We were lucky to catch up with Ken La Salle recently and have shared our conversation below.

Ken, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

I work as an independent author because I have a lot of dreams to fulfill. I don’t believe in bucket lists, which puts me on a ticking clock. I wrote my entire life, as I tried to fit into the corporate world, but didn’t invest in writing full time until 2012, so I’m relatively young for an old author.
If I had started in my twenties, I would have had decades to write whatever I liked. As it was, I decided to listen to my wife and take a chance on myself just before I turned 50. When that birthday came, having written a few novels and learned some ropes, I made a list that turned out to be my career direction. The list included three items.
First, I wanted to write a grand, sprawling space opera. James Bond meets the Lord of the Rings, is what I called it. My James Bond turned out to be a broken-down private detective who can’t hold a license named Max Dedge. He and a few friends stumble upon an alien conspiracy taking apart our solar system piece by piece. The only thing that can stop them is the magic from another world. This has already come together in its first trilogy and I’m calling the series The BreakThrough, available in ebook and paperback.
My background is in theater, both writing plays and acting. I’ve also written and performed monologues, a la Spalding Gray, around Southern California. To continue pursuing this avenue I enjoyed, without having to pay for the theater space, I built a recording studio in a closet (of course) and have released three monologues you can listen to online (via Audible, Spotify, etc). That was item two on my list.
In my most recent monologue, Cambria, I talked about the period in my marriage when my need to be an author pushed me out of my marketing career, leaving me with no other option, especially when my wife, Vicky, insisted. I had to face becoming what I always wanted to be, meaning I had to be however much a failure or success but, mostly, I had to find a way to live a life as an artist or lose the best marriage I could have imagined. Did I mention it’s a comedy?
But you’re here to hear about real risk. The third item on my list was to find a way to create an audience for my work. My background in acting made me comfortable in front of a camera, which was good because I’m terrible in front of people, so I created a YouTube channel. This happened around Covid and I got a few viewers. Things were looking good.
Then, something happened.
The viewers disappeared.
My books stopped selling.
I got covid. Long covid. Something called Swan Neck Syndrome, which is when your spine starts to bend the wrong way – long story short, I had a few rough years.
And I realized that YouTube wasn’t going to work the way I thought it would.
That’s why, about a month ago, I took part in my first Indie Writer’s Day at my local library in Anaheim, California. It was awkward. I still deal with imposter syndrome, but my beautiful wife was with me, and she manages me like I’m a superstar, so it was okay. And I’ll be doing a lot more of these moving forward.
Being an independent author is all about taking risks. It’s about saying, “Yes, I know that’s been proven by an algorithm to sell but what if we told this story?” And then, smiling.

Ken, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

What could I possibly tell you about myself…
I’m hopelessly in love with my wife and I’ve always wanted to be an author. Somehow, I’ve written dozens and have found a few people who enjoy them.
My first writing job was writing commercial parodies for my junior high school newspaper.
My first short story, written at 17, was a moment-by-moment account of someone dying after having slashed their wrists… because I really wanted to know and I didn’t have to actually do it because I had an imagination but my mother… oh, my mother… and all the references to therapists after that. No, she was not pleased.
In high school, I wrote a newspaper column in which I basically mocked just as much as my 17-year-old body could mock. Yeah, it was a banner year.
I spent most of my life promising that I would never write a romance novel and, Heaven Enough, my best selling novel to date is well, I prefer the term “romantic story.”
Earlier this year, I released a zombie novel called Wormfood, in which the zombies are sex-crazed lunatics being eaten alive by worms. That was fun.
I’ve written 8/9ths of 3 trilogies that I’m so proud of, I’d like to tell you about them now…
I’ve already mentioned The BreakThrough. Earth itself is at stake in an intergalactic battle for ultimate knowledge and it’s up to a few, unlikely
heroes to save it in this epic, 9 novel series.
The Heaven series explores the value of love in three books and with the last one titled “Heaven For Now” you just know there’s another coming.
What does it mean to be an artist? Work of Art is a series that explores just that. I’m re-releasing the first two chapters with new covers in 2026, with the third chapter also coming out in 2026.
I recently watched an interview with George Carlin from years back, and he was saying that after forty years his work just felt like it got better and I’ve been feeling this in my own work, which unsurprisingly I’ve been at for about forty years. My next monologue, Fences, is coming next year. I’m pitching my first Christmas novel, Up On a Rooftop, to agencies and publishers. And I’ve never loved writing nearly as much as I do now.
Keep an eye out.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

I love this question because, when I saw it, I thought, “Uh oh. You’re going to have to be honest.”
And I love being honest.
The simple truth, as an independent author, is that I won’t see the type of monetary renumeration someone who has other people to say monetary renumeration for them might, if you see what I mean.
No, I had this moment, also back around my fiftieth birthday, in which I understood that I didn’t want to change who I was to fit the mold of best-selling this or that. I never fit in any mold that was not my mold… I should rephrase that, but I won’t. I learned to accept whatever consequences came with that understanding, with the support of my amazing wife, because that allowed me the freedom to simply be the best I can possibly be at this life, nay dream, of being an author.
So, what does an author do? An author tells stories honestly. An author isn’t afraid to find truth; in fact, an author looks for truth. An author is a rebel and a revolutionary. An author does it because it’s fun.
So, there’s the goal. Now, the trick has been and continues to be to live that reality and love that reality.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

The lesson I had to unlearn made me an independent author.
When I began submitting novels to agencies and publishers, back in the steampunk future of the 1990s, I would receive notes back in which someone at the agency or publisher would explain to me one of the rules I clearly had not yet learned in the writing world. (Possibly such as: Don’t write run on sentences.)
Some of the rules told me not to trust my sense of humor. Some of the rules told me not to write the world as I saw it. Some of the rules told me to stifle who I was because I was a complicated individual. And they don’t like complicated individuals. They want the individuals they can market and sell at, to, and for. (That part doesn’t seem to change.)
I had to unlearn the rules that provided me with the illusion that I was ever going to fit in that mold.
I have to write from this complicated background; I don’t have a choice. It’s how I understand the world. It brings me characters like Arturo Delgado, who would be a hero in any other world except he really likes stealing things, and Heather Brooker, who hiked the Pacific Crest Trail believing she was going to die only to meet the love of her life and then to die… and I write about two novels a year, which for me means I get to live in those worlds, usually with headphones on and a pretty great soundtrack.
I knew the teacher of a ghost-writing class once who asked me if I’d rather make enough money to buy a bag full of groceries or enough money to buy a carload of groceries and I told her I’d love to have life so full that I only needed to buy a bag full of groceries, which may not have been entirely honest but being an author does have some perks.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.kenlasalle.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ken_la_salle/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kenlasalleAuthor