Indie Author Friday – Devon C Ford
Indie Author Friday – Devon C Ford
For our first Author for Indie Author Friday, I have selected Devon C Ford!
What made you want to be a writer?
I fell in to it, in all honesty. I’ve always had an overactive imagination and a love for sci-fi, but I’d never considered myself to be a creative person at all. I’d spent all of my adult life in uniform as a prison officer and then a police officer, which doubtless provided plenty of backdrop material especially for the post-apocalypse, but it wasn’t until I’d suffered a bad injury which put me working in an office for the first time ever that I’d ever begun to put my thoughts down on paper.
It started with a list of things to get and places to go which were relevant to me should the proverbial shit hit the fan. That list took on more of a life and became a plan for a co-operative society with different ‘departments’ as such. Those pages of notes and ideas stopped me sleeping until they became a story with characters, and even eight books in to that series and eighteen books later they’re still entertaining people.
I didn’t set out with the intention of becoming a writer, but the fact that people enjoy what I create still humbles me.
Most Indie Authors have day jobs beyond their writing. Do you, and if you do, how do you balance writing, work, and life in general?
Not any more! That’s not to say that I don’t have to do a lot of balancing… We have kids, the youngest being our 5-month-old baby boy, and my wife is exhausted (for a good reason). I have to balance doing the night feeds and being a joint full-time parent alongside hitting my 25k words a week target.
One of my most effective ways of balancing is to get up after the early morning feed and start getting words down at 4am. Quite a lot of days I’ve managed to get 4, 5, or even 6k words written before the normal day starts.
In the book The Leah Chronicles: Andorra, what was your inspiration in writing it?
The Leah Chronicles (the second of which will be out very soon) is a continuation/spin-off of my first series, After It Happened. I’d originally left the story at an emotional end (no spoilers), but that end was a generation after the main story. So many people contacted me with questions about the character’s lives in that missing period that it began to infect my brain and I started to imagine what they were doing. After finishing the series because I felt like I’d put the characters through too much already, I decided to go back and torment them some more!
Do you have any projects coming up that we should keep an eye out for?
Yes, constantly! I’m about to release the third in my new sci-fi series, ‘Expansion’. I’m loving writing this and wish I’d had the confidence to jump into science fiction sooner. I’ve also got a whole raft of audible releases to announce, and am thrilled to have branched out with new narrators for Andorra (Kate Reading) and the first of a multi-author series, Burning Skies: The Fall I (Neil Hellegers).
I can also announce that I’ve signed an audible contract with Podium Publishing for The Expansion Series, but I can’t say who the narrator is yet!
The Fall, the first in the Burning Skies series, will be joined by the third book written by a friend of mine – Chris Harris (UKD / Zombie Castle).
Do you have any advice for writers that are just starting out?
Just write! You can’t be a writer unless you have a product, and nobody wants to hear the stories of ‘that guy’ who has been writing his book for years. I write a book every 8-10 weeks on average, because I treat it like my full-time job. I have friends who write and still have very demanding jobs, and the only reason they have success at it is because they put the hard work in. On that note, you can’t go cheap on covers and editing – there are so many people out there who can help. Join a group on social media: watch and learn.
Everyone wants the magic pill to show them how to successfully market and advertise their books, but I’m sad to say that after 2 years of searching I’m barely any wiser than when I started. No matter how good your marketing skills are, you need a good book to sell.
Links
Amazon Author Page UK – https://amzn.to/2Cax2bd
Amazon Author Page US – https://amzn.to/2QsaDP6
**I will also post links to Devon’s’s books in the Sc Fi, Fantasy, Post Apoc, and Horror Book Club