Michael wallace author biography

You might assume that Michael Wallace has led a charmed existence as an author: his first book hit the Top right from launch, and the hits just kept coming, especially when Amazon Publishing picked him up and gave him a real push; he has now sold over a million ebooks and seemed to do it without breaking a sweat. Michael Wallace took the time over several days in September to answer my questions about writing, marketing, and the book business, and the dialogue is presented in full below and is still hugely relevant to being an author in David Gaughran: When I started self-publishing in , you were one of those guys already doing well that everyone was watching closely.

I think you uploaded your first in January of that year, and, if memory serves me right, The Righteous — your thriller set in a polygamist compound in the Utah desert — launched straight into the Top of the Kindle Store and has sold well ever since. The Righteous was my ninth completed novel. Toss in over a hundred short stories and maybe a thousand rejection letters and you start to get a picture of how persistent I was.

Michael Wallace was born in California and raised in a small religious community in Utah, eventually heading east to live in Rhode Island and Vermont.

Or maybe stubborn is the right word. I was not able to give up even in the face of overwhelming indifference on behalf of the publishing industry. I was able to interact with readers on the Amazon forum before the policies changed and gave away several hundred copies of my novels in return for honest reviews. As the books started getting visibility, a couple of big review sites, including Pixel of Ink, gave me important mentions.

The Amazon algorithms at the time were very favorable and both The Righteous and Implant got swept up in an almost miraculous updraft.

Follow Michael Wallace and explore their bibliography from Amazon's Michael Wallace Author Page.

The Righteous reached as high as 20 in the overall store as an indie book. In addition, I started to get queries from agents and publishers expressing interest in The Righteous. As someone who had been struggling to get noticed for so many years, this was perhaps the strangest thing of all. Of course, that was only the beginning of the story.

Amazon then cranked up their famed marketing machine, and, at one point, the only book selling more was The Hunger Games. That was an exciting time.