An Interview with Jeff Gerke - by Nick Harrison

The following is an interview Nick Harrison conducted and published on his blog November 16, 2010. I thought it was a terrific interview - lots to chew on here. We're re-running it on our blog with Nick's gracious permission. Enjoy!

As promised, today I have an interview with Jeff Gerke, one of my favorite people in our industry. Even if you don’t write speculative fiction, you need to read this interview as part of your assignment to keep up on what’s going on in the publishing world.

Jeff has been called the de facto gatekeeper of Christian speculative fiction. After his own six novels were published (under the pen name Jefferson Scott) and his time spearheading the launch of a fiction imprint dedicated to Christian speculative fiction at a major Christian publishing company, Jeff branched out on his own to launch Marcher Lord Press, an Indie publishing house billing itself as the premier publisher of Christian speculative fiction. His popular fiction how-to book The Art & Craft of Writing Christian Fiction is available through Amazon or Marcher Lord Press and his new craft book from Writer’s Digest Books, Plot versus Character, released in October 2010. Books Jeff has edited, acquired, and/or published have won the Christy Award, the ACFW Carol (Book of the Year) Award, the EPIC Award, the Indie Award, the INSPY Award, and the Foreword magazine Book of the Year Award. Jeff was one of three finalists for the 2010 ACFW Editor of the Year Award. Jeff lives in Colorado Springs with his wife, teenage daughter, 10-year-old son, and 2-year-old adoptive daughter from China.

Nick: Jeff, you’re passionate about speculative fiction and yet many readers don’t know exactly what it is. Could you define it for us?

Jeff: Speculative fiction is an umbrella term that includes a number of subgenres like science fiction, fantasy, time travel, vampire, post-apocalyptic, dystopian, supernatural thrillers, superhero, horror, alternate history, and urban fantasy. Or, as I like to say, anything weird. Christian speculative fiction is anything weird from the Christian worldview. Christian speculative fiction adds two subcategories not included in secular speculative fiction: end times fiction and spiritual warfare fiction.

Nick: Speculative fiction is a hard sell in CBA. Is it because, as publishers fear, the market is small? Or is the market there, but publishers are just failing to reach that market?

Jeff: The market isn’t small. Every time Ted Dekker comes out with a Christian novel, it sells 100,000 units. And of course there were the millions who bought the Left Behind books. Same potential audience. But these readers don’t always identify themselves as fans of SF or fantasy—they just know they like Ted Dekker. So between Dekker releases, they’re not scouring the shelves for other books like those but from different authors.

The audience who normally reads Christian fiction is not the same audience who reads Dekker and Peretti and Jenkins. Christian publishers have done a great job reaching the core fiction demographic, the dear ladies who love their bonnet and buggy fiction. But Christian publishers have, perhaps understandably, not devoted much energy, time, or money toward developing other audiences. You can’t put an ad for a vampire novel in Just Between Us magazine and have a good response.

Nick: Some publishers seem more willing to take on speculative fiction if it’s aimed at the YA market. Is it true or a myth that to be successful with speculative fiction in the CBA market, it must be aimed at younger readers?

Jeff: It’s true that, to have your best shot at getting your fantasy published, it had better be YA. YA is sort of reaching the home school market, but only with fantasy. Other Christian speculative fiction, even if it’s YA, will not be well-received.

Home schoolers love Christian fantasy. If you go to any Christian writers conference that has a teen writers track, and you ask the teen writers what they’re writing, they will unanimously say, “Fantasy.” I like to say that this is the generation that is going to save us (well, those of us longing for Christian speculative fiction). Because in 10 years they’re going to be running Christian publishing companies—and they’re not going to be publishing Amish fiction.

Nick: Is there something that can be done to change the future for speculative fiction in CBA or will it always be this way?

Jeff: So long as traditional Christian publishers are allowed to exist with their current publishing model, CBA will not change. For them, it’s all about the bookstore-publisher dyad. Whatever the women who walk into Christian bookstores want is what traditional Christian publishing companies publish. Those dear ladies want Amish, so publishers keep giving it to them, and rightly so.

But bookstores are dying. Not coincidentally, the traditional Christian publishing model is dying. Traditional Christian publishing companies are shrinking and scaling back and trying to wait out the recession. But I believe it’s not just the recession causing the diminishing of this model. I believe it’s a model whose time has passed. There’s no weathering the storm and then going on like usual afterward.

We’re in the age of the small press, the micro-publisher, the niche publisher, and the self-publisher. The Internet has transformed how we think. It used to be that if we had an idea for something (book, car, restaurant, knowledge, etc.), we’d ask the people we knew if there was any such thing. We might even go the library. But if we couldn’t find it, we’d figure it didn’t exist, and we’d settle back to hope someone created it in the future. Now, we’re pretty sure that whatever it is we’ve thought of, someone else has thought of it, made it, and is offering it online. Google is 100 times more powerful than a visit to the library—and 1,000 times more convenient.

Gone are the days when people think, if they’ve never heard of a Christian science fiction novel exploring what would happen if sharia law dominated the future, that such a thing simply doesn’t exist. Now they keep searching online until they find something like that (A Star Curiously Singing by Kerry Nietz). We’re pretty sure we can find whatever it is we’re looking for. And if we can’t find it, we feel like someone needs to do it—and maybe it should be us.

A large percentage of Christian fiction readers don’t want to read about Hannah’s secret love for Josiah the Amish carpenter. They want to read about mutant alien vampires who will eat your brains. Or they want to read Christian military thrillers (Operation: Firebrand by Jefferson Scott). Or they want Christian literary fiction. These people, this majority of Christians, are not being served by traditional Christian publishing. That’s the kind of situation that is not going to last. An artificial imbalance like that will be naturally self-correcting in time. That’s what we’re seeing now.

After Marcher Lord Press rose up and showed people what a small, indie press dedicated to Christian speculative fiction could do, several other similar presses have sprung up to help meet the needs of that demographic. Similar presses are rising up to fill other niches, like Christian poetry, true crime, military/men’s, literary, and more. All the dispossessed authors and readers are beginning to walk around in the sunshine and find each other. And that’s only going to increase.

It’s a great day to be a writer and reader of a kind of novel that has previously been squelched by the traditional Christian publishing paradigm.

Nick: You struck out on your own with Marcher Lord Press in an effort make speculative fiction more visible for Christians (and presumably non-Christians too) who enjoy that genre. When you began, were you confident you’d succeed?

Jeff: I was certainly not confident MLP would succeed. I was under so much stress the six weeks before the launch that I thought I wouldn’t survive. It didn’t help that I had titanic problems with the online storefront/shopping cart software right up until the night before the launch.

The good news was that I hadn’t exceeded my conservative budget parameters. I also knew I was going to be able to break even on any given book with only a handful of units sold. Whereas traditional Christian publishers need to sell ~12,000 units to begin to break even, I knew I’d break even on about 300. I was hopeful I could sell at least that many. But I was not remotely sure I would. We’d spent the previous 12 months spreading the word about the impending launch, and we had a big prize giveaway contest going for launch day, but even so, I had no idea if it would fly.

Praise God, we’ve been in the black since day 1 and continue to be there. It’s a very lean model that is pretty much designed to exist and even flourish in a recession and with a niche audience, and of course to scale upward if the recession eases.

Nick: You’ve received several good reviews in Publisher’s Weekly. That must be gratifying.

Jeff: It’s been amazing to receive positive reviews in PW. For a small press, we’ve been mentioned in PW an inordinate number of times—4 times in 2 years—with a similar number of mentions in Library Journal. It’s incredible for a small press to be able to put a positive quote from PW right on the front cover of one of our books. The front cover quote forKönig’s Fire by Marc Schooley includes the phrase “gold mine” from PW. Very cool.

Nick: In addition to speculative fiction, there are other genres in CBA that don’t fare as well as in ABA. What advice can you give writers who are writing in a genre that’s currently out of step with the market?

Jeff: Anything that does not appeal to the core Christian fiction demographic will not fare well in CBA. That’s simply a consequence of what that readership wants. Christian publishers would actually be unwise to publish books their constituency doesn’t want. That’s a good way to go out of business. It’s hard enough finding a hit without producing books you know won’t appeal to your market.

My advice to those of you/us who don’t write fiction that appeals to that market is to keep writing and to keep looking to the horizon. Your help draweth nigh. You may have to give up on the old publishing dream of massive advance, multi-city book tour, and tremendous marketing support. But in the age of niche publisher, someone is going to think your “off-beat” book is the very thing they got in to publishing to publish. Just ask Stuart Vaughn Stockton, author of Starfire, a far-future non-earth SF about computer-using dinosaur people. No one in CBA would touch that. But I did, and it was up for ACFW Book of the Year this year.

We’re on the very threshold of the heyday of the obscure novel genre!

Nick: Do you have any advice for publishers who are scratching their heads over failed attempts to publish speculative fiction?

Jeff: Yes: stop doing it. Every other one you put out will fail too. It’s because soccer moms and grandmoms don’t want SF or fantasy or horror. They want bonnet girl meets Amish boy. Give them that, and stop trying to give them what they don’t want. How many times do they have to say no before we get it?

I personally think CBA houses should choose to redefine themselves now, instead of waiting to be redefined (or deleted) by the market forces that are only going to squeeze harder in the months and years to come. They should get rid of all but about eight people—most of them editors, with maybe 1 sales guy and 1 marketing person. They should break into 3-5 versions of Marcher Lord Press, each one serving a niche they’re known for. Go small, save money, be king of a niche…and prosper.

But people in traditional Christian publishing houses have everything to lose by the paradigm shifting, so they may be tempted to just plug their ears and keep doing what they’re doing until they finally have to close their doors.

Unfortunately, the world will not long mourn the demise of what has been the norm for decades. So long as people find ways of getting what they want—and they will now, more than ever—they’ll be happy.

Nick: Jeff, can you name some names of those who are doing it right in CBA? Is there an editor or publishing house that “gets it?”

Jeff: I always think Thomas Nelson seems to be the most willing to try new things, especially with their fiction line. I almost always like what Michael Hyatt and Allen Arnold come up with. Zondervan’s last round of layoffs and hirings seemed to indicate they were moving toward e-publishing aggressively. That’s probably good.

But I think it’s the new, small houses that truly get it. Houses like Splashdown Books and Written World Communications and Port Yonder Press and, if I can include my own company, Marcher Lord Press. These and others like them will be the leaders for the next 5-20 years.

And watch out for those new presses that will spring up under the guidance of now-adult home schoolers. Those will be the real leaders for the next generation of Christian fiction publishing.

Nick: Do you have any additional plans for the future you’re at liberty to share?

Jeff: There’s a change in the works that, if it happens (and it very well may not), would be a game-changer for MLP. It would allow me to do more books per season, branch out into YA, explore graphic novels and computer games and blended media apps, maybe look into Christian film, become kind of a patron for other small Christian presses, do a lot more marketing, and get back to my own fiction and screenwriting.

If that doesn’t happen and we continue just motoring along as we have, I’ll be fine with it. Hopefully we will continue to win major awards and steadily establish ourselves as the premier publisher of Christian speculative fiction.

Nick: Who are the authors you enjoy reading, and what’s on your nightstand right now?

Jeff: People are always amazed to hear that I don’t read fiction for pleasure. I’m interacting with it about 70 hours per week. And even though I love it, in my down time I want to do something else. I play games on the PC or the PS3. On the nonfiction side I’m re-reading Search for Significance and the excellent little summaries I get from getAbstract.

Thanks Jeff. This was very informative. I passed around the following quote to my colleagues here at Harvest House and got some interesting responses.

“A large percentage of Christian fiction readers don’t want to read about Hannah’s secret love for Josiah the Amish carpenter. They want to read about mutant alien vampires who will eat your brains.”

A great note to end on.

Guest Blogger Jeff Gerke: Cardboard Characters a Problem?

Welcome back, Jeff! Here's part II of Jeff's blog about plotting and character development. Last time, he helped writers with soundly developed characters find their story. Today, for those of you who are story-firsters, Jeff offers pointers on rounding out your characters. It seems Jeff understands your dilemma from a personal experience.
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For those who missed Jeff last Friday, you really must scroll down and read his post. He knows what he's talking about. He has experience as an editor for the biggest houses in CBA, writes fiction, & heads a publishing house. All that & a new papa too!



Character Creation for the Plot-First Novelist arose out of a crisis in my own fiction writing.

I had this sinking feeling that I didn't really know what I was doing with my characters. I felt that my characters ought to be more...something...than how they were coming out in my stories. But I didn't know what to do about it so I just let them be.

Guess what the #1 critical comment was on those early stories? Somewhat shallow characters. The reviewers were actually nicer than I thought I deserved. I thought I'd used stereotypes and cardboard cutouts.

So began my quest to figure out how to create richer, more realistic characters for my novels. I hit the bookstore and tried multiple books on character creation. They were all very hard for me--like the calculus I mentioned last time--and I never felt like I'd figured anything out about my story cast, even after all that work.

When it came time to decide what my next fiction trilogy should be, I decided to set a challenge before myself: Could I write a character-driven series with an ensemble cast?

In order to do that, I knew I needed to radically improve my character-creation abilities. But that was kind of the whole point. I wanted to make myself learn it, so I committed to doing this series. Since the writing books didn't help me, I decided I'd better create a system of my own.

In the absence of an innate understanding of characters and personalities, I turned to psychology books. I eventually discovered Please Understand Me II by David Keirsey. Keirsey is a proponent of the Myers-Briggs teachings on temperaments.

The premise is that there are only 16 main personality types on the earth. In his book he identifies them very well, in terms of what they're like, how they talk, what jobs they gravitate toward, how they are as spouses and parents, what temperament they tend to marry, etc.

It's the kind of hard facts that a plot guy like me could wrap his brain around.

But it instantly occurred to me that characters have to be more than just their temperament. Otherwise I would be a clone to the other 375 million people who shared my temperament, and I knew that wasn't true. So, what accounts for the differences in people beyond their core temperament?

I began thinking about the obvious: gender, age, physical appearance, ethnicity, educational background, intelligence, etc. Then the not so obvious: birth order, love language, spiritual gift, major life events, disabilities, and more.

By the time I was through, I'd created a system that began with a core temperament but then added layer after layer of specificity that further defined the character and made him or her different from every other person--even those with the same temperament.

The centerpiece of the system was the formation of the character's inner journey, or character arc. The best fiction, in my opinion, is that in which someone changes. Indeed, you might say that fiction is about change. I also liked the inner journey part of character creation because it felt a bit like plot creation. Familiar terrain.

The system culminates in a monologue scene in which the person is presented in the penultimate setting for that character, doing and saying things that reveal who this character is--and done and said in this character's characteristic way. Writing that monologue is like graduation. When it's done, the character is fully baked. And the monologue scene itself is actually something you can adapt to introduce the character the first time you bring him onstage.

After using that system for the new trilogy of novels--and no longer hearing from critics that my characters were flat (I heard the opposite, actually)--I realized I was onto something. Something that might help other writers who are character-challenged.

Character Creation for the Plot-First Novelist is exactly the system I use to create my own characters. It's a system of questions that you answer in the form provided. Then you summarize each section and synthesize the character as he or she exists so far.

At the end of taking a character through the system, you will utterly know this person, love (or love to despise) this person, and be champing at the bit to bring this person onstage.

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Changing gears now, let's look at how I created How To Find Your Story and what it entails.

Plot creation comes easily to me, as I've said. But I'm a teacher, which means I enjoy explaining to eager learners anything I happen to know about. I also realize that at least half the novelists out there (and I suspect it's more like two-thirds) are character-first novelists. They create amazing characters but have little for these interesting people to do.

If I could create a system that allowed character-first novelists to create gripping plots that featured their terrific characters, I might stand to help a lot of people.

So I sat down to design what I was originally calling Plot-Creation for the Character-First Novelist, but which eventually became How To Find Your Story.

The key discovery I made was that the best way to build a plot was to grow it out of character.

I mentioned earlier that the creation of a solid inner journey for a character feels like plot work. I realized that, in truth, a main character's inner journey actually is 75% of a good plot for a novel. When I realized I could do this plot creation system from a starting point of character, I knew I was onto something that all those character-firsters could understand.

So the main character's inner journey becomes the first major component of plot in How To Find Your Story. The major movements of this character arc constitute the internal plot, if you will. What was left was to form an external structure that amplified this inner journey and gave it a stage upon which to play.

How To Find Your Story includes interactive discussions of genre, era, theme, backdrop, antagonist, and more. But the major pieces are the inner journey and the outer journey, which I talk about in terms of three act structure.

I have been so gratified to hear comments like Jeannie Campbell's on last week's blog: "I'm character-driven...no doubt. Jeff's books are amazing... I had a plot developed out of my character's intrinsic goals before I even knew what I was looking at!"

That's what I'm after: plot developing out of character. With that kind of system, character-first novelists are on familiar ground from the word Go, and they come up with page-turning, character-driven plots that satisfy the reader, feature the characters beautifully, and are certain to achieve what the author wanted to do with the story.

Both How To Find Your Story and Character Creation for the Plot-First Novelist consist of two main files: instructions and template. The template is a Word document that is a color-coded table. On the left are questions and on the right are blanks for your answers. This is the key piece of each system, and you go through it once for each story or character you want to develop. The other piece is a PDF document that expounds upon what to think about as you fill out the template.

When I teach the continuing fiction track at writers' conferences, I now use this system. First I have the class go through an abbreviated version of Character Creation for the Plot-First Novelist--right there in class--and then we take that character and build a plot around her using a scaled-down version of How To Find Your Story. It's been very helpful for many novelists, both those who are still aspiring and those who are multiply published.


To purchase Jeff's ebooks go here: http://marcherlordpress.com/Store_Stand-In.htm

Guest Blogger Jeff Gerke: Plot-first or Character-first?

We invited Jeff to blog today and next Friday because he asked us to test drive a plotting tool he developed for fiction writers a while back. I like what Katy said about her experience with Jeff's book: "It's like having a brilliant editor at your elbow for the whole process." Curious? You should be. Jeff brings years of experience as an editor, novelist, and publisher to your elbow too.

I believe there are two kinds of novelists in our world. Of course every writer is an individual and no one writes entirely like anyone else. But when you break it all down into its simplest elements, I think you can put every novelist into one of two groups.

You're either a character-first novelist or a plot-first novelist.

A character-first novelist has character ideas all day long. Interesting people populate this writer's imagination. This writer is constantly coming up with cool issues and fears and backstory for fascinating story people. This kind of novelist will have more heroes and best friends and mysterious women in black than she has stories to put them in.

A plot-first novelist, on the other hand, gets story ideas like crazy. Ooh, this guy could totally be a double agent and that's why he's here with the bomb before the president makes his speech that starts the war! Plot-first novelists create fascinating stories and nail-biting plots that make their character-first brethren's minds spin.

The problem with being a plot-first novelist is that most of her characters are more like furniture than people. They don't have real personalities. Typical characters in these writers' books are "the girl" and "the friend" and "the bad guy," which is to say they're basically just more plot elements. They're in the story so that when the truck blows up and they're killed, it gives the hero a reason to go on his rampage.

The problem with being a character-first novelist is that her books are filled with beautifully drawn, realistic characters--who sit around doing nothing. We get manuscripts full of exquisite dialogue and unforgettable story people, but then we fall asleep because there is no story for these interesting people to live out.

A great novel has both strong characters and a strong plot. But how do you do both if you are, like most novelists, naturally better at the one and weaker at the other?

The solution is twofold. First, you have to dedicate yourself to doing the very hard and counterintuitive work it will take to produce excellence in the area you're not strong in.

Plot-first novelists draw shallow characters partially because they don't think they're important but also because it almost hurts mentally to put in that work. It's like making yourself do a semester of calculus if you're terrible at math. It's the same with character-first novelists trying to come up with good stories. It's so much easier just to do one more exploration of a relationship than it is to figure out three-act structure.

So the first thing needed is to agree with yourself to do the work to get better at what you're weak at. Until you decide that crafting a great character is just as important as writing the scene in which the plane crashes, you're never going to do it. Until you decide that it really is vital to give your story a satisfying structure, you'll simply skip it. Your novels will all remain lopsided and defective. And probably unpublishable.

The second thing you need to do is learn how to get better at the thing you're weak at. There are many books and electronic writer's helps tools that can help you. I have developed two myself: one for character creation and one for plot creation. These are the tools I use in my own writing, and I know they can help you.

Next Friday, I'll summarize Character Creation for the Plot-First Novelist and How To Find Your Story, but for now it's enough that you 1) recognize whether you're a plot-firster or a character-firster and 2) commit to doing what it will take to strengthen your skill in the area where you're naturally weak.

By the way, some writers say they are setting-first novelists. I know what they mean, but usually you find out that the setting is, to them, really more like a character. Like Narnia or Middle-Earth or Avonlea. These people are usually character-firsters. Others tell me they're murder-first novelists, but these are really plot-firsters who begin with that element of plot and build the story from there.

You can purchase Jeff's e-books mentioned in this blog at http://marcherlordpress.com/Store_Stand-In.htm

The Plotting Process: No "Right" Way; No "Wrong" Way

Before I talk about the method I use when writing a novel, I'd like to chime in on the first point of Latayne's post on Wednesday regarding a question she was asked by a conference attendee over the weekend. I too was dismayed to hear that an author would think he or she could take a secular story, add some Christian elements, and voila! have something that could easily be sold in the Christian marketplace. Putting aside the fact that selling to a CBA publisher is no easier than selling to an ABA publisher, Christian elements aren't something to be tacked on to a manuscript as an afterthought, any more than elements of horror are tacked on to a story that was meant to be anything but horror. If Christian elements don't emanate from the heart and soul of the author, it will feel as false as it is. That author may get away with it once, but it's unlikely that readers of Christian fiction -- who are a discerning audience -- will buy into it twice.

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Now to the question of how we plot our novels. I loved reading the comments to Wednesday's post and seeing that even in our differences there are a lot of similarities. I've just begun my tenth novel (2 or 3 of which were great learning experiences but will never see publication) and until now my pattern was always the same. I had a beginning and end in mind when I launched the project, with a general idea of how I planned to get from point A to point B. Everything else evolved out of that, often surprising me, including most of the supporting characters. I've loved that process, loved the surprises I found along the way, loved the subplots that presented themselves.

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But this time I'm using Jeff Gerke's "How to Find Your Story." Jeff will be our guest blogger in June, and we'll talk more in-depth about the process then. It's a method that's easily adapted to the amount of detail the author wishes to develop before the writing begins. In my case I've penciled in more detail about plot, characterization, motives, etc. than I've ever begun with, but less than other authors I know. For me, it's an experiment. I'm hoping the writing comes easier without barricading the detours I find so intriguing. Next time I might try Latayne's method of taking apart a novel to use as a pattern. If I do, I have just the book in mind.

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But here's the thing I continue to learn: there is no right way; there is no wrong way. There's only the way that works for the author. And a particular method doesn't have to carry over from one project to the next. That's what's so wonderful about the creative process . . . it's so creative.

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Visitors who are readers and not writers, have you learned anything interesting about the writing process in the blog posts and comments this week? We'd love to hear from you.