Author S. T. SANCHEZ: Welcome Kevin J Kennedy co-author of You Only get One Shot

Kevin J Kennedy is the co-author of You Only Get One Shot, and the man behind the best-selling Collected Christmas Horror Shorts & Collected Easter Horror Shorts anthologies. His short stories have featured in many other notable anthologies in the horror genre.
Kevin lives in a small town in Scotland with his wife, step daughter and two strange little cats.

ST: Welcome Kevin, can you tell us what are you working on?

KK: I’m currently putting together the Collected Halloween Horror Shorts anthology. It’ll be the third in the series. I had never planned on releasing a series of anthos but after the success of Collected Christmas Horror Shorts and Collected Easter Horror Shorts I just had to do a Halloween one. So far it’s shaping up to be a great book with lots of fantastic authors involved again.

ST: How do you promote your books? Any tips you can share?

KK: I’m not very organised so it’s been different with each book. I don’t keep a list of reviewers or anything like that so it means I generally just search horror blogs and contact the ones I like. I always offer review copies out to anyone who is recommended to me and there are a few people who have supported me from the start so I always send them a copy of anything I do to see if they want to read it. I do a lot of Facebook and Twitter sharing and I have my website now too. I think it’s just a matter of letting people know it’s available and if it’s a good book and reasonable priced it should sell.

SS: I think that's the key, just spreading the word. Is You Only get One shot a stand-alone novel or part of a series?

KK:‘You Only Get One Shot,’ was planned to be a stand-alone novel but JC had mentioned he may use the main character for his story for the Halloween antho so who knows. There may be more to come.

SS: Kevin, when you are writing what is the easiest part of the process? What is the hardest?

KK: The hardest part is the editing simply because it is so boring. I lose the will to live while doing it and often take weeks to get through it. It actually delays me writing more as I sit and think about the editing I have to do. Writing the initial story as a first draft when you have a good idea is always the easiest part.

SS: Do you have people read your drafts before you publish? How do you select beta readers?

KK: I do. I often send out a few early copies for some feedback. Mandy Tyra, who is a fantastic reviewer made a few suggestions for this one which we took on board. Author, Weston Kincade, also gave us some great input and Brandy Yassa who edits my books is a great help. The fact that this book was co-written meant that JC and I were giving each other constant feedback too.

SS: Who designed the artwork for your cover? Or did you design it yourself?

KK: Lisa Vasquez. I go to Lisa for most of my covers. She designed the Collected Horror Shorts covers and the cover to ‘The Gatekeeper,’ which is a Kindle short I have on Amazon. She is easy to work with and I love her work.

SS: I think it's so important to get a great cover. It's the first thing a reader sees. What brought about the idea for this book?

KK: JC and I were initially talking about putting a few short stories that we had, together and putting out a short collection. We then decided that as we are relatively new authors that it might be more appealing to release a novella. We liked the shorts we had and came up with the idea of having them in the book as stories written by authors who were characters in the book and the story built from there. I’ve read several books that are a cross between a collection and a novel and have been a little let down buy each of them so we really wanted to make sure that the overall story worked well. Based on the feedback so far it seems to have worked.

SS: What was your biggest challenge when writing? Did you have any writer’s block? If so, how did you work your way through it?

KK: The biggest challenge was the work/life balance. Both JC and I work full time jobs so sometimes I’d finish my bit and send back to him but he would be busy with other stuff and vice versa. The good thing was that neither of us were in a rush so we were able to just take our time and not put any pressure on the other.

SS: That's great. I think it's important not to rush. It can be hard sometimes because of the excitement as a book comes close to being finished. But patience is the key to getting a great novel. What was your writing process like?

KK: We each had two short stories we wanted to put in the book. We spent a lot of time talking about how we wanted the story to go that would link them all together and then we changed and added to the idea several times. JC wrote the introductory chapter and then I started writing in linking parts and we went from there. Neither of us were too precious about any of it which made it easy to go back to each other and suggest changes.

SS: What are your hobbies aside from writing, if any?

KK: I don’t have many hobbies. I read a lot and I like spending my spare time with my family. When you add writing into the mix I really don’t have any spare time anymore.

SS: In your novels, which character is your favorite?

KK: I don’t have a favourite character as such from the works that I have written, but I do enjoy writing flawed characters. I don’t really enjoy when someone is entirely good or evil as it’s a rare occurrence in real life. I prefer my bad guy to have some redeeming qualities or the good guy to have some major flaws. That being said, there is a character called Drexl in ‘You Only Get One Shot’ who is just a nasty piece of work. The reader is supposed to despise him. He was a lot of fun to write.

SS: Since you wrote in this genre, do you think you will ever write in other genres?

KK: I mainly read horror so I’ll always probably write horror but genres are easily crossed. Several people have said our book has a crime/noir feel to it. I love Bizarro so may try my hand at writing something in that genre in the future and I do like gritty urban stuff like Irvine Welsh’s work so that always creeps into my stories but I’m not sure I’d want to write anything of any length that didn’t have a strong horror element.