Author Sydney Bauer is on a roll (+ her top 5 career tips)

Pamela Wilson interviews
Sydney Bauer at an
'in conversation' author event
earlier this year.




Australian author Sydney Bauer has published four legal thrillers in her series about criminal defense attorney David Cavanaugh. To date she has sold more than 200,000 books locally and in the US. Sydney Bauer talks to the WriteSmart blog and reveals her top 5 career tips.

Sydney Bauer is on a roll, revelling in the knowledge that her fourth book, Move to Strike, is her best selling novel to date.

“In fact, each book has sold more than the previous one so it is a good pattern that I’m following. I hope it’s a pattern that continues,” says Sydney, who lives in the eastern suburbs of Sydney with her husband and young daughter.

And there are positive signs this pattern will continue as her third novel in the series, Alibi, is released in the US this week. “Numbers should spike again over the next week or so; hoping to get up over 250,000.”

Whilst Sydney concedes that publishers always stress there is no clear answer to the question of why one book sells better than another, she has a few theories as to why her books continue do so well.

“I have developed a fan base. You have that group of people who are following the Sydney Bauer series and all the characters. That helps,” she says.

“It’s also good writing skills, the research and it is a good story. Writing a story that people can believe, and you can suck people in and take them on this magnificent ride that fools them in the end, or surprises them or makes them happy or sad.”

But she points out that no matter how great the story, if readers don’t feel a connection with the protagonist they’ll never be fully satisfied. To that end, she says it’s important for authors to be true to their characters and not to write to a formula. "You have to root for the hero," she explains.

Sydney is also true to her own writing style. A former programming director for the Seven Network and publicity director for Channel 10, Sydney has spent much of her working life behind the scenes in television studios. And it is this background that, she believes, has shaped her writing.

“I read other authors’ works and I see that they do it differently to me, perhaps less visual or it is structured less like scenes. But I write and visualise in scenes,” she says.

“I think it is because of my background. I don’t know how to write any other way. I am sure no-one else does it like that, but it makes me comfortable.”

Sydney is hopeful that her style will be the clincher that sees her stories launched onto screen. She currently has agents in the US working towards getting her novels adapted into a TV series.

Not wanting to jinx herself, she admits she doesn’t like talking about the process but reveals that it is ‘so far, so good’ and is currently in the hands of a TV network.

The fact that the books are already so visual may help a director ‘see’ the scenes and make the process of converting them into scripts a little easier. “I think it cuts the hours and work down that somebody else has to do. It would already be broken down into what’s called production segments,” says Sydney.

It’s a tough wait, but Sydney is confident she’ll know more about the prospect of a television series later this year.

Next year, Sydney will release the fifth book in the series, Matter of Trust. Ahead of her publishing schedule, she is already 40,000 words in the next book, aptly named Book 6, for now.
In the meantime, she can look forward to the rush of sales from Alibi in the US to remind her of her successes to date.

Sydney’s top 5 career tips

1. The key to getting published… is to be proactive; and to be able to take rejection.

2. I combat the loneliness of the job by… stopping work to call my mum.

3. Authors shouldn’t... go down the route of copying something they think might sell, because inevitably it won’t work. What’s going to be the next big thing? What comes after wizards and vampires? I don’t know.

4. The main ingredient of a good thriller is… good writing skills, research and a story people can believe. It is grasping hold of your reader and making them satisfied.

5. And the secret to grasping hold of your reader is… to make your characters the key. You really have to make the reader care about them and then the story follows from there.












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