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Overview
Kyle is the author of sci-fi book – Space Pirate. He lives in Alabama, where he not only writes but runs a small publisher called Jumpmaster Press.
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https://www.jumpmasterpress.com/
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Transcript
Stephen: Today I’m discovering wordsmith. I wanna welcome Kyle. Kyle. Hello. How are you doing this? Great afternoon.
Kyle: I am great. It’s a beautiful day. So same
Stephen: here. Same here.
First thing I’ve really gotta say to you is, oh no, Mr. Bill.
Kyle: Isn’t that? Yeah. I, excellent. And you’re wearing a
Stephen: grumpy old men’s shirt, right?
Kyle: Yep. Grumpy. Do what I want. Yeah. I do what I want. But
Stephen: we’re some of the people that would recognize that? I think
Kyle: Oh, the bill? Yeah. Yeah. It was, it’s actually a dog toy.
But when I saw it, I said, oh no, it’s mine now. Nice. And I actually play it a lot during Zoom meetings. Somebody will say something and I’ll just, And it’s a perfect attention getter. Nice. Nice. All right we’re
Stephen: gonna talk about some of your books and about the business you are a part of jump, master Press.
But before we do all of that, let’s find out a little bit about you. Where do you live and what are some of the things you like to do besides writing?
Kyle: Okay. My name is Kyle Hannah. I live in the suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama. I retired from the Army about eight years ago. I spent 30 years as a paratrooper in finance and logistics guy.
If you see me walking around, it’s usually with a sm slight limp. But you know what, it was worth it. I got to travel a lot. I saw the world. And that’s not too bad for a country boy from Alabama. Nice. But these days I write, I edit I, I go play in the backyard and just enjoy the sunshine and just enjoy retirement.
Stephen: Nice. I see a guitar in the background. You play. I.
Kyle: I, I play at it more than I play yet there’s also a keyboard back there. There’s a bass. Yeah. If anyone just walked in and looked, they’d say, wow, you’re a musician too. And I’m like, Yeah, sure. Yeah.
Stephen: I’ve been struggling to try and learn some chording on guitar.
It’s just so small for me. I’m a bassist and a drummer. Oh
Kyle: yeah.
Stephen: All right. So let’s talk about some of your books. I know we picked out a
Kyle: couple that we were gonna talk about.
Stephen: So why did you, after being in the Army and a vet, why did you wanna
Kyle: start writing books? Actually I started writing in high school.
I had a very overactive imagination, and this was years and years before anyone said the initials, a, D, H, D, but that was me to a t. So instead of acting out in class and getting sent to the principal’s office and then getting home, And getting in even more trouble, I decided to apply my gift toward just sitting quietly and letting my mind wander.
And I spent most of my high school years getting, good grades, but most of my time my head was down and I was writing something and somewhere in the house, I still have those. 35, 40 year old stories. They’re absolutely horrible. They will, no one will ever see them, but they’re still here somewhere.
And believe it or not, for one of my series I wrote about five or six years ago, I actually pulled out some of the ideas. I wrote in those stories and incorporated them into this universe I created, and it actually worked out very well. And I keep wanting to go back and go, I’ve got this, that I could possibly, and then I start looking at it again and go no, it’s just too silly.
No, not gonna do it. Nice. Okay. Yeah I’ve been writing for years. I never really took it seriously until I was deployed to Afghanistan in 2002. That’s when I wrote my true first novel, came home, put it on a shelf until 2010. And then since 2010 it’s, I guess it’s been an average of a book a year.
I’m, I’ve got 12 novels out. Nice.
Stephen: That’s great. And I was talking to someone yesterday with taught novels and that for my podcast,
Kyle: that puts you in the rare
Stephen: elite of people who have been writing a while. Most of the people I get have two maybe most of ’em are one That was the whole idea.
So what are some of the books we’re gonna talk
about?
Kyle: Tell us about those. Okay. I picked out three of the 12, and you can see, I keep my little library up there. The first one is called No Harbor, and it is a Space pirate story. And I’ve always said I was either born 200 years too late or 200 years too early.
For this one I took a lot of the pirate lore. I always do a lot of research for my stories, and so I took I researched the pirate lore and I just put everything, two or 300 years in the future and had a a. A fast-paced, action-oriented pirate story. Nice. My latest book came out last year.
It’s called A thousand Cuts, and it is a futuristic crime thriller. So I took, I, it’s about 30 years in the future so I could have a few liberties with geographical landmarks and cities and stuff like that. I just had some fun with it. But that’s actually a big departure for me. Most of my stuff is sci-fi fantasy.
In this case I did A crime thriller with safe crackers and it’s very character oriented, which I’m an action guy. I write action stuff. But the first three quarters of the book, it’s very character oriented, very plot driven, and then it devolves into my normal, shoot ’em up at the end and you don’t know who’s gonna live, who’s gonna die.
But it’s a rip roaring good time.
Stephen: Nice. Nice. And yeah, I was gonna ask you about
Kyle: being a vet in the Army.
Stephen: But you’re writing sci-fi. I, it just seems sci-fi didn’t seem like the first thing that would’ve come to my mind. I would’ve thought some military, something, maybe military sci-fi
Kyle: or something like that.
My first novel was military sci-fi. And And I keep a lot of the military and the action oriented stuff from what I learned in the Army. But I’m a huge sci-fi, I love starships, I love exploring planets and stuff like that. So when I set down to write a space opera, if you will, which I’ve got one up here.
I tell when I’m at a convention and telling people about the Tri System Authority I’ll tell ’em, I said, look, it is a very Star Wars esque story. The Starship battles the world building. I’ve got creatures, I’ve got, you walk into the the Tatta cantina that’s in there. All the alien races, and I tell Authors all the time.
I said, have fun with it. I’ve got an alien race that when they get nervous they secrete cinnamon. You can smell ’em a mile away. And I just threw that in there, just, for fun. But it works cuz we don’t know what an alien species would do, right? Or how they would react, or what smells they would smell like.
So I just have fun with it. Nice. I like that. All right, so what’s the third book here? The third book is called Harvest Day. It took me about five years on and off to get this story right and it actually won best sci-fi novel at the 2020 imagined awards. Nice. And it is a futuristic, dystopian after the aliens invade story, but it’s not your typical story.
It’s got turns and twists action. A love triangle, believe it or not. And just. And then my mother-in-law said it was buck Rogers meets the Hunger Games. That’s how she described it. And I said, you know what? I love Buck Rogers. I’m gonna take that one as a win. Absolutely. Yeah. Buck
Stephen: Rogers
Kyle: is rules.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Cool. So those are the three if you wanna ask questions I’ll tell you everything but the ending,
Stephen: that’s a good thing.
Kyle: So you said there
Stephen: sci-fi you wrote a little military sci-fi. Do you have any authors or other books out there that are similar that you feel your writing
Kyle: is like?
One of, one of my favorite authors what in the military sci-fi genre is William Deeds. He he did the the Legion Series or Legionnaire series bounty Hunter ca, Cade Bounty Hunter. He’s got, a dozen or so novels that are very influential. And I actually got to meet him a few years ago.
Got some books signed, and he got a couple of mine. It’s nice to trade ’em out. I. I sat down with him for about 30 minutes and we just talked shop, which was absolutely amazing. So yeah he was a big influence. Lately I’ve been reading a lot of Larry Korea his fantasy and the Monster Hunter series.
The weather’s turned nice, so I’ll go sit on the back porch with a book and just, sit there and lose track of a couple hours, but I’m seeing his style and, other author styles and I’m like, I could do this with something. And, it just gets the mind going that, that old adage, if you wanna be a better writer, be a better reader.
And in a lot of cases it is true. I’m not gonna copy their styles. I’m going to I’m gonna learn from what they did because, They’re at the next level, and that’s where I want to be. The I’ve got to learn a few more tricks. Got it. Okay.
Stephen: And that’s great. I’ve always said, I think authors are better than actors because
Kyle: actors get that
Stephen: standoffish, a little bit of ego and they’re better. They don’t have time to talk to all the fans and stuff, but authors can walk down the street and they’ll talk with you. They’ll take pictures and they, then they treat other people as authors, not I’m better than you or anything like that.
Kyle: A co. A couple of things about that. One, I’ve done some screenplays. I’ve written a novel from a screenplay. Screenplays are very important. But the actor, they get the screenplay and it says, angrily say this. And that’s what they do. They act it out. The writer is the unsung hero because they’re actually writing what the actor says.
Without a good writer and we’ve all seen a movie going, oh Lord, what was that? The acting was good, but the writing was horrible or vice versa. You’ve got to have a good writer and a good actor to really bring it forward, right? Yeah, writers are the unsung heroes in everything.
So from a screenplay to the actors on stage to a radio production it’s all, it all boils down to is the writing any good?
Stephen: And that’s, subjective. And it also depends on the style of genre you’re in. I just talked to an author. What movie was the novelization?
Kyle: Oh, it’s a friend of mine.
He’s a director. Nice. Yeah. He wants to go to the next step. He’s out of Atlanta. He wrote a horror horror screenplay, and I’ve known him a few years. He said, won’t you write the novel for me? I said, okay. And I thought he was in production for the movie. I was like, man, this is gonna be great.
Everything’s gonna hit at one time. And then it comes out. He goes, okay, the trailer’s done. Wait a minute. I, where’s the movie? I’m still doing this, but you know what? The books turned out to be one of my best sellers. Nice. And so I’m happy he’s happy, but I, and then I’ve written a few I’ve got a alternate history time travel series called Time Assassins.
And not to steal anything but think Quantum Leap with historical events. Okay. Yeah, so I actually took the first book and wrote the screenplay for a TV series. I think it would be a fantastic time travel series. I. And so I’ve got I’ve got the first episode written. It’s in screenplay format, so if anyone’s out there, gimme a call.
We’ll talk right.
Stephen: There you go. I just talked to an author who wrote the screenplay for the attack of the Killer Tomatoes movie. Oh, wow. 40 years ago. Yeah.
Kyle: So I always miss
Stephen: the novelizations. I used to love those back in the eighties. A good movie. I’d get the novelization and read it, but Oh, yeah.
Now there’s hardly any of those out there, so I think it’s cool that you did one.
Kyle: Yeah. And I’m gonna talk to somebody this coming weekend. And propose the same thing. I’m not gonna say any more than that. Tease but if it works out, I’ll be back on your show to tell you all about it.
That would be awesome.
Stephen: We’ll have I like getting authors back a second time and see what they’ve been up to. And
Kyle: It is funny. Let me say something that you said a minute ago, you said something about not pleasing everybody or, you can’t please everyone, whatever.
My Harvest Day award-winning book, three stars. Oh my God, this is just so trophy, blah, blah, blah. I’m like, if you’re, if you want to be a writer, if you want to be an actor, if you want to be a musician, not everything you write is going to hit it out of the park with everybody. Just be prepared, right?
Some of the stuff I go, Ugh, I wrote this. It’s okay. People love it. And then it’s man, this is great. It’s okay. You just never know how it’s gonna affect someone or not affect them. I got a friend who does
Stephen: write military sci-fi and he is been doing it for 35 years and, all of his books have on the cover big spaceships with guns and shooting and blowing up and over an alien planet.
Kyle: All of them look like that. And
Stephen: He laughs about this one, one star review that said this is a horrible romance. Yeah, of course it is cuz there’s no romance in it,
Kyle: yeah. My my business partner and I to segue into jump master press if you want we take a lot of joy in turning lackluster reviews or onestar reviews into advertisements.
It’s I got one my, the audiobook it was for Harvest Day. I, I. Yeah, no one, oh. It was for Jake Cutter. It was the Tri System Authority. The guy says left me a review on Amazon after listening not Amazon, sorry, let me back up. The guy left me a review on YouTube after listening to the audiobook, and he said, this has no basis in reality.
And I went, duh, it’s a sci-fi book. It’s got spaceships and aliens and lasers. No, it does, has no basis in reality. He’s absolutely right. That’s right. So I took that, copied it and made it into an a a social media post and say, hey, you know what? If you wanna get away from reality, like this guy did don’t listen to Jake Cutter.
Yeah.
Stephen: Nice. Crazy That and I do have a bunch of questions for Jump master press. Sure. In a couple minutes. But first of all what we talked about some of the feedback from your books. Yeah. But if you had a choice would you rather see your books turned into movies or TV shows?
Kyle: It depends on the book. I’ve got two. Three Book Trilogies The Time Assassins and the Tri System Authority. I think Time Assassins would make a great TV series. There’s already three or four seasons worth of material in the books. The writer the script writers don’t have to go far, but then I’ve got stuff like Harbor Day or No Harbor that would probably make pretty decent movies and their standalones.
So it really depends On the book my writing style is I will sit right here, I will stare off in the space and see the scene. I see the movie, and then I write what I see, and that’s my writing style. So it can very easily be transferred. To, to the bigger or small screen, because that’s how I see it when I write.
Okay. All
Stephen: right. And do you, besides
Kyle: Jump Master Press, do you have an author website all? I used to but when we started Jump Master Press about five years ago I just turned everything off and put everything I do into the company now. It’s only been the last. Probably six months that I’ve slowed down working for the company and started back on my own projects.
I’ve been doing a lot of short stories for anthologies lately which has been great. Trying to find bigger audiences out there doing, podcasts like this just to get the name out there, let you know, hopefully stir some interest. I’ve got, Three books that are done that’ll be released over the next year, probably.
A detective story, which again, totally off the wall for me, but the concept was too good, so I wrote it. And then I’ve got a two book series called Terran Coalition, and it goes back to my roots. It’s a military sci-fi kick, the alien’s butt kinda story. Nice. With a few turns and twists because that’s what people have come to know me for.
Nice. Okay.
Stephen: So before we talk about jump master press, which I think
Kyle: people will love to hear about. Okay. Do you have any other favorite
Stephen: books and authors that are yours? Not necessarily that you write but ones that you just
Kyle: enjoy reading? I’ve probably read Starship Troopers a dozen times.
Not only because of the action, but because I was a paratrooper. And it starts off not like the movie, I’m talking about the book. It starts off with the guys doing a drop. And I’ve always enjoyed, seeing that kind of stuff because I experienced over a hundred parachute jumps. That’s something I can relate to.
So Starship Troopers way up there on my favorite list and the other, Speaking of Buck Rogers is buck Rogers. I think it’s Buck Rogers 24 50 something ad It was written by Phillip Nolan based on the original characters. And it came out in the late seventies, early eighties, I think. And it’s very different from the TV show that we all know and love and very different from the 1930s cereal.
But it’s a very good book. I probably read it a dozen times. I don’t think the covers on it any anymore. That’s, yeah. But those are two books that I will go back to every once in a while just to get away, just to, reread. Again John Scalzi I really liked his ghost brigades books William Deets.
Yeah, just all kinds of good stuff. Nice. Do you have a favorite bookstore in your area? No I used to work at the predecessor to Books A Million, so I’ve had my share of bookstores in my life. But there is a local used bookstore. I’ve done a couple of book signings there.
I took a lot of duplicates and stuff over and gave it to her. She’s got some of my books on her shelf that she sells from the local author kind of thing. But. Most everything these days it, it’s like everything else. And I hate to say it, it comes from Amazon. Yeah.
Nothing against Amazon, capitalism go, but they do not treat authors well. And that’s all I’m gonna say. Yeah. Yeah.
That’s
Stephen: a whole nother discussion. All right, so before we move on to jump master press if someone met you on the street and said,
Kyle: Hey why should I get your books and read them?
What would you tell ’em to entertain yourself? I write ’em to entertain myself and others. If you like. And I’m gonna say this, if you like a clean book I keep everything PG 13. All of our authors do if you like, action if you like. And I’ll say, fairly developed characters.
I. I’m not the character development guru by any stretch, it, I write good stories. They’re full of action. They keep you turning pages. And every once in a while I throw in a very good curve ball to make you go, what? Why did he do that? That’s cool. And, and then you just turn to page and keep going.
Nice. So if you wanna be entertained, Check out, jump master, press and look for my books. There you go. All
Stephen: right. And we’ll make sure to have links in the show notes for the books. So before we turn over to, we’re gonna talk some author stuff before we do jump Master press, you’ve written 12 books.
And I’m sure you’ve learned some things and you’re doing things differently now than you did at the beginning. So what are some of those things that you’ve learned
Kyle: and you’re doing different? I, it’s a good question. My first book, and. Let me say this. Jump master press we do a monthly seminar via Zoom.
It’s free. If you’ll join the Facebook Jump Master Press Writers Group, you’ll get all the information. In fact four hours from right now Thursday at two 30, so six 30 tonight. I’ll be hosting the next one as a matter of fact. I tell, we, we tell everybody. A lot of authors go through this, they’ll go, I finished my book, your Welcome World.
Ah, where’s my million? And it doesn’t work that way. My first book, I just wrote the story. I wrote it how I think, how I talk, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s a good story, but it’s nowhere near the way I write now. In fact, I market it to eight to 12 year olds. They eat it up. So younger reader.
But the second book I ever wrote was, is called Time Assassins. And I found a publisher out of Canada. She picked it up and she taught me how to edit. She and I always joke that she had stock in red ink. Because every time she sent me something back, it dripped, right? But I took those lessons and then the second book in the series is, that much better.
The third book is that much better. And over the last, 12 years, I’ve truly, honed my craft. I’m still not, I’m not the greatest writer in the world. I won’t ever claim to be, but. I’m a pretty good writer. And it shows, if you read them my first book to aid and protect and you read a thousand Cuts, which came out last year, you’d swear it was two different writers.
And so we take those lessons and we put them into the seminar we do each month, and, We have students all over the country. We’ve signed five of our students over the last couple years because their writing went from here to there. Because some of the lessons and everything like that.
And that’s all we’re gonna be doing tonight is going over some of these editing lessons to help the writers hone their skills. Nice.
Stephen: Okay. And we’ve been hinting and talking about Jump master press a little bit. So tell everybody what Jump master Press is, what you guys do and what benefit
Kyle: you have for authors.
Okay. Joe Master Press was formed in 2018 with me and EG Rowley. He, we served together in the Army. I’d written, four or five books and he was writing his first. And I’d gone through two or three publishers for various reasons. I’d self-published one, found a publisher, got rid of that one, found another one, and I just wasn’t happy.
And he said why don’t we just form our own company? We’ll take all the lessons you learned the hard way and we won’t do them. So in August of 2018 we formed Jump Master Press, and it was me and him and we signed our first guy about November that year. And since then, we’re now over 30 authors in four countries.
We have a celebrity author. We’ve got mystery writers time travel, sci-fi, horror, look at everything. We’ve got children’s books, historical fiction. We are a full fledged publisher. And like I said earlier, we try to keep everything family friendly. And all of our authors have agreed to that.
And we put out somewhere between 15 and 20 books a year. And as, and it’s Jean and I running it, we do probably a dozen cons a year. And like this weekend will be in Huntsville, Alabama. I’ve got six authors coming in from across the country. To join us. So we’re gonna have eight authors at this sci-fi convention or pop culture convention.
And readers can come by, they’ve got multiple genres to choose from, and the author sitting right there to get ’em, get their book signed. So that’s what we do, that’s what we bring to the table is we are proactively going out there to these conventions. To these readers and presenting our books.
We’ve got a robust website. And that’s what we do. And I know
Stephen: I saw you guys at Scares That Care,
Kyle: Which was a great
Stephen: event. I had really enjoyed myself. Really wanna be coming back.
Kyle: Yeah, do it
Stephen: again. And you guys had an enormous booth. You had a big wall with books you had tables, you had a little of everything.
I was like, and you did take quite a bit of my money that I was eating ramen for a week.
Kyle: No, not no. Sorry about that. No, don’t apologize. I got a stack of books. Yeah. That’s always a good thing. Yeah. W the skiers was kind enough to give us about a 30 foot section of wall and we filled every bit of it.
And then we had our, one of our authors Armon Shimerman from DS nine Fame, he played cork. He’s been on the podcast, historical fiction authors. So he sat there and he signed books and autographs all weekend. He had a great time. We had a great time. And yeah, it’s definitely on my list of things to do in the future.
Yeah,
Stephen: It was a fun event. Lots of, oh, man I did not expect that many author tables with books everywhere. I was like, oh my gosh. If you like horror, And you’re looking
Kyle: for authors that is the place to go. Yeah. But you asked what jump master press can bring to, to audiences.
One of the things we’ve prided ourselves on is we innovate products. One of our first things we did right out of the gate was, and I actually happened to have an early prototype. We did. Audiobooks. My business partner is a nationally recognized voice actor, and we wanted a way to get away from Amazon and a cx.
So what we did, this is an early prototype. It’s called a Jump card. Yep. And it’s a U S B drive credit card sized U s b that has the audiobook on it. That’s cool. So this is one of our innovative projects. This was, this is all three of the time. Assassins, trilogies on one, believe it or not. And that was an early prototype.
It’s gone through five iterations, but we’ve got almost 20 titles available in audiobook. Check out john master press.com and click on jump card and you’ll see them all. But that’s an innovative project product. It’s a way, for authors. Our authors, when they do their own conventions, somebody will walk by us like, yeah, I’ve got it available in paperback or audiobook, and they’re like, whoa.
Audio. And then another thing that was like the first year the second year came out and we. Found a way to sell e-books at conventions. And I don’t have an e-book card with me here, but they’re on our website. We can sell e-books at the convention. We don’t have to send them somewhere else.
Stephen: The e-book cards are a little bit like, if
Kyle: anyone’s gone
Stephen: into GameStop and they have those cards you can buy that’s a game, but it’s, so you can put it in a ca in a birthday card and give it to somebody, and then they type in the code. They go to xbox.com, type in the code, and boom, they’ve got it on their Xbox.
So yours, your
Kyle: cards are the same type of thing? Yeah. Yeah. It’s a nice little card. It, and when we first started it, we started it with individual covers, for each of the books and all this stuff. And, again we’ve honed it. We’ve Squeaked it a little bit over the last couple of years.
And so we’re about to start doing just plain generic cards to send people to our website and then they can pick out whatever book they want. And then this last year the latest innovation that we’ve done is box sets. Most authors, independent authors have found that box sets are cost-prohibited.
Cross prohibited. They it’s about a thousand dollars for the setup fee and then you gotta pay for this. So if, and then you gotta buy like a minimum of a hundred or some something crazy. So you know, it’s $1,500 for box sets. Gene put on his engineer hat and figured out a way to do it. And now our two book and three book trilogies, we have box sets and they’re, go out to jump master press.com.
You’ll see them down on the bottom of the main page. They are super sharp, they look fantastic. The books fit in. They’re tight. You can actually hold ’em upside down. The books won’t fall out. Yes, Uhhuh, because I bought
Stephen: Monds Trilogy. Yes. And we couldn’t get ’em out to
Kyle: have ’em signed. And that, that’s a.
A unique way of for authors to present trilogies and collections and stuff like that. And we’re finding it hard to keep them on the shelf this weekend in Huntsville’s gonna be the first test since we’re gonna have the authors and the box sets there. I’m expecting a lot of people walking around carry, carrying stuff like, it’s gonna be en entertaining, but that’s one of the things that, that we do for our authors and some of our affiliate publishers as well.
We make things unique. It’s a unique experience. When you come to the Jump Master press booth, we put down a floor if it’s on a concrete, we put down our own floor, we welcome you into the bookstore. It’s a unique shopping experience and, normally we’ll have a couple of authors there, so people get books signed and then, everybody’s happy.
And you had reesey’s
Stephen: peanut butter cups,
Kyle: so Yes. Yeah. And you can’t go wrong with those,
Stephen: right? No, absolutely. If an, if there’s a, an author listening and they’re like I’m interested in jump master. What do you guys look for and what do you expect from authors?
Kyle: Right now we are opening for general submissions in August.
We do that one time a year because, and we shut down. A couple of years ago because we were just constantly inundated with submissions. And as the editor-in-chief, I spend about half of my day every day editing our signed authors books. So we had to narrow the time down so that I can concentrate on a one 30 day period and then, get the rest of the work done the rest of the year.
Plus write something for myself, which is right. Something I haven’t done in a year. But anyway what we look for we look for good writing. Anything but erotica and poetry. We don’t publish that. We try to maintain a PG 13 rating. That means no gratuitous sex, no n none of the good words.
If you will if they can say it on primetime tv, we pretty much allow it. But Like I said, sci-fi, fantasy time, travel, murder, mystery horror, historical fiction, kids books. Steampunk. Steampunk, yes. General fiction. We’ve got several thrillers on the shelf as well. We, like I said, we’re a full fledged publishing company.
We look for good, solid writing, and once you submit to us, You basically fall into two categories. One, and lemme back up. We have a selection committee. It’s not just me sitting there going, Ooh, I don’t like this guy, or whatever. We actually have a committee of about four to five people that will grade every submission.
And what they look for is, the plot the writing, the grammar, et cetera, et cetera. And. Once it’s graded, most everybody falls into two categories. It’s pretty good with a little editing. This is good. So send them an acceptance letter and then otherwise it’s a revision letter. What I do is I actually take the time to do an edit on the first couple of pages of the submission, show the author what we’re looking for, how they can improve, and then I’ll send them a revision letter going, Hey this is what we found.
We really like this, but you really need to work on this and, try again. And I just last couple of weeks ago, I had somebody six months after the fact send me in their second thing, and, they got that much better. It’s very rare that we do an outright rejection letter.
I think I’ve done less than 10 in five years, just flat outright rejection. And I hate to do it because I think everybody has some potential. But, At some point, I’ve got to weigh the cost benefit of do I want to spend, do I have the time to spend trying to make this story, acceptable or not?
And, there’s a few unfortunately that I just don’t have the time for. And and it’s not a personal decision, it’s a business decision because y I, most of my day, every day is either, Editing, marketing or writing, and that’s, eight to 10 hours every day. All right. So
Stephen: what, what did for authors that do wanna submit what would be your advice to new authors before they would send to you or just, publish their book out there, anything like that?
Kyle: The current standard. Standard and again, There is no right or wrong. Okay? I for you authors out there, write your story.
If somebody tells you, Hey, you need to add in more sex or you need to do this, write your story. There’s a publisher out there for you. Second piece of advice, do not ever pay to get your book published. Okay? I did it my very first book. I did it. I never got that investment back. So don’t do it. You can go you can go and do it yourself, and it will cost you a thing.
But what we look for again, good writing limited use of passive voice. We want everything. Active voice. We want you to show, don’t tell. I don’t want you to tell me the story. I want you to immerse me in your story. I want to feel like I’m living it. And we have a class called, he said, she said, on writing female and male dialogue because it is different women talk differently than men did.
And all of that’s on the writer’s group. We want a good story and when we open up for submissions, The first three chapters, a summary of the story, including the ending, and a short bio on you. No pictures. I don’t wanna know your demographics. I don’t want to know any of that except, Hey, I’ve written 14 stories.
I’ve got a BA in, in English, and your welcome world. I, I don’t I don’t need demographics. I need good writing. Got it. All right.
Stephen: Kyle it’s been great talking to you. I’m glad to Yeah. Catch up with you and we’ve got a bunch of jump master authors coming up from you guys, so we’ve got some
Kyle: good interview.
I told you if you sent me your information, I’d get you, I get you a full slate, yep, we
Stephen: did I’ve got quite a few, so we’ll have a lot of those. I
Kyle: get I get a lot from
Stephen: various sources in that, so we’ll be having some good jump master press authors and I’ve got, Some good books on my read pile from you guys, so
Kyle: I appreciate that.
Good. I do invite everyone to check out jump jump master press.com. You’ll find all of our books, you’ll find all of our audiobooks, all the eBooks, our upcoming events. We do a, like I said, about 12 cons and we’re all over the southeast of the United States. We’ve even got a page for our authors so you can read a little bit more about them.
But if you’re an aspiring writer, join our Facebook group. Follow us on. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok for our YouTube channel, we’ve got free audio books out there. I do a weekly vlog. I’m not doing one this week but I do a weekly vlog talking about our authors upcoming books where we’re gonna be.
Who knows what the subject might be next week, you can stay up to date with everything that’s going on with us, by following us on social media. Great.
Stephen: And I’ll put links in the show notes
Kyle: driving people. I appreciate my website, all
Stephen: right, Kyle, I appreciate you taking some time today.
It’s been great talking
Kyle: to you. Hey, thanks. I always welcome the opportunity if if you need anything else from us, just reach out. I’ve got plenty of authors to interview. Cool. Great. And I’ll, I’m
Stephen: sure we’ll run into each other as I get to more cons and events, maybe scarce at care next year.
Kyle: Yeah. It’s on the list. We’ll have to see. All right. Thank you, sir. I appreciate it. Hey, thanks everybody. Appreciate it.
Bye.