I, Hannah, had the great opportunity to sit down with Paul Austin Ardoin, the author of the mystery series Fenway Stevenson as well as The Woodhead & Becker mysteries. Ardoin is a USA Today best-selling author, and has built an impressive Indie career. He was kind enough to sit down and talk Indie publishing, marketing books, and his first series. He is also someone who is in the writing group I attend semi-frequently, so he has helped me immensely at those meetings with my own writing journey.

Below is our interview, pulled from written answers as well as a Zoom interview. Edits were made specifically for readability and to mix the written with the interview questions, but the content and message is in tact.

• What made you want to be a writer?

I have always been really interested in creating things. I’m a piano player and have been since I was seven years old. I started a band in high school. But for as long as I can remember, I was making stories [since] I was three or four years old. I’ve wanted to be a novelist since I was six years old. I’d spend hours planning long, complicated novel series (including the hand-drawn covers!). When I was in second grade, I wrote a short story about a mouse who was the quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers. I think I was inspired by Beverly Cleary’s The Mouse and the Motorcycle. I don’t even know if I knew the rules of football at the time I wrote that, but ever since I’ve written short stories. Once I got my career going, I really had trouble finishing a longer form work and I started 3 or 4 novels and wrote myself into corners after 100 or 150 pages. 

My undergraduate degree is in creative writing,  and one of the things that they taught me in the program, and I think is fairly common in a lot of creative writing programs out there, is that it doesn’t really count if it’s not literary fiction. You have to write something that could win the Pulitzer Prize one day. Otherwise, you’re not a real writer. 

So in my 40s, I woke up one day and realized I’d never finished a novel. (Which is kind of important if you want to be a novelist.) [I also realized that] I really like Agatha Christie. And I really like Sue Grafton and Janet Evanovich and mystery writers. I’ve been reading mysteries ever since I was a little kid, and my wife was like, “Well, write a mystery novel. Don’t let your creative writing teacher from 25 years ago get in your head.” I guess I have her to thank for unsticking me

With the help of my local NaNoWriMo chapter, I finished my first novel in 2017, and I’ve published 12 novels and 3 novellas, and I hit the USA TODAY Bestseller list in August 2021.

• What stories inspired you to become a writer and how did they inform your work in mystery? 

Agatha Christie’s Poirot books, Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone mysteries, and Stephen King’s On Writing. I think I read a lot of Agatha Christie when I was in junior high school and the structure of those stories really, really stayed with me. [That age is] a pretty formative time in your life. You know the music that you listen to when you’re 14 years old is the music that stays with you for the rest of your life. That was about the same time I was reading all these Agatha Christie books and mystery in that form. Before that I was reading Encyclopedia Brown and Donald J. Sobel’s two-minute mysteries and books like that. 

I really just internalized the structure of the mystery. Mystery has a lot of unwritten rules. I think the readers of mysteries have expectations that rival romance readers in terms of [rules and expectations]. In romance, you’ve got to have a happily ever after, or at least a happily ever “for now”. With mystery stories, the sleuth has to catch the killer at the end of the book and has to be the one to catch the killer. It can’t be happenstance. It can’t be dumb luck. It has to be ingenuity on the part of the sleuth. There are many other unwritten rules: you have to reveal the body by a certain point in the book; you have to introduce the killer at a certain point in the book and it can’t be a person who is revealed too late. There can’t be twins. There can’t be a hidden trick. Readers don’t want to be tricked. Readers want to be able to figure everything out themselves when they’re reading a mystery. I think those rules are things that I internalized when I was reading all of those Poirot and Kinsey Millhone mysteries. I hope that what I’m doing with the Fenway Stephenson and the Woodhead & Becker series, and my series that I’ll start and continue in the future. 

• Are there any difficulties that readers don’t always see behind the scenes when drafting a mystery? 

There are. There are a few times when I have written a mystery and I bring it to my developmental editor or to my critique group, and they say that the sleuth doesn’t actually figure out who the murderer is. Of course, I think I’ve done it. But then I reread it, and [I realize] I missed a few steps. It’s really interesting because mysteries tend to be fairly complex. And I’m more of a pantser or a discovery writer than a plotter, but there are some times when I have had to definitely turn to the outline in order to get through a few scenes. For example, I have a book that is a locked room mystery, The Courtroom Coroner. There are 13 people in a locked courtroom. There’s a dead body and one of the people in there is the killer. And I realized I had to outline it because I couldn’t go through my normal discovery writing process. [For example,] I realized I didn’t have a person in the room that the sleuth could talk to. And each one of those twelve other people besides my sleuth had to be somebody who was involved in either the motive, the opportunity, or explaining background circumstances that were relevant to everything. That was a big challenge to get through. It was probably one of the hardest books I’ve ever had to write from that perspective. 

• Can you tell me a bit about The Reluctant Coroner and what readers need to know before heading into the book? 

Fenway Stevenson’s world just fell apart: she just lost her job, her house, and her mother—and she has to return to the coastal California town where her estranged father is practically king. But as she’s dealing with her new normal, the murder of the county coroner draws Fenway into a deepening conspiracy. As the body count rises and all signs seem to point toward her father’s oil company, will Fenway uncover the truth before family bonds become deadly?

I don’t think you need to know more about her other than that. The name of the book and character came to me before the plot of the book came. To me, one of the reasons why I think it’s one of the reasons the first set of three books was a hit USA Today bestseller is because people relate to [Fenway].  People feel like her struggles are real. I think it’s because the character came to me first before the situation or before the plot. She’s in a tough spot. She has to move back to a town where her father pretty much owns everything in the town and she does not like him. She’s been estranged from him for 20 years. He got married to his new wife the weekend of her high school graduation and she feels very disconnected from him. She has to move because she doesn’t really have any other choice. She feels very alone there and has to basically start over. And you know, her father is a huge Red Sox fan, as you can probably imagine. Who else would name their daughter Fenway? You have to imagine that this guy is pretty self-centered in order to name his child after the ballpark of his favorite baseball team. [He’s] not really thinking about how it’s going to affect her in the future and how many baristas will mispronounce her name. So the first set of seven books really focuses on her estranged relationship with her father and how she deals with the challenge of having to deal with him on an almost daily basis when she really doesn’t like who he is and doesn’t like the way he’s treated her for the last two decades. 

• What’s it like to create a long-running series? What are some of the ways you help keep readers coming back? 

When I finished the first [Fenway Stevenson] book, it was really a challenge for me to prove to myself that I could finish a book. But I left the ending open so that Fenway is still the county coroner at the end of book 1 and that she could easily take a second case and then a third. And now there are 10 books in the series. One of the things in the first seven books is the character arc for both her and her father. It’s something that my developmental editor was really interested in. He offered to be my developmental editor after reading The Reluctant Coroner because he was interested in the central relationship and how they could even begin to repair the kind of damage that had been done over the last 20 years. That really propels readers from one book to the next. 

This also didn’t happen in the first book, but in almost every book after that, I leave an open-ended question about Fenway’s personal life at the end of each of the books. I don’t want to call it a cliffhanger because it’s not a cliffhanger, but the central mystery gets wrapped up at the end of each of the books. But then there is an open question. At the end of each of the books with something that’s going on with Fenway personally, with her father or her new boyfriend. That hopefully is the open question that makes readers want to continue. I didn’t do it at the end of book 7, because that’s the end of Fenway and her dad’s arc. 

• What excites you most about your characters? And can you let us know a bit about how Fenway’s changed and overcome her personal challenges, without too many spoilers? 

After 9 novels and 2 novellas, I feel like I know Fenway Stevenson well. She’s a work in progress (aren’t we all?), and over the book series, she overcomes personal challenges piece by piece while solving murders. [With the fact that] her father abandoned her when she was eight years old, she got a real mistrust of interpersonal relationships. She was very close with her mother before her mother passed away from cancer right before the start of book one. But she doesn’t have very many close friends. When book one starts and she hasn’t had a romantic relationship that’s lasted longer than three months. Through the friendships that she forges in her new city and through all the turmoil and all of the issues that she works on with her father, she grows a little bit every book. She becomes a little bit less guarded. As the the books progress the arc is now towards a romantic relationships instead of a parental relationship. But I think you can see it in every book. How little by little she starts to let her guard down, to open up to trust.

• Can you give me a bit more information on the side characters? I loved learning a bit more about McVie and the other members of the team (Rachel, Dez, etc.)

Fenway comes in and is basically appointed as the replacement coroner because of the death of the [previous] coroner. She’s not even 30 yet and she is officially the supervisor of these two detective sergeants who work in the coroner’s office. They’ve been on the force for 15/20/25 years. So there is a real push and pull there. And one of the sergeants in particular, Dez, is really no nonsense. She knows how the system works. She was prepared for this to happen, and she’s very cynical about Fenway at first. But then she sees some of Fenway strengths. [But] at first it’s Fenway’s weaknesses. She sees how green Fenway is. In the first year of these stories, she calls Fenway rookie all the time. Instead of boss or a coroner or an honorific. She uses rookie. She is very sardonic. She’s very playful, but also doesn’t mind telling people what they don’t want to hear if she thinks they need to hear it. And I have heard from many, many people that she is their favorite character in this series. One of the novellas I wrote was actually a story about Dez set 25 years previous to this series. When she’s working on her criminal justice degree as an undergrad. I think people really, really like her. Because of that, she’s tended to be a major secondary character in most of the books I’ve written in the series.

• Are there any characters you struggled with to make them full-fledged or anything along those lines? 

The other sergeant who appears in the first couple of books. They sort of disappear into the background a little bit and really don’t become a major secondary character until his retirement party in book nine I did struggle with with him. Also, one of the major characters in book 1, Fenway’s assistant in the coroner’s office. In book 2, she gets promoted into the PR department of the County. And then she kind of gets replaced by the computer forensics person as Fenway’s confidant. I’ve brought her back every so often as well. Sometimes you don’t have a whole lot for characters to do. And so they need to disappear. Fortunately, unlike sitcoms or TV shows, it’s a little bit less noticeable if a character doesn’t appear in a book. Or only appears sporadically in a book. It’s different when somebody completely disappears from the opening credits of a TV show. 

• Can you tell us a bit about your most recent book, Book 10, The Digital Coroner

Book 10, was released in November. It’s done well and so far actually it’s been my top rated book in the series. [O]f course, any similarities to people or places, living or dead, is purely coincidental. But my wife and I just celebrated our 25th anniversary and we went to Amsterdam a little bit early to celebrate. And one of the things I was really excited to see was the NXT Museum. It’s all about the fusion of art and technology and what’s next with innovation. And you walk in and everything is dark and they have these black velvet curtains on the walls everywhere. And the first exhibit you go into is nothing more than light bulbs on a wall where you stand on one end and the lights on the other end light up. And as you walk forward the lights turn on closer and closer to you, and then as you walk to the other end, it walks to the other end. And then there’s a plaque that’s like “We did all these awesome things with NFT’s, blah blah blah.” And there’s no art. I don’t even know how the NFT’s would talk to these light bulbs anyway. I was [disappointed] and pretty much every other thing in the museum was like that as well. [A] couple of the exhibits weren’t working properly. You got to the end [of the exhibit] and it was this big screen and it [said there was] 80,000 pieces of art, but they were all represented by these tiny little NFT’s on screen. They were books and the pages flapped, so they looked like birds and were flying around. But we didn’t get to see the art. Nothing there was inspiring [or] different. We didn’t know whether it was an NFT or a computer graphic simulation. I left feeling so ripped off. 

Coincidentally, the murder takes place at this museum east of Las Vegas. There’s also a fusion of art and technology in this museum. There are also black velvet curtains, a weird coincidence, and everything is based on NFT’s. Fenway, and mostly Fenway’s friend Piper, the computer genius person who was the one who dragged Fenway to this museum in the middle of the desert, feels super ripped off. She winds up running into the owner of the museum at the gift shop and and just yells at him for about 5 minutes before stomping out of the store. And then you’ll never guess who ends up dead in the parking lot the next morning!

• Is there something about your characters that you struggled with while writing? 

My first draft of The Reluctant Coroner was written in first person (from Fenway’s perspective) and it made her sound whiny. I rewrote the whole thing in close third person, which fixed the problem. There’s also the problem that Fenway is a biracial woman and I’m a white guy. I think there are way too many stories about whiny white guys, but I know that Fenway has aspects of her (fictional) life that aren’t my story to tell; balancing that with what I try to make an authentic-feeling story is definitely challenging

• Throughout the series, you have a lot of diversity in your books. How do you develop those characters and their unique perspectives, like Fenway’s biracial identity? 

I don’t really know why I made the choice to make Fenway biracial other than I thought there were too many stories, especially in the crime fiction genre, of the white guy who had white guy problems. I wanted to do something that was a little different. One of the big challenges that I had was how to make it authentic and how to make Fenway real. There are problems that she encounters during the course of her investigations that are how other people react to her race, especially because her rich father is white. [People expect] Nathaniel’s long lost daughter to be white. There are a lot of stories that could be told here that would not be my story. I would not be able to tell them authentically from that point of view. But I also can’t just give her a non-white race and just ignore it and treat her as if she were a white character. That’s not authentic, either. It’s also problematic. 

That is why I have to see, if there are other writers out there who are looking [to do] this, it is so valuable to have a sensitivity reader. One of the things I learned very, very quickly is that if I asked Black friends to read it and they would say, “Oh it’s fine.” And I found out later, after a sensitivity reader had read it, it wasn’t fine. There were some things written out of ignorance. There were some things that I put in there that didn’t work. [For example], I had Fenway thinking about something, and as she woke up, she got in the shower and I was having the thoughts go through her head. The sensitivity reader was like, “No, that’s not how a black woman washes her hair. That’s not her. There’s a treatment. Do you not know this?” And I [had to say], “I guess I don’t.” 

There were some other things in terms of language references which I was using that were outdated. That’s not my friends’ responsibility to educate me about this. If you’re paying a sensitivity reader, it becomes their job to tell you what you’re doing wrong and and point you in the right direction. And I just think that it is so important and if there are writers out there who are doing this, and particularly if they’re white. If you hire somebody or if you get feedback that says you’re not doing this right, that it’s insensitive or it’s problematic, shut up and listen to what they have to say. Because the chances are very, very high that they know what they’re talking about and you don’t know what you’re doing. It was so valuable to me. When I heard it I was like, “No, no, that wasn’t my intention.” It doesn’t really matter if it was your intention or not. You have to fix it so that it is no longer problematic. That was a very difficult lesson to learn. I’m really glad I learned it, and I’m sure I still have a lot to learn and a long way to go. 

I hired a sensitivity reader for every single one of the 11 of my books that I have now. It’s not something that you hear in a lot of writing spaces. In fact you hear the opposite. Write what you want to write. Don’t let anybody tell you you can’t write a character like this or a character like that. [But] you can write problematic characters. You can’t write racist or sexist or problematic [characters] without being called out on it today. And I would hope that you wouldn’t want to do anything like that. So just like every other writing mistake we make, there are mistakes. There are typos littered throughout [works]. I certainly didn’t intend for the typos to be in there, but if somebody points it out to you, you don’t get mad about it and say, “No, no, I’m not the kind of writer that makes typos.” You fix the typos and you move on. I’ve really found it instructive to treat it as if this character isn’t working, or any other piece of criticism that you would get about it. It’s not personal. You need to fix it. Understand what you’re doing wrong and do better in your next book

• What made you want to go into Indie Publishing and/or Traditional Publishing? And what made you successful and a USA Today Best Seller in 2021? 

An old friend had success as an indie author, and I reconnected with her as I was finishing my first novel. After analyzing the pros and cons of indie vs. traditional publishing, I decided I was much better suited to the indie world. I’m not a very patient person and when you query you might be published in three to five years. That was not a palatable option. And then when I found out that I could be published and have it out as soon as I felt it was ready to go, that was it. I think that was probably the biggest reason why I chose to go Indie. But there were all of those other reasons: the higher percentage [profit], the more creative control. Those were all reasons in the pro column for me as well. I listened to my indie author friend, who had a little bit of success with her book. She turned me on to the Creative Penn Podcast, probably one of the biggest indie author podcasts now. I think it’s been going on for a decade or or so, maybe even longer than that. There’s such good advice about marketing. 

You don’t expect your first book to sell because nobody, nobody knows who you are. Nobody wants to drop even a dollar on an author they don’t know. Friends and family purchased it. One of the great things I heard was, “I bought your book and it’s actually good!” “I bought your book because you’re my friend, and I wanted to support you. Then I started reading it. I am shocked that it’s actually on par with some of the traditionally published books that I’ve read.” So a little bit of word of mouth grew. But I knew that if I wanted to sell because, I had to write in a series. I listened to the Creative Penn, The Self-Publishing Formula, and The BestSeller Experiment (when that was in its heyday). After I published the third book, I went on to this website called Book Funnel. This requires not being exclusive to Amazon. I know a lot of indie authors out there feel like they need the page reads and KU and that is certainly valuable. It’s a viable way. Amazon gives you access to some marketing tools that can help you. But I was in KU for 90 days and I hardly got any page reads. So as soon as I could, I ended that program and I started to publish wide, which means I published on the other ebook stores as well. Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Google Play (although Google Play wasn’t wasn’t available to indie authors when I first started publishing). So with the third book, I went to Book Funnel and I started giving the first book away. It was still available for sale on Amazon and Apple, but in exchange for an email address and signing up to my newsletter, somebody got my first book for free. 

A lot of people say, oh, don’t do that with a full novel. Do that with a reader magnet. Do it with a novella or short story or something like that. But because I started The Reluctant Coroner with Fenway arriving in my fictionalized California coastal city, I didn’t really have a story before that I could use. So I know it was against the advice of a lot of experts, but I gave my first novel away in exchange for the e-mail address and I grew from my mom, her cousin and their dog to a newsletter list of 1600 people in about a month. From that I continued and talked about my writing process, what inspired me, if I’ve gone to anything interesting [like] a restaurant or traveling for work. I did that every two weeks without fail so people would expect that in their mailboxes every Tuesday. And from that it went from 1600 to 3000 and now it’s about 7500 [subscribers]. It’s stayed there for the last three or four years. I’m not actively trying to grow that list much. But those were my original people who went through and bought the first five books, and 4 1/2 stars on all of them. 

Then I was lucky enough where I submitted The Reluctant Coroner to BookBub for a feature deal and it happened to be July 4th weekend in 2020. I don’t know if you remember, but mid-March of 2020, everything shut down. Nobody could go anywhere and all the restaurants were closed. And people said “just two weeks and then we’ll be back.” And then at the beginning of July, when we thought it would ease off, there was a big resurgence and everything shut down again just before the 4th of July. That’s when my book feature deal hit. Everybody was stuck at home and I had made my book one free and book 5 was out. My downloads went through the roof and people bought every book in the series after that. 

Now, every week, I advertise a free book one, either The Reluctant Coroner or The Winterstone Murder. I advertised that for free in one of those promo newsletters, either BookBub or FreeBooksy, Fussy Librarian, Robin Reads, E-reader News Today, Hello Books. I’ve been consistently getting hundreds of downloads, sometimes thousands,every time I send that out. Then there are a certain number of people who buy the second book and then about 2/3 of those people buy the rest of the series. I’m lucky in the way that Bookbub hit. But you know, to quote Edna Mode from the Incredibles, “luck favors the prepared,” I think having done all that research. I had the developmental editor who I listened to, even when he said a lot of stuff I didn’t want to hear. I had the sensitivity readers. If I hadn’t listened to them, I would not have been prepared to have a book of feature deal happen at the time that it happened. 

• I think that’s very helpful. I know you through our writing group and you are one of the more knowledgeable people I’ve ever met when it comes to indie authors, and you are someone who also likes to share your knowledge and what drives you. Could you talk about how you found the writing community that you’re in and how it’s helped you through your time and experience. 

When I was starting to write The Reluctant Coroner, I had stopped and started NaNoWriMo a bunch of times, ever since 2009. It was this book that I was starting and then abandoning after 1000 words. I made myself a promise that I would finish the book. Even if I thought it was terrible, I just needed to prove to myself that I could finish [it]. I was living in Northern California in Sacramento at the time, and I didn’t realize that NaNoWriMo even had a website and groups that met locally. About halfway through November 2017. I went to a Panera where there was a “Write-In” happening. I met a bunch of writers, and actually met the members of my current critique group. Then a little over two years ago, I moved to Milwaukee. I had worked for a company based here, loved the city, both my kids decided to go to Marquette. And so when the youngest came here, it was a really good excuse to move to a city that I really, really liked. And I know California to Wisconsin is not common. But I actually prefer the weather here, even when it’s like 20° like it is today. 

When I moved here, I had been very involved in the NaNoWriMo community, and I discovered there was no Nano here. It died out at the beginning of COVID. The three ML’s decided to disband it. I was really bummed because I’d really liked my writing community back in Sacramento. I was bummed for about a month. 

Then I realized: maybe there are other writing groups besides NaNoWriMo. I bet Google will know. Sure enough, the first thing that I got was MeetUp and I found both Shut Up and Write Milwaukee and Just Write Milwaukee. I’m a member of both. Shut Up and Write has a whole weekend retreat the first weekend in November called the Actually Writing Conference, and I go to that. I love it because you have to sit your ass in the seat and write. I got 20,000 words this past November. Shut Up and Write was almost 100% online and still after 2020. Just Write meets in person and I showed up when I signed up to come one day. A lot of people, sitting at a coffee shop for three hours writing. 

It was a really good experience because [there are] no distractions except for other people writing. And you feel this guilt to write instead of watching YouTube videos for the next three hours. Then you talk about what you wrote at the end of the sessions. You get to know the people a little bit and it’s really great. I feel very fortunate to have found two writing communities here in Milwaukee that are just as supportive as what I’ve found in Sacramento. And I’m still now a remote member of the critique group that I was in back in Sacramento, and we went remote in 2020 as well.

• What’s something you’re reading, watching and/or enjoying? 

I have been very focused on literary fiction and mysteries for most of my life. Then I was recommended N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth Trilogy. And I just thought it was absolutely amazing. 

I’ve read that and then that led me into the Becky Chambers Wayfarer series and those four books are not super plot heavy. They’re very character driven, but they are four of the best books I’ve ever read. So I’m getting much more into that world of sci-fi. I realized there’s a lot of overlap between what I liked exclusively over the first five decades of my life and what I’m really discovering now. There’s a book called Winters Orbit by Everina Maxwell. It’s worth a read. It is. It is a science fiction story, but there’s a romance at the heart of it, which I was not expecting. It’s very real. I’m not a huge romance reader, although I’ve also expanded into that because I never thought I’d like science fiction. But what if I like romance [too]? I hope that I’m going to continue. Expanding my genre collection and not sticking with the literary fiction and crime fiction.

• Well, that is a huge plug and I didn’t ask you to say it because we are covering NK Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy starting in January so. 

I’m jealous of the people who are reading it for the first time. 

• I am reading it for the first time. My co-host specifically asked me not to read it until we covered it so she could take over the plot. . 

Ohh you. Are you in for a treat! I am so envious. 

• I’m just jealous you got to read those because all I know is that they’re amazing. And you know, we can’t wait to dive into your books as well. So thank you so much for joining

Thank you for having me!

• Where can readers find you?

https://www.paulaustinardoin.com/

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