We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Mike Faricy. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Mike below.

Mike, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Have you been able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen? Was it like that from day one? If not, what were some of the major steps and milestones and do you think you could have sped up the process somehow knowing what you know now?

I’ve always loved books and I’ve wanted to write from an early age. As a kid in high school I wrote for the school paper and the year books. I wrote my first work of genius many years ago and then, somehow, finagled a lunch with a local, nationally known author. He wrote everyday in a restaurant that closed at 2:00 in the afternoon. He would remain there until 5:00, writing. Over lunch he told me about his writing experience and his popular crime fiction series. At the end of our discussion I reached down next to me and brought out my three hundred page manuscript. I handed it across the table and said, “Would you like to read my book?” He raised his hands, shook his head, and said “No,” a number of times. He then told me, “We all have a work that we keep under the bed.” I thanked him for his time, went home, reread my manuscript and decided that under the bed would be the proper place. I then went on to write six stand alone works of genius. They were written in the dark, before sunrise or after sunset because at the time we were raising three children. At the completion of each book I would dutifully send out submission requests to publishers and agents along with a self addressed envelope so I could receive my rejection in a timely manner. I went through this process for a number of years, always having my work rejected. It was on the sixth book that I received a returned submission request. The request had been sent to one of, (in those days) big five publishers in New York. The envelope was unopened and stamped with large letters in purple ink; ‘RETURN TO SENDER’. On the back of the envelope was the handwritten note; ‘This does not fit our needs at this time’. It dawned on me that Mike Faricy from St. Paul, Minnesota didn’t have a snowballs chance with these people. Luckily, there was a side gate into the publishing playground called Amazon. I had covers designed, published my six books, and haven’t looked back. I make my living selling my books, both ebooks and print. I have four crime fiction series, Hotshots, Dev Haskell P.I., Jack Dillon Dublin Tales, and the Corridor Man series. I’ve published over seventy books and if you include my boxsets, I have over a hundred works on the market and I’m adding six or seven more every year. The industry is changing constantly and thus far I’ve been able to keep up. I work very hard at it, seven days a week, and I’m blessed to have something I love to do.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

As I mentioned, I work very hard at my craft. I’m involved in writing, marketing, and building an organization seven days a week. At the end of any day it is often a solo enterprise which makes me the most boring guy in town, but that’s okay. I have a network of individuals who assist me in my endeavors, from editors, to cover designers and marketers. They all assist and continue to teach me.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

There are many stories but I think one of the most pertinent is the rejections I received from publishing companies and agents over the course of four or five years as I was starting out. This wasn’t just a few, I would send out sixty or seventy requests to have them consider my latest work. This was done in a standard format; a one page letter with three paragraphs. The first two paragraphs were a description of my manuscript. The third paragraph consisted of two sentences giving a brief bio of me. No one was interested, ever. I now make a strong six figure income and wish I could thank each and every individual who rejects my work. They forced me to work even harder to succeed. I continue to do that and now, twenty-five years later, I receive monthly requests to publish my work or have someone work as my agent. I politely turn them down.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

Initially writing my books was a side game. I worked full-time and would write in the evenings or early in the morning. I had self published ten or eleven books and was probably making enough money to take my wife out to dinner once or, in a good month twice. I was contacted by an independent book marketing group. They ran ads on the internet, not on FaceBook or Amazon but on sites readers subscribed to based on the type of books they enjoyed, romance, westerns, crime, etc. It sounds pretty basic but I was totally unaware. The first month they ran ads on my books my sales increased literally 800%. I haven’t looked back and I’ve been using them ever since to offer my work to the marketplace.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.mikefaricybooks.com
• Facebook: Mike Faricy Author
• Other: [email protected]