I am greatly honored to host our first author interview.
This is the result of a Twitter love story (friendship love, not romantic love!). While I was training to become a librarian, I decided that I had to explore the new social networking sites, so I created a Twitter account. If I had known then what I know now about Twitter I probably never would have met the people I did meet. I didn’t know anyone who used Twitter at the time, so I just logged on to the public timeline. At any given instant there are at least tens of thousands of people writing a Tweet (as Twitter posts are called). If you refresh your page the landscape will change completely from one second to the next and you may never again see the people who were on that first screen.
Having said that, the first two people I met turned out to be two extraordinary and wonderful people who are now “real” friends and probably will be for the duration. I am half Italian and half American and have the good fortune of having two mother tongues. I was surprised to see some Italian tweets, and of course there were a bunch of other languages I did not speak. I ended up befriending a Dutch writer (who had just finished National Novel Writing Month – NaNoWriMo for short) and an Italian journalist who is an anchor on the news in Basilicata. The journalist and his newly married wife came to visit me on their honeymoon in September and Mario Kluser, the Dutch writer, was here for a week, from Nov. 2 to Nov. 9.
Mario on the Brooklyn Bridge
We were both embarking on internet ventures and we decided to pool our brains and collaborate for a few days in person in Brooklyn, and he came and stayed with me during election week. One of the highlights of his visit was that they let him come into the voting booth with me and we pulled the lever for Obama together. So he voted for Obama too!
I have divided the interview in three segments, and you can listen to the podcast of each segment, download the segments or the entire podcast to your computer or iPod, or download the PDF file to read during your subway commute. Enjoy!
Ilaria: Hello, everybody. I’m here today with my friend Mario Kluser from Holland. He’s a writer and I’m going to interview him on the story of how he began to write and how he went from starting to write in his own living room to being published and distributed throughout Holland. So, welcome, good afternoon.
Mario: Welcome. Hello.
Ilaria: First of all, I’d like to know what brought you to writing? How did you decide to start writing? Is it something you always wanted to do or is it something you discovered as you were older? How did it all start?
Mario: I always wanted to write a book. When I was a child I wanted to write a book, and I forgot about it for the rest of my life. And when I met my girlfriend and I saw that she was always reading books and she sat on top of the chair, I thought, now I can do this too. And so I began to write my first book, gave her the first chapter, and said to her, don’t lie to me. If it’s crap, just say it and I’ll stop. But she couldn’t stop. And at that time I was a member of a forum for stock exchanges and my first novel, my first thriller is situated partly on Wall Street. And I asked the people who were trading stocks what they thought about the story, and they all replied, they thought it was brilliant. So I moved on and I finished the book.
Ilaria: That’s great, that’s a great story.
Mario: In fact, the story of my first book was… I had this plan, I always was thinking about how to trick, how you could trick the system if you had the right person in the right place. And I was thinking about it and it actually could work, what I had found out. And one day I awoke and I had the whole plot in my mind. The whole plot from beginning to end.
Ilaria: And when you wrote the novel, did it… were you able to keep it that way or did it change as you wrote it?
Mario: It changed a little bit. You know, you have some blank spots that you have to fill up. You have to put subplot and something like that, and different characters have to feel something…
Ilaria: Yes, they do. Okay, that’s very interesting. So tell me a little bit about where you live, because you are not originally from Holland. So you live in a town called…
Mario: Heerlen.
Ilaria: And that’s spelled?
Mario: H-E-E-R-L-E-N.
Ilaria: And that’s close to the German border, right?
Mario: It’s close to the German border, yes. Fifteen kilometers or something like that.
Ilaria: So Dutch is not your first language, of course.
Mario: No, it’s not my first language.
Ilaria: So you’re originally German.
Mario: Yeah.
Ilaria: Your heritage is part German, part Dutch and part Italian, right?
Mario: Yes. My mother was half German and half Dutch, and my father was an Italian.
Ilaria: Okay. So you grew up speaking German.
Mario: Yes.
Ilaria: And you visited Holland often. You liked it and you decided to move there, and you learned Dutch this way.
Mario: And I learned Dutch.
Ilaria: But you’re self-taught, right? You didn’t go to school, you learned it by yourself.
Mario: I learned it by myself, yes.
Ilaria: So how did you decide to write your novel in Dutch rather than in German, which is your native language?
Mario: Because I felt more comfortable writing it in Dutch.
Ilaria: You did?
Mario: Yeah, because I was at a point where you think in another language. I stopped translating in my head from German to Dutch, and that’s the point where you actually speak the language, where you can say, I speak the language.
Ilaria: Yes, that’s great. And so, okay, so now you’ve written a novel and you have to decide how to get it published. Now, did you decide to self-publish from the get-go, or did you try to find a traditional publisher first?
Mario: At first I tried to find a traditional publisher. I decided to publish the novel before I wrote the first sentence, because I thought, I don’t write a novel, a couple of hundred pages, and then put them into a drawer. I was knowing that I was going for the whole thing. So it has to be published.
Ilaria: One way or another.
Mario: One way or another. And I first contacted a publisher. I sent my manuscript on Friday, get it back on Thursday, a brief note that it doesn’t fit into their…
Ilaria: It’s not the kind of thing that they publish, right.
Mario: Yeah. And then I went to a bigger publisher and it took, I think a month, and I didn’t hear anything. I called them and I just asked on which pile is it laying. And they said that they had to find out. And at some point I said, I don’t wait any longer. I didn’t contact them anymore. I just didn’t want to wait that long. In the meantime I already had informed how to publish, how to self-publish my book. I contacted the biggest printer in the Netherlands, so my books are made with the same machines that Michael Crichton and Lord of the Rings all roll out, with the same printer. So I had the warranty that I had a good quality.
Ilaria: But you had to pay for it yourself.
Mario: I had to pay for it myself, yes.
Ilaria: And how many copies did you decide to have printed?
Mario: A couple of hundred. Just a couple of hundred copies.
Ilaria: Okay. Now, let’s go back one step. So when you get together with a big publisher, or a publisher, a traditional publisher, you also get an editor, who will go through the book with you and give you some suggestions of… you know, make this section longer, make this section shorter, this character is not developed enough, we want to know more about this person, we need some more back story on this… you know, things like that. And of course you didn’t have the benefit of an editor because you chose to self-publish. So how did you go about editing the book?
Mario: Editing in the way you described it, about the characters, I decided everything myself. When I had the feeling this character is described enough, then it was described enough, and so on. Of course, I needed the support of a native speaker. And my girlfriend just corrected all my errors.
Ilaria: And did she make any recommendations of changing the style of the way some things were said, or shortening something or lengthening something else, or anything like that?
Mario: No.
Ilaria: Okay, she just corrected typos or grammatical errors or whatever. Okay. So you printed a couple of hundred copies and at this point you had to distribute the novel.
Mario: Yes.
Ilaria: So, how did you go about finding distribution?
Mario: I first sent two copies to a service. In the Netherlands there is one organization where you can send your books to, and where all publishers send books to, and then they decide if they put it in the catalog for the libraries. This catalog goes to the libraries and libraries decide what books they are going to order, and they ordered my book. So I got… most of my books that I had already printed were sold to the libraries.
Ilaria: And so that was how you gained your first recognition.
Mario: Yes.
Ilaria: And how was it that you were interviewed—you were interviewed by newspapers and radio, right?
Mario: Yeah.
Ilaria: How did that happen?
Mario: The radio interview came half a year after publishing. I just got an e-mail because they read it… I had sent to one big newspaper in the town where I came from, or the region where I come from, and they wrote a review about the book. And after that I was contacted by a radio station.
Ilaria: After the review came out.
Mario: Yeah. And then we talked about everything, publishing stuff and the book itself. It was pretty funny.
Ilaria: That’s wonderful.
*** End of part 1 ***
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