Bestselling Author Darrell Delamaide on Writing, Financial Apocalypse & Critics
I am fortunate to have Darrell Delamaide sit for an interview. Darrell is a literary renaissance man: a veteran financial news reporter, author of two non-fiction books and two novels. The latter, Gold and The Grand Mirage, have been Kindle bestsellers. He's currently working on two more novels. Darrell's writing style is crisp, vivid and engaging. If you like historical and financial thrillers, give him a shot.
Q: Darrell, you’ve been a financial news reporter for many years. What made you decide to try out fiction? Has making the transition been difficult? Would you give up your day job, if you could?
A: Jim, actually it was the other way around. I was a big reader as a kid -- comics, library books, science fiction, the works -- and I started writing my first "novel" at age 9. I eventually went into journalism because it is writing and storytelling, and I thought I could easily combine it with writing novels. The specialization in financial journalism was dictated by my timing coming out of graduate school. The economy was in recession and editors were only hiring journalists who could explain the economy. Any full-time job, however, makes it difficult to write books and when I finally got an agent she wanted to sell nonfiction books first. So my first book, Debt Shock, came out in 1984 and my first novel, Gold, came out in 1989. I published a second nonfiction book, The New Superregions of Europe, in 1994, but by the time I got back to writing fiction again, it had become much more difficult to get published and I ended up self-publishing The Grand Mirage last year. I would prefer to focus exclusively on writing fiction, and would definitely give up my day job if that ever become financially possible.
Q: You have two novels out, both of which have been Kindle bestsellers. One – Gold - is a financial thriller. The other – The Grand Mirage – historical fiction. In just what genre do you feel most comfortable writing? Aren’t you afraid of being a literary schizoid? Have you thought of writing in one genre under a pen name as many other writers do?
A: Conventional wisdom says writers should establish a franchise -- a reliable, predictable and repetitious formula for their fiction so that loyal readers know what they're getting. There is some feeling that it is particularly important for indie writers who need to build their own audience. So there is some risk in blurring the "brand" image. I think the most important thing, though, is to get titles out there and provide some good reading for people. I think readers can accept a writer having two different genres, but that is probably the limit. I have some ideas about co-writing a series of police procedurals with my brother, a retired police officer, and we would do that under a pen name. As to comfort level -- I'm not sure I would be comfortable just churning out book after book with the same set of characters and plots that eventually blur together. It may take longer to build an audience working in different genres but it might ultimately be more satisfying for everyone.
Q: Gold lays out a chilling plot involving near global financial collapse due to the chicanery of irresponsible bankers and politicians. It is so relevant to today’s events yet you wrote it almost a quarter century ago. Are you writing about perennial flaws in capitalism, i.e., history repeating itself, or are you a modern day Nostradamus?
A: Capitalism does need some government intervention to smooth out the boom-and-bust cycle inherent in the markets' self-regulating system, especially in our modern global financial system where the outsize profits of the boom cycle go to bankers and their shareholders and the losses of the bust cycle are borne by society. The reason I could describe this environment decades ago in ways that are relevant today is that the problem was never fixed. In the debt crisis of the 1980s, banks were bailed out and citizens in developing countries bore the privations of deflation imposed by international monetary authorities. The same thing is happening now in the wake of the new financial crisis, with the difference that it is many of our own citizens who bear the consequences of excessive and reckless lending by the banks. It is worse this time around, because the banks invented new forms of financial chicanery to amplify the reward and the risk at ultimately little cost to themselves but much greater damage to other people. Again, it has not been fixed. So I fear that, sadly, Gold will be relevant again, and we won't have to wait a quarter century this time.
Q: You’ve published both traditionally and independently. How would you describe your experiences, and what advice would you give to authors who are just starting out?
A: I published traditionally when that was the only viable option and when it was not so difficult because there were many more publishers, many more agents and publishing was not so rigorously oriented to profit. The industry has evolved and technology has opened up great new possibilities for book authors as it has for so many other forms of expression. New writers should feel free to try and make it via the commercial route -- find an agent, hope he or she finds a publisher, cross your fingers that the publisher will make some minimal effort to distribute the book, etc. But I would caution against wasting too much time in that effort. The means of distribution and the chances of success for a new author will soon be very nearly the same whether self-published or published by a mainstream house.
Q: Regarding critics, Hemingway said, “I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it.” How do you deal with bad reviews?
A: Is there such a thing? In the old days, any exposure for a book was good. My first book got a favorable, full-page review in the New York Times Book Review, while a prominent Times columnist, Leonard Silk, panned it in the widely syndicated review for the daily paper because he thought I was unfair to the banks. He even brought it up in an interview with the then-CEO of Citibank, Walter Wriston, mentioning me by name. You can't buy publicity like that. Even now, I think those scurrilous one-star reviews some mischief-makers put on Amazon sometimes make a potential buyer take a second look. One of the liberating things about the explosion in communication from blogs and social networking is that people are much more aware that any reviewer's opinion is really just one person's view and ultimately it may be worth 3.99 or 4.99 to find out for yourself.
Q: In your next life (as a writer), would you do things differently and, if so, how?
A: I would focus more on writing books earlier in my career and not let my job or other things distract me so much.
Q: What’s your next one going to be about? When will we see it?
A: I'm working on two books right now. I'm well into writing a new financial thriller -- this time the hero is a Washington-based blogger -- while researching and writing the sequel to The Grand Mirage. The financial thriller is likely to be finished first, I hope by the fall. The new historical thriller, tentatively titled Black Sands, could be out by the end of the year, with any luck. But authors missing deadlines -- even self-imposed ones -- may be the one thing about publishing that never changes.
-- Thanks, Darrell. And good luck with your upcoming books.