"You've Got to Go Where the People Are"

S.A. Cosby's wife gave him the best career advice he ever took.

Shawn Cosby always wanted to write. He studied writing until he couldn’t afford any more classes. Then he did what those who aspired to get published do. He continued to sit his butt in a chair and write. He wrote all the time and supported himself managing a hardware store and helping transport bodies for his wife’s funeral home in rural Virginia near the Chesapeake Bay.

“What I thought would happen…I’ll be able to write, maybe not full time, but a few books every couple of years,” he says. “I never thought I would be a full-time writer.”

His work was good, but nobody knew about it. His is a story of what every writer needs to understand and most hate to do—they must network to find success. And what form does that take? Hanging out at a bar with writer friends? Going to writers’ conferences? Signing up for pitch sessions with agents?

Networking is about getting discovered, and Shawn, who goes by S.A. Cosby, has discovered that being talented is one thing and being discovered something altogether different.

Cosby didn’t have an agent when he participated in a reading at the Wonderland Ballroom in Washington, D.C. Austin Camacho, editorial director for Intrigue Publishing, a small indie publisher in Maryland, caught his act and asked to read his manuscript. Camacho loved it and told Shawn he wanted to publish him.

The first printing of My Darkest Prayer was 1,500 copies. “It didn’t blow the world up,” Cosby says. “I got some nice reviews and got noticed by other writers and fans.”

After Intrigue Publishing accepted My Darkest Prayer, Cosby considered attending his first Bouchercon mystery writers conference being held that year in St. Petersburg, Florida. It was 2018 and he was forty-five years old.

“I wasn’t going to go. I didn’t have a lot of money,” he says. But his wife, Kimberly, persuaded him to attend, took money out of their savings and bought him a ticket.

“You’ve got to go where the people are,” she told him. Without a doubt, that was the best career advice he ever got. (The reading public thanks you, Kimberly.)

When he arrived at Bouchercon, his friend, Eryk Pruitt, asked him to sit on a writer’s panel on southern crime fiction, which she was moderating. “You bring a unique perspective,” Pruitt told him. Cosby didn’t want to do it.

“I already told them you’re on the panel,” he replied.

Literary agent Josh Getzler of Hannigan, Salky, Getzler was in the audience, and was intrigued. Getzler caught up with Cosby after the session. “I like the way you talk about fiction,” he said. “Do you have anything you’re working on?”

Cosby was working on Blacktop Wasteland. “I wanted that to be a little different, a little more intense,” Cosby says.

Getzler quickly signed him in December 2018 and sold Wasteland to Flatiron books the following February. Five publishers expressed interest and the novel was sold at auction. It was released in July 2020 and was lauded by the likes of crime luminaries Lee Child, Dennis Lehane, Walter Mosley, and Attica Locke.

Six months after publication, his first royalty check arrived. It was more money than Cosby earned in the previous five years. “It changed my life…I’ve been able to help family and friends. I come from a very poor background.”

Blacktop Wasteland didn’t initially hit the best seller lists but sold steadily until it became a phenomenon. Of course, Hollywood came calling. Cosby’s third crime novel, Razorblade Tears, didn’t suffer from such a fate. The world had discovered him by then and it debuted at number ten on the New York Times bestseller list.

By now, sales of his first novel, My Darkest Prayer, began to follow his two bestsellers—so much so, that Flatiron bought the rights from Camacho and reissued it. And it’s all because he stepped out and networked.

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Former investigative reporter Rick Pullen is the author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice. He’s also a magazine columnist and feature writer.

Thanks for reading Idol Talk! Subscribe for free or support my work with a paid subscription. — Rick Pullen