Author Interview – Bob Mayer

5:00 AM | Labels: Authors

Who designed the cover? My business partner, Jen Talty. We do all our own covers and we’ve learned a lot over the years. I love the image, the color and the boat that you can see through the letters.

Who is your publisher? Cool Gus Publishing, my own company. We view ourselves as publishing partners, where the author comes first. Publishing has got to change from the distribution model to the discoverability model, and we’re leading the way on that.

Will you write others in this same genre? Yes. The end of Chasing the Lost sets up the next book, Chasing the Son. I like the team of misfits I’ve put together in the low country of South Carolina. I view it as a modern Deadwood, where there is little law and order and only the toughest survive.

Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp? A theme that keeps coming up in my books lately is the conflict between honor and loyalty. My epic Duty, Honor, Country: A Novel of West Point & The Civil War really touched on that, focusing on the way West Pointers fought on both sides in the Civil War. But in Chasing the Lost I focus on it at a personal level. Would you rather have an honorable friend or a loyal one? When can either turn into a liability?

How much of the book is realistic? More than people might realize. My background in Special Forces showed me a side of the world most people don’t experience. Often we cloak the seriousness in humor, such as the movie RED, but there has been a war going on in the world of covert operations ever since World War II.

Have you included a lot of your life experiences, even friends, in the plot? Yes. I took what I knew of covert operations as a former Green Beret and used that. I change some thing to protect classified information, but much of the action and all of the gear is real.

How important do you think villains are in a story? In this book it’s critical, but I can’t say much, because what appears to be isn’t.

Do you have to travel much concerning your book(s)? I tend to set books in places I’ve already been or lived in. I lived on Hilton Head Island for four years, so setting Chasing the Lost in the low country was easy. Chasing the Ghost is set in Boulder, CO and I lived there for four years also.