Q: It's been a while since we've had one of these interviews. You've been pretty quiet lately without a whole lot of news from you, leaving a lot of people wondering what you've been up?
RJ: Yeah, I have been pretty quiet. I needed to take a break from a lot of things. People who know me know I'm a workaholic, but I just had to get away from stuff. As you know, my wife and I had a son who just turned a year old this past week, and we also have a 3 year old daughter...I was finding it difficult to take care of a newborn, be a good dad, a good husband, plus write, plus promote, plus do all the other things I was doing so I pretty much just scrapped everything but spend time with my family.
Q: So how is the family doing?
RJ: They're doing good. My son is starting to walk so he's blazing through the house at a pretty good pace. I'm slowly starting to get back to what I was doing before with writing, promoting, blogging, interviews and all that. I was just trying to do too much before and I thought it was taking away from family time and my family's gonna come first for me.
Q: So when should we expect more material from you?
RJ: Well, Deadlock should be released as an e-book within a couple months with the paperback to follow after that. It was supposed to be released in the summer but with my hiatus it was pushed back since I didn't feel I had enough time or energy to promote it.
Q: Why was the decision made to release Deadlock as an e-book first instead of the paperback?
RJ: Well, the biggest reason is that I sell more e-books than paperbacks. All 3 books have sold more as e-books. The second thing is cost...it costs a lot more to print paperbacks.
Q: Is there a chance there will not be a paperback released?
RJ: There's always a chance but I don't think that's a likely scenario. I like having a print version and not everyone has an e-reader or reads on their computer so I think it's still necessary to have a paperback.
Q: I've always wanted to ask this but it just never came up, but I was wondering if you enjoy promoting your work? I know some people love to promote themselves, some don't, where do you stand?
RJ: I would definitely fall among those who don't. I hate promoting myself. I'm a very private person. I like to think of myself as being pretty humble and down to earth. To promote you almost have to brag and shout at everyone to look at me and that's definitely not my personality. But unless you're Stephen King you pretty much have to promote yourself, at least on some level or you'll get lost out there since there's a lot of books and authors vying for attention. It's also very time consuming, takes a lot of energy, and is almost never ending.
Q: I guess for authors like you it'd be nice to have a staff of publicity people to do that for you?
RJ: It'd be great but I don't think that's likely to happen anytime soon. Though I have been looking into starting a Street Team. I'm still working out the details but it's worked for music bands and I've heard of some authors doing it so I figure it's worth looking into. I should be announcing some details on it within the next week or two.
Q: That sounds like a great idea. So when we sit down next month we should be able to talk about it in a little bit more detail?
RJ: Absolutely.
Q: Alright, well, that's it for this session. We'll see you again next month.
RJ: You got it. Thank you.
