An Author With 1,000 Amazon Reviews Who Turned down a TV Option
A conversation with prolific author John Pearce
Hello Friends,
Today I would like to share a conversation with author
. He’s the author of Treasure of Saint-Lazare which has over 1,000 reviews on Amazon!I believe it’s important for writers to support each other. So, when I saw that John had a book, I immediately grabbed a copy for a review down the road. I know that many writers struggle to get any visibility for their books, and that many of the marketing services that target writers are just an expensive waste of time.
I like to say that I write “book reflections” rather than “book reviews.” The idea is that the final article has to be interesting even for people who might not be interested in the book. My book reflections are sent to my audience, so they have to contain a lot of my perspective in order to keep that audience happy. My review publication is called Write and Review (
provides invaluable insight there):John’s book is a fascinating little thriller set against the backdrop of stolen Nazi treasure. It’s a great “airplane read” that will inspire you to learn a little more about history. Here’s my review: How Humanity Is a Consequence of Recognizing that True Value Can’t Be Owned.
The article was Boosted, and I hope that helps to move a few more copies. Even though I picked up my copy on Amazon, I didn’t notice that the book already had 1,000 reviews!
Small press and independently published writers dream of getting 1,000 reviews!
After I sent my review to John, we started chatting about independent publishing, Substack, and Medium. I realized that John’s questions would be of value to many writers out there. I proposed that we continue our conversation as an article, and that’s what you’re reading now.
I’d like to start off by asking John to give us a little more background information. Please tell us about your career, your web page, and how you managed to accumulate so many reviews.
Words from John Pearce:
Hi, Walter, and thanks for inviting me to this chat.
I’ve been around a while and I’ve done quite a few things in that time, but my writing skills and habits were formed in journalism, first as an AP reporter in Mississippi, where I covered the Civil Rights struggle, and then in Washington, where I covered economics and finance.
I married a Washington Post reporter and we moved to Germany, where we edited English-language expat magazines in Frankfurt and wrote freelance for the International Herald Tribune, mainly economics, banking, and finance articles. The paper had no German-speaking reporters on staff.
I managed to convince myself that if John Le Carré could write cold-war Germany thrillers, so could I, so I took a shot at it. I still have on a shelf somewhere the notebook I started during a long stay in Italy as we began our trip back home to Washington, writing in the dining room of a convent/B&B in Assisi. It’s my luck that none of it got published.
Years later, I decided to have another go. One week I was stuck at home with a scratched cornea, living more or less in the dark, and began thinking about the plot that would eventually become Treasure of Saint-Lazare. By that time we were living part of most years in Paris and I knew the city pretty well (it’s still a second home).
Plotting began in the dark and continued when I could see again. Writing brought pain of a different sort. I explored trad publishing but was not impressed by the agents who responded to my queries, so decided to take the indie route, found an editor in Canada and a cover designer in England, and was off to the races. Both are still part of my team.
I had some good luck along the way. I submitted *Treasure* to the Readers’ Favorite writing competition and it was chosen the top-ranked historical mystery of the year, which came with a medal on a ribbon, stickers for the cover, and a certain amount of welcome attention. I’ve had one offer of a TV option, on which I passed, but one of the items on my Things list is to restart that project.
I networked to find readers, to the point that Amazon now tells me I have 1,075 reviews and ratings.
Since that time I’ve published three more in the series. Last Stop: Paris is a true sequel, Finding Pegasus is a semi-techno thriller that reflects my own nerdiness, and the 2023 book, The Final Heist, wraps up the entire series with a shootout between a tugboat and a Victory ship on the Med.
All focus on Paris but shepherd the reader to other exotic locales (Florida, Hungary, San Antonio, the karst caves of Mediterranean Spain). All feature Eddie Grant, a rich-as-Croesus Parisian who’s the third man in his family to become an American military officer and lives in the penthouse of a hotel he owns near the Louvre. His partner is a six-foot eye-catching blonde Sorbonne professor whose father is a prominent senior inspector of Paris police. His confederate is a college classmate who has risen far in the CIA and calls on Eddie for volunteer assistance at least once per book. There is sex.
The working title of my next project is *Washington Square*, and it has more of a domestic U.S. focus, with a look back at the war as experienced in the Catskills. I hope to follow that with a genuine World War II story about Eddie’s father Artie, who FDR recruited to be an American military spy in France, posing as a collaborator. (It was his role as a Monuments Man that led to immense grief in Eddie’s life and the main friction points in *Treasure.*)
And now I have a question for you. You’re a stalwart of Substack; you’re also a seasoned writer with an international viewpoint. I need to overhaul my marketing for several reasons, not least of which is to sell some books but perhaps as important is to scratch my storytelling itch. Pitching free promos and book swaps hasn’t been very satisfying, and throwing ad money at Facebook (er, Meta) and Amazon seems to be a mug’s game with a very low ROI. So my web marketing presence is something I need to improve.
I maintain two sites, one for books called JohnPearceBooks.com, and a blog called PartTimeParisian.com, but the fact that we’re in this discussion is a reflection of my ambivalence about both of them. The books site is semi-static but seems necessary, while the blog feels more like an albatross. I’ve been thrashing about, looking for a better approach, for months, and have settled on Substack and Medium as vehicles for more long-form writing in support of my novels and my ideas on public affairs, perhaps along the lines of your essay about *Treasure*.
Comments from Walter Rhein on establishing a web presence
How to achieve a viable web presence is the million dollar question. I think the other aspect is whether it should be in “support” of your novels, or whether it should be its own initiative, or whether it can be both.
I, too, have a few small press books out there. My most successful book is only sitting at 158 reviews, so I haven’t managed to become as well established as you have. I still write novels, but I’ve been waiting to fortify my online presence a little more before I get serious about placing them.
I think the issue is fatigue. An online presence requires a lot of work. I do approximately 20 stories for Medium and 8 stories for Substack (along with Notes and Tweets). The Substack stories require a bit more energy recording the voiceover, and I prefer to use original images for all my stories. Creating those images takes a bit of energy.
The best I can do is provide more details about how I’ve built my following. The problem is that things are different now than they were when I got started. However, my status as a Boost nominator means I can provide a significant amount of guidance and assistance to quality writers who are getting established on Medium. I’m less of an expert on Substack, but I’m learning fast.
I make a solid income from my online presence, but I haven’t seen much overlap into book sales. I find that people are more inclined to give me a $5 tip on Ko-Fi than spend $5 to purchase and review one of my books.
Lately, I’ve been toying with the idea of publishing my next novel as a serial on Substack. I have 5 complete novels sitting on a shelf, so I could publish 2 or 3 chapters a week and have content for the next few years. The good news is that serializing your work on Substack doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t get a book deal at a later date.
Why did you pass up on the TV option? Was it too little money and too little chance that the project would be realized?
John’s response on the TV option
Ah! The TV option.
Of course my decision came down to the money, but it wasn't the amount that was the problem. I understand writing on spec.
I had a verbal agreement for a $1,000-$1,500 option payment and was awaiting a contract. Instead, the producer emailed to say he would rather do it on the basis of no option fee, with the promise of a payment if they didn't start filming in a year.
My own lack of knowledge about the market was another part of the problem. I would probably respond more positively to the same offer today. I haven't pursued it since, although I do think Treasure of Saint-Lazare and two of my other books would make a cinematic Netflix series. I've been thinking of finding an agent for that.
That’s enough for you all to chew on for today
As you can see, this article is a bit different than I what I usually publish, but I think this conversation represents some productive synergy. John and I have different nuggets of information, and there’s value in putting our heads together and speculating on how we might create a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
The idea of approaching television studios or Netflix is like a unicorn to me. All you have to do is read the box office reports to recognize that big numbers get thrown around. The only problem is that those big numbers sometimes have a huge minus sign in front of them.
My primary area of expertise is how to build a following on Medium. I think in the next few weeks, I’ll provide some reflection pieces on how I got started and how I feel the platform has changed.
As always, thank you all for reading, and thanks to John for providing his insights! Here’s his Medium account so you can follow him there too.
My CoSchedule referral link
Here’s my referral link to my preferred headline analyzer tool. If you sign up through this, it’s another way to support this newsletter (thank you).