By Clara Wessely, aged 19

I sat down with Jack Hayes - bestselling author of the trilogies When Eagles Burn and Dead Man Rising – and talked through his best advice in getting your work published, what influences his writing and his experiences with online publishing.

How’s the quarantine going first of all?

It has been absolutely insanely manic - such is the life of a journalist. Obviously while everybody else has to stay at home we actually cover the story so it’s been quite intense for the last six weeks or so.

 I can certainly imagine. Am I right in saying you’re based in the UK at the moment?

Yes, I am based in the UK. I’ve been in the UK for about…oh… seven years now? I had the option of applying for other posts elsewhere where either I didn’t want to go - I have a young son now – so that makes it tricky for me to get reposted to Jerusalem… or Belgium… or wherever.

Right so – not to sound like a stalker – I’ve been doing my research and read a little bit about you. From your website, I’ve seen you’ve done your fair share of travelling. It’s very impressive.

Well yeah, a lot of it was when I was a kid and then obviously more as an adult being a journalist. There’s been a lot of reporting from a lot of different places.

Pause

Still no South America though yet, so I still have to work on that.

Well great. Firstly, thank-you very much for agreeing to have this interview. I’d like to start off by asking you what your best advice would be for our young writers at InkBeat in getting work published?

Tricky one that… I mean there are all kinds of detritus ways of going about this. There are two main pieces of advice. 1) Sit down and write the book. 2) Get an agent.

Item one: You can’t publish a novel if you haven’t written one. Authors will sit, plan, work out a storyline and more often than not these people will use the planning stages as procrastination. Sit down and write the f****** book. That is the first thing to do. It’s irritating and trite but very true. The procrastination stage is incredibly tempting. Don’t do it. Sit down. Write.

Item two: Getting an agent is impossibly difficult. However, there are many good services on the internet offered by other authors. I used Harry Bingham’s Writers Workshop. I don’t know whether they are good these days but when I started out, they were a very good route in having your finished manuscript peer reviewed by other authors. Of course, if you went through the route of other authors liking your book, they’d pass you onto their own agents. So, use a service like that or similar, though it can be expensive.

So, in regards to InkBeat, there will be readers who may have heard of your work or may be coming across it for the first time. Would you mind giving a brief outline on the genre that you write about?

Sure! So, I write ‘Bloke Lit’. Now most people have heard of ‘Chick Lit’ and know what that is. ‘Bloke Lit’ is bombs, car chases, exploding briefcases and missing damsels in distress. And this genre was incredibly popular through many decades. Then, around about 2000, it disappeared. The last remnants of it you can see is in Lee Child. But those in charge of the market determined that if it wasn’t an SAS story the novel should somehow be about SAS people.

So, if you go and read any book, not just picking out Lee Childs (he is one of the most successful ‘Bloke Lit’ authors) but Jack Reacher is obviously an ex-military policeman. Now, many of the authors in this field are extremely famous names: whether its Alexander MacLean or Jack Higgins. But the uniqueness of this genre is that you don’t need to know who the author is, you just know that when you saw their name, you knew exactly what the book was about. You see Jack Hayes and you know that it’s the kind of book with bombs, car chases, explosions… that kind of thing. It’s very hard to describe where the power of that comes from. The other names in the genre are all old. The genre has not been very well maintained with fresh names that have gone into it; it has moved in different directions, which is good and healthy, but it’s left a very underserved market. So, when I wrote my first book, I tried to rejuvenate the genre while getting through the publishing process. But when I went through agencies and publishing, the feedback I received was ‘can you make the main character an SAS man’? Rather unfortunately in that book, I couldn’t.

How long does it typically take for you to write a novel?

The answer for that is totally elastic. I haven’t written a novel in five years. It’s not because I don’t have lots of ideas. It’s not what most authors describe as having a problem. I’ve never really understood the problem… most authors describe it as writers block. I’ve never had writers block, I’ve always known what I want to write, it’s just whether I like what I’m writing. And for me personally, I have to have a certain amount of background brain space that I can devote to just sitting there thinking about what’s going on in the novel. A little bit like when you’re using your computer, and you might have the internet open but, in the background, other programs are running at the same time. So, while I’m going about my daily job, my brain is working out novel plots, situations and resolving various different things.

What made you decide to publish online?

I published online because the publisher that would take my stuff is from Endeavour Press. They’ve been very good to me. The publisher is a friend of mine, as well as a writer. He writes in the same genre and he is very good at it. So, he said that if I couldn’t get published by anyone else, then I should give it to him and he would put it up. So, that’s what I did.

And do you get any money out of it?

Yeah, I did very nicely out of it. If I really pushed it and sweated it, I would make a low end living at it.