Michael A. Ventrella

MICHAEL A. VENTRELLA: I’m pleased to be interviewing my friend Caitlin Rozakis today! Marketer by day and writer by night, she has had short stories published in numerous magazines and anthologies, and her debut novel DREADFUL recently hit the New York Times bestseller list!

Your new book has been quite successful! That must give you a great feeling!

ROZAKIS: It’s extremely weird! I was honestly not expecting this to go so well, so hitting the New York Times Bestseller list was a bit of a shock. It’s pretty amazing, I have to admit. I was going upstate for a long weekend with my extended family, and figured I’d hit a couple of the Barnes & Nobles on the way up and sign copies. One had reached out to me the week before on Instagram asking for a signing… but the time I got there, they didn’t have any copies left at all. The other, which I chose completely randomly based on how close it was to our rental house, was immensely smug to have ordered an extra box. But they also hauled out the personal copies of all the employees who wanted signatures… and there were like 10 of them. They were so excited to meet me, which is very weird. I don’t actually know if this is a flash in the pan and I should just enjoy my month of fame, or something I should try to get used to, but I’m doing my best to enjoy the ride.

VENTRELLA: Tell us what it’s about!

ROZAKIS: DREADFUL is a fantasy farce featuring an evil wizard who loses his memory and has to fake his way along with his own evil plan. It’s about second chances, toxic masculinity, and moat squid.

VENTRELLA: How did you get it published?

ROZAKIS: I’d done the very standard querying thing and landed an agent, who circulated it to all the big U.S. publishers, none of whom were interested. My agent decided to make some changes for personal reasons and stopped agenting altogether. A junior agent at the agency was willing to take me on. I have to admit, I was nervous – but I shouldn’t have been. It was Sarah’s idea to submit to Titan, a mid-sized publisher in the UK I’d honestly never heard of and had to look up. At the time, I was kind of disappointed, but a deal is a deal, right?

Well, I had no idea how lucky I was. Titan is small but mighty, and their team decided to do a major marketing push for Dreadful that went so far beyond anything I’d ever dreamed of. They managed to land multiple book box deals, which are a huge impact for opening numbers these days. Even better, their US publicist managed to negotiate an amazing exclusive deal with Barnes & Noble that centered around Titan’s ability to do sprayed edges on paperbacks, which hasn’t been done in this country to my knowledge before. So Barnes & Noble got their own special edition, which lead to them picking it as their spec fic book of the month for June, which has led to much, much bigger sales numbers than I could have ever expected.

VENTRELLA: You’ve used a few different names for your books and stories. Why is that?

ROZAKIS: Marketing! Also, taking fifteen years to break in. So when I started, I just used my legal name, Rebecca Rozakis. I’ve got a bunch of short stories published under it. But I work in marketing, and started to generate a number of blog posts and whitepapers for my day job, which increasingly became an SEO issue. I tried switching to just R. Rozakis, but that made things worse; my father-in-law is the legendary DC writer/editor Bob Rozakis, and so people got confused if R. Rozakis was for Robert. Then in the middle of querying DREADFUL, I had a sudden brainstorm and popped out a Christmas romance novella which is so far off brand for me that I was worried that if agents and editors saw that was my first long work, they’d have trouble seeing me as a fantasy writer. So I self-published that under Catherine Beck. (And if I ever write more straight up romance, it will go under that pen name.)

When DREADFUL actually started looking like it might happen, I realized how big a branding mess my socials were. I made a list of potential pen names, figured out which one had the URL available, and then set up the whole Caitlin Rozakis brand – website, socials, and all. It does let me keep most of my personal stuff and author stuff separate, which is pretty convenient.

VENTRELLA: I first became aware of your work when I accepted a story from you for the Baker Street Irregular series. Tell us about that story! What was the inspiration for it?

ROZAKIS: The fun thing about Holmes is that at this point, he and Watson are basically archetypes. Which means you can do all the mixing and matching you want. In “Investigations Upon Taxonomy of Venomous Squamates,” I did a riff on the classic “The Spotted Band.” Only, Watson is actually a sentient AI and the snake in question is a bioengineered monstrosity. It’s fun to see where you can push the bounds, while still keeping enough of the shape that the reader can still recognize the source material. It’s even more fun to find ways to surprise them, when they know how the original turned out.

I have to admit, though, I have no idea where the idea came from. Sometimes I have origin stories behind the stories, but sometimes… it just sounded like fun?

VENTRELLA: We’ve both attended various conventions (and had lunch together!). I have to admit that I am getting frustrated by the fact that these are attracting less and less participants as the years go by. Do you find these useful, either for meeting readers or for networking?

ROZAKIS: Ooh, so this is a tricky one. Here’s the thing – I genuinely do like the small Northeastern sff literary conventions. (I specify the location only because those are the only ones I’ve been to; no idea if the culture is different in other areas of the world.) They’re a lot of fun, the staff works really hard to put together something enjoyable, and I’ve made some friends through them over the years. I feel lucky to have met a circle of authors who are wonderful people and who have been kind and welcoming. A couple anthology invitations have come out of them, and I’m sure some more short story opportunities will come in the future as well.

But in terms of meeting readers, I’m not sure they’re all that helpful to me at this particular stage of my career. There just aren’t that many people there, there tends to be a lot of overlap between the attendees of all the cons in a driving radius of me (which makes sense, it’s in a driving radius of them, too!), and because the audience tends to skew older, you don’t really get the multiplying effect from more social media-savvy audiences. I suspect I’ll go to 1-2 a year to catch up with friends and the time and money is better spent sending ARCs to Booktokers and running giveaways on Reddit. (And saving up for a couple of the bigger cons that require more travel.)

VENTRELLA: What projects are you working on now? Is a sequel likely?

ROZAKIS: Well, I have a book on contract that I just saw the cover for (but can’t share that bit yet) called THE GRIMOIRE GRAMMAR SCHOOL PARENT TEACHER ASSOCIATION. We’re pitching it as “Big Little Lies goes to magic school” – it’s about the mundane mom of a kindergartner who gets bitten by a werewolf and unexpectedly accepted into a magical school for wizards and cryptids.

I’ve got 8 chapters of something else that isn’t working at the moment – I’ll be ready to talk about it when I’ve fixed it.

I never intended for DREADFUL to get a sequel, but I’m starting to reconsider after seeing the reception. I don’t currently have a plan, though – I’ll need to give it a little while to brew in the back of my head before I give it a stab, if I ever do.

VENTRELLA: How much of writing is innate? In other words, do you believe there are just some people who are born storytellers but simply need to learn technique? Or can anyone become a good writer?

ROZAKIS: I think anyone can become a good writer, but I’m not sure anyone can become a great writer. (For the record—I consider myself a good writer but not a great one.) The thing is, even becoming a good writer is not a thing I think most people have the motivation and willpower to do. There’s a need to read widely and deeply, to analyze what does and doesn’t work and why, to observe humans closely and try to understand why different people do different things and why, and then to practice actually writing, a lot. But like any other major skill, even after you put in your 10,000 hours, there’s still differences in the level of skill that must be innate. There’s still a difference between a professional concert cellist and Yo-Yo Ma, you know? But we need professional concert cellists, and they bring a great deal of joy and artistry to the world, even if they’ll never be a household name soloist. And even if you never make it into an orchestra, that doesn’t mean playing the cello isn’t worthwhile in and of itself.

VENTRELLA: What is your writing process? Do you outline heavily or just jump right in, for instance?

ROZAKIS: I outline pretty heavily—I need to know where things are going to be able to get there. But I also edit very heavily, despite hating the editing process. Basically, the first outline is a roadmap but that doesn’t mean the planned destination is where I end up by the final draft. I find the outline really helpful in the editing process, as it lets me move the beats around until the arc actually finally clicks into place.

VENTRELLA: How did you get started? What was your first story or book published?

ROZAKIS: My first story was published in an online magazine that subsequently went out of business, way back in 2007. I’ve had a bunch of short stories published in a bunch of different markets, ranging from tiny magazines to pro-rate markets to anthologies from several different indie or small press publishers. I’ve self-published a novella that didn’t do particularly well, but did get optioned. I’ve written three novels before DREADFUL—one of which I’ll never let a living soul see because it was not even terrible but just embarrassingly meh and two which were steampunk after steampunk peaked. Those both got a bunch of really nice personal rejections from agents who thought they were good but unsellable. (I now see flaws in them I’d have to fix if I wanted to self-publish, and haven’t had time to go back and fix them. Maybe someday.)

Some of this game is just endless persistence—there’s so much luck involved. You have to be talented and you have to work hard, but you also have to be at the right place at the right time.

DREADFUL was written before the cozy trend started, but landed with pitch-perfect timing I never could have planned. I am deeply aware of how many people I know whose writing I personally think is as good or better than mine who haven’t been this lucky. I am incredibly grateful for and slightly disbelieving at DREADFUL’s success. Will it last? I have no idea. But I’m doing my best to enjoy the ride while I can!

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