Talking Fantasy – R.A. Salvatore Interview, Part 2

[wpcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””]

Unwinnable: And even though he is such a hero, he is such an outsider. He will almost never be truly accepted and I think that resonates with teens.

R.A.: Absolutely.

Unwinnable: One of your great strengths as a writer is your ability to choreograph fight scenes, and I would almost think that you storyboard them the way a director would – they are just so detailed. Do you really premeditate and design them or do they just flow naturally?

[pullquote]It has been an amazing journey and as I look back, it becomes even more amazing to me the way it went[/pullquote]

R.A.: It’s both. I generally will premeditate and design the battlefield so I know what is there, but then when I get going in the scene it gets crazy for me and I just flow. I am watching the fight take place and I am just reporting on it, essentially. So it is a little of both. I think that if I wasn’t a writer, I would be a choreographer for action scenes in movies. I just have this, I see it in my head and I tell you what I am seeing and it seems to work.

Unwinnable: You have been writing novels since 1988. How much has the business of writing changed since then?

R.A.: Oh, dramatically. First of all, as soon as everyone got home computers with word processors, everyone became a writer, right? Publishers started getting a thousand manuscripts in the door each week, so it became much harder. And of course now with ebooks it is changing again because so many people are into self-publishing now. I’m not sure how

[/wpcol_1half] [wpcol_1half_end id=”” class=”” style=””]

this whole thing is going to fall out. I’m not afraid of it; to me it is what it is, so just go along with it, see what you can figure out and see what fits best for your own style and position in the world.

As recently as five or six years ago, if somebody had emailed and said, “I am thinking of self-publishing my book,” I would have said don’t do it, because it would cost you thousands of dollars and you are never going to recoup that money. One in a million will. Now you can self-publish a book and it doesn’t cost you much at all, so I can’t give that advice anymore. So yeah, it’s changed dramatically.

Unwinnable: I think the instant nature of the new market is great. This summer, my girlfriend was looking for a book suggestion, so I recommended her The Dark Elf trilogy. She had her Kindle and was able to download all three. She read them one after the other and just inhaled them. That is so great.

R.A.: Certainly for a long series of books, the ebook is a blessing. It’s funny, because the number of books on my backlist remains about the same but the percentage of those that are ebooks has gone from two percent, to 19 percent last year, to over 40 percent this year so far. When you have a backlist, there are 25 Drizzt books and 10 other related books or some breakdown like that. When you have 25-35 books out there, a Kindle is a really great tool for readers when they are trying to figure out what comes next.

Unwinnable: So it’s true that there are going to be six more Drizzt books?

R.A.: I don’t think it is six anymore. I think Neverwinter is the first of that, so there are five more under this contract. But you know I would never make that statement, because I doubt that will be the end of it. By Drizzt books, I don’t necessarily mean books featuring Drizzt but books in this series of adventures that I have been writing. He could go at any time. You never know.

[/wpcol_1half_end]

———

Check out Neverwinter by R.A. Salvatore, available today on Amazon.com. Tune in tomorrow for Part 3 of the interview!

You should probably just go to Amazon right now instead of my Twitter @GeorgeCollazo.