5 Minutes Alone… With Bente Gallagher
Bente Gallagher finally gets to roll out her first-written novel, A CUTTHROAT BUSINESS, as her fifth published mystery. Taking a little from both the write-what-you-know and dream-big axioms, Bente delivers the fun and intrigue between each set of covers.
We’d like to thank her for taking the time to be part of our “5 Minutes Alone” interview series.
AuthorScoop: What was your very first publication credit?
Bente: There was that article in the LaGuardia Community College newspaper some years ago, about a drama department production of The Wiz… No, I wasn’t a student there, although my husband was. In retrospect, I think the byline may have been his, not mine, although I’m damn sure I was the one who actually wrote the article. Along with quite a few of his assignments and essays, as I recall.
As books go, A CUTTHROAT BUSINESS was the first complete manuscript that I wrote, but it took a while to find a home. While we were waiting for a publisher to fall in love with it, an editor at Berkley Prime Crime approached my agent and asked if I might be interested in generating a series for them about a home renovator. She’d read A CUTTHROAT BUSINESS and decided it didn’t fit their line of cozy crafts- and activity-related mysteries, but she liked me and my writing style, and also thought my background as a realtor and home renovator might be a good fit for them. I was offered a three-book contract to create the Do-It-Yourself home renovation mysteries. The first book, FATAL FIXER-UPPER, was released in November 2008. I guess that’d be my first professional publishing credit.
AuthorScoop: Tell us about your latest release.
Bente: A CUTTHROAT BUSINESS was the first book I wrote, four years ago. It’s a rather obvious case of 
writing what you know. I was a brand new realtor in Nashville, going into empty houses with strangers every day, and I got to thinking about what I might find behind the locked—and sometimes unlocked—doors. Out of that came the story of a struggling realtor and Southern Belle, Savannah Martin, who’s sitting in her office one early Saturday morning hoping that the phone will ring, when the phone rings and the man on the other end tells her that he’s been stood up by Savannah’s colleague and competitor Brenda Puckett.
Savannah, delirious at the thought that Brenda has dropped the ball, rushes to the rescue, only to discover that her caller is none other than Rafael Collier, former black sheep of the little town of Sweetwater, where they both grew up. Oh yeah, and Brenda is dead inside the house, chubby throat cut from ear to ear; that’s why she was unable to show him around. Of course, Savannah has to figure out who killed Brenda, and avoid getting killed—or kissed—by Rafe, all before the money in her savings account runs out and she has to go back to selling make-up at the mall.
It’s a sort of a hybrid of genres: a Southern romantic chick-lit mystery, or maybe a romantic mystery with a Southern chick. Or as it has also been described, “a frothy girl drink of houses, hunks, and whodunit, narrated in a breezy first person voice.” (The Nashville Scene said that, and I love it.)
AuthorScoop: Aside from your own hard work, who (or what) else do you feel has contributed to your success?
Bente: My success? Don’t know that I’ve had a whole lot of that, frankly, but whatever you want to call it, it wouldn’t have happened without a lot of people marketing and promoting and talking about the books. There’s my in-house publicist, employed by the publisher, and my independent publicist, employed—or at least paid—by me, and then there are all the people who’ve read and reviewed all the books on their blogs and in their magazines and newspapers and on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and all the other websites. None of us would be anywhere without readers, of course, and I’m sure luck has played a part too. And then there’s God…
AuthorScoop: At what time of day or night do you do your best writing?
Bente: I don’t think my writing changes much with the day or time. I can write any time, just as long as I have the necessary time to get into the zone, if you will. That said, if I wait too long in the morning before getting to work, it becomes easier to get distracted and not get to work at all. I do better, i.e. I’m more disciplined, when I get started right away. The quality of the words I churn out seems to be much the same whether I’m writing at night or in the morning, and whether I write fast or slow, though.
AuthorScoop: Finally, what advice would you give to new or unpublished writers?
Bente: Read a lot. In any genre, not just the one you think you might want to write in. Sure, you’ll have to be intimately familiar with what sells and what doesn’t, what works and what doesn’t, in your chosen genre, but good writing has a way of sinking in when you’re not paying attention, and you can absorb good writing from any genre or format. So read widely, anything you can your hands on. It’s the best way to learn the craft of writing, and the best way to figure out what you like and don’t like.
Then write a lot. The more you do something, the better you’ll get at it—usually—and writing is no exception. Everything will be easier the more you do it.
And finally, learn as much as you possibly can about the business you want to get into. Because it is a business, and it has its own ins and outs and ways of functioning, and if you don’t understand the inner workings of the publishing industry, you’re gonna find it hard to break in. Case in point: some seven years ago, I thought I wanted to write romance novels. Someone had told me it was ‘easy’ to get published in romance—I’ll take a break for laughter here; no, it isn’t ‘easy’ to get published in any genre—and I thought I’d give it a try. So I wrote a synopsis and shipped it off to the biggest romance publisher in the world, Harlequin. (I should probably mention that at this point I hadn’t actually written a book. I just had an idea for a story, wrote a two page synopsis, put it in an envelope, and hoped for the best.) A couple of weeks later I got a response: a two page rejection letter detailing everything that was wrong with my synopsis and outlining suggestions for what I could do to fix it.
Now I know that this is code for ‘fix this and send it back to me.’ Then, I didn’t know anything except that I’d gotten rejected. So I put the letter in a drawer, never looked at the manuscript again, and basically shot myself in the foot. If I’d known a little more about the industry and how it works, I might have gotten published a whole lot sooner.
Just goes to show.
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A CUTTHROAT BUSINESS rolls out later this month from PublishingWorks. You can secure a signed bookplate for your copy by contacting Bente through her website - www.jenniebentley.com.
AuthorScoop
