was without a literary agent. I mean, partly because Virgin looked at somebody, they were willing to look at people who didn’t have agents. But even when I moved on to other publishers of TIE in books, I didn’t have agents for any of that work. But of course, TIE in work and IP work, it’s, generally speaking, it’s boilerplate contract. There’s nothing to negotiate. You are working with other people’s characters, other people’s concepts. You have to bring all your creativity and all the rest to it. But if you invent, I don’t know, the next incredible thing in your… Let’s say you do a TIE in book of a SAW novel for some reason, or whatever the next thing is going to be.
[00:27:05.520] – David
But if you’re doing that and if you invent some great new character and then they import that into the movie, you’re not going to get paid for that character that you invented that reconfigured and took it into a bold new direction. You surrender your rights to your creativity and that particular piece of work. So that’s the deal. That’s what you sign up for. But you should walk into it with your eyes wide open. And if you do have an agent, then they can offer you some protections from that. You’re not a lit agent. But the reality is it’s a boilerplate contract, the terms are the terms, and you can almost never negotiate better terms for yourself. And there’s certainly no white rights that you can withhold. That’s not within your power to do. Even if you got the best day, even if you got Juliet, mushroom, as your agent. If you’re doing time work, that’s the deal is the deal and you take it or you don’t take it and there’ll be somebody in the queue behind you who wants it.
[00:27:53.720] – Sunyi
there’s two questions I’d ask of that. I mean, the one is I’ll get into the income side later if you’re willing. But the first one is across 30 years, do you think, I mean, obviously there have been more agents, more gatekeepers over time. Do you think that’s changed the landscape of how people get into publishing? And do you think that that’s basically a good thing or a bad thing or neither?
[00:28:15.970] – David
I think the fundamental things that have changed is, first, our agents are on the Internet now. You don’t have to send a physical manuscript to anybody for the love of God. So that has made life a lot easier. I think the level of connectivity and the ability and social media outreach enables you to find out a lot more about what agents do want. There’s a lot of demystification, I think, has happened over the last 10 years, particularly, which I think has altered the benefit of Redis. There’s so much more information available than there was even five years ago. And podcasts like yours really helped to… If anybody is sufficiently intrepid to go out and find podcasts like this, then they’re like, Yes, because this will tell you an awful lot of things to avoid. And some of your guests have said, Well, I wish I’d listened to them publishing radio podcasts before I went and sign that particular deal because… But we’ve all been there. We all have regrets of one form or another. And so, yeah, I think the amount of information available is much better. I think self publishing. I mean, so I run the creative writing programmes at Edinburgh, Navy University in Scotland.
[00:29:21.380] – David
In fact, one of your previous guests is joining us as a colleague next month. Nick Binge is joining our teaching team next month. I’m looking forward to working with him. It’s going to be great. And yeah, I know the moment where you get a praise quote from Stephen King, you’re like, Okay, that has just taken it up a level for goodness sake. Sorry, what was my point? I was talking about nothing creative writing. Now I’ve lost it completely now. Okay, so gatekeepers. So when we started the creative writing program was 2009, and we’re the only genre loving program that you can go on. We get a ton of US students come to us because if you wanted to do an MFA and creative writing in the US, God forbid you want to have an El for a spaceship in it, I mean, that’s the invite as well. Just go and piss on the chips of the Great American novel, not to be born. So yeah. So when we started that programme was 15 years ago now, and self-publishing was still a dirty word at that point. We didn’t have the iPad, Kindle had just emerged.
[00:30:18.750] – David
The first Kindles were just out there. But really, we didn’t have… Now you can legitimately have a self-publishing career in certain genres as long as you’re able to pump out enough work and feed the beast. And you can make really good money doing that. So I’m working in crime now. There are crime writers who have never been traditionally published and who have sold close to 10 million books now in one format or another. So they have complete control over their canon of work and how it’s distributed, and it goes into and actual bricks and mortar bookshops and printed copies and all the rest. It’s not just ebooks. So they’ve gone past the point where they’re dependent upon Amazon to keep them in money. So that simply didn’t exist. So things have changed dramatically over the past 30 years. I mean, obviously you have the massive consolidation of traditional publishing down to the big five in the UK and probably the US, I guess. So that has an impact on what’s available and the land grab of rights that you’re willing to surrender or that you’re told you must surrender. If you want to get a contract, it’s going to be World Rights, all languages, the list goes on of all the things that you must be willing to give up if you want to give this contract.
[00:31:32.070] – David
So that’s-.
[00:31:32.990] – Scott
Oh, we know.
[00:31:33.650] – David
-one of the downsides.
[00:31:35.780] – Scott
We know all about it hahahaha.
[00:31:37.230] – David
The- But for the most part, I would say things are better. But there isn’t that.
[00:31:41.710] – Scott
But I do, and you don’t have to answer this if it ventures into uncomfortable territory. But I do have to ask about the financial side of novels versus TV, film, what have you, because I think there are a lot of novel writers out there, even published, traditionally published authors out there who are eyeing TV and film thinking it’s their perhaps their next best avenue to making an actual living as a writer. Would you like to disabuse people of that notion? And/or tell us how that might work for people, if that is an option.
[00:32:28.720] – David
Okay, right. Well, I mean, it depends what you’re writing, what audience you’re writing for, the length of the script, because you get paid in the UK. I can only speak to the UK because I’ve written for telling the US, so I can’t speak to the amount of money that’s available there because the writer’s room system. So you’re on staff, so I believe you’re salaried, and then you get a script on top of that. So that’s a different system from the UK. I can only speak to my experience of the UK. And in the UK, and in the UK it can vary wildly. So, for example, I did some… I wrote for some preschool shows in the UK, so aimed at zero to six effectively. And if you wrote… So the scripts there, they’re only… The shows are only 11 minutes long. So therefore the script’s only 11 pages long, which is like that’s not a lot of work, frankly. You can knock one of those off in the weekend if you’re really lazy about, there’s more involved in that. But generally you’re writing for a pre-existing format or certain expectations.
[00:33:24.950] – Sunyi
Was it Ben and Holly? No random task, sorry.
[00:33:28.920] – David
No, I wrote for a show called Nina and the Neurons, which is a weird combination of an actress is playing Nina, who’s a scientist character. Then they have real children come into the studio and interact and do experiments with Nina, who’s an actress pretending to be a scientist. And then they have CGI characters who represent the five senses inside the brain of Nina. So it’s a.
[00:33:55.430] – Sunyi
Very odd show. A very classic British weird show.
[00:33:58.300] – David
Yeah. It’s the one you think, How many drugs did they have to take to come up with this? Because it’s just like, What? But the budget, because it was made in-house by the BBC, the budget was so tiny that you are only allowed to have… So the CGI was quite expensive for them to do to lip sync the mouths of the neuron speaking with the dialogue. So you were only allowed to have 11 lines of dialogue spoken by the CGI characters, where we could see their mouths. Otherwise, we had to see the back of their heads while they were talking. And because they couldn’t afford to animate the mouth, which is arcane. But then it’s preschool, so you’re only allowed one three-syllible word per episode as well. Everything else had to be two syllables or less. So if you said stethoscope, that was it, you used your one three-syllible word of the episode. Neither or neither that was an in-house show, and I was getting 300 pounds an episode. So whatever that is in US, $400, $450 an episode. If I’d been writing that for an independent producer who was making the show for the BBC, I would have been getting two and a half thousand pounds per episode.
[00:35:04.760] – David
And that’s 10 years ago now when I was doing that. So in fact, my agent got the fee increased to 400 pounds per episode while I was there. So the fee went up by 33 %. But if I’ve been writing for, I don’t know, Dog and Duck or Bluey or something else, then if I’ve been writing for an indie, then the rates would have been nearly 10 times what you would have get for writing for a BBC in-house show, which is just a factor of the economies of how the show was made. And then when I was writing for Doctors, my first four episodes, I was deemed to be an inexperienced writer. So I got the starter’s fee, which at the time for a half hour episode, I think was two and a half thousand pounds. And then after I had two hours of credits under my belt, the BBC didn’t need to be an experienced writer. So my rate went up by 50 % to that point for every script thereafter.
[00:35:56.900] – Sunyi
I mean, that’s an entire advance from a mid-sized press in the UK. Yeah.
[00:36:03.050] – David
Yeah. And that was… And if you read an episode of Doctors, the actual scripting of it was, I think you had five… It was six weeks from Commission to cameras start rolling because they make 200 plus episodes a year. Because it’s like a telly, basically. It’s on almost the only time it’s off is Christmas and during Wimbledon, because we have blanket coverage of Wimbledon on the BBC. So Doctors rests for two weeks while people play tennis on grass somewhere. When I was writing for River City, that was an hour, and I think my kill fee was somewhere between six and eight grand. And if I’d actually got the full fee, if they had gone on my episode, I think that would have been 12 to 15 grand. Again, this is a few years ago now. And it used to be you got residuals if you got repeated. I think now they mostly do buyouts, so you get your fee and you get your fee again, so they never have to pay you after that, but they basically double your fee. So the money you can make if you’re writing hour long dramas, is really good, but to get there is the challenge.
[00:37:01.330] – David
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you have to write all these calling card scripts that demonstrate your powers of originality and your craft skills to then be hired to write somebody else’s characters and somebody else’s stories for years because you have to write for soap operas or continuing drama to then progress where you might be able to get your own show. And it’s a real, I mean, it’s a total lottery ticket. And you can spend years writing scripts that never get made. I mean, there are people who make a couple of friends of mine have made lucrative living, 10 years doing development work for film and TV, and nothing ever gets shown. It never gets made. It never goes into production, but they keep getting paid to write new scripts and develop stuff, but it never gets made. And as a writer, I write to be read. So that’s why I ended up… That’s why I gave up on on TV because I wanted to be read and my agent and two people wasn’t enough. But yeah, if you want to break into… If you want to break into TV, you have to have a TV agent.
[00:37:58.210] – David
If you want to break in film into film, ultimately you’re going to need an agent and you’re probably going to need a manager as well and a lawyer if you’re going to break into film, because otherwise you’re going to get completely ripped apart. But you can break in. So there are contests that you can get noticed on, things like the Nicol scholarship. So there are avenues that you can get in and you can draw attention to yourself, which is how I got my first telly gig, was I entered a script in a competition, short film script in the competition, and it won a prize in L. A. And that got me some interesting notification and that got me a radio job and that got me a telly job. And that was before I had an agent. So I actually got my first… I got my first TV commission before I had an agent, and then I had to run around and quickly get an agent because I’d shit. It’s like the guys, the horse is in front of the town, or the town’s in the horse. You knew what I meant.
[00:38:47.920] – Scott
Yeah, I’ve heard of Blacklist and a few others.
[00:38:51.870] – David
Yeah, Blacklist is a great example of that, and there’s a UK equivalent of that as well, whereby… So you can write the amazing calling card script and it can never get made, but you can use that script to get you jobs on other people’s shows for years afterwards. And then the goal is always to try and get your own show commissioned, and then other people come in and write your characters. Yeah.
[00:39:12.800] – Scott
Not too dissimilar then.
[00:39:13.330] – David
The guy who invented a show called Death and Paradise, that’s had like 11 seasons now, and it’s got a spin-off show as well, where it’s sorted for life. But that’s the freakish one out of thousands of screenwriters because there’s so many screenwriting programs pumping out new screenwriters who have got their masters or their MFA and screenwriting every year, and they can all get job.
[00:39:36.170] – Scott
Yep, totally makes sense. So how does that compare to… We’ve discussed the world of novels and how vast the range of pay can be in the novel world. And that gave us a bit of insight, at least to how much TV at least might pay if you’re lucky enough to find yourself writing for one. How does that compare to IP and freelance work in the novel world? Because you mentioned you had done quite a bit there as well. Is that an avenue worth exploring for people looking for some extra cash? Or did you find it not worth the time in terms of compensation?
[00:40:15.060] – David
I mean, the time work is a bit like writing for superhero comics, actually, in that if you can write fast enough, you can generate enough work so that you can make a comfortable living. But you’ll never make quite enough to be able to quit.
[00:40:30.490] – David
It’s the perfect trap. It’s the Gilded Cage, I think, who is it? Dave Givens called it the Gilded Cages, comics. Well, tie in is the same. If you can produce enough work, if you can write fast enough, then you can have a perfectly lucrative living. So I think I was grossing about £40,000 a year for about eight years in a row with a load of time and work. And some of them were paying royalties and some of them weren’t paying royalties. And some people were meant to pay royalties. There was one particular company who I’m not going to name because actually they’re still the only royalties. I usually save that for direct messages. But yeah, so some tie in work you will get royalties for and Yay, there’s a correlation between if you do a tie in book, then the hope is… It used to be for a long time, a Star Wars tie in book was like the holy grail for a lot of time writers, because instant New York Times bestseller status, that was a bang. You now had New York Times bestseller next to your name for the rest of your career.
[00:41:28.480] – David
You didn’t have to talk about the fact that it was actually for Boba Fett’s nephew, Volume 6, because who cares? You’re still a New York Times bestseller. That can go on the Head Start. So you can make a decent living, particularly if you could write fast. I mean, if you’re going to agonize over every word, then tie-ins is not the way forward for you, because you’re going to be able to pump it out fast. I mean, particularly if you’re writing film novelizations, those are notorious for how fast they have to be written. Some of them a week, two weeks to do 80 to 100,000 words. Now, immediately they hand you the screenplay. But so the stories all that you just need to add description. But there’s no guarantee you’ve actually seen the film or even a rough cut film. I did a comics adaptation of the film by the guys who made Train Spotting. So Danny Boyle, who did Slum Dog, Millionaire and a bunch of other things. So his first film was Shallow gray, which was a big underground hit. And then they did and I think the screenwriter won the Oscar for that. And then the next film is called A Lifeless Honorary with Ewa McGregor and Cameron Diaz.
[00:42:39.500] – David
I think Stanley Tuchy is in it as well. I mean, it’s got an amazing cast, and it’s just a train wreck of a film. And I did the comics adaptation of that. And they literally showed us, I think, 20 minutes of the Rough Cut, because they were still editing it two weeks before it was due out. And they gave me some colour photocopies of images from the shooting and the rest we just had to imagine. And I did a novella, which was when they rebooted the TV show, Heros, and they pulled it back with the terrible, terrible Heros: Reborn. Why? Why? Well, money. But yeah, so I did the novelisation of the pilot episode of that, and they showed me bits of the footage. And I think I was able to take screen grabs without them noticing it while it was on my computer, because the only way I could try and remember what the fuck it all look like. And then I had to try and turn it into a novel. It was just a nightmare. And that I think I had three weeks to do it in. So a lot of time work has to be done insanely fast, particularly movie-based stuff.
[00:43:42.560] – David
Tv, sometimes it can be, but a lot of TV stuff, it’s more like original stories in the world of. So therefore, you’re bringing a lot of yourself to it. You’re not just blurting out a prose version of the screenplay, which is a straight novelization. So there’s two different things.
[00:43:57.840] – Scott
You’re telling me that begging Stephen Knight to let me write the novelization of Peaky Blinders, assuming that doesn’t already exist because it might. That’s not my ticket to retirement.
[00:44:08.250] – David
It would depend upon the deal. I mean, it’s a dead show now, so probably not at this point. It mean, with time work, I think it really helps if you love the property that you’re writing for, or at least that you really, really like it, because otherwise it’s torture. If you’re having to write a thing that you hate and then you just have to grind it out, then it is just you might as well be writing pamphlets for the Republican Party. You might as well just like, you’ve got I think you have to love it. So a friend of mine, anyway, so he’s done a ton of tying stuff and a ton of original stuff very successfully, and he was offered the chance to write computer games because he writes computer games as well as praise for Harry Potter. When Harry Potter, the first one was just coming out and they’re going to do the computer game. And it was like and everybody was like, Oh, this job, it’s going to be money forever because they’re going to make so many films and there’s seven books and you’re going to be sorted for computer games for the next 10 years, mate.
[00:45:10.780] – David
And he’s like, Yeah, but I hate Harry Potter. I don’t know. He could not do the job because he hated Harry Potter so much long before things occurred. And so he turned it down. He turned down 10 years of work because he just went, No, It’s too… No, because otherwise you’re signing up for a bad Marriage, really.
[00:45:33.210] – Sunyi
So do you think there are pitfalls? Maybe I don’t know if this is too broad a question, but I guess pitfalls that you could maybe advise writers who are looking to IP work because I do actually have a writer friend who signed to IP work and got burned by it very badly. And I think without trying to go into too much detail, basically they did all the work on the assumption that this was going to materialize, but I think the contracts hadn’t actually been signed. And then…
[00:45:59.790] – David
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s the red flag on the plane, basically. Yeah, that’s just like… I mean, the only time I’ve done significant work on a project, like the actual drafting of the project, started drafting the project was for the BBC because the BBC is such a big monolith. And actually because they’re publicly funded, they can easily be shamed. Whereas private companies cannot be shamed for the most part. I’ve written stuff for book publishers where I’m not sure they’re still going down and I’m going to name them Christmas books. I wrote stuff for a book they were doing about superheroes or something. And it was a hundred pounds they owed me, and I chased them for 18 months to get a hundred pounds. If it had been 90 pounds, I would have given up, but it was a hundred pounds. And I went, No, you know what? This is three figures. I want my bloody money, you bastard. So I just kept chasing them and eventually wore them down. And they gave it to me.
[00:46:54.300] – Sunyi
It’s the principal of the thing. I chased the people that organise London comic con for 30 quid because I paid them 30 quid for a Bernard… Was it Bernard Criven? Is that his name thing? And he did an appearance and he cancelled. And that was actually the last time he would have done an appearance because he died a month later or something. But they were like, No, you’re not. We don’t want to give you a refund. You can use it again. I was like, This man has literally died. What events? How am I going to… And it was only 30 quid.
[00:47:23.550] – David
Haha. How we doing this, with a Ouija board? How are we getting this on the signature. On the page?
[00:47:26.540] – Sunyi
Yeah, I know it’s not writing related, but yout for stuff like that, I do chase because it just winds me up when they sit on money. It’s like, Yeah, that 30 quid is nothing to a corporation. Just pay it.
[00:47:36.750] – David
No, absolutely. The reality, of course, for us as writers that we end up having to do a lot of spec work. You write an entire novel on spec effectively, and I hope that there’s going to be a payday down the road. But if it’s IP work, then you really need to see the color of the contract. You need to have a contract and you need to know what you’re signing up for, what the terms are. And if you don’t have that, then you have to then you have to withhold your neighbour. It’s as simple as that. And the problem is they get you two ways, either because the money sounds like it’s going to be so good for so little work or else because you love the property. So if somebody offered you, let’s say that your socks roll up and down for Indiana Jones, and they’d offered you the chance to do Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny’s Child, then you’d be like, Yes, please, I would love to do that. I would write the novelization of that. You don’t have to pay me just the chance to play with those particular set of toys.
[00:48:29.140] – David
And then they’ve got you. So then they can just do what they want because you’ve already rolled over at this point. So if you’re going to do IP work, you have to see the contract or you have to know the person for years and trust that things will be okay. I did a job with one particular person, and that’s how I got the Heros Reborn thing, which was… And then they offered me another gig and it all went belly up because we were dealing with a company in another country, and then they changed their mind. It was going to be a serialized novel to be read on mobile phones. Each chapter had to be exactly three and a half thousand words long, and they’re going to be publishing one a week or one a month or something. And then people would read the new episode when it dropped, and it was going to be this whole thing. And then so we wrote like 35,000 words of this, me and a cowriter. And I said, Oh, no, we just want it to be a novel. Turn that 35,000 words into 70,000 words, and we’ll make it into a novel.
[00:49:24.370] – David
All right, we’ll rewrite the whole thing. We did that. And then they still didn’t publish it. It’s just, Oh. And I just stick this around. And you just went, They changed the terms, but they didn’t rewrite the contract. I was like, No, this is bad form. But there were people in another country and it’s hard to argue with somebody in a different time. So get a contract. If you got a literary agent, then they can go and fight those battles for you is what it boils down to. And that’s why a literary agent is helpful.
[00:49:52.160] – Sunyi
Do you think that screenwriting is a skill that’s worth authors learning if they have the time and inclination? And I guess the reason I asked that is because I remember very early on when Bookeaters was being passed around to different film people, and I asked my agents like, should I be learning screenwriting? Will that help chances if I learn that to then maybe do a script myself? And they basically said, well, you can learn screenwriting if you want, but you’ll probably spend all your time writing other people’s scripts, and you won’t get to write your own because you’re a debut author. And it increases the chances of a book being turned to a film or TV if an experienced screenwriters attached, which is not you.
[00:50:29.780] – David
Yeah… so for my series, because I’ve done so much time work, I don’t own the rights in any of that, or if I do, it doesn’t really count. I’ve got my own series now, which I know will never be turned into a film or TV project because it’s set in the past, and that’s plus 25 % on the budget before anybody’s done anything at a bare minimum. But if they were to say, Right, well, we’d love to turn this into a hopefully a TV series, then the question then becomes, Well, would I ask to write the first draft, the first script? Because I have some screenwriting experience, there’s an argument to be made for that, and they would have to pay me for the privilege of doing that. But I know they would just sack me off it afterwards and replace me with somebody that they actually wanted on it, because that’s what would happen. So there’s a very well-known writer of science fiction in the UK whose novel was turned into a series on a well-known streaming network, something to do with a large river, I couldn’t speculate. For the first episode of that adaptation, I know somebody who also worked on it, they did somewhere in the read, let’s say it was over 100 drafts of the first episode.
[00:51:32.210] – David
A hundred was like, it was in development for seven years. Seven years. And that writer didn’t write another book during that time, strangely enough, because they were just trapped in development hell over here. I’m going to get paid for their labor and everything else. It’s not like they were starving while they were doing it. But you just go, Oh, my God. I could not write 100 drafts of anything. My eyes would explode. No. It’s not going to happen.
[00:51:55.840] – Scott
This is a bit of a tangent, but you brought up Amazon and Amazon’s video arm. How does a production as bad as The Rings of Power show happen? This is a real question, and I’m not just trying to shit on that particular thing. I have others that I hate so much, Wheel of Time. I mean, they just put so much money into The Rings of Power and The Wheel of Time adaptation. And you see all these others that have huge budgets have their pic of any writer in the entire world. Theoretically, you would think they’d have budget for CGI, but that did not show through on Rings of Power. And then you have certain studios who seem to have at least a better hit rate. So BBC seems to kick ass with at least several of their dramas. The Last Kingdom was excellent. Peaky Blinders was excellent. They have Sherlock, Poldark, whatever else. You have a few on Netflix like Stranger Things, and HBO tends to do really solid shows with what seems like, at least to me, good writing more often than not. And then you get these others, right? How? How? How? With literally everything at their disposal, do they fuck it up so badly?
[00:53:30.860] – David
Well, the simple answer is that money does not fix everything. An unlimited budget, weirdly, is less helpful because basically if you have the infinite canvas, you can never fill it up. Well, if you’ve got the infinite budget, you can keep spending money forever, but it doesn’t mean it’s going to be any good. You can only put so many horses in front of a carriage. It’s not going to get any faster or any better because of that, because you’ve got that many horses in front of it. Well, instead of spending five million, you can spend 500 million making it. It doesn’t make it 100 times better. It just makes it 100 times more expensive. So the money spent and the quality of the show with two things are unrelated to one another, and it takes a lot to disengage those two things in your head. But that’s the reality of it. I’m amazed that any film is any good because there’s so many people in between the writer and whatever it was that they produced and the thing that ends up on screen, there’s a hundred, a thousand, 10,000 between that and the final product. And the numbers aren’t quite as big in telly, it is effectively the same thing.
[00:54:37.950] – David
It’s that many people bringing their own interpretation or not to the creativity of the thing. And does that strengthen the core and the essence of it? Or does it dilute what you’re trying to do? Yeah. So I wrote four episodes of Doctors and the first three I was really proud of them. And then the fourth episode, they used to send me through the advanced disc of it. And I watched the fourth episode, and I was watching it and the skin wanted to crawl up my arms and leap off my spine because it was so unspeakably bad. And I was watching this going, Have I forgotten how to write? What the fuck happened here? This is terrible television. And I suddenly realised, I mean, the script wasn’t the best in the world, but I suddenly went, Oh, this is what bad direction is. Oh, I understand. Because people never blame the director, they always blame the writers. Because they think the problems start from the script, and maybe they do. But a great director and good actors can make something good. But if something, you can kill good writing with bad performance or bad directional editing, all the other things happen.
[00:55:44.150] – David
There’s just so many people involved in the process, and you get so far down the road. And it’s like, I don’t know. I did watch the whole of The Rings of Paradise, and I sincerely doubt I will watch season two, but we watched The Cold Open. There’s an Amazon show called Citadell. I hardly recommend… Yeah, watch the first six minutes and then turn off again because you’ll be like, Oh, my, getty aunt. No. And it’s just I just went, Jeez, how much money they spent on this. And it’s just like, No. No. Oh, Stanley. Could you have some self-respect?
[00:56:18.080] – Scott
Yeah, I do wonder if the corporate nature of Amazon itself has infected their studio, right? And if there are just far too many middle managers and senior managers, etc, who have way too much input on scripts and direction and cuts and edits and things like that. But, I mean, HBO belongs to a conglomerate corporation as well, and they still turn out things like House of the Dragon, which was extremely well done. You look at it-
[00:56:58.580] – David
Yeah I mean, the other thing is to separate out from the… You don’t know where the problem is. I mean, it’s this vast food chain, and there’s many, many people who have got their hands in the pants of this unfortunate programme or whatever it might be. And you just don’t know who is meddling with what somewhere and where this is being fucked up effectively. So many opportunities for it to go wrong. Whereas with a novel, the joy of a novel, it’s like it’s you, there’s an editor. Maybe if your agent is editorially minded and they’re involved, but that’s it. There’s really only like a handful of people between the idea that you had and the book that’s in somebody’s hand or on the Kindle they’re listening to is audio and that’s it. So it is all on you. And therefore there is the capacity for you to just speak directly into the minds of your readers, which is why I come back to prose ultimately, because I just went the money is better and telly, but to what purpose?
[00:57:52.170] – Sunyi
How are you finding that being back in a novel world? Is it good? Is it bad?
[00:57:58.510] – David
It’s good. Yeah. I mean, obviously because I’m doing the book a Year thing. So I’m writing crime. I’m writing historical crime. And they said to me at the start, Will you be a Book a Year author? And I could have said, No. No, I think the pressure of other things on my plate means that no, I’m not going to be a Book a year over. But I said, No, because I’d always wanted to be a book a year over. Because I love writers who come up with a great new book each year, and you look forward to it and you get hold of it, Oh, the next one in the series. Yay. So I had always wanted to be that. And I don’t know whether I lack ambition, but I aspire to be midlist. Honestly, if I could be midlist, I’m not going to say I’m die happy. I’m not going to die happy. I’m going to be died and pissed off because I’m dying. But nonetheless, I would be like, Yes, midlist.
[00:58:44.730] – David
Why? Because that’s having spent so long in the trenches of tie in and comics and then the less salubious ends of television, to be in an industry where you get treated with respect, but they say, Okay, we have some feedback for you, but it’s your book. So you can take these suggestions or not. And that is not the world of telly. I tell you that right now. They’re like, You’re doing this, or you’re doing this and you’re making it what we want it to be, or, You’re fine. And it’s as simple as that. That’s not how book publishing is in 99 % of the examples I’ve ever heard of, unless you’ve got some complete maniac running the company or in charge. Or I did have one… It was a tie-in book. I didn’t want to write it. It was my fifth and final Judge Dredd tying book, and I didn’t want to write at all. I was persuaded to do it so I could write something else I didn’t want to write for the publisher. And so to keep myself from falling asleep while I was writing it, I wrote a load of gratuitous, inuendo and smut into the book.
[00:59:43.820] – David
And that was fine. I was having a blast directly. And then it turned out the copy editor they got to do the book was the world’s biggest prude who hated anything sexual and didn’t believe it at any place in fiction. And I was like, But the copy edits were done. But the nature of this, because it was typing work, you don’t see the copy edits. They just get done and then the book appears. And I remember reading it going, Where’s all my smut? My smut’s gone. They’ve literally taken all the stuff I was looking forward to reading. Oh, yeah, that’s a bit weird, honestly. I can’t believe you. I got away with it. I just took it all back out. I said, What the fuck? That was the only reason I wrote that in four grand that you paid me. That was the only reason I did this stupid book. And it’s still bloody and an ebook forever.
[01:00:33.170] – Sunyi
I think we should have more midlist, honestly. I think one of the things that saddens me about publishing is that Midlands is dwindling just because everything is moving towards more and more extremes, towards the big titles with a lot of money or people paid very, very little. And wanting to be a Midlands author was a thing that you could aspire to at one point and still make a living and still be really happy and have your niche and have your fans and your followers. Without, I guess, the pressure being the Stephen King.
[01:01:01.230] – David
Yeah. I mean, obviously, when I got my contract for the first two books in the Aldo series and I was told the number was negotiated, and I went, Right. Okay. So on that basis, you’re going to support the book well, but there’s no… In most trade publishing, certainly in the UK, if they’re not spending six figures on your advance, there will be no marketing. There will be publicity. All the publicity in the world, they will do their best to try and generate coverage and all the rest, but there’s not actually going to be… Nobody’s putting up ads on the tube or on buses or anything else. You’re not going to see it anywhere except hopefully in bookshops, because that’s a separate job. So I got my contract went, Yeah, okay. All right. So I’m not going to be an overnight sensation. I’m not going to be, there’s not the equivalent of crates in crime, largely speaking. So therefore you’ve got two choices in trade publishing. Either you’re the skyrocket and then the hope is you can sustain that thereafter, or else you have to be the little engine that could and you just have to keep chugging away and putting out the books and raising the quality and raising awareness and getting out there and pimping your book and hustle, hustle, hustle.
[01:02:14.510] – David
So I’m on path too, and that’s what I’m doing.
[01:02:18.310] – Sunyi
You hear that, Scott. Get to it.
[01:02:21.180] – David
Yeah, come on.
[01:02:23.220] – Scott
Well, yeah. Hah.
[01:02:27.100] – David
I mean, in your case, the reality is what you can do is you can write a different book and you can get a different contract, and every new book or every new series is potentially, if not the lottery ticket, then it’s at least a different path that you can take.
[01:02:42.080] – Scott
I will decline to comment on that just now, but yes.
[01:02:48.200] – David
I’ll put it to you another way. So I’m in my 50s, and yet here I am, reinventing myself as a midlist crime author. Having spent years writing science fiction and fantasy and horror and war and all these other things and people in tights hitting each other. Men in tights and capes hitting each other, which is its own special, homoerotic world of excitement that we call comics.
[01:03:12.040] – Sunyi
Thank you so much. I’m out of questions, but I was going to ask if you want to tell people who listen where they could find you or what you’ve got going on. I know you mentioned some of your books earlier already, but a recap of them might be good.
[01:03:26.290] – David
Oh, yes, I am that relentless. I will just keep mentioning the book. Yeah. So where can you find me? Well, I’m still on Twitter at the moment. I haven’t quite left the hell site. So I’m @davidbishop on Twitter because I joined Twitter so long ago I got my own name. Instagram, I’m @cesarealdo, so C-E-S-A-R-E-A-L-D-O, and obviously also on Threads, I’m @cesarealdo. I think I’m still on TikTok, although I don’t think I’ve done anything. Some very silly videos indeed there. And my website is DVbishop.com. And yeah, the first book of my series is called City of Vengeance. I suggest people start at the beginning. Yeah, because that’s nearly earned out that one.
[01:04:11.560] – Sunyi
Okay, that sounds awesome. Thank you. You’ve been listening to the Publishing Radio Podcast with Sunyi Dean and Scott Drakeford. Tune in next time for more in-depth discussion on everything publishing industry. See you later.
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