Saturday, October 13, 2012

Author Interview #2 - Keith Raffel

This is very good timing because I recently blogged about Keith's 4th book - A Fine and Dangerous Season.  You can go to the blog and see that review which I posted on September 25.  This book is Keith's 2nd digital-only book.  The first 2 are in print and were published by Midnight Ink.  There were several reasons why he went digital:

1.  Books can be published immediately - for print, it takes 12 months after the book is completed.
2.  Feedback on the book is monthly.
3.  Royalties for print is twice each year - for digital, it's monthly.

Compared to many other authors that I interviewed, Keith started writing well after he was firmly entrenched in his career.  He started by taking a writing class through UC Berkeley extension.  It took him 8 years to write book 1.  His books, in order, are:

Dot Dead
Smasher (which has been optioned as a possible movie)
Drop by Drop
A Fine and Dangerous Season

I have read them all, and I have to thank Sabrina and David for that.  They came across Keith in a bookstore when he was promoting Dot Dead.  They had him autograph it for me and then presented it to me as a gift.  I would like to think that I would have come across him somewhere on my own, but who knows?  I'm glad that they did that because I have enjoyed all of the books and have watched him improve his craft with each new offering.

Here are a couple of fun facts about Keith:

1.  He has lived in Palo Alto since he was 8.
2.  One year, he acted as a judge for the Edgars (the mystery writers' awards) and read 450 books - in one year!  That's crazy.
3.  He was 1 of 72 people who sat on a committee geared to overhauling Kepler's.  That process has finally been completed.  In fact, this coming Tuesday, the 16th, is when Kepler's will re-open by having an author's event.

If you want to know more about Keith, you can go to his website - www.keithraffel.com.  And if you're looking for one of his books to try, I would go with A Fine and Dangerous Season.  It's really good with an extremely clever story line.

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