My Experience as an Author

By George C Baker

 

As a school administrator I have been writing throughout my entire 46-year career.  My professional writings were newsletters, articles for local newspapers, faculty and program evaluations, curriculum, accreditation reports, letters of recommendation and varied reports.  The most creative professional writings were anecdotes and humorous observations on life in schools.    Along the way my career educational writing was developed, mentored and assisted by Paul Toth, Joel Monnell, Brewster Eli and Pam Reader.  

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I have been a lifelong thriller reader and fan of Clancy, Ludlum, Grisham, Patterson, Kellerman and many more. As a fan of the thriller genre, I am intrigued by character development, plots with interesting twist and turns, and varied settings that gave words the ability to create visual imagery.  Frankly I was intrigued by the authors use of numerous technical literary devices and styles, use of words in dialogue that conveyed idiomatic language, descriptive passages and flow of novels leading to a climax.  

 

For years I collected notes on nuances of travel experiences, interesting characters I have encountered, and complex political and social relationships, that I thought could be the basis for a good thriller. As I began to outline my first thriller, I found that those materials were more than sufficient for an entire series of six books.  This in itself was very exciting, as I have heard again and again "that everyone has one good book in them, but few have more than one."

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My hope was that I could write books that had real entertainment value, gave an interesting context for my plot, and provided both suspense and unexpected developments that engaged the reader. 
As I wrote The Master of Deception I was confronted with the typical challenge of developing my own style, and creation of dialogue. After three years of writing I decided to explore the steps to get my book published. As I explored the traditional process of obtaining a literary agent to get my manuscript presented to major publishing companies, I quickly realized that the chances of going in that direction were slim to impossible.  I submitted my manuscript to numerous self publishing firms (Dorrance, Outskirt Press, Hay House, GreenIvy, and New Century) and discovered that they were more than willing to work with pre-publishing, publishing, and marketing for between $2000-$9000.  My son Patrick is a fantastic writer, and movie director- producer. He self published a book "John Wayne's Execution" in 2016.  I decided to use Patrick’s publishing experience as a guideline for my first book so I worked with Draft2 Digital and created an e-Book version of my book. In the second phase I took my manuscript to Createspace to get a version that is print on demand. I just published The Master of Deception and have completed 1/2 of The Master's Ultimatum.

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I would appreciate any comments on my blog and other aspects of writting a thriller on the Genre Forum sections.