Interview with Jim Denney
Interview by Jenna Glatzer

Jim Denney is a freelance writer with more than 60 published books to his credit. He has been writing full-time since 1989, and has authored fiction and nonfiction for both adults and children. Jim is the author of Answers to Satisfy the Soul and the Timebenders science-fiction series for middle graders (ages 9 to 12). He has just written a new book for writers, Quit Your Day Job and Write For a Living: How to Sleep Late, Do What You Enjoy, and Make a Ton of Money As a Writer. He is currently writing a new book on the life and creative mind of Walt Disney.

How did you get your start as a writer?

My transformation from a voracious reader to a would-be writer came when I was in the third grade, when I wrote a short story as a class assignment—a three-page mystery about an innocent man trying to break out of prison. My teacher read it to the class. Later that same year, I wrote a story about a man whose rocket ship crashed on Mars. At some point during the writing of those two stories, I realized I wanted to write for a living.

When I was in college, I sold a number of articles to a magazine for $20 each. That seemed like a lot of money to me at the time, doing something that came easily for me (it sure beat picking grapes or driving a tractor in the tomato fields, which I had also done).

In 1982, a man came to me and asked me to help him write a book. Because of some celebrity status he had achieved, he had three or four publishers pursuing him, but he wasn't a writer. He knew I had done a fair amount of magazine writing, and he showed me his notes and papers, and asked if I could turn them into a book.

"I've never written a book before," I said. "I don't know if I can."

"Well," he said, "this would be a way to find out."

So he and I had lunch with an acquisition editor from a large publishing house, and we discussed the book idea we had put together. The editor liked our idea and offered us a contract on the spot. It took me about four months, working in my spare time, to write the book. The process of writing a book turned out to be a lot easier than I expected. In 1989, six years after that first book was published, I made the jump to full-time freelance writing.

You have collaborated on a remarkable number of books with celebrities. How do these collaborations work? Do you meet with the celebrities and do lots of interviews?

Early on, I did books for three or four different publishers. They noticed that I delivered quality work on deadline (more or less). The biggest complaint I hear from editors about writers is that it is hard for them to find writers who keep to deadlines. So the fact that I was delivering on time gave me a good reputation.

Editors started coming to me with projects. They'd say, "We have a book under contract with this football player or this supermodel, but he or she isn't a writer. Could you work with this person to develop a book?" And that's how I got to work with Super Bowl heroes like Reggie White and Bob Griese and with supermodel Kim Alexis.

I would go to their home, spend three or four days with them, ask questions, take notes, and make tape recordings of our conversations. At the end of that time, I'd hop on a plane and head home with about twenty hours of interview tape. At home, I would transcribe the tapes myself, so that I could get that person's voice playing in my head. I wanted to capture the cadences of their speech, their idioms and unique vocabulary. Then I would organize all of those thoughts, anecdotes, and ideas into a book.

After the book came out, people often said, "I could actually hear So-and-So's voice in my mind as I read." That's high praise.

Which celebrities have surprised you? Have any of them been different in person than their public image?

Collaborating with celebrities, psychologists, business leaders, and so forth, has been a good experience for me. I have never had to work with someone who was a pain to deal with or who refused to cooperate. I've heard the horror stories from other writers, but I've always been rather choosy who I write with, and as a result, all the people I've written books with have been great people.

Reggie White is a man of integrity who is concerned about race relations and justice as well as football. He was closely involved with every phase of writing his book, In the Trenches. He had good insights into how to structure the book. He was a pleasure to work with.

Contrary to the "airhead supermodel" stereotype, Kim Alexis is a bright, articulate spokeswoman for serious causes. She cares about our society and about young people. When she was in high school and college, she was at the top of her class. She was very much involved in the structuring of her book, A Model for a Better Future. Even after the initial interview phase was over, we spent hours and hours on the phone, refining the message of her book.

One of the most interesting books I did was The Longest Trek, the Hollywood memoir of actress Grace Lee Whitney. She was Yeoman Janice Rand on the original Star Trek, and she also worked in movies with stars like Marilyn Monroe, Shirley Maclaine, and Jack Lemmon. Grace was not the most famous member of the Star Trek cast, yet hers is by far the best, most honest, most revealing of all the Star Trek cast books. Leonard Nimoy wrote a glowing foreword to the book, and William Shatner gave us a terrific endorsement. Being a Trek fan from way back, it was an honor to work with Grace. She's become a good friend.

We expect celebrities to be phonies, to be all image and no substance. So it was a pleasure to find that Reggie and Kim and Grace were really decent, honest, humble people who truly had something important to say. Their books have actually reached out and changed people's lives. It's an honor to be associated with people of that caliber.

What's the difference between collaborating and ghostwriting? And what are the payment arrangements for writing with other people? Do you generally split the royalties, or are you paid on a flat-rate basis?

Some people use the terms "collaborative writing" and "ghostwriting" interchangeably. Personally, I distinguish between the two terms this way: Collaborative writing is writing in which the collaborator gets credit for his or her work. Ghostwriting is writing in which the writer gets no credit, but is completely invisible—like a ghost. I believe that, as a matter of integrity, the writer's work should be acknowledged at least on the title page, and preferably on the cover. If you write the entire book, but the publisher and the "author" give you no credit, then you are being used in a dishonest way, in my opinion.

Payment for collaborative writing varies. I have worked for royalty splits, and I have written books on a flat-fee basis. If you work for a flat fee, you sign a work-for-hire agreement that specifically states that you forgo all intellectual property rights to the book, including the right to future royalties.

On two occasions, I wrote books on a flat-fee basis, only to see them sell more than 100,000 copies in hardcover. I winced a bit when those books took off without me, but there's nothing unfair about it. I knew what I was getting into when I signed those work-for-hire agreements. I didn't get to share in the profits, but the success of those two books helped me to get better projects later.

Now that I have established a reputation, I'm able to negotiate royalty arrangements on most of my collaborative projects. I usually take anywhere from a 30 percent to 50 percent split of the royalties, depending on how famous the celebrity is (usually, the bigger the celebrity, the smaller my percentage of the royalties).

Your new book, Answers to Satisfy the Soul, is your first solo book. Why did you write this one?

The subtitle of that book is "Clear, Straight Answers to Twenty of Life's Most Perplexing Questions." By the time I wrote Answers, I had already written forty or fifty books on subjects ranging from relationships to religion to success and motivation. This gave me a broad background to write a book like Answers to Satisfy the Soul. I had studied successful, satisfied lives, so I could answer questions like "How do I become successful?" and "How can I find happiness?"—and I could use people like Reggie or Kim Alexis as living examples of those principles. Working with top executive trainers like Bert Decker and Dru Scott, I had learned the answer to "How can I put more time in my day?"

But my biggest motivation for writing this book has to do with the deeper questions of God and the soul. I had discovered that there are scientifically valid answers to such questions as "Does God exist?" and "What is the soul?" So I could write about these subjects without just giving a bunch of fuzzy opinions or religious dogmas.

I began outlining the concept for this book, and I refined it to twenty questions. I knew I had solid, reliable, verifiable answers to each of those questions. I knew I had a book to offer that was unlike anything that had ever been written before. And the reader response to the book has been amazing.

A few months after the book was published, I did a speaking and book-signing event at a Barnes & Noble in California. There were about thirty people present, and I noticed that about a dozen of them were all sitting at one table directly in front of me. They had come in as a group, and they were sitting with rapt attention. After my talk, they all came up to me and told me that they had been meeting weekly and studying my book for seven or eight weeks. They loved it. They wanted to have their picture taken with me, and that really made my evening.

I understand that you "test-drove" the book on Internet message boards. Can you explain how this worked?

To me, the most important concepts in the book had to do with the scientific evidence for the existence of God and the soul. I wanted to make sure that I could present the evidence in such a way that it would be interesting and easy for the average reader to grasp.

I also wanted to see what kind of reaction I would get to the idea that there is verifiable proof of the existence of God. So I got involved with several different Internet forums. I told people on these forums about the book I was writing, and I presented the evidence, and I asked people for their reactions. And I got plenty of reaction!

I found out that there were two groups of people who were resistant (and even angry and offended) at the idea that the reality of God is a verifiable, scientific fact. One group that resisted the idea was, of course, atheists. 

But the second group really surprised me. These opponents of my ideas were religious people, primarily fundamentalist Christians. I had expected them to welcome scientific proof of the reality of God, but they actually tended to reject the idea. They told me that "faith" means believing in God without any proof. According to these people, by suggesting that there is good, reliable evidence for God, I was canceling out the need for "faith," as they defined it. They seemed to be threatened by that.

I was glad I took the time to "test-drive" those ideas, because the information and insights I gathered helped to shape the writing of the book.

How did you get the great endorsements for this book?

Those came from a lot of different sources. My good friend, Pat Williams, is a V.P. with the Orlando Magic and a prolific author. He gave me an enthusiastic endorsement himself, and he introduced me to a number of people he knew who also gave me very positive endorsements—Jack Canfield of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, Dave Thomas of the Wendy's restaurant chain, and business writer John C. Maxwell. I made direct contact with some other people, including psychologist Jim Osterhaus, novelists David Brin and Robert J. Sawyer, and the Bruce and Stan writing team. These people were all kind enough to say some very nice things about the book.

You quickly followed up Answers to Satisfy the Soul with the Timebenders books, a series of science-fantasy books for young readers. What inspired you to write the Timebenders series?

The initial inspiration of that book was my son, Ryan. When he was in the first grade, he saw me writing books with different people, and he said, "Daddy, would you write a book with me?" I said, "What kind of book would you like to write?" He said, "I want to write a book with a time machine and dinosaurs in it." So we worked together on the idea for a while, and eventually I got busy with deadlines and Ryan lost interest.

Years passed, and I ran across the computer file for that book and started thinking about it again. I worked up a proposal with a sample chapter, sent it off, and—long story short—the book sold to the first publisher I sent it to.

The proposal I sent them was for one book, which I called Timebenders. The publisher said, "We don't want to publish just one book. In children's publishing, you have to have a series. So we want four books, not one."

Well, that was fine with me. The only problem was that they wanted all four books written in eight months—and I already had a book under contract that was due at the same time. So I had to write five books--about 250,000 words total--in just eight months.

It wasn't easy, but I got them all done, and none of the books ran more than thirty days past deadline. The publisher decided to call the entire series Timebenders, and I retitled the first book in the series Battle Before Time. Later books in the series were Doorway to Doom, Invasion of the Time Troopers, and Lost in Cydonia. Even with the intense deadline pressure, those books were the most fun I've ever had writing. I plan to write more Timebenders books.

Was it hard to shift gears from writing for adults to writing for young readers?

For me, it wasn't a hard transition, because I have always tried to write clearly and simply, at about a sixth-grade reading level, even when I write for adults. I sometimes use the Flesch-Kincaid readability scoring feature on Microsoft Word to check my work, and my writing for adults is generally at a simpler reading level than the Harry Potter books.

Because I keep the language and sentence structure simple in my Timebenders books, I feel free to make the storyline as complex as I want. The Timebenders novels generally have two intertwined plots that come together in a single resolution. I throw all kinds of esoteric ideas at the reader--time paradoxes, a smattering of quantum physics, tough human problems (grief and loss, spiritual questioning, divorce, crime). Young readers, eight or nine years old, email me and tell me they love the stories, and they have no problem following the plot twists and challenging ideas.

Madeleine L'Engle once said, "You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children." My experience is that there is not that much difference between writing for kids and writing for adults. I have not had to make many adjustments at all.

What's the best advice you could give someone wanting to write for young readers?

Remember your own youth, remember the things that hurt and the things that mattered to you. Then write the book you wish you could have read in those days--and the book you would like to read now. I think there should be a bit of the child in you and a bit of the adult in you in your book. It should appeal to the wonder of your youth, and it should express the wisdom of your present maturity.

Let's talk about agents. Do you believe it's necessary to have one? How can a writer tell a "good one" from a "bad one"?

I was writing full-time for twenty years before I ever had an agent, so no, an agent is not necessary to a successful career. In fact, I find that it is at least as difficult and time-consuming to find a good agent as it is to find a publisher. So I usually tell people, "Don't waste time chasing agents. Just get published!" Once you start getting published on a regular basis, finding an agent becomes a lot easier.

The best agents are easy to spot: They are the ones who aren't taking on new clients. The worst ones are also easy to spot: They are advertising for new clients.

Most novice writers are overly obsessed with landing an agent, as if an agent is the key to getting published. Once you've been in this business a while, you figure out that the keys to getting published are (1) producing excellent work, (2) maintaining a consistent writing discipline, (3) staying focused on your goals, (4) persevering through rejection, (5) finishing what you start, and (6) submitting everything you finish, again and again, until it is accepted.

Once you've created a demand for your work, an agent can make your professional life easier, but an agent is not the key to getting published. The key to your success is you.

The best way to get an agent is to keep submitting to publishers until one of them offers you a contract. Once you have a publisher's contract in hand, it becomes an easy matter to interest an agent who will negotiate the contract for you. If a publisher makes an offer on your book, simply ask for time to think about it—then shop quickly for an agent. Pick up the phone and call, or send an email.

The agents' listings in Writer's Market all say write a snail mail letter, don't call, don't e-mail—but if you've got an offer from a publisher, that's "found money" for an agent. You're doing the agent a favor, not the other way around. She doesn’t have to go out and market your book, because you've already done that. If an agent refuses to take your call or answer your email, it's her loss—and you've just screened out an agent you don't want to do business with.

An agent may not get you a bigger advance—but there's a lot more to a book contract than the advance. An agent might be able to negotiate better royalty escalators, or a bigger percentage of the sub rights, or other deal points that you might not even be aware of. I always tell people to avoid agents who charge fees of any kind, especially reading fees or editing fees. Those agents make their money off of fees, not sales and commissions.

Science-fiction writer Orson Scott Card put it this way: "I have spent too much time helping too many writers get out of bad agency relationships. It is better to have no agent than a bad one."

What was it like to finally work on a solo project? Will you continue writing collaborative books after this, or do you think you'll stick to your own books now?

When I first envisioned becoming a writer, I never imagined that such a thing as "collaborative writing" existed. I got into collaborative writing thinking it would be a stepping stone to writing my own books. I more or less fell into collaborative writing, was pleased I could make a living at it, and I enjoyed it.

But a few years ago, I realized that while I was busy writing other people's books, I was painting myself into a corner. Collaborative writing had become a treadmill and there was no way to get off. I had collaborative projects scheduled so tightly that I couldn't find time to write my own books.

Life is short, and it takes a long time to write a book. I realized that if I wanted to achieve my own goals and write my own books, I'd have to do two things: focus and sacrifice. I would have to focus on developing and submitting my own material, and I would have to sacrifice by saying "No" to some lucrative collaboration projects that were being offered to me.

So I focused and I sacrificed. The results came immediately: My income took a sharp dip. But I also managed to get a number of book proposals written, many of which sold. Within eighteen months of making that decision, I had one solo book completed and five more under contract, with still more on the way.

Collaborative writing has been good to me, and I still do collaborative books today, though not as many as before. My advice to anyone considering a collaborative career is that that you should regularly assess your progress toward your goals. Don't get stuck on a treadmill. If you have an ambition to write your own books, make sure you set goals, then focus and sacrifice to achieve those goals.

Any advice you'd like to share with our authors?

Yes. Don't listen to self-doubt. Every writer doubts his or her own ability to succeed as a writer. Every writer goes through phases of thinking, "This is garbage! I'm worse than a has-been! I'm a never-will-be!" When doubts come, refuse to listen to them. Just keep writing.

John Steinbeck was one of the greatest writers who ever lived, and he went through terrible bouts of self-doubt while writing The Grapes of Wrath. He kept a journal while he was writing, and in one of his journal entries he wrote, "I'm not a writer. I've been fooling myself. Nevertheless, I must keep writing." He pushed straight through his doubts, and he completed The Grapes of Wrath in five months. The book went on to win the Pulitzer and the Nobel Prize for literature.

Self-doubt is the most common of all writers' afflictions—more common than writer's block and carpal tunnel syndrome combined. If you want to be a writer, you have to force your way through your insecurities and fears, you have to ignore all the rejection that's shoved in your face, you have to write every day, and submit everything you write. If you do that, you'll succeed.

As you succeed, don't let success change you. Keep your sense of balance and your humility. Don't write to feed your ego. Science-fiction writer David Brin once gave me this advice, which I pass along to you: "No matter how high you rise as a writer, there's always a narrowing tip above you. It can daunt and intimidate you. Don't let it. Enjoy who you are and what you do. Do good work and do some good."

Anything else you'd like to add?

May I plug my next book? It's called Quit Your Day Job and Write For a Living, to be published in November 2004. I not only packed that book with the lessons of my own twenty-plus years as a full-time writer, but I interviewed scores of professional writers from every field—fiction and non-fiction, children's books and adult books, science-fiction, fantasy, romance, mystery, western, business, religion, and on and on. I may be prejudiced, but I think it's the most complete book ever published on how to write for a living. It's honest and practical, and it pulls no punches. It's the book I wish I had read before I embarked on my own full-time writing career.

Now here comes the hard sell: Quit Your Day Job and Answers to Satisfy the Soul can both be ordered through Amazon.com, or your local bookstore, or direct from the publisher, Quill Driver Books, at 1-800-497-4909. I also have articles and links for writers on my website at http://www.denneybooks.com.  

Thanks, Jenna, for the great service you provide at Absolutewrite.com—and thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk about myself and my books.

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