Interview With Editor and Course Creator John Fox
I stumbled upon John’s website a few months go, completely by chance, and was positively surprised to find out that we both share a collaboration with the lovely Ms. Bellamy Westbay, author of “The Infinity Series”. John Fox is the founder of Bookfox, he is a course creator and a professional novel editor.
Hi, I’m Ana Grigoriu-Voicu, book cover designer to independent and best selling authors all around the world. My focus lies on creating powerful visual stories for your published masterpieces. Via my blog I’m aiming towards providing you with the unique artistic perspective of someone who wants to turn each project into a best-seller. If you want to find out more about my work or you’d like to stay in contact, feel free to connect with me over Facebook, Instagram or e-mail.
Your work was published in the Chicago Tribune, Crazyhorse, Arts & Letters, Los Angeles Review, and Hobart. You’ve also won countless writing contests. What is the secret ingredient to your success?
I submitted widely. I didn’t get depressed by getting rejected (okay, I got a little depressed. But I also sent it out again to another 20 lit mags).
I also think it’s important to write what I wanted to write, rather than what other people wanted me to write. Nowadays, writers have a thousand bugs in their ear from their family, friends, and writing partners, and you kind of have to ignore all that and march to the beat of your own drummer.
On your way to publishing success, you’ve met with quite a few dismissals from publishers. You call them your “shoebox of rejections”. What inspired you to keep on writing and fulfill your dream?
Back when I was traveling through Italy with a few college friends of mine, I got nicknamed the Bulldog. It’s because I would bulldog through any situation to help my travel plans. When a train was leaving without us, I stuck my arm in the door until we could all get inside. I screamed at the gypsies trying to pickpocket us. I persisted in speaking very bad Italian (mixed with terrible Spanish) until we could figure out the right bus to take.
What inspired me to persist in my writing was my bulldog personality. I never give up. I never submit. I will figure out a way to win.
The book cover design for your novel “I Will Shout Your Name” is quite attention-grabbing. What is the story behind its powerful illustration?
I got to work with Alicia Kleman for the cover design, and she did a fantastic job of reading the book (too many cover designers don’t read the book) and then being inspired by a particular scene in “To Will One Thing” where the protagonist leaning out the window and has this out-of-body experience.
I think the starburst pattern really expresses this almost supernatural experience he’s having, where his mind is unhooked and his body feels like it’s not his own, and he has this kind of epiphany about what he should do. He’s looking through the window toward the future of his life, a life where he has to leave his girlfriend, a girlfriend he loves, in order to serve as a missionary.
We wrangled through a process of several different fonts and text placements, and also through some color designs, and hit up on this one. I’m very happy with the result – it always stands out on the sale rack at conferences.
You’ve visited more than 40 countries, when did you catch the travel bug and how did the travel experience influence your debut novel “I Will Shout Your Name”?
For most of my life I spent every summer traveling. Really, from the moment I turned 18 until I had children at 33, I got out of the country every single year. The year wasn’t complete until I had at least one stamp in the passport!
Travel is simply my biggest passion — and more than just travel, adventure — and it makes sense that would find its way into my fiction.
The travel theme in the book was organic, it wasn’t planned. I kept on writing story after story and found out many of my stories were set internationally. So I decided, almost after the fact, to arrange the collection in that manner, and focus on stories that took adventures abroad.
“Because of my journey as a writer, from my shoebox of rejections all the way to winning contests, I started up Bookfox” – John Fox
As a former editor of the Southern California Review, you had the opportunity to immerse yourself in thousands of stories, what do you think is the most common mistake writers make in their storytelling?
I’ve written so much about this, probably because I’m very mistake prone. That’s one thing I always emphasis on my email lists — I’m very fallible and have made the mistakes I’m telling others not to make. There’s a tendency to create an aura of invincibility around writers, and I break that right down and show some vulnerability.
Here are three posts about mistakes:
• How not to start a novel
• 10 Career Mistakes
• Short Story Mistakes
You decided to leave the academic world behind to establish Bookfox, your blog and online teaching platform for authors. How did this decision come about?
I’d had a one-year full time position at a local university in 2011-2012 and it wrapped up just as my twins were born. Since my wife had a steady job teaching photography, we decided she would keep bringing in the bacon and the health insurance, and I would be a stay-at-home Dad.
So I stayed home with my twin boys, and I was happy to do it. During that time I thought: I don’t want to go back to teaching at the university level. I didn’t have a Ph.D. and that meant I’d always be treated as second tier, and I’d been spinning my wheels for a decade as an adjunct without any headway. Unfortunately, I had no idea what else I would do. I literally had no skills other than teaching, and had done nothing else as an adult.
I moped around for a few years, rejecting one idea after another, sure I’d be a stay-at-home Dad forever, and then my wife started me on some entrepreneur podcasts. They got me thinking in alternative directions, and I figured out that maybe I could use my blog to make money. I taught myself SEO, pumped up the traffic by 3000%, and created a post offering my editing services.
My first full year I made 6 figures, quadruple what I made as an adjunct teaching five courses.
This year, I’ve made more in a month with Bookfox than I made in a year as an adjunct.
I’m very glad I’m no longer in academia.
“Bookfox is my gift back to the literary community that supported me through my writing journey. Because I believe that the writing community needs to support its own.” – John Fox
What courses do you offer authors on your platform?
I just released a course on “How to Write a Splendid Sentence” and I’m really proud and excited about it. I’ve written about sentences for so long on Bookfox, and spent years compiling beautiful sentences, so it was a real pleasure to sort out my thoughts on the subject and create a primer to teach writers how to level up their sentences.
I also have a course on how to market your book, “Your First Bestseller,” mainly because I got asked about it on a near daily basis over email.
It makes sense that writers are clueless when it comes to promoting their book – after all, they’re creatives, not marketers. So I put together a 45-video course that compiled everything I knew about the techniques of book marketing, and the people who have taken it have sung its praises.
Lastly, I have a children’s book course. I take you step-by-step through the process of writing, editing, and publishing a children’s book. People love this course. I’ve gotten more reviews for it than anything else, and that’s because I keep it simple and I’m very encouraging.
Through BookFox, you also offer various editing services, such as book editing, short story editing, or copy editing. How should an author prepare before starting a project with you?
Prepare themselves to be humble. Most writers underestimate the amount of revision they’ll need to do. Certainly with developmental editing, prepare yourself to radically change a manuscript – cut a chapter, cut a scene, cut a character.
Even with copyediting, writers think: “Oh, I’ll need to change one or two things a page.” And then every single page has ten to twenty corrections, and they’re just flabbergasted.
If you have an attitude that you’re willing to do whatever it takes to improve your book, then you’re in the right mindspace to hire an editor.
What is one of the most influential pieces of advice you’ve ever received?
Write every day. It seems so stupid, but as long as you write every day, you will create enough material that your career as a writer will thrive.
What are your future development plans for Bookfox?
I’m going to create more courses. I have plans for 10 more already. I just need time to shoot them – and having kids and wife underfoot during coronavirus isn’t exactly giving me that time!
Where can readers, writers, and authors follow your work on social media?
I have a twitter account @bookfox that I diddle around on with book-related stuff, but I’ve found that social media is far less effective than email. I have a huge email list and hundreds more writers join every day.
I have 4 different email subjects:
• Children’s books
• Sentence Writing
• Novel Writing
• Poetry
Writers can sign up for each one when they land on a page with that particular topic on Bookfox.
You can connect with John at:
And purchase “I will shout your name” in e-book and paperback formats from Amazon.
Share this article:
