Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey everyone, Jim Phoenix here. And we've got Anthony McCarroll for today's podcast. That's right. We've got the writer and screenplay extraordinaire. We talk some deep dives into the genre and a bit of author talk at the end. All this more on next. What's cracking? Hit it.
Hey everyone, Jim Phoenix here. And in today's what's cracking, we've got none other than Anthony McCarro. And if you know anything about horror, you know Anthony McCarro, it's a pleasure to have you here. I am so glad we can make this work out.
I have a few questions for you and I'm going to flip back and forth between authorization and then movies, author movies, author movies. Sound good?
[00:00:54] Speaker B: Awesome. Yeah, sounds great. It's great to be here.
[00:00:57] Speaker A: Very, very cool. Now, for your author work, did that come before the screenwriting work?
[00:01:07] Speaker B: Yes and yes and no.
What happened was I originally wanted to write prose when I was very young and I found my way traveling through the film industry in Hollywood and as an assistant, working in offices and things like that. And I was a creative person. I think I was an idea person. But even though I was working or had done a lot of writing, a lot of non fiction writing, a lot of my published work, original work were nonfiction, a lot of nonfiction for magazines, smaller magazines, mid sized magazines on horror movie themes and histories and things. I mean, I might still do that today for horror news.net dot.
But I was thinking story wise, I was always thinking more like a producer. I think my, that's development.
For those of you unfamiliar with that sphere of the movie industry, development would be the development of a screenplay or, well, eventually has to be the development of a screenplay because that's what they focus on the story. But it doesn't always start as a spec script or a commission script. It could be a novel or rights to a true story or whatever. And I found myself in development and I started to write. I started to try my hand at doing my own screenwriting and, but I kind of geared more towards producing. And then I kind of shifted into becoming a writer in marketing, marketing related writing, copywriting and all that. And when I was younger, I was, I love the Martin H. Greenberg short stories. He was an editor and he put out a bazillion compilations. I mean, when Francis for Coppola's Dracula came out, he, there was a, yeah, Dracula, prince of darkness, short stories by all the top names at the time. And Christmas time, he came out with a, you know, ghost of Christmas past present future collection and all this. I mean, it was great stuff. And then there were other guys like, you know, hot blood by, you know, Jeff Gelb and all that. And a lot of the paperbacks from hell. I was a big paperback from hell reader. So I think that in my reading habits and my writing habits, I kind of was into nonfiction. Almost 80, 85%, unless you count comics. Yeah, yeah, for books. I mean, I was still comic book reader. I would. I read, um, consistently read the law on it all for 2025 years.
What happened was, was, uh, I never gave up on reading non fiction. You know, I would get, like, Michael Crichton's stuff, or I would, if something grabbed my eye, I would get it. But I was mostly a non fiction fiction consumer, and I wasn't really concentrating on fiction until maybe four years ago. And when I wanted to, I wanted to do some writing. I didn't want to do screenplays. I wanted people to actually see the stuff. So I geared myself more towards trying to write short stories or writing novels and all that. But from having worked in development, I knew that it's a little.
It's wise for a writer to take on what they can handle. And since I had not written a novel, I was not going to write a novel right out of the park. I knew that a novelette, aka something that was 50 pages or a novella, you know, like 100 pages, 90 to 110 pages or whatever, I think that's where you kind of belong, for me, anyway, starting out not to tackle something that turns out to be 300 pages, because, remember, you have to edit it, you have to tie up all the plot holes. You have to make sure everything makes sense. You know, you have to. Do you have a manageable number of characters, or are there too many or too little or all that? And, you know, you don't want all that, you know, with your first work, at least for me, you know, for me, jumping into something that would be 200, 5300 pages, no, I didn't want to do that. So I was. I started focusing on shorter stories.
And when I went back to Los Angeles, I was focusing on looking for production assistant jobs, grip jobs, things like that. I wanted. I didn't want to go. I didn't want to go back to development. I wanted to get to be on set. And while I was doing that, it was also fiction writing. So both of them kind of converged.
[00:05:59] Speaker A: So when you're doing this, do you think it's because when you and I both started, e readers weren't a thing we had to have the paper back. We had to have the magazine. We had to have the paper copy, right?
[00:06:11] Speaker B: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
[00:06:12] Speaker A: And that made us read more.
Now it's kind of like you had the e reader 2000 books around it. You probably read one.
[00:06:20] Speaker B: You know, I remember I absorbed a lot more. I'm. This is, you know, man, it's like you're almost forced to skim a lot of stuff and you're also, in a way, I gotta put my laptop on a table and go about my business. And I have Netflix on in the background because I gotta, you know, just for career wise, professional, I have to catch up on this stuff and I just don't have time to sit there and watch the whole thing. So a lot of it is just like I'm catching it in the background, you know what I'm saying? So. And same with reading. I have to skim a lot of it because so much of it's out there and some of it moves so fast. But back in the old days. Yeah, man, I mean, you got a book and that was it.
And you had to read it. I think you absorbed it a bit more because you didn't want to necessarily rush through it unless you had, you know, extra cash to spare to just keep buying books. Buying books, buying books. So I kind of like to take my time with them. But that was. That was a totally different, totally different.
[00:07:23] Speaker A: Industry, you know, different era, different eradic.
[00:07:25] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:07:26] Speaker A: I mean, did you grow up with the movie adaptations? You're talking about the Bram Stoker Dracula thing. I remember, like, Friday the 13th came out and then Friday 13th, the book came out, which is basically a screenplay, which is kind of doctored up a bit.
[00:07:41] Speaker B: That book's worth a lot of money. I was actually trying to track a couple of them down, man. There was a whole series of Friday the 13th books and they're out of my price range. The one I was tracking was probably one of the worst books ever written was eat them alive, which is, you know, have you ever seen the deadly manus? You know, the old 1958? Yeah, you know, giant bug movie. This is like a crime caper. Giant bug movie. Like gore, gore, insanely gory book. It's really stupid. Just really stupid ass book. I mean, yeah, go for like $800 a copy.
[00:08:17] Speaker A: The things that we should throw away as a kid. I mean, back in the day, these books, I made this comment, I don't have the book up here right now, but when Stephen King was like $5, a Stephen King book went for, you know, 495 plus tax or whatever. It was, yeah. And that was like the thick big books. Other ones were like $2 maybe. Yeah, not so much anymore. And now the ones we just threw away are worth a couple hundred dollars because of like this nostalgia aspect of.
[00:08:43] Speaker B: It, or it's just rare. You know, there wasn't a big, big print run. I mean, it wasn't, you know, I mean, apparently, see, in those days, well, even today, I mean, even with the ebook market, anything serialized or part 123-4567 of a series, if you hooked somebody, they went and they bought the other issues or the other books, I should say. So if you have five Friday 13th books and somebody bought the fourth one and they liked it, well, you know, maybe they go back by the second one and the fifth one comes out and they buy it. So you got one reader and he's, but he's, but he's a customer. He's a three time customer. So you might not have a huge, huge audience base, but you have like that core base that, you know, move 20,000 copies, 30,000, but you're not going to have a second print run.
There's no buyer for it. At least not those.
[00:09:39] Speaker A: But the back, the back catalog, I was just at the indie Incon Florence, Italy, and someone said this, I think is very true. That is the back catalog. They're new to somebody. Everyone's old books is new to somebody. And so you get that second reader. Yeah. And then goes back and buys the rest of them. Right.
[00:10:01] Speaker B: That's the key to, that's, I think that's the key to any indie book or any pulp publishing. You want to get that, that, that guy who comes in or that girl who comes in and goes and I, and picks up your new book or a book and then goes and buys three other ones. I mean, I mentioned this on another show.
It's like Kiss the rock band.
[00:10:24] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:10:25] Speaker B: Their first three lP's did not sell. I mean, I think one of them only did 70,000. I think another 1110,000. They were, they weren't recouping what it was costing to make. And then they did a live alive boom goes gold. And then it goes beyond gold. And people, new fans, they come in. Well, the three albums that bomb became old records.
[00:10:49] Speaker A: They're like out of nowhere.
[00:10:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
They were still in print. People went and bought them. So, you know, that's, that's with authors too. But today it's different. See, in the old days, like Jack Ketchum, I really dug Jack Ketchum.
[00:11:06] Speaker A: Really?
[00:11:06] Speaker B: Yeah. He was great. Great writer.
He had that super shocking extreme book. The first one that he, that he did offseason.
Offseason, sold like 300,000 copies on the paperback. Mario Valentine put it out, one of many books that sold 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 copies in those days. It was, it wasn't super glutted, I would say, because once you ran out of customers, you're, you, you know, you got to make money or your publishing house is going to go out of business. You didn't have print on demand in those days. So like, like Brian Lumley, I knew who Brian Lumley was. You know, the guy can't write. I can't remember the book series you wrote, but it was, you know, it was like a horror series. I don't remember, but I remember the name. The reason I remember the name is because when you went to in the bookstore, I mean, he wasn't Dean Koontz, he wasn't Stephen King, but he, but he was there and he had a following. Had like eight books or whatever. John Saul will be another guy like that, you know, so it wasn't that many people. And you kind of had tears. You had the, you know, then you had the second, I don't want to say second tier guys, but people who wrote for the magazines, wrote for the newsletters, wrote for, you see them in a lot of anthology collections. You know, they'd have their own books out there, but they were not million copy sellers. They were just people who consistently sold and consistently could contribute.
I don't want to say that doesn't exist today, but I went into a Barnes and nobles and it's like almost nothing. There's nothing there. It's like a fraction of what used to be there.
[00:12:54] Speaker A: It's a bit weird. I remember science fiction anthologies, Isaac, Isaac Asimov's anthology, so many great story writers are there that would appear again and again and again and again and again. And then you don't really have that outlet for the people who might have the short stories to sell or the smaller works to sell to an anthology.
Because if you look at, for those at home, go to your local bookstore after you get past the candles, the mugs, the sleepwear and all this other stuff that they sell that aren't books, find the bookshelves and see how many bookshelves are dedicated to your favorite genre. Anthology guy has nothing. Horror is getting a bit better now, but it used to be like that one half shell for a long time.
You know, it's, it's hard this really.
[00:13:49] Speaker B: Is, well, the horror, the horror paperback market. And I'm saying that's a, and we're talking pre e book, pre current landscape. Because now everything's print on demand, everything's digital.
In the old days, printer. In the old days, if you couldn't get published in a magazine that people read, like Alfred Hitchcock Mystery magazine, and that was really hard to get published in that. I mean, or any, any newsstand magazine that had 3400,300, $400,000, circuitous, three or 400,000 people circulation.
[00:14:22] Speaker A: Right.
[00:14:22] Speaker B: You know, he wrote for small press publications, fanzines, this or that, wherever you could get your stuff published.
And I guess, you know, you can work your way up from there.
I mean, you mentioned, you know, science fiction anthologies there. I was like, mirror Shades was a really cool one. That was a cyberpunk one. Burning Chrome was another good one. But I think when Harlan Ellison, I was shocked when I read this. He did dangerous visions, which was like mass, it's still in print today after 50 years, you know, great collection of Sci-Fi short stories, and it was the number one bestseller, sold the most copies of any Sci-Fi anthology ever published at the time. It came out and lost money. We lost $1,500.
[00:15:14] Speaker A: That tells you the whole thing. But you're right, a lot of it came from, if you could get into a fanzine, great, that's a stepping stone to the next area. Great, and that's a stepping stone to the next area. Some people started as newsletters, like the actual, we hear newsletter, we think about the email. We get no newsletters. You had to buy and subscribe to.
[00:15:35] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, and they would send.
[00:15:37] Speaker A: Them to your house. You know, I used to subscribe to.
[00:15:40] Speaker B: A billion of them. I mean, this is, I mean, this is before the Internet, like back in the eighties and in the early nineties, you know, a dollar quarter, $0.50, you know, $2 and you get Xerox, stapled newsletters from, from very obsessed, obsessed people writing on a lot of crazy, different topics. Like, uh, not, I don't want to, I don't like to single anybody out because then I got to leave so many of them out. But yeah, one of the, you know, spaghetti cinema is always the one that sticks to my, in my mind because that was, you know, that was a state. It was, I was like eight by eleven staple, you know, on spaghetti westerns, you know, and it was like really, you know, you didn't, you couldn't go on the Internet and type in spaghetti Western and read 50,000 million pages. I mean, in those days you couldn't even get a book on. I don't even think there was ever even. I don't think there was any major books about it.
[00:16:35] Speaker A: No. The spaghetti western is very specific. Like, I can only name the ones that Clint Eastwood were in.
I don't know if any other spaghetti westerns exist beside Clint Eastwood's.
[00:16:47] Speaker B: Oh, there are a lot of them. There are a lot of them.
[00:16:49] Speaker A: There has to be a ton of them, though, right? But we see the genre as the one that rises to the Titanic iceberg when we see the tip of it.
[00:16:56] Speaker B: A lot of people didn't know they were seeing a spaghetti western until they went into the theater and it was dubbed.
It wasn't like they were going to tell them that on the advertisement, right, because that actually a lot of people didn't dig. It's dubbing, but, yeah, but, you know, today's landscape is a lot different. Today you can self publish on a lot of platforms and you have ebooks and it eliminates the need to go and shop. You know, it eliminates the, you know, where you have ten manuscripts, nobody reads them, you're trying to shop them around. And quite honestly, a lot of times they're getting, their stuff's commercially viable, probably better than a lot of the stuff they're publishing, but.
[00:17:39] Speaker A: Right.
[00:17:39] Speaker B: It didn't see print. And now today, you know, I mean, there were always vanity publishing services, but, you know, they, you know, costly and they still exist today. But they're, yeah, they still exist. They're print on demand.
[00:17:53] Speaker A: Yeah, but print on demand with, we've got things like, well, the monster in the house right now of Amazon, who used to be just a bookseller, by the way.
[00:18:02] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:18:04] Speaker A: Book vault, who does an amazing turntime demand, especially if you want anything in color inside of it, Amazon will charge you the entire book as color. Book vault only charges for that page in color. So if you want to do comic books, if you want to do anything, that's going to be great. I always, you know, book vault is the best in town, I think. But we have these services, right? We don't have to have our basement filled with 12,000 boxes making a box fortress of books that maybe don't sell because we now have this demand. Client comes in, pressed a button, prints out in a day, and they suddenly get it right.
[00:18:43] Speaker B: You don't have that overhead. And the money that you're saving you can put into what is really, really, really important, advertising. Because if you don't advertise it. It's not going to move. Like, I just was reading today, like, terrafire three is projected to do 15, $15 million at the box office. And this is what shocked me. The massive, massive, massive, massive amount of their advertising was strictly Instagram, Facebook, social media. And I think they got something like 86 million views on some videos or whatever, YouTube or whatever.
That to me is not a whole hell of a lot different than 1985. Like one or two in the morning we watch the boy who cried werewolf at like 01:00 a.m. and then these UHF channels would have these know, these 15 2nd spots for a movie. They weren't 30 seconds. 15 seconds is cheaper. So they would put 15 seconds of a movie and then 15 seconds of like ice cream, you know, like, like buy an ice cream birthday cake. So.
But the 15 seconds would be to like the Duke and Duchess Grindhouse or it would be to the Sam Eric or the Eric's place. And they wouldn't be the only theater, but they'd be like maybe five theaters carrying like, like an exploitation film. And in a way, instead of UHF, they're just going on Instagram and they're doing essentially the same thing, just targeting that audience for that big opening weekend. And there's no expectation what it's going to do next weekend. They could, they don't know if it's going to sustain or drop 90% because it's a, it's such a classic front load advertising campaign where you just want to get everybody there that weekend.
[00:20:34] Speaker A: Boom.
[00:20:35] Speaker B: Yeah, one week only, maybe two weeks. And that's the way a lot of horror movies were, man. They rolled in and out in two weeks for many, many years.
[00:20:42] Speaker A: Oh, absolutely. To the eighties, the, the exceptions were probably nightmare and Elm street, like the house that Freddie built, like the first one because it was something like, oh my God, we didn't see it might have lasted but a couple of weeks, it's not the long stay where like, what was that one Avengers movie on for a year? Or, you know, lots of theaters in the year.
[00:21:05] Speaker B: I remember seeing the tv ads for Nightmare on Elm street and they were creepy as all hell.
I did not see the movie in the theater, but when it came out on VHS, I, you know, I rented, I was like, wow, this is cool. And part two comes out. I went to go see part two. I, I don't remember exactly how much part two did. I know part three did 45 million, but part two did in the 2020 5 million range. It was a big hit. The first movie, I don't think it did. I think it did about ten.
[00:21:38] Speaker A: Enough to make another one.
[00:21:40] Speaker B: Enough to make another one. And the whatever money, you know, if you look at it from a trilogy. Oh, they cleaned up.
[00:21:50] Speaker A: Yeah, that's the thing like we're talking about before, if someone sees, like you said, part two, now you want to see part one.
[00:21:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:58] Speaker A: And VHS rentals were royal, you know, that was a money stream for a secondary stream. Yeah, for a long time.
[00:22:05] Speaker B: Terrifyer one was basically, you know, a very lengthy six years, whatever advertisement for a sequel that never came. Never came. Never came. And then I call it an advertisement because it's just been out there drawing an audience for six years. So a new movie comes out and, you know, the audience was bigger than they thought.
And that was the same thing with a Helm street. You know, the audience turned out to be a lot bigger with the sequel because the movie came out. But I think more people saw it on video. So like original came out, not that many people saw it, but they saw it on video, saw it on cable or whatever. So when the sequel came out, massive audience turns out for it. You know, it's like.
[00:22:51] Speaker A: Sometimes it's about commercial is the first movie.
[00:22:54] Speaker B: Yeah. So, yeah, it's. It was basically a big promo for, you know, the franchise when the franchise kicks into gear, you know.
[00:23:03] Speaker A: Yeah. And now that segues into, you are a writer in a lot of horror.
What do you see for your own writing? Because it looks like you're getting like dreaded invocations, terrifying horror tales to utter in hushed tones.
Is this going to be more of what you're going to be into versus writing screenplays?
Are you going to go more into your authorship? You know, you're going to raise the.
[00:23:31] Speaker B: I was commissioned a while back to do a screenplay and it came out very well. But, you know, the financing and whatever, just didn't materialize, which, you know, John Carpenter wrote a lot. He wrote a miniseries for the Beast, Peter Benchley's the Beast. I didn't even. I. They made that, but they didn't make what is screenplay. So a lot of times, you know, people get commissioned for works that don't come out. Yeah, but with the, not with a novel or a podcast or audio, audio theater podcast or any underlying property you can sell. That you can sell. That's my development background. I don't write a screenplay because I want to get, I want the stuff to go out there. I mean, I can write the novel. I can write it far more engaging in a novel form, you know, to directly entertain an audience.
[00:24:25] Speaker A: Right.
[00:24:26] Speaker B: And then if somebody wanted to convert it into a screenplay, I know the difference between a novel and a screenplay. And I worked in production. I know how to do business. You know, I'm not going to, you know, you take the novel now, you turn into a screenplay, and the screenplay has got to be truer to its format.
[00:24:45] Speaker A: Right.
[00:24:45] Speaker B: Which is a nice way of me selling. Look, you want to buy my book, cool. But, you know, give me, give me, you know, part of the deal, you know, take, you don't have to use it, but give me first draft on the screenplay, you know, because screenplay is going to get rewritten 65 times, gonna have 20 people involved. A lot of them are not even going to get credited. So you can't, you can't marry yourself to the screenplay. It's, it's so, I know this. My shtick is basically this.
I would prefer to write the novel or write the fiction piece or whatever, or podcast or whatever, and then it's intellectual property, and then if somebody's interested in it, then we'll talk about a screenplay. But in terms of writing a spec screenplay, it's like, not why I don't, it wouldn't make sense for me because I dreaded my previous books did not sell that well, but dreaded invocations because it was marketed better and, you know, or marketed more comprehensively.
[00:25:46] Speaker A: Right.
[00:25:47] Speaker B: Had a price, I think, that befit an author that nobody ever heard of.
It moved. It moved, you know.
You know, it was a mile. A modest success so far. It's still in print, still, you know, sold a copy yesterday and got 500 pages read on the, on unlimited. I mean, I know some people get 40, 00, 10,000 reads a day, but, you know, they've been at it a lot longer and it's, a lot of, it's.
[00:26:19] Speaker A: You, yeah, you have to set your own concepts of success. And I used to do spec scripts and I used to be the person that do for rewrites for some. And you're right, it's really weird because by the time you're done with it, you know, 12,000 other writers also write something and you might not get credit at all. And so the movie you wrote won't be the one on screen necessarily, whereas a book, the move, the book you write is the book on the page.
[00:26:51] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:53] Speaker A: You know, they don't take that away. Right.
[00:26:54] Speaker B: And there's, you know, I know people don't like to talk about this, but there, there's promotional benefits to having something in print.
You can always cut a press release on it. You can always. Even if it's been you haven't marketed in six months. Like I said, it can write you to somebody else and new to someone else. You could book yourself on a podcast to talk about a book you wrote six years ago, and they don't know if it's six years old, you know, unless you tell them. And, you know, you. You can. You can slap your face on a blog article or a social media posts with the book next to your face and your name and send it out there and you can promo it. You can't really do that with a screenplay. I mean, you can. You can say I finished my screenplay or, you know, I won this contest or I got second place in it, you know, but I just. I just think that. That something direct, content wise, like either a book, you know, I'll put it as way, if I were just only doing spec screenplays, I'd still want to get myself out there somehow, like on Instagram or something like that. Like maybe gimmick Instagram, where, you know, like, talk about screenplays, you know, make a channel or something about, you know, what you think about screenplays and this and that. Oh, by the way, this is what I've been working on, although I don't recommend, don't even remotely recommend talking about work that we did.
I wouldn't put it out there unless it was. Unless you were really protected. You know, I, you know.
[00:28:35] Speaker A: Yeah. And copyrighted and all that and a lot of the. Okay. If you are doing a spec, so that's gonna be mostly you. But if you're going to work on something to fix up, like, they should call it script doctoring, I guess, where you might be under an NDA for a long time. So you're like, hey, what are you doing next? I can't tell you. How about that?
[00:28:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:28:57] Speaker A: Can't tell you.
[00:28:58] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:28:58] Speaker A: What's the last five things you did? Can't tell you.
[00:29:00] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've had some NDAs.
[00:29:02] Speaker A: You sure you're right? Like, I'm sure I write. I just can't tell you anything about it.
[00:29:06] Speaker B: I've had some NDAs for, like, some. Some reputation management work I did, like, press releases and things like that. And you want to tell people because it's like, it's cool stuff, but you can't.
[00:29:18] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:18] Speaker B: You can't at all. Yeah. I don't even tell people I've done press releases for in general. I know a lot of times I don't even mention it, because a lot of it's NBA stuff, so.
[00:29:33] Speaker A: Right. You can't talk about it at all. And that's sometimes part of the more frustrating thing about, hey, here's my, like, portfolio. And you can't list anything you've done for a while.
[00:29:46] Speaker B: Yeah, we're just talking about it in general, you know, just generalize. Yeah, but I mean, you know.
Yeah. To me, like, it was this, this past two years, it has been a big learning experience. Like, I did the book tragedy man, which, you know, the people who read it really liked it, and that was serialized first on Amazon's smaller serialized platform before coming out as a book. And it, it didn't, it didn't sell because I use an archaic marketing strategy.
[00:30:20] Speaker A: Really.
[00:30:20] Speaker B: Yeah. It's just I thought about the, you know, the big open, you know, like, try to, you know, massive open advertisements sale and all that. That's a publishing thing. Like, for an indie author, it's, you're picking up people here and there. Like, you can do, like, I mean, when it's new and it's a completely new book. Yeah. I mean, you know, you still want to open it. You want to open?
[00:30:47] Speaker A: Because I'll bump you. Yeah. Amazon, especially.
[00:30:49] Speaker B: Yeah. Nobody's read it, so you might as well grab as many people as you can. But it's, you, you have to keep advertising, and you can't hope that, you know, reviews are going to show up and word of mouth and people are going to rave about and this and that. It's not traditional publishing. It's, you know, they're not getting all these free copies from the, from the publicist and all that. You know, it's. So you have to just keep running ads. And I kind of like to do it like this. You know, like, you run them for a while, then you cool it off.
[00:31:17] Speaker A: And then you come back, go up and down.
[00:31:19] Speaker B: Yeah. Because, you know, sometimes, you know, you, you don't want to keep spending money to reach the same people, and people already bought it, you know.
[00:31:27] Speaker A: Right. And for cereal, did you wait for the first, like, one or two, maybe sometimes even three to be done and then push it all at once? Now do one, two, and three. Okay.
[00:31:40] Speaker B: Now what happened was, was, uh, what happened was, was I would generally not start anything until I knew how it's gonna end. And that's, um, again, that's coming from my screen writing background.
Meandering screenplays are disastrous. Meandering books. You can get away with it unless you're really meandering, unless you're really getting into subplots that, you know, that are muddling your work. So what I would do is, like, one of the, one of the best bits of advice I ever heard was, was if you know the ending, you'll build towards it. You'll know what you're writing towards. Now, not everybody does that. And it, it's not right or wrong. It's, you know, some people like to. Right by the seat of their, you know, fly by the seat of their pants.
[00:32:29] Speaker A: Right.
[00:32:30] Speaker B: You know, and some people will say, don't do that. But there have been many people who've done that and done great work. But as for me, I kind of need a bit more structure. So I kind of like to have a premise, you know, like, like a general premise of what I want to write about, who I want to write about, and what their general goal is, just in general. And then I stopped thinking of, like, random scenes and stuff. That's cool and all that. And I said, okay, you know.
[00:33:00] Speaker A: What'S.
[00:33:01] Speaker B: The end look like, what's going on at the end? And then once I can come up with how it ends, then I kind of create a middle.
Doesn't mean I have to preach. It doesn't mean I have to write all this or have to be super detailed. I just need a brief outline, like, who's it about? What's going on? What's the conflict, you know, in the middle? I mean, is there what twists, what's, like, a general one or two twists that kind of shift things? And then how does it conclude?
Like I said, in general, like, and then when I go to serialize it, I would try to think about, like, three chapters in a row because I didn't want to write one chapter. I mean, I used to do this one chapter, then come back two weeks later and it's like, you know, where was I again? You know? So I kind of like to think in terms of three or five chapters and, like, right. Generally, like, what's in those three or five? You know, I don't have to detail it or write a treatment or anything. I just have to really have some bullet points where I literally will just put some bullet points down and then I can free flow the story, my stuff.
I cheat a little because I grew up in Philadelphia, spent a lot of time in New York, I spent a lot of time in Hollywood, bounced around the globe in the last few years, and particularly in Philadelphia, New Jersey, North Jersey. You meet some quirky ass characters, and you'll meet a lot, a lot of loudmouths, a lot of kooks, especially going to dive bars like New Jersey or queens or whatever, and. Or just live life. Just walk down the street and just whoever you talk to. I mean, so I kind of had an ear for quirky dialogue. Just, just. And I kind of put that in the. In the end of the books. But I kind of.
Although I had an idea about the narrative. The beginning, middle and the end.
[00:34:58] Speaker A: Right.
[00:35:01] Speaker B: I kind of like to just let the character carry the story, you know? In other words, the character's personality, their quirkiness or their. Their hang ups or whatever. Or their attitude or their perspective. It's always focused on them. Like Chinatown would be a screenplay that has that kind of approach where you're reading through somebody else's eyes right through somebody else. Now, never deviates from having a good beginning, middle and an end. But it's just not. It's. It just comes alive or becomes more character driven. And that's really what motivates me to do it, you know? Because if I just had to write a plot or then it's just generic. Point a to point b to c. Okay, it's over.
[00:35:49] Speaker A: It's gotta be the character.
[00:35:50] Speaker B: Yeah. That kind of keeps me moving. So that, what I mean by helps me cheat is, is because you're in the head of the character.
If you meander a little or whatever, it's forgivable because you're focusing on this dude or this. This woman's outlook on whatever crazy situation they're in. And. Yeah, but, yeah, in horror, I think that's. I don't want to say super rare, but a lot of horror is very plot driven. It's very shock. Shock oriented.
Character driven. Horror is. Is not.
I don't. Shouldn't say it's uncommon, but it's.
[00:36:35] Speaker A: Right. It's uncommon, but when it works, I mean, it works really well sometimes. And then I have a question, because I. Okay, the way I write a screenplay, I will get.
I'll get the acts done, I'll get my major beats and I'll make the connection scenes to it. Right. This, then this and this. And then, and if I have to change because the character does something great, I'll change it. The way I write a novel, I don't outline.
I must do the opposite. So you actually take your screenplay knowledge and you go, I can write this way and have the structure first. Right?
[00:37:09] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, with a novel, a lot of time, like I said, meandering is okay. In a novel, a screenplay, you're very condensed to time and you're very, very condensed to sticking with the story and the primary plot. You know, you've got 90 minutes, 120 minutes.
A lot of, when you look at deleted scenes on a Blu ray, it's like, well, yeah, yeah, no wonder they deleted it. It's killing the pace and it's. And, yeah, and it's not even off topic. I mean, some of the stuff is, fits in the narrative, but they got it, you know, they got to trim it because it's just, you know, too long. So a screenplay's just got to stay focused and move and it can't drag, it can't meander. With a novel, you can always circle back. You can circle back so, you know, you can even insert, for lack of a better word, stuff like George RR Martin. You know, you might go three, four pages as something that's theoretically off topic, but it's never really off topic. He leads into it and then he smoothly, and then he circled back smoothly and you got yourself an extra four pages of bang for your buck, you know?
[00:38:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
And one day he'll finish that book. One day we'll see. I know. I think something else can finish them. But for books you've got which books you're working on now, you have dreaded invocations, terrifying horror tales to utter in hushed tones. And that's on Amazon right now? Yes.
[00:38:41] Speaker B: Yes. That is. The ebook is exclusive to Amazon and the paperback is, you know, went wide. So you got books a million Amazon, eBay and Barnes and Noble and all that. And that. That was a fun anthology that I, not anthology is a short story collection. Tragedy man's an anthology. There's a difference, right? Tragedy man. The stories are connected with dreaded invocations. It was a series of random short stories that were published and on the serial platform and a novella also included. And I wanted to get something.
I wanted, you know, between tragedy man and my next work that I'm working on, the, the work after Tragedy man that I was considering making my next book, I said to myself, wow, this is going to take a couple years to finish. So, well, you know, I got short stories I'll put out. I'll release them in a collection. And I said, I don't know if anybody is going to buy them because, you know.
[00:39:47] Speaker A: Right.
[00:39:48] Speaker B: It's harder to sell short story collections because when you sell a novel, you can give you the through line to the novel in your advertisement. You know, like, you can tell people what it's about in two senses and turn that into marketing spiel. Short story collection. It's not that easy to market because every short story collection is marketed the same way. You know, ten terrifying tales, 1012 scary tales. That's what you're gonna, that's what you're.
[00:40:15] Speaker A: Even King's last one, right?
[00:40:17] Speaker B: Yeah, that's what you're getting.
[00:40:19] Speaker A: I think that was it.
[00:40:19] Speaker B: You can't, you can't, you know, you can't give the plot away while you can. You know, you can synopsize, you know, synopsize a couple stories which can't, you know, do with all of them. But I said to myself, you know, let me put it out there. I think I can have fun with this because it was, a lot of the stories are influenced by movies like amicus short stories or television shows like Night Gallery and Alfred Hitchcock presents. And very influenced by comic books like EC comics, DC Comics, like ghosts or tales from the crypt and pulp cereals, like I did, like a steampunk kind of Frankenstein story that is written as if, as if there's more stories, you know, like if you had picked up a pulp magazine in 1942. Conan. Well, right, yeah, you read Conan, it's new to you, but there's like stories that came before, there's more stories coming after, but you just pick one up in the middle. And Robert E. Howard never used backstory because he knew it was most people, a lot of people reading were reading them for the first time. So he would just give you a tiny backstory and two paragraphs to give you idea who Conan was and then you were off to the races. So I, I wanted to do that as an homage. Although it's not sword and sorcery or fantasy, it's, it's uh, it's still a, it's still a horror testing punk horror tale. So that was a neat one I put in there. Um, menace of the mansion, which was the novella.
That to me was a weird book because I envisioned if somebody said to me, they said to me, can you write a screenplay for a AIP hammer? You know?
[00:42:07] Speaker A: Right.
[00:42:08] Speaker B: 1973, you know, 1973, these guys were on the way out. That style of horror that they were writing that was making money in 67, 68, it was by 73, these.
So I said, well, what if they gave me something like, how could I, how could I stick with a pg rated old school horror movie that these guys like and what they're comfortable with but still making it a little, little edgy ish slightly because 73 exorcist, you know, Andy Warhol's Frankenstein, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and all that. But I'm thinking to myself, PG. Like, the mindset that. That you're thinking with this. Think PG. Think a PG. A company that does not do violence does not do r rated movies, right? And.
But nobody hired me to write that screenplay. It's not 1973, but all that. When you. When you do turn it into a novella, you let that inspire it through. And I kind of said, well, maybe it's like an adaption. But if. What if they said, adapt the screenplay? When I put it in a collection? We need to make money. You know, something like that. So. So these are these weirdo things that go in my head almost like method acting, you know, when I write it. And that is it just showing the quirkiness, you know what I'm saying? Like, I got some stories that, you know, if somebody said to me, can you write for weird war tales? Or can you. Can, you know, an old DC comic? Or somebody said to me, you know, can you give us something for Martin H. Greenberg collection? Like, you know, you know, we want something under this topic and, you know, we want a short story. So all these different things. Motive. It wasn't like I was in one mindset of writing a particular type of story 13 times. You know, I would have bored me. So I played around with a lot of different things doing it. And like I said, I priced it low. I put it on kindle unlimited and I, you know, spent quite a bit on advertising it.
When you look at what, you know, it's not 100,000 copies, it's not a million copies seller. But when you look at independently published books and, you know, it's. It would be a minor success so far. And, you know, it's great, you know, which to me. And I'm like I said, I'll be honest. As I said the word, you know, maybe somebody else will say it's more than minor, but I kind of look at it as being a, you know, a success. On Ondezenhe.
No, for what it is, an independently published book from an unknown author in a saturated platform at a low price. You know, it got good reviews and it got, you know, decent sales figures and it's still selling and, you know, selling modestly and moderately but consistently. And maybe I could move more if my. If my marketing strategy was. Was better.
[00:45:17] Speaker A: Oh, that's the thing. You never really know.
[00:45:19] Speaker B: More knowledgeable, you know, like when you go and you do something, you look back, you know, like myself, I said, I don't like to sound like, you know, the lawgiver from Planet of the apes, but you know, because I could be completely wrong or my perspective could be completely wrong, or it's all subject to change.
It's subject to change with new information.
But last year, you know, I did not know as much as I know now about marketing a book online that, I mean, I know a hell of a lot more now than I did a year ago. And I hope to learn, you know, a little bit more as I keep going. And maybe in another year, you know, maybe I'll be able to put these things out at.
Again, this is not a writer speaking. You know, once you, once you publish, you're not a writer or you're a writer, you're still a writer. You wrote the book, but selling the book is not the job of the writer. That's the publisher. So you got to be in a publisher mindset with it. And you want to keep your advertising well, you want, you know, you want your sales to exceed your marketing and production costs. And that, you know, is not always easy, and it could take time and, and it requires experience on how to budget these things. And again, I don't want to, I don't, you know, for me, myself personally, sales are always better on the weekends.
People are home, you know, I don't, I myself personally, would not spend more money advertising something for ads to run on a Monday or Tuesday than I would on a Friday or Saturday and a Sunday. You know what I'm saying? So, you know, if I had a, you know, limited budget, I wouldn't be as enthusiastic. Say, well, I want to try this, this newsletter over here. They're going to send a blast out. I want to do it now. And now is Wednesday. You know, I should, should have waited two or three days, you know what I'm saying? It's just right. You end up, you end up getting a return that's smaller because you're advertising with people aren't, they're not, they're not reading, they're not. It's Wednesday. You know, I'm saying, yeah, I'd say you won't sell anything. Not to say that they won't move, but personally, if not to say that you shouldn't advertise on a weekday, but if you have a budget, you know, instead of $5, $5, $5, $5, you know, maybe $2, $2, $1 load on the weekend, you know, that's a strategy that I found. You know, work for me. And then there's other things I'm not even involved with, like TikTok shop, which some people have a lot of success with and all that. Yeah. You know, I try to just take it bit by bit, you know, like, I don't try to overwhelm myself. I kind of prefer to do a little bit and review. Did it sell? Did it not sell? How much did it cost? You know, what are my analytics? You know, but then again, it's my marketing background, you know, so that kind of comes in there, so.
But it was cool, you know, dreaded invocation was a lot of fun to write. It was not fun to edit. The editing process was never work.
Yeah. Which. But I improved because my next, my next work, a Sci-Fi work, I edited a lot more before I put it out on, on a serial platform instead of one or two edits. Now I do like five or six. Why? Because when I want to. When I, when I put it out as a book, I want to be.
[00:49:03] Speaker A: One, two, or edits. You have to do that?
[00:49:04] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I wanted. I want it in six weeks. I don't want 1214 weeks going by and it's still not done because it needs all these extensive edits. And why does it need extensive edits? Because you didn't edit it.
I didn't edit it as well at the beginning. Now I got a plot hole. Now I gotta go and, and now I got all these pages. Now I gotta go through everything that. So, you know, you don't want to do that. I mean, you can, but, you know, not if you want to. Not if you want to get that thing out there and then move on to the next one, you know.
[00:49:33] Speaker A: Right. It's like cleaning a room a bit at a time. You have to keep it constant vigilance on that. Now, where can people find you online? Social medias?
[00:49:43] Speaker B: Yes, you can find me at Tony McCarrow on X, aka Twitter, if you go on TikTok. Tony M. Caro horror.
I have a Facebook page for r and for comic books, but I'll put links on that on Twitter because the links on Facebook are like that long.
And what else I got? I got a podcast, comic book ruminations, which I just started up, which is audiobooks. So you can see the links to that on my ex profile.
[00:50:17] Speaker A: Amazing. Yeah, yeah, of course.
[00:50:19] Speaker B: I got the Amazon link for dreaded invocations. And my daily posts are mostly on trivia for movies or comic books or pop culture, you know, nothing controversial. I just like to post. I see a cover of a book I read. I'll give you a paragraph of what I liked about it. I don't do negative, I don't do bad reviews.
[00:50:41] Speaker A: Oh, that's cool.
[00:50:42] Speaker B: Now we stay upbeat and positive, unless, you know, talking.
[00:50:46] Speaker A: We need that.
[00:50:47] Speaker B: Unless, talk to me privately. I'll trash a lot of people.
[00:50:52] Speaker A: Yeah, people need positive reviews. Someone put effort and time and spirit and blood into that project, right?
[00:51:00] Speaker B: I have zero interest in spreading anything negative. If I don't like something, I just. Why? Why? I'm not going to talk about it. If I see something I like, I'd rather, you know, I mean, it's like Joker. I can't mention the new Joker movie tanked because the movie nobody wanted to see, you know?
[00:51:20] Speaker A: Yeah, I've not seen it. I've heard that they went completely away from. It's not even a sequel.
[00:51:28] Speaker B: Nah, it's just, it's musical wackiness and.
[00:51:32] Speaker A: You know, nobody wants reimaging of it.
[00:51:35] Speaker B: But that's about my level of my level of negative. Everything else is just historical stuff or positive stuff, but, uh, doing that, man. Also, I want to give a little, little mentioned about the movie stuff. I actually got try to get back involved with that. That's another little thingy with books and comic books and this and that and independent authors and writers and producers, like, yeah, a lot of crowdfunding Kickstarter and all that cool stuff. And that creates opportunities and access. It's radically different than what existed just maybe ten years ago.
And, you know, I kind of try to, I would like to get back into production. I like to launch a development company and, you know, my little night play publishing, which is the imprint I use for my own books. I'd like to do other people's books one day and expand it to motion picture development, podcast development. Although, you know, I do have a non fiction podcast. I'd like to, I'd like to get a radio theater podcast up and running.
[00:52:36] Speaker A: Yeah, those are always fun. Yeah, I remember those. Back in the day, we had the radio theaters a couple times. They're very successful for podcasts because it's got the entire story there. And people remember when there was a radio.
It's like nostalgia at this point. Like, oh, yeah, I remember this now. And they'll sit down for it.
[00:52:58] Speaker B: Yeah, I still call it radio theater. I just caught myself. Yeah, old time radio radio, although that's what it was. Yeah, yeah, you know, radio theater just disappeared. It just, you know, I don't know, it just disappeared. They tried to keep it alive in the seventies, even in the eighties, but there's no audience for it. But with podcast, with podcasting, I started saying, oh my God, they're going back to audio theater. Audio drama, radio theater. Wow. And it works. And people download some of this stuff by the millions and millions. Millions, millions.
There's a market for it.
[00:53:32] Speaker A: It's just no longer terrestrial.
[00:53:34] Speaker B: Yeah. What happened was, you know, nobody, everybody stopped listening to radio theater because they got television in the fifties. And now today, people have, can access computers on their, on their, you know, through Apple car, Apple CarPlay, or Android Auto, and they can listen to a podcast. So boom, audio drama is back because now it has a legitimate, legitimate market, you know, where you can listen to it in your car, you can listen in your headset or running around on your iPhone or whatever, and that. Look at all the content now that exists.
[00:54:08] Speaker A: Absolutely, absolutely. Sounds like you're being.
You're very busy.
[00:54:12] Speaker B: Very busy.
[00:54:13] Speaker A: So thank you for taking the time to be here. And again, again, if you want dreaded invocations, terrifying horror tales to utter in the hushed tones, check it out. It's, it's actually, I love the idea of the connection, you know, putting the stories out, and it's really hard to write these. And I love that you're putting this out. I love the idea of the radio theaters checking out your podcast, all the socials. You got me hooked. So thank you very much for coming, man.
[00:54:41] Speaker B: Thank you. I appreciate it.
[00:54:42] Speaker A: A pleasure.
[00:54:43] Speaker B: Awesome.
[00:54:44] Speaker A: Bye, everyone.
