Writing For The Long-Term With Tess Gerritsen

How can you write a series which keeps your readers engaged, while still keeping your creative spark alive? How can you sustain a writing career for the long term? With Tess Gerritsen.

In the intro, The Creator Economy report [The Tilt]; Publisher Rocket tutorial.

Today's show is sponsored by IngramSpark, who I use to print and distribute my print-on-demand books to 39,000 retailers including independent bookstores, schools and universities, libraries and more. It's your content—do more with it through IngramSpark.com.

Tess Gerritsen is the multi-award-winning and internationally bestselling author of the ‘Rizzoli & Isles' series adapted for TV and other medical thrillers and suspense novels with over 40 million copies sold. She's also a filmmaker, director, and screenwriter, and her latest novel is Listen to Me.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

* Tips for discovery writing* Keeping readers engaged over a long series* Staying creatively engaged and making time for writing ideas that might not fit anywhere* The differences between writing books and writing for TV* Tapping into creative darkness without being overwhelmed by it* Changes in the publishing industry and increased responsibility for marketing* Tips for a long-term writing career

You can find Tess Gerritsen at TessGerritsen.com and on Twitter @tessgerritsen

Transcript of Interview with Tess Gerritsen

Joanna: Tess Gerritsen is the multi-award-winning and internationally bestselling author of the ‘Rizzoli & Isles' series adapted for TV and other medical thrillers and suspense novels with over 40 million copies sold. She's also a filmmaker, director, and screenwriter, and her latest novel is Listen to Me. Welcome to the show, Tess.

Tess: Thank you for inviting me. I'm happy to be here.

Joanna: I'm so excited to talk to you. So let's wind the clock back. You were a medical doctor before you started writing.

How do you incorporate that medical background into your novels even many years after you stopped practicing?

Tess: The funny thing is, when I first started writing books, I didn't incorporate any medicine into it because I was writing romantic suspense, and I thought, ‘Oh, nobody cares about medicine. It's a day job for me,' and I think that most of us who have day jobs think of them as humdrum.

It wasn't until I wrote a book called Harvest and that was published in 1996 where the medicine came into play. And I found out, hey, audiences do like these details. So I incorporate my memories of what it's like to ...