Welcome Back to Pottersville: Interview with Alex Shaw

In the two plus years I’ve been doing interviews with my Facebook Authors of the Month, I’ve restricted my ken exclusively to those who were self-published or otherwise indie authors. The reason for this was simple- Being an independent author myself and being victimized by the smear and propaganda campaigns waged by those in the “legitimate” publishing industry that had unwittingly enabled and necessitated a self-publishing subculture, I’d immediately realized that we indies need the support and exposure more than “Big Five” authors. This month, I’d like to make a break from that… sort of. So I’d decided months ago to profile British novelist Alex Shaw, who’s technically a hybrid author, as he’d self-published some of his work.

15) Alex, in your decade in publishing, it’d be very easy to pigeonhole you as strictly an action/adventure thriller author. Yet you’d crossed over into other genres, including horror/sci fi in your DeltaForce Vampire (UK link) duology featuring Brad Black aka “Peter Pan”. What made you choose a vampire as your protagonist and how did you make him more sympathetic than most vampire protagonists in fiction?

I was having a drink with an old friend of mine and he was annoyed that in modern fiction vampires had suddenly become lovelorn teenagers, so there and then for fun we decided to both write our own take on vampire mythology. I’d enjoyed watching ‘Dog Soldiers’ and thought, ‘I wonder what that would look like with vampires’, and that was my starting point whilst my friend wrote a series set in 70s London.

With regards to writing a sympathetic character I tried to make him a normal guy in an abnormal situation. The reader has to identify with the character in some way, like them or loath them in order for the fiction to be effective.

14) Your longest-running series features SAS cum MI6 operator Aidan Snow in the Cold series. What makes Snow tick and what are his strengths and weaknesses?

He has a strong sense of inner justice which drives him and won’t stop until the job is done and perhaps that’s also a weakness. He has a world view which he gained as an ‘embassy brat’ having gone to international schools and lived in several Eastern European capitals.

13) In your workaday life, you’d spent a good amount of time in the corporate world. Have any of those experiences found their way into your fiction or inspired ideas?

Not the actual corporate structure or staff but the places I went to. I was in export sales so have written a lot about the countries I visited and the clients I met. My time in Saudi Arabia was especially helpful for Cold Black (UK link) and the upcoming Total Fallout. There’s a scene in Cold Black where Aidan Snow meets an agent at his luxury villa and that is very much based on a meeting I had in Jeddah with my agent at the time. I went on three British Government Trade Missions to Saudi Arabia which is why Aidan Snow opts to do the same. My most recent writing has been influenced by both this and my past three years in Qatar. Whilst based in Qatar we also travelled to Oman, Sri Lanka, The Maldives and Singapore. These places will feature in future books.

12) You’d launched a new series on September 25th, the Jack Tate series. Total Blackout begins with a scenario seen in Die Hard 4: A cyberattack that kills anything with a processor. Only this treatment gets more into the inevitable result of an online blackout betraying our dependence on the internet. Was that the message you were trying to impart in Total Blackout or was it simply a desire to tell a good tale?

To be honest, that’s the first I’ve heard of my book being like Die Hard. It’s not only an online blackout, the EMP has killed dead anything that has wires and a microprocessor, this includes everything from cars to kitchen appliances. I prefer the simpler analogue age we used to have, which really stopped in the mid-nineties as I think we are now too over connected and over complicated, but know that we couldn’t survive without this digital connectivity in some aspect. The theme of TOTAL BLACKOUT really is revenge rather than reliance on technology. Thriller writing is ‘show business’ I never set out to preach but if I can say something to both entertain and inform the reader then I will. This is especially true I think of my depiction of the Russian invasion of Eastern Ukraine and Crimea which I touch on in TOTAL BLACKOUT and COLD EAST, and which I’ll be exploring further next year in TRAITORS.

11) Snow and Tate both begin as SAS operators but how do the two men differ?

They both share certain abilities and traits which enabled them to first join the SAS and then get recruited for MI6 (SIS), this includes an innate sense of right and wrong, but are different people. Snow is perhaps more cerebral and less impulsive, having been the son of diplomats whilst Tate is troubled somewhat by his family past. However I think my readers are the ones who know the differences better than I do. It’ll certainly be interesting, fun and if I’m honest, tough to write when they both appear together as soon perhaps as 2022.

10) You and your family divide your time between England, Doha and Kyiv. Has your time in Kyiv been made more difficult by the warfare raging in the nation’s east and how has your experience in Europe’s largest country inspired and informed your fiction?

Of course all of Ukraine has been shocked by the Russian invasion of Crimea and its proxy war in the Donbas, however daily life in Kyiv has not changed an awful lot. The war is on the other side of the country but there is obviously much more tension in the air and more Ukrainians from the east who have fled west. Prices have gone up but Ukraine has further resolved itself to be a truly European country and there is a lot more investment in Ukraine than there was perhaps five years ago. Ukrainians are extremely resilient and Ukraine is still a place I feel at home in. My writing has very much been influenced by my time in and ties with Kyiv and a lot of my work is set there. I love the place and hope that comes through in my work. No one used to write about Ukraine, which was why I did. To try and explain the full effect of Ukraine’s influence on my work would be too difficult to do so here but I think it is safe to say that without my having lived in Ukraine I wouldn’t be an author now.

9) Plotter, pantser or plantser?

I’ve plotted one novel out completely (as I was asked to do so by an editor) and Cold Blood (UK link) was written without any plan at all, but normally I work from bullet points and have a general idea of where the book is heading. I think a happy medium between plotting and pantsing works best but there is no right or wrong way to write. My advice to anyone wanting to write a novel would be to have both the start and the finish written before they try to write the rest.

8) What quality did you see in Jack Tate that made you decide to devote an entire series to him?

Both my agent and publisher were eager for TOTAL BLACKOUT to be the first in a series set primarily in the US and they felt that Jack Tate was the perfect protagonist for this. I think it’s interesting for those in the US to see their country through the eyes of an outsider as they can laugh at his assumptions and mistakes, and its appealing for non-US readers to visit the locations Tate goes to so that they can experience them with him. It’s a kind of arm-chair tourism with added bullets.

7) So here’s the big question. You are published by an imprint of HarperCollins but started out as an indie. How did you get your deal and which do you prefer, being self or trad published? And would you call yourself a hybrid?

My publishing journey was a tad convoluted. When I finished writing COLD BLOOD (originally Hetman) I wanted to get a traditional publisher. This was in 2007 before Kindle when the current self-publishing business was in its infancy. I spent a year submitting and amassed thirty five rejections, although some gave me positive feedback. An advert for CreateSpace made me self-publish overnight. Kindle appeared and I created Kindle versions which, happily for me, sold well. I wrote my second novel COLD BLACK and published this and then decided that I’d try again to get a publisher. I was friendly with Charlie Flowers who suggested I try his publisher, I did so and they took both of my books and wanted a third – so I wrote COLD EAST. I then had a chat with US author A.R. Shaw (no relation) who suggested that I contact her German publisher. They took my existing books and published them, over the course of three years in Germany where they sold much more than in the UK.

My then UK publisher went into voluntary liquidation and handed me back my rights, so I contacted five larger publishers. HQ (HarperCollins) made me an offer I couldn’t refuse and republished all three of my Aidan Snow thrillers. It was only in summer 2019 that I managed to attract an agent who then negotiated two more contracts with HQ for me. I feel very lucky to be where I am as I know the industry is difficult to break into and I have nothing but thanks for those who have helped me and this is one of the reasons why I like to help any author who asks me for support or advice. Self-publishing for me was a way to hone my craft and get my stories published and out there, and I loved it. I loved the technical aspects of creating my covers, and blurbs, and of course the freedom and speed of publishing my written words. But the more I self-published the harder I saw it was becoming to get sales, which is why I really respect today’s successful self-published authors as they are doing what I could not – competing with the trad authors. Am I a trad author? I’m not one for labels, I do still have self-published short stories, novellas, anthologies and a novel so perhaps I’m a hybrid but my upcoming books will be published by a publisher.

6) Describe your typical writing day, if there is such a thing. Do you draft in notebooks, exclusively write on a laptop and do you set a daily word goal? If so, what is it?

I like to write on location whenever I can but with the current travel restrictions I’ve not been able to this year. When on location I use a note pad and a pen and make notes and write actual scenes which I’ll then type up later. I’ve been tempted to get a ReMarkable tablet but have not taken the plunge, yet. For the past year I’ve been writing at home, first Qatar and now England. I write in my orangery, when my sons are at school and my wife is working either from home or at one of her offices. I used to write in the evenings but now find that I’m more productive if I write during the day. I don’t set any word counts and try to write my novels scene by scene, these I then arrange into chapters when the book is finished. Unless I’ve got a deadline I don’t write every day, which I know I should, but we all need time off for an effective work/life balance.

5) Your short fiction has also been featured in the successful Death Toll series. How did it feel being anthologized along with other rising luminaries in your genre?

When you start writing you have no idea if what you are creating is any good or if anyone will buy it, so when some of the industry greats read, like and publicise your writing, it’s an amazing feeling. As the publisher and editor of the Death Toll (UK link) series my idea was to showcase upcoming indie authors and I think it worked well. I was very grateful to Stephen Leather and Jake Needham for their support, they are both writers whose work I highly enjoy. I was also a contributor to and co-editor of the Capital Crimes anthology for Endeavour Press. I was thrilled to have Peter James give me a foreword for this and Simon Toyne a blurb.

4) Do you ever see yourself diversifying into other genres or does action/adventure do it for you?

I have a part-written Nordic Noir but for the moment I’m sticking with espionage and have a third espionage series launching next June. As an author my readers expect a certain genre from me, which luckily for me is what I like to write. Several authors I know have used pseudonyms to write in different genres, so I’ll never say never.

3) Has the coronavirus pandemic had an impact on your book sales or have they remained the same?

Although globally physical book sales have decreased as high street shops have closed, my sales (ebook and paperback) have remained the same. TOTAL BLACKOUT (UK link) is out in paperback in November and one large UK-based bookshop is taking a large order. My first audiobook edition with HQ/HarperCollins is also coming out in November so it’ll be interesting to see how audio sales fare. I’m hoping that as people travel less, they’ll be reading more.

2) In the internet age, readers can fact-check an author on a dime. So research is more essential than ever. Considering how highly secretive the SAS is, where do you go to get accurate information on it?

The majority of the information on the SAS is open source as there are a number of non-fiction books and documentaries written about the regiment. This of course is not true for E-Squadron, the still classified ad hoc unit run by the SIS which Jack Tate is seconded to. What was originally harder for me to research was the Ukrainian Intelligence Service (SBU) and the Russian GRU/SVR. Luckily however I have ‘friends’ I can chat to in Ukraine who are willing to help. I also have an ex-SIS (MI6) officer friend who answers any questions I may have and a weapons expert who is willing to advise me. But if all else fails I use the internet.

1) What’s next on the horizon for Alex Shaw?

The paperback and audiobook editions of TOTAL BLACKOUT are published at the end of November. TOTAL FALLOUT – Jack Tate 2 - is out in February and TRAITORS my other new series with French intelligence operative Sophie Racine (featuring Aidan Snow) is published next June with the follow up in November 2021. So between now and April I’ll mostly be editing these and if I have the time may continue writing my Nordic Noir crime thriller. I may also write a couple of short stories.

If you're interested in learning more about Alex and his work, you can find resources at the links below.

Alex Shaw — The Crime Readers' Association