We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Chris Lynch a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Chris thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s jump back to the first dollar you earned as a creative? What can you share with us about how it happened?

I’m going to cheat here and talk about the first dollar (or pound, in my case) that I earned with my most recent project, “Welcome to Neverbury”, because I think that’s a much more interesting story.

Over the years of what I will inaccurately call my “career” as a writer, I’ve written comic books, graphic novels, plays, TV pilots, a movie, short stories, novellas, and a few books. I’ve also moved between independent publishing and traditional publishing.

For me the critical dividing line between these two types of publishing has been simple – I make money when I work with a publisher and I lose money when I go it alone.
However, this fact has never dampened my desire to “go indie”. I spent more than ten years working in digital marketing and even wrote a book that spent some time as the #1 book on digital marketing on Amazon. It didn’t make sense to me that I couldn’t join the ranks of those making a serious living through their books without a publisher.

“Welcome to Neverbury” was a book that was never meant to exist.

I’d found myself in something of a creative rut, with two different books in a semi-finished state, waiting for me to figure out exactly what it was that wasn’t right with them and fix it. The plan was to publish these the way I’d been publishing for the past few years, working with a lovely publisher who had given me a shot working with licensed Doctor Who spin offs and been my “home” ever since. Sadly, you can’t publish books that aren’t finished and I found myself badly in need of something to reboot my creative engine.

With an appropriate dose of luck, I stumbled across a writing challenge being run in February 2023. The challenge was to write a (very) short story every single day of February, inspired by a daily writing prompt from the notebook of H P Lovecraft. It seemed like just the thing… and it was.

By the end of the month, I hadn’t quite written twenty-eight stories but I had written over forty thousand words. Not just that, but they were forty thousand good words. I could feel it. This was something.

And so, with my hands on this thing that was not supposed to exist, this unbidden creation that had slithered into the world through the cracks in my head, I saw the opportunity to take another chance on “going indie”.
This time though, I took it seriously. I hired an editor. I persuaded my wife, an English teacher, to do a second edit after that editor let me down. I made a marketing plan, I built an advertising campaign. I ran an ARC, reaching out to reviewers before and after the release. I treated it like a project, like a BUSINESS, and I kept records of every penny going in and out.

And so I knew precisely when I’d made it into profit.

“Welcome to Neverbury” has been my most successful book so far and, I hope, the start of a very successful new era in what I’m still not sure I can call my “career”.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Thanks to a somewhat eclectic career so far, people might have come across my work in anything from a comic book to a movie. Whatever medium I’m working in though, some things remain the same. It’s usually scary, it’s also sometimes funny, because real scary things are sometimes both. It’s certainly going to have some geek or pop culture references in it, because I love puzzles and games and things hiding inside other things. One of the reviews I’m most proud of receiving is “the unlikely and strangely adorable lovechild of HP Lovecraft, Roald Dahl and the League of Gentleman” and I think that sums my work up pretty well.

As for what I am most proud of, I would probably say my work on the Lucy Wilson books. Set in the extended Doctor Who universe, they were the first books I wrote for kids and I wrote them at a time when my own kids were getting into reading (and Doctor Who!) in a big way. The looks on their faces when they found me listed on the TARDIS-apedia fan site was truly priceless to me. If I had fallen down a well and never written another book after that, it wouldn’t have mattered at all.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.chrislynch.link
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chrislynchwriter/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chrislynchthewriter/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrislynchcto/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/chrislynchwords
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVjQCRKdBaF1-1_GyRnLODg