Justin: Originally from Dothan, Alabama. Now I reside in the Orlando, Florida area.
What inspired you to become an author at such a young age?
Justin: I had a lifelong interest in professional wrestling due to a distant relative/family friend being in the business for 15 years who was a legend in the Gulf Coast named ''The Wrestling Pro,'' Leon Baxter. After Vince McMahon purchased WCW, the wrestling business went into a deep recession. So I pursued a side interest in writing, and got more serious about it.
My first serious story was a short story about a journey to The Lost Continent of Atlantis that I wrote after I turned 15. This led to a solid interest in writing more short stories and making short films as well as writing screenplays and teleplays that never made it to film or television screens.
How does your family support your creative endeavors?
Justin: Most are very supportive. And Leon and his wife actually gave me the idea to write "Dothan." We were having a discussion about the decline of the wrestling business, and they responded '''Yeah, now it's just showbiz''. I thought to myself ''What if 'Dothan' was larger than life'', and here we are!
Your first book, "Dothan," offers a small town's perspective on 9/11. Was this a fictional perspective you created or did you write about your observations from your own town? Tell us about your characters in this book: the wrestling promoter, soap opera writer and the young boy.
Justin: A little of both. The first draft of 'Dothan' was actually a love story between the wrestling promoter and the soap opera writer. The reason for that was that both wrestling and soap operas are both considered low brow by the mainstream, and that inspired me even more.
Actually, I've learned a lot from both wrestling and soap operas about how to write and promote your book. Wrestling inspires the basic structure of the story, the plot involving the main character who competes with his rival, and the business side of writing a book. You start with the basic foundation of 10-12 chapters, that could stretch into almost 50 or more chapters, and a few months of writing into writing the book for about six months to a year, which depends on how good the story is.
I learned the first book is the hardest sell, and that it gets easier starting with the second. And that each time you're promoting your book in a different market, because your market appeal grows with each book. Also, that the beginning is just as important as the ending, and that the middle shouldn't be a race to the ending. It should be a slow buildup that intrigues people, and each part of the middle should be handled with care.
Soap operas inspire more or less the craft aspect of the story regarding the characters, and how to weave a canvas. Everyone knows that the main character and his rival have personal lives. The spine of a novel involves the main character and his rival are trying to reach for something that one will achieve in the future.
However, there's also those demons from the past that both characters have to live with that makes it an even more personal struggle for them. Interesting how what are widely considered the lowest forms of entertainment could end up having the most intelligent people working in those mediums, and could end up helping one's career in the most positive way.
The reason the 9/11 plot was added was because 'Dothan' couldn't get by on a love story alone. It needed a hook that appealed to a wider audience, and hence that's what grabbed the attention of readers and sold books. Speaking of a wider audience, one's story should appeal to both young and old. In addition to the middle-aged wrestling promoter and soap opera writer rekindling their romance after years of separation, there's the young boy searching for his long lost uncle. It's about the older set searching for a soulmate, and the young boy searching for acceptance and belonging from someone he hasn't seen in years. It's about reconnecting with those you love after a great tragedy.
You focus on the McMahon Family in your novel "The Titans of Capitolism." Vince McMahon who you say "turned wrestling into a media giant in the 1980s." What inspired you to do research on Vince and his family?
Justin: After the wrestling business fell to its knees a few years ago, I knew I needed to choose a more grounded profession instead. However, I felt there were some loose ends that needed to be tied up. I originally wanted to write a book about the last recent boom in the wrestling business, and how ugly it was behind the scenes -- the feud between Vince McMahon and Ted Turner.
However, that story had been covered by almost everyone. I got an idea to write a book about Vince's father Vince McMahon, Sr. I pitched the idea to a wrestling historian named J. Michael Kenyon who suggested to instead write about all three generations of The McMahons and the trials and tribulations to get where they are today. He mentioned it was the only story about The McMahons that hadn't been told.
In your latest novel, "Everyone Loves a Scandal," which will be published by Epstein Publishing this summer, you explore "the conflict about to brew between a minister named Rev. Peter Jacobs and the publisher of a dirty magazine that just moved to town." Are you mirroring a similar feud between two well known individuals? What message are you presenting your readers?
Justin: The only similarities between Jerry Falwell and Peter Jacobs is that they're preachers, and the same can be said for Larry Flynt and Charlie Sanders (the dirty magazine publisher). In the public eye, we're used to seeing preachers portrayed as as good and pornographers portrayed as evil.
Behind closed doors, the preacher beats on his wife, and she runs to the dirty magazine publisher for help. The story questions our stance on who or what is really good and evil.
Was Epstein Publishing the first publisher you sent your magazines to? Tell about your experience with them? What do they offer their authors?
Justin: Epstein wasn't the first, I always sent queries to agents in New York, but I always had the eBook deal with Epstein Publishing to fall back on. I've always a good one-on-one relationship with the people there rather than being sent a memo from an executive at one of the big publishers on Madison Avenue in New York or through your agent. The same goes for people who can help you with publicity -- having a good one-on-one relationship with those people is also great.
Every author at Epstein Publishing learns how to promote their book and conduct business on their own. The first year of an author's career is always the most important, and you never stop writing. For the first three months, you do market research on your target audience. After you've pinpointed your audience, you spend the next three months writing and promoting your books to cater to that audience.
After the first six months of hard work, you should probably get a least one royalty. You spend the next six expanding on your writing and promotional techniques in this business. In other words, the first six months as a published author are spent getting a foundation established, and the next six getting things off the ground. After that the first year is complete, you can get some people to help out. This is also the point where you start to define your career.
In addition to the fact that most authors of eBooks get the majority cut of the royalties and keep all the rights to their material. This is the complete opposite of authors who are under binding agreements to the big Madison Avenue publishers where the publishers get the rights to the books, and give authors only a small percentage of the royalties. As well as pumping out a big marketing machine to do the author's promotional and business work for them -- although that would be a nice luxury for those on the eBook side of the industry.
Justin: I promote them online through websites I design, press kits I create and send to media. I'm a member of many writer's groups, and best of all, several authors (including myself) are members of The RYZE Business Network. It's still a tough market, but we manage to get some breaks.
Justin: I believe that in the long run eBooks will do just fine, but there are several obstacles eBooks still need to get passed first:
Authors of eBooks tend to be novels that are short, and are considered by some to be flavors of the month due to the fact that these authors release several eBooks each year. We should all be writing eBooks that are much longer in addition to writing and promoting only one book for a period of about six months to a year rather than writing and promoting a new release every few months.
Another problem is that eBooks are largely ignored by newspapers, radio, and television. Not to mention that some of these outlets ask you to pay expensive publicity fees well into the thousands. There needs to be a way for authors of eBooks to get major recognition through these media outlets and get publicity without having to pay any major fees.
It's well known that eBook publishers can't pay the major advances that the big Madison Avenue publishers do. And if they started paying that kind of extra incentive right now, some eBook publishers would have to start paying authors a fee to get published which would be a bad sign. So the best thing to do would be to wait until the eBook market opens up and expands a little before the publishers do anything like that.
When the market does evolve, eBook publishers should seek an alternative to the big advances that Madison Avenue offers -- something like a bonus. Several eBook publishers have articles on their websites. These publishers could invite the authors they have under contract to contribute articles to the website in order to earn a bonus in addition to the royalties they receive from their book sales.
One of the biggest problems is that most people involved with eBook side of the industry think that it's ''the next wave of the publishing industry'' despite its low sales. Publishers of eBooks honestly need to think more along the lines of small online business alternatives to big corporations like Napster and Netflix did.
On Napster, customers were able to download music, and provided a small business alternative to the big record companies (which also happened to be on Madison Avenue), after a series of nasty legal battles. Napster agreed to charge fees for their music downloads with a percentage of the profits. Soon after, many similar websites popped up, and gave birth to many unknown artists who began to pop up online writing, producing, and performing their own music that was available online in which these previously unknown artists started to get recognition for their work and started to make a nice profit.
With Netflix, people were able to rent DVDs online, and indeed caused a stir with major Hollywood studios (although not nearly as nasty as the feud between Napster and the record companies), but soon many other sites like Netflix popped up, VHS has now almost completely given way to DVD. Video stores have given way to online rentals, and DVD kiosk rentals. Movies are now even streamed online and downloaded onto computers, and DVDs can even be played on the hardrive of a computer. And like the boom with unknown musicians on Napster, many unknown filmmakers began making films with digital video cameras and digital editing systems on their computers that are available online. Filmmaking on the Internet is just an inch away from being accepted as a viable alternative to the major Hollywood studios.
In all fairness to the motion picture and music industries, the publishing industry has always been the slowest of the three, and the eBook era is no different. There has been a publishing industry recession for the last 10-15 years when they started buying up publishers, half of them were even merged into one publisher. To accommodate these mergers and acquisitions, the middle and lower level authors were released from their publishing contracts while the bestsellers were kept, of course. Those same bestsellers are now mostly used as promotional tools for possible movie deals.
Several years after the corporate buyouts, eBooks surfaced hoping to be ''the next wave of the publishing industry'', however that was not the case as there wasn't much interest at first. Interest did build at a very slow rate when various small eBook publishers started to appear online that featured some of the authors who had been released by the big publishers on Madison Avenue, as well as some new authors. And the big publishers in Madison Avenue even dabbled in eBooks. However, instead of hiring new blood for this outlet, the big publishers decided to rely on the bestsellers, and simply print electronic versions of their hardcover and paperback titles.
Stephen King wrote an eBook titled "Riding The Bullet" that commanded around 400,000 book sales making it the bestselling eBook of all time. There was even a film adaptation made last year that starred David Arquette, but Stephen King's successful experiment with eBooks did nothing to help the book sales of middle and lower level authors who were now having books published online. And the success of "Riding The Bullet" had no long term impact on sales of eBooks in general. In addition to realizing that the eBook side of the industry is at its best as simply a smaller online business alternative to the big publishers on Madison Avenue, these working class authors that make up the middle and lower levels of the publishing industry need to find a collective voice that distances them from the bestsellers who are published on Madison Avenue, and gives eBooks an identity.
What is your next writing project?
Justin: My next book will be a novel about two intertwined rich families in The South -- The Hazeltons and The Vernons. One family worked hard for everything they got, and were once the most powerful media moguls in the Gulf Coast in the 1970's. The other were a bunch of newspaper magnates from Tennessee who had everything handed to them and bought out the Gulf Coast newspapers to get control over the newspaper industry in the Southeastern United States, and made enemies of the other family.
As both families entered the 1980's and 1990's, one family ascended the corporate ladder in North America while the other operated a bunch of low-rated radio and television stations in the Gulf Coast. As this new generation develops, one family will rise and the other will fall.
