John Coon

I used to go mountain biking frequently as a teenager. Enjoyed hitting mountain trails and seeing nature. I haven't owned a bicycle in a few years since I moved to an urban area. I've lived in a series of small apartments and haven't had a place to properly store a bicycle. It's definitely a hobby I'd like to pick up again when circumstances permit.

From a young age, I've had an active imagination and creative energy. I can visualize stories and characters with ease. They play out in my head almost like my own personal movies. I've always wanted to share those stories with others and turned to writing to put in words what already existed inside me.

My parents used to own a manual typewriter. When I was 12 years old, one of my sisters typed up a couple of short stories. I decided I could also write my own stories, so I started working on a series of interconnected stories. The main characters were five kittens (based on family pets we owned at the time) that go on a series of comedic adventures. I didn't finish up the rough draft until high school, and I still have copies of those early stories saved. I plan to publish them in a future children's book once I find a good illustrator to partner with.

My mom instilled a love of reading in me from an early age. She read all sorts of books and I picked up on her habit. In middle school, I won a school-wide reading contest two straight years. (I also won $150 which was a huge amount of money for a kid.) My writing grew out of this early reading, along with having an active and creative imagination.

I endured frequent criticism or ridicule from family (with the exceptions of my mom and my oldest sister) whenever I shared stories or characters I created. The majority of my family labored to convince me that I wasn't talented enough to become an author. I honestly worried about Pandora Reborn receiving bad reviews when I first released that novel due to all that early criticism. I feared it would flop and validate their unwarranted criticism. Thankfully, Pandora Reborn was well received by my target audience and I'm in the process of developing more stories with some of those characters.

Under a Fallen Sun began life as a short body horror story called Village of the Gargoyles I wrote in college. The story followed four college students who become trapped in a Texas town bound under a demonic curse. My Mom read the initial story and her feedback led me to expanding the backstory as I tried to fill in the details on what happened to the town residents and why it happened. Eventually, I shifted genres to science fiction when I realized that aliens experimenting on humans were responsible for the events that unfolded and a more comprehensive backstory emerged in my mind. With that shift, I also decided to set Under a Fallen Sun within the same fictional universe as Alien People. Readers who read both novels will uncover and enjoy the connections between the two stories.

I originally wrote In Hell's Shadow two decades years ago and submitted it to numerous magazines over the years. After a steady stream of rejections, I decided to try out Kindle Unlimited and published my ghost story to that platform within Amazon. Finding a professional cover at a affordable cost for a short story wasn't easy and, I hate to say it, but I ended up losing money on the project to date. I've sold roughly 20 copies and had approximately 200 pages read on KU in nine months. These developments convinced me to think twice about publishing additional short stories. I put my next planned short story on hold until I can figure out a better avenue for reaching my target audience on Kindle Unlimited.

Standing out from the crowd is not easy to do. There's a deluge of new novels every month and it can feel like swimming against the current to keep your novels visible to your target audience. The key, I believe, is producing quality stories that people will want to read again and again. Some publishing experts will say 'write to market” or establish yourself in popular genres and sub-genres to make a quick buck. My philosophy is find your voice and write your own stories. If you have something that stands out from the crowd, and use effective marketing, readers will find you and embrace your books.

I wrote the original rough draft for Alien People before starting my freshman year at the University of Utah. I tried to get a summer job after graduating from high school without success. I didn't own a car at the time, so I had limited employment options. I decided to spend that summer writing a science fiction novel. I concocted a clever story idea about first contact between aliens and humans from the alien point of view. Within three months, I cranked out a 400-page story. The original rough draft is drastically different from the final version and I made wholesale changes which included cutting out several characters and adding new ones. I also dropped entire scenes, dramatically rewrote others, and changed the ending. Still, the early framework of Alien People held enough storytelling promise that I continued to tinker with the story over the next two decades until it was ready to publish this year.

Ron is based on a few high school soccer players I interviewed and interacted with back when I reported on high school sports. They were driven with a single-minded focus on their sport. The most talented ones often possessed this smug selfish arrogance where they figured they were better than you and you couldn't do a thing about it. That's a common trait in elite athletes in general and probably why they are so good at what they do.

I love sketching out the backstory when I sit down to write a novel or a short story. It's fun to flesh out histories, character biographies, myths, legends, geography, and other things to bring a particular story to life. And it helps give my readers a snapshot of a larger fictional world that exists outside the pages they're reading. The main thing I don't enjoy in the publishing world is doing marketing myself. I'm not a pushy salesperson by nature, but you almost need to be one on social media and elsewhere to get enough people to pay attention to your books.

Get the facts right before you send a story out into the world. Young journalists who are eager to make a name for themselves can fall into the trap of trying to break news before interviewing multiple reliable sources and checking all pertinent facts. Your reporting can impact many lives – for good or bad. Being right is far more important than being first.

I enjoy photography. Nothing is better than into the outdoors and snapping pictures of animals, landscapes, and other visually stunning sights. Photos often tell stories as fascinating and in-depth as the tales words convey.

Seeing people embrace the stories and characters I've created is gratifying. I enjoy seeing the positive reviews and how much readers genuinely love what I've written. It inspires me to keep going and create other stories.

I like the tools that allow you to make gifs and banners for marketing. It helps my books be seen on visual social media platforms. Along those lines, I think it would be fun to do a book of the day or author of the day feature on AllAuthor. Spotlight works of different authors on the site and use those cool mockup banners and graphics to do it.