Author Spotlight | John and David Smith.

We had the pleasure of interviewing the talented John and David Smith, check it out below!  

What has been your highlight of publishing so far?

Seeing all our hard work finally paying off. It has been a long journey. The project that we nurtured was like a child, growing, maturing from our minds in to a book that we could hold in our hands and know that we have achieved something special.

What Kind of research do you do, and how long do you spend researching before beginning a book?

I guesss the research we base our books on is spiritual. A friend of ours is a spiritual medium. With his help the vale between our world and the spirit world is like a phone call away, (so to speak). Even as we were writing the book we were still learning more about the spirit world but not all of what we have discribed in the book is fact. Some of what we have written down was of our own creation if only to enhance the story the way we had wanted it to be.

How many hours a day do you write?

That all depends on what hours we work.

What period of your life do you find you write about most often? (child, teenager, young adult.)

We don’t really write like that, but, in ‘The village that fell into hell,’ we did place a few areas of our life that pulled along the story quite nicely. Kind of like little paper snippets of what our real life had been like.

What did you edit out of this book?

That was our problem. We had written this book a long time ago but we could not get it published so we stripped it right back, changed the title and re-wrote the story. So to answer the question, we would say that we edited most of it until we felt comfortable with what we had written down on the computer, and even then we could not help ourselves but to tinker with it some more.

Do you hide any secrets in your books that only a few people will find?

Yes. There are a few of them scattered amongst pages.

What was the hardest part to write?

That would have to be, visualising the story in your mind and then putting it down into words that will not only make sense to us, the writer, but also the reader. Another issue we had would have had to been when writing together as brothers. It is not an easy thing, but we worked through it in the end by working on the book seperately. It may not be the right solution for other writers who have a co writer in tow, but for us, it worked a treat.

What advice would you give to aspiring authors? 

That’s easy. It could be a job interview that did not go as well as you would have liked. There could be a girl or boy that you fancy. Rejections are a way of life but it is the way you respond amidst those rejections that offers you hope. When we wrote our acknowledements for the ‘The Village That Fell into Hell’ we summerised on the fact that if you have a dream, never give up on it, because you never know what is around the corner. We wrote them words because it ment so much to us and if just one person finds inspiration and comfort from our words then we feel we have done our job.

If you could review Olympia publishers in a few words, what would they be?

We was once told. ‘It is about getting your foot in the door.’ Thanks to Olympia Publishers we were given that chance, and through their hard work and dedication they have made us feel like part of the publishing community.