Interview with Kevin Bohacz, author of 'Immortality'
His latest books are Immortality and Ghost of the Gods.
Visit Kevin’s website at www.kbohacz.com.
Q: Welcome to The Writer's Life! Now that your book has been published, we’d
love to find out more about the process.
Can we begin by having you take us at the beginning? Where did you come up with the idea to write
your book?
Kevin: I’ve been writing since 1989. Immortality and Ghost of the Gods are my 3rd and 4th novels. The
short answer to your question is the ideas come from my muse. The longer answer
is that my novels come from daytime dreams as well as nighttime lucid dreams. When
I am writing it does not feel like I am creating the material. It feels more
like I am watching daydreams which come from somewhere other than me and I am
merely typing as fast as I can to capture the daydream that is unfolding before
my mind’s eyes.
For all four novels I have
written, I first created thousands of pages of meticulously detailed background
material. Once I feel the characters have become like friends to me, I sit down
and start writing. Invariably in a short time the characters stage a revolt and
the story takes on a life of its own veering off in directions that I never
planned. In the end I typically use about 1% of the meticulously detailed background
material! Thousands of years ago the Greeks and Romans thought that all
creative people were merely channels for muses. I truly cannot figure out where
my stories come from. Out of a process of elimination I have decided they come
from some Jungian collective awareness that we might as well call a muse.
Q: How hard was it to write a book like this and do
you have any tips that you could pass on which would make the journey easier
for other writers?
Kevin: Writing is something I love. It
is my passion. It is my life. I never have writer’s block. To me writing is
like breathing—something I cannot imagine doing without. In fact not long ago
writing literally saved my life. I was widowed at a young age. My wife, my best
friend of 17 years died in my arms while we looked into each other’s eyes. When
I was deeply grieving I could hear my wife whispering to me, “Write my love…
Write.” So I wrote. I wrote so hard that my arms grew sore and my eyes blurred.
I wrote so hard that I gave myself tendonitis and had to seek medical help. My
writing saved me from the darkest abyss imaginable. I completed my third novel Ghost of the Gods in an amazingly short
period of time while also at the same time working on two new novels. I still often
write furiously but now its only because it feels so good.
Q: Who is your publisher and how did you find them
or did you self-publish?
Kevin: My first novel, Dream
Dancers was conventionally published in 1993 in a deal closed by the agent I
had at that time. In 2003 when Immortality
was completed I assumed I would be able to get it published since I was already
a published author. I soon found myself waist deep in rejection notices from
both agents and publishers. All the rejection notices basically said, “We are
sure this is a wonderful book but we don’t have the time to read a long
manuscript by an obscure author.”
I knew Immortality
was a timely, entertaining, and marketable novel. Some extremely successful
literary professionals including more than one famous writer had read it and
told me they loved it. So here I was a published author unable to open a single
door into the major publishing houses. Three years later I had reached the
point where I either had to give up or publish it myself. Back in 2006
self-publishing carried the stigma of failure but I had no choice. I knew in my
gut Immortality was a fantastic
story. So I started a small publishing company, hired an offset-printer, and
proceeded to manufacture and sell Immortality.
In 2007 Immortality
took off. Shortly after the paperback edition hit bestseller status on Amazon,
I released a kindle edition. By the summer of 2008 Immortality was constantly ranking #1 in several of the bestselling
genre categories under Amazon Kindle. It also had a consistent overall ranking across
all books and genres of better than #500, and many times hit #255 or better for
weeks at a time. At the same time, the print edition continued to sell well and
was constantly ranked in the top 25 to 100 in several genres.
Using my bestseller success as bait, I was able to sign with
an agent who had represented a smattering of NYTime’s bestsellers. My agent
proceeded to shop Immortality to all
the big publishing houses. My wife, Mazelle and I were deliriously thrilled. This
time the responses from publishers were very different from when Immortality was unpublished and I was
un-agented. Across the board the feedback was surprisingly similar, “We love the book but who are you?”
What the publishers were really saying was I had no massive
following. I did not have a million readers chanting in unison, “We want to buy
more books by you…”
Fast forward to 2010,
Immortality was still selling very much like it was in 2008, constantly
hitting the top 10 of its genre and never falling below the top 50. In fact
2010 and half of 2011 was one of my best grossing periods ever. By now my agent
had done all he could and given up six months prior in 2009. He loved Immortality and was very frustrated and baffled
by his inability to close a deal. It was then that I was contacted out of
nowhere by a veteran NYC agent who was a senior member in a super-agent firm.
This agent told me they had read Immortality
and loved it! This agent was convinced they could sell the book. Mazelle and I
were wildly excited and told the agent to go for it. This new agent got the
book read by a different group of more senior editors. This time the responses
really threw me. The feedback I got was essentially, “We love the book but why should we buy it when you have already sold
the heck out of it?”
At this point I felt like I just could not win. Years ago I
didn’t have a big enough following, and now that I had a following, it seemed
the publishers wanted something more. They wanted an unpublished book. I
explained that 95% of the copies of Immortality
had been sold on Amazon and it had never been in any physical store or even
B&N online, which is well over half the market. I had tapped only a small
percentage of the potential market for a book in this genre. So while it was a
bestseller on Amazon, the lion’s share of the meat was still on this bone yet
no publisher was interested in the feast. With fractional market penetration I
had made a pile of money but there was many times more to be made if a big
publisher would get behind the book. Yet it now seemed that with regard to
attracting a publisher, success was my worst enemy.
Today, three years later I now have a new amazing NYC agent
from a top firm who has closed deals for other indie authors in exactly the
same “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” predicament as me. In the last six months
I have received glowing critical reviews, including Publisher’s Weekly who has
awarded STARRED reviews to both Immortality
and Ghost of the Gods. There is
interest from Holly Wood in making Immortality
into a movie. I have every confidence that this time we’ll succeed in finally getting
a solid publishing deal.
Q: What other books (if any) are you working on and
when will they be published?
Kevin: I am working on a supernatural
thriller titled Dream Signs that will
be out sometime before the end of this year. At the same time I am working on another
supernatural thriller titled The Bridge
that will be out in less than two years. Finally, I am working to get my wife’s
memoir and cook book titled Fat Clothes
Thin Clothes published. My wife was a famous dessert chef whose amazing
creations were served in 50,000 restaurants around the country.
Q: What’s your favorite place to hang out online?
Kevin: I can be found lurking night and
day around my writer’s Facebook page. Any one can strike up a conversation with
me there. The page is www.facebook.com/KevinBohaczWriter.
Q: Finally, what message (if any) are you trying to
get across with your book?
Kevin: All my novels have deep
philosophical underpinnings or subthemes but since the essence of any novel is
to be a thrilling read, the ideas remain an integral part of the mosaic and so
do not detract from the entertainment as attested to in the professional
reviews of my novels. Example: Publisher’s Weekly STARRED review: “Bohacz
provides mind-bending portrayals of factions vying for power and reflections on
the essence and fragility of humanity. But philosophical concerns never obtrude
on the fast-paced plot…”
In these philosophical subthemes
I grapple with the big questions: what are we, where did we come from, and is
there a purpose behind existence. I also grapple with the fallout from these
themes and the great contradictions such as why society as a whole displays
this self-destructive seeming disregard for life, our fragile environment,
love, and sprit—while if you ask any individual in the same society they will
tell you they regard all these things as important and in fact try to act
accordingly in their own lives.
Q: Thank you again for this interview! Do you have any final words?
Kevin: Just thank you and to everyone
please take Ghost of the Gods for a
test drive! I promise it will be a wild and winding road that will keep you
guessing until you reach the very last word on the very last page.
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