How to Write, Edit and Market Books. A C Fuller ep09

A C Fuller began his career as a journalist, he went on to become a freelance editor, and today, he is a writing teacher and a Speaker. In 2014, he donned the podcaster’s hat. Somewhere in recent past the worked with an Internet startup, was a chef, went to graduate school to get his Master’s. In 2015, he became a published author – his debut novel is titled The Anonymous Source, and his second novel will be released later in 2016. AC Fuller, or AC as he is known, grew up in California, then moved to New Orleans, New York and Connecticut. These days, he lives in the Pacific Northwest (Seattle Area for those who are not familiar with that term), with his wife, two children and two dogs. And he still finds time to teach, write, cook and watch sports.

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Discussion with AC Fuller

  • AC Fuller worked for a start up before the dot com bubble burst in 2000. The startup was video streaming company called Hearingnow.net. His role was to find investors as well as advertisements to make the business work.
  • His name is Adam Fuller, but he prefers to be called AC Fuller. He writes thriller and mystery based novels, and believes that going by the name AC Fuller will make it easy to find him out and help him create a long term brand. He believes that writing and publishing a book is an entrepreneurial activity for authors and it is important to build an author brand .
  • AC wrote a lot in his early twenties . He then got hired by New York University to teach journalism and did a lot of freelancing. Eventually he gave up writing though he used to teach writing in college . A t the age of 32 years he decided to write his first book , The Anonymous Source which took 3 years to write. It is a mystery thriller and the first of the three part series. The protagonist is a journalist in the New York area and the novel is set after the 9/11 attacks in New York, It also covers the transition that happened in media in US from 2000 to 2004-05 after Google, Facebook ,Twitter, iPhones etc. AOL Time Warner Merger is the central piece of the story line.
  • His book went through 14 rounds of edit and expecting one more revision. He is obsessive about the quality of the content and hence tries to get it as tight as possible . His method is as follows: He writes a rough draft to get the story out as fast as possible and then shuffles , edits and rewrites it two to three times, then sends it to 10 to 20 readers after which it goes to 2 different editors who give him the feedback and then it goes to the proof reader and his wife does her own round of proofreading.
  • After writing his book , he had gone to a Pacific Writers Conference and he met couple of literary agents for publishing his book. He received an offer from a New York Publishing House but the deal fell off. He decided to self publish and approached Booktrope which are into Hybrid Publishing. They take the best between both the models i.e. traditional and self publishing. The way it works is the publishing house does the layout, cover design and editing . The team gets paid on the percentage of the profits received by the sales of the book. The author get to keep 33% of the royalty which is almost double of what one gets in traditional publishing. So it is a win win situation and as the complete business model is based on sales , they prefer books which will finally sell.
  • A.C.’s second novel, The Inverted Pyramid, is a sequel and second book in the series, and will be released in Mid-2016. The story is about a start up website that investigate the media about the mergers etc. It also highlights the 2004 US Presidential Election which is a part of the plot. He believes that publishing the second book will help in marketing the first book as well.
  • AC is the host of the Writer 2.0 Podcast, a weekly podcast with over 90 episodes till date. He started his own facebook group, a community where folks in the book publishing space can interact.
  • A.C. is a speaker and conducts workshops to group of adults and teenagers about writing. His workshops focus on the psychological part of writing apart from teaching them how writing is a craft.
Resources and References mentioned in the podcast: Ways to Contact AC: Link to AC’s Book
This post was updated on 2016-01-27