Author interview by Valerie MacEwan, editor The Dead Mule

Joseph Finder, Power Play

Joseph Finder is the author of five novels, all of them thrillers. His website, JoeFinder.com (duh, betcha’ never thought that would be the domain name) is updated daily. Go there and take a look around, get some free stuff… I’ll save you a bit of clicking, here’s his bio from the site:

Joe’s background is not in literature, but in international politics. Born in Chicago, he moved around the world with his family, spending much of his early childhood in Afghanistan and the Philippines. He later moved with his family to Bellingham, Washington and then to Albany, New York where he attended high school.

Joe majored in Russian studies at Yale, where he also sang with the school’s legendary a cappella group, the Whiffenpoofs (see the photo gallery for a picture of Joe with Ella Fitzgerald, before a Whiffenpoofs concert). After graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, he completed a master’s degree at the Harvard Russian Research Center and later taught on the Harvard faculty.

Joe’s first book, Red Carpet: The Connection Between the Kremlin and America’s Most Powerful Businessmen, was published in 1983, when Joe was only 24. This controversial expose about multi-millionaire Dr. Armand Hammer’s ties to Soviet intelligence is no longer in print, due mainly to Hammer’s threats of a libel suit. The book’s assertions were confirmed after the fall of the Soviet Union, when newly-published documents verified Joe’s research.

Interesting man, eh? His thrillers Company Man and Zero Hour were very well received. High Crimes became a movie starring Ashley Judd and Morgan Freeman. Paranoia really tripped my trigger and I interviewed him in Popmatters in 2004. A couple of months ago I received an advance copy of his next book, Power Play. The Mule needed a Joseph Finder interview for its Summer issue. So we asked him and damned if he didn’t agree to answering questions. Got right to it, he did. Quick like a bunny! or as he put it: Val ‹ Can you believe it ‹ answers to your interview questions almost 2 months before pub date???
Thanks
Joe

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Without further warning, let us present to you:

The Dead Mule: Firstly, I enjoyed reading Power Play but that’s no big deal. All the books you’ve written have been entertaining (except Red Carpet, which wasn’t exactly offered as entertainment, was it?)

Publishing. Advance Reading Copies. Reviewers. “Pre-Pub Buzz”.

Can you come up with a time-line of change in marketing techniques in your novels – from The Moscow Club to Power Play?

Joseph Finder: Yeah, but it might take me a month or two. The Moscow Club came out in 1991. Power Play is, what sixteen years later. Also, Moscow Club was a first novel, and Power Play is my eighth, and I’ve been a New York Times bestseller for three or four books, depending on how you count. In both cases, they did Advance Reader Copies, which are basically fancy galleys targeted at booksellers and reviewers and newspaper/magazine editors. Unlike with Moscow Club, where I was an unknown quantity, by now there are booksellers and readers who know my work, so it’s not so much a matter of trying to break through but trying to build on an established base — which is much easier. Then there’s the Internet. And my website. And the Power Play “book trailer”. . .

Mule: That’s kinda’ a no-duh question, I suspect. Oh wait, a “no-brainer” (mule readers- this is a phrase used frequently in Power Play)…

Some pre-publication approaches change with the onset of best-seller status and others from the marketing strategies of other thrillers. Did Dan Brown’s phenomenal advertising coup, his break-through advance publicity on The Da Vinci Code, affect Paranoia’s “pre-pub buzz”, maybe even on Company Man’s? Or (drum roll) was his marketing campaign already working for other writers at the time, it’s just that he struck such a cord with his “novel approach” to Christianity? (novel approach, get it?) This is not a discussion of Brown’s novel, one must have a starting point for discussion and his novel seemed to be a good one.

Joe: Well, it is a good one. . . Dan Brown’s editor at Doubleday, Jason Kaufman, did a remarkable job of beating the drum (speaking of drums) for DVC. He got the word out there early and really built up enthusiasm. Look, Dan’s book was terrific in all sorts of ways, but — and I mean this only in a positive sense — if it were published by another house, another editor, you might well have not even heard of it. And Kaufman was starting from a deficit, really: Dan Brown wasn’t a blank slate; he’d published three novels, and none of them did well. In fact, by the standards of commercial publishing, they’d done pretty badly. So Doubleday had to get the chains (which are obsessed with BookScan numbers) to overlook the performance of his first three books and see Dan Brown, and his fourth novel, in an entirely new light.

And you can bet that my publisher, St. Martin’s Press, had Doubleday’s publishing model in mind when it came to launching Paranoia. Granted, it wasn’t anywhere near the kind of phenomenon DVC turned out to be. But there were a number of publishers who took one look at my track record after four novels and decided that I was over. I hadn’t hit the bestseller lists. St. Martin’s turned that around with a long, relentless pre-publication campaign, and I owe that to Dan Brown.

VMac: Let’s discuss advance copies, first run numbers. Pre-pub Buzz. Did you ever envision you’d need a website with a fan newsletter or devoting this much time publicizing your excellent thrillers? Online give-aways! E-mail campaign with giveaways! It’s amazing, it’s got to be exhausting for you and your staff. When you first started writing thrillers, did you anticipate the need for a “staff” beyond agent, editor, publisher? The process is rather amazing, isn’t it? The Internet changed marketing strategies in exponential ways. That’s a topic in itself, I suppose.

JOE: I probably shouldn’t say this, but I remember the day when I told my editor (not my present editor, obviously) that I wanted to do a website, and he dismissed the idea at once. He said that people who buy books would never look at a website, that these were totally different demographics. He thought it was a complete waste of money.

But that’s publishing. Most publishers have historically been late to the technology party. I happen to think that the Internet has a huge, still untapped potential for reaching readers or potential readers, and it’s far more cost effective than old media like print, radio, or TV.

VMac: And rambling on to a new free-association paragraph of semi-lucid discussion topics:

Do you think today’s pop culture online read-it-for-me society enjoys the current spate of book reviewers that give everything away? The main body of the review is a complete book synopsis rather than a discussion of technique or comparison of writing style. It’s annoying. Don’t tell me the story, the plot and, for sure, don’t have a stupid “spoiler alert” and tell me the ending!

JOE: You know, I avoid that kind of book review like the plague — if I’m thinking about reading a book, I don’t want to read the Cliff’s Notes version. What I want is an informed, evenhanded appraisal — sort of like Consumer Reports — that’ll help me decide whether to buy a book. That means that if it’s a biography or a nonfiction book, I want it reviewed by someone who’s, if not an expert, at least well informed — and doesn’t have an axe to grind. If it’s a novel, I’d rather not read a review that lays out all the plot developments and thereby spoils the surprise. Which is the sort of thing that only an amateur critic would do. But it’s harder to write an appraisal than a book report. Maybe that’s why there are so many book-report-writers online. I guess this is the dark side of the Internet, which is so participatory, so populist — anyone can play. Anyone can post an opinion. It’s a land ruled by amateurs, not by gatekeepers, which is one of the great appeals of the Internet — but also its downfall.

(here the Mule edited out an inane response on my part reiterating what had already been said)

VMac: Can we discuss your terrific amount of research? Impressive. Fantastic. The endnotes were as interesting as the book itself. I truly read it all. I’d never heard of “chicken rivets” – I’m going to submit the name to our local King Chicken restaurant for their unknown chicken parts served in their chicken and pastry.

JOE: Ahhh, research — it’s my drug. It’s a habit I wish I could shake. I love finding out about new world and telling my readers about them — the way Michael Crichton does, or Arthur Hailey used to do, to name just two. As a reader, I always want some meat on the bones — some chicken meat beneath the crispy-crust. Not too much — the balance has to be just right. You don’t want to be lectured to; the main point is entertainment, after all, not education. But my problem is that I often find myself carried away with the details, finding out how things work, far beyond what the reader needs to see. It may be interesting to me, but it takes way too much time.

VMac: And, are your interview responses more guarded now that your success keeps compounding exponentially?

JOE: Yes, of course. All those things I just said? I shouldn’t have. Any number of my frank remarks can now be picked up on Google and spread about, out of context. I’m going to start hearing that I’m a druggie who trashed Dan Brown. I suppose I really should be more careful.

Thanks for the questions. Hope I gave you what you wanted.
Joe

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Well, you sure did, Joe. That was fun. All you Mule readers need to get you a passel of Finder thrillers. Start with Paranoia and go up or down the list from there. Be sure to check out Power Play in a couple months!

–Valerie MacEwan