The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Brett McKay, Thriller and Suspense Author

Episode Date: November 16, 2022

Brett McKay, Thriller and Suspense Author Brettmckaybooks.com After an unexpected turn flushes his chosen career down the toilet, Dex Sanders is struggling to make ends meet as a used car salesman. Despite the drudgery of the job, he manages to put on a brave face for his wife, Reagan, and their two boys, until the day an unsettling encounter with a stranger coincides with a mysterious package appearing on their doorstep. Later that night, Dex and his family are abducted by a group of armed men and taken to an underground bunker, where Dex is tortured. When Dex can’t answer any of their odd questions, the strangers conclude they’ve nabbed the wrong guy, and the entire family is marked for execution. With the clock ticking, Dex must free his family and retrieve the strange box that seems to hold the answers. But doing so means running from relentless killers, uncovering the truth behind an evil as old as time, and stopping a supernatural power that threatens the entire world.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the big show. It's time. It's that time of day for the new show. Of course, I don't know.

It's that time of day for whenever you get around to listening to it. You're like, Chris, it's 8 o'clock. It's not really that time, but whatever time you're listening to the show is the time for you. So welcome to the show, my friends and family. We certainly appreciate you. The Chris Moss Show family that loves you but doesn't judge you, at least not as harshly as your mom does. Go clean your room. Anyway, guys, you know, I should modify that joke.

I should say not as harshly as your wife does because I think your wife judges you harshly than your mom. But if you're married, that's your problem. Anyway, guys, go to YouTube.com forward says Chris Voss. Goodreads.com forward says Chris Voss. Go to all those places on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, all those crazy places the kids are playing. The Chris Voss Show is not on Snapchat because we're not going to send you DMs.

That's just how we roll on the show because it's inappropriate, folks. We're a business, the Chris Voss Show. But it sounded like a good joke to hit on at the time. Anyway, we have an amazing author on the show. He's prolific. He's written multiple books. In fact, I lost count. We're going to have to ask him on the show how many he prolific. He's written multiple books. In fact, I lost count. We're going to have to ask him on the show how many he's written,

but he's a big fan favorite. Brett McKay is on the show with us today. He is the author of the latest book we'll be talking about, The Intruders. It came out June 15, 2022, and we'll be talking about what he loves to do and how he does it. He's been prolific. Pretty-lific? I does it. He's been pretty prolific. Pretty-lific?

I don't know. He could be. Something with a P. He's not really my type. But you can hear him in the background there. He's coming on the show. And when Brad McKay is not conjuring demons and bloodthirsty psychopaths, he sounds like my Tinder, to put on paper, he sells landscaping. He loves

all types of music, but hard rock and heavy metal fuel him the most. We like this guy already. He enjoys the outdoors, spending time with friends and family, curling up in front of a good movie with his wife and a bucket of popcorn and hopefully his wife doesn't judge him harshly. I don't know why we're going to use that as a callback joke today,

but maybe it'll work. He lives in Utah with his wife and two sons. We won't hold that against him. That's a Utah joke because I'm visiting Utah right now. It's his favorite time of year because he gets to decorate his house for Halloween much too early for his neighbors. He's one of those guys. He's really into horror. Welcome to the show, Brett.

How are you? I'm great. Thank you. Thank you for having me. You sound like my sick brother, and I mean that in a gentle way, but he turns his house every year into a Halloween, like what are those, a Halloween house? Yeah. Yeah.

And, you know, just I always loved that. Yeah. He turns his whole basement into a house of horror, which is very different than Jeffrey Dahmer. So welcome to the show. Give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs. Yeah, it's really easy. It's brettmckaybooks.com. And I step right off into the darkness of serial killers.

But I don't know, maybe that's appropriate for the show as we're going along. So how many books have you written? You have so much fandom going on there on Amazon. I can't keep track. Oh, thank you yeah i've got six books uh published right now and um you know a couple of them are a little bit more in the horror genre yeah but mostly they're all thrillers there you go you're pumping out one every couple years it looks like yes uh yeah that's about right this is kind of interesting

there's one called damage incorporated iporated I'm a metal metallic fan and I heard you were too is there an homage there a bit I don't know I always wondered should I name it after their song I don't know if I'd get in trouble if he finds out

he'd come after me I guess it's similar because I know that song it sounds like a company clip and they're talking about well the book is about a company of hitmen there you go well you know i don't know this is whatever you get a cnd from lars whatever you can stop by metallic and things uh i think they only get upset when you put their music on napster i think that's how it works yeah that's right so let's talk about your new book and then we'll talk about some of your other books and touch on them. You've been writing for quite some time. When did you discover to be, when did you decide

you wanted to be a horror writer? Well, really, you know, I wanted to be a writer. I probably discovered it when I was about 12 years old. I was in English class and our English teacher gave us an assignment to write a little short story, a little science fiction short story, and so I did. And she highlighted it and read it to the class and gave me this great grade on it. And, you know, just for a little quiet guy that didn't get a lot of attention, suddenly all the kids seemed to want to do the next project with me that was coming up. So it really, that's when I got the little bug.

And then I, of course, back then I was reading a lot of Louis L'Amour Westerns. That's when I started writing those Westerns. And then, you know, I'd watch Chuck Norris movies, of course. It's early 80s. So I wrote a lot of books, kind of more action-orientated like that. And it wasn't until I read, well, a couple of different books, like Paul Wilson, The Keep, and then also Stephen King's Graveyard Shift. That really turned me around.

I'm like, okay, this is my thing. Ah, Stephen King gave you the bug there at the end, huh? Yes, definitely. Those Louis L'Amour books were amazing. My grandfather, he was retired, but he would work for spare money. I guess he wasn't officially retired. I don't know how it works. But back when they were building Hemet, back then it was just kind of this little town in California out in the middle of nowhere.

And they were building all these mobile home parks for retirement people. It was much cheaper. And so they were building like homes like everywhere and golf courses everywhere. And he would go watch the houses so they didn't get robbed and vandalized and stuff. Yeah. And he would, it's really funny, he would just have to sit in the car all day and drive around, look at the houses, and they would have a golf course there. They were building a thing around it, so he'd collect the balls and sell them back to the course.

So he'd have these buckets of balls in the trunk, but in his spare time, he would read Louis L'Amour books. Yeah. And he would have like 100 of them in the back seat that he would read Louis L'Amour books. He would have like a hundred of them in the back seat that he would just be reading and he'd throw them in the back seat, I guess, when he got done with them or whatever. I grew up sometimes hanging out with him on duty.

There'd be these pile of Louis L'Amour books in the back. My grandpa was the same. My grandpa had a stack of them. I think he had every one of them in his basement. And he'd let me borrow a couple at a time, and I'd go home and read them and then come back and trade them out for another one. That's just crazy, man.

But, yeah, that guy was prolific. I mean, it's kind of like romance novels. Once you get the formula down, you just bang them out. So you start writing basically all your books are horror genre basically right well i because i like a lot of the thriller elements and suspense um i i write a lot of horror but really what drives the whole story is a thriller element so i'm kind of changing around to go well maybe I'm more of a thriller writer with elements of horror. There you go.

Thrill and horror. I mean, that definitely goes hand in hand. So let's talk about your latest book so we can get that moved off the shelves. I mean, we don't want to take it off the shelves, but we definitely want to clean it off the shelves so they can read it. There you go. So the intruders pray they don't get in. That sounds like, yeah, I don't have a joke for that. That is the joke.

Anyway, so tell us about this book. And is it a standalone book? Because I think I see a couple of Damaging Corporates. It is a standalone. You know, the Damaging, there's a couple of Damaging ones. And what's odd enough, you know, if you read my books, you'll catch a little bit of a thread that's similar in all of them. There's a little bit of a connection, but it's not strong enough to, you know,

all of them are standalone. That's how I like it. I like my books to be standalone. But I like little Easter eggs maybe in there that go, oh, hey, this kind of connects to that other book a little bit. I like to do that. Give us an

overview of the plot of this book. You can't of course give us too much because it's the novel, but give us a rundown. Well, it's about a normal family. A normal guy. He's trying to make it. He's lost his job, and so he's working as a car salesman, not doing very well at it. And then, you know, he runs into this dark stranger, kind of scooping him out at work, kind of creeps him out.

Then he comes home, and there's a weird package delivered to him, and he doesn't know what that is. It doesn't open it yet. But later that night a group of armed men break into their house and they kidnap all of them to an underground bunker and now he's being questioned tortured about things he knows nothing about uh so once they finally figure out that they've nabbed the wrong guy they're just gonna set all of them to be executed and so now he's got to figure out a way to escape or run away from them. Meanwhile, kind of unravel the mystery of who are these intruders

who happen to have a supernatural ability that's pretty terrifying. Yeah, that's pretty scary, man, the intruders. So was there anybody in your personal life that you based the characters on? Any movie stars you based the characters on? Well, there's a lot, I think, that goes into the inspiration for a lot of my books. You know, I like the movie The Thing. It's one of my favorites. Oh, yeah.

What a classic, right? This one definitely has a lot of elements of that to it. So if you like that, you're going to like this book This book also It just moves I just wanted a book that just It just started with a Like a crack of fire

And just goes off and doesn't stop And so That was the main thing of this book And of course the main character It's a guy and a wife and two boys. So somewhat like me. Oh, there you go. I was a car salesman at one point.

I was trying to figure out where I was going to go in life. I was a car salesman, and that's really about the time when I came up with this idea. Oh, there you go. So there's some insight you have, the car business that you could pull off of and all that stuff. Yeah. This one was fun because Amazon started this new Vela platform where you can submit for and put out an episode at a time. So it's a serialized novel that comes out an episode at a time. Oh, wow.

And you also put author notes at the bottom of it, at the end of each one. So we did that first, and then after it was all finished, we said, well, let's just put it into, you know, let's just publish a whole book. And so we published the book, and we decided to keep the author notes in it. And I didn't know how well that would really translate to readers, but so far, everybody that's reading it are commenting and really liking the author notes. Now, is it kind of a different approach that you took based on your other books? Just not really. The author notes were new to me to put in, but they were a lot of fun. And what I would do is I would look at the chapter that I was writing.

And I said, you know, this is what inspired me to write this or, uh, these cars, I put these cars in, cause these were the cars. My kids are right. Driving at the time.

And I would just little things like that. I kind of like have fun with, and I would, um, put little inspirations. What made me think to write this, right? This was written completely different. and then I changed it,

you know, stuff like that. But do you see this being a continuing series that you're going to do with the book with the, what was it called, the Vela system? Oh, Vela, yeah. I think Vela may end up being really, it started off really slow. Amazon really didn't promote it very well. But I think it's going to start catching fire. And I think a lot of people are going to start, you know, using the Vela and, you know,

you can release your episodes at a time whenever you want to. You can keep the story going on and on and on. So whatever you want to do with it. But it's a pretty cool, um, little platform. I mean, you, you end up buying tokens,

so you buy a number of tokens and then you use these tokens to buy episodes with. And, um, yeah, I think that's pretty darn cool. Sounds kind of like gaming for, you know,

how you buy stuff in gaming, like the token thing. That's kind of, right. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of like gaming for, you know how you buy stuff in gaming, like the token thing? That's kind of interesting. Oh, right. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of like gamification of where games sell stuff and stuff.

You know, there's so many great authors like yourself that they just write these books, and they're really prolific. I took 51 years, 52 years to write my first book, and so I guess at the pace I'm going, it's going to be like 102 when I do my next one. A system like that, we have authors on the show. They've written 50, 60 books. There might be one that's broken the 60 barrier. I'm not sure, but they come back about every four months on the show.

Well, not four months. It's six to nine because the publishers take time to put their stuff together. I think they're writing a book about every three to four months when they write it and then it comes out that's about right uh you know if you were full-time so i'm not quite full-time yet and i would like to be uh then i could i could put them out you know a lot quicker like that but i guess if probably a full three months to get the whole story down. But then there's rewriting and there's rewriting and editing and, you know, all sorts of more work that goes into it.

I'm still scarred from editing. You're probably aware of it. It's a lot of work to put a whole book together. It is. People don't realize that when I wrote my book, I just joined up with some friends to do a, I don't know what they call it, where you write every day and you make sure everyone writes every day or you shame them and cane them with a stick or something. I don't know. Don't do that, people. But it was basically, I forget what they call it, but it's where you keep each other honest.

And you write like an hour a day. And we all were intending to write books. And I just caught fire with it after about, I don't know, a couple weeks of just getting in the habit. And then, but by the end, everyone had dropped out out of about six people. And, you know, I think they're still working on theirs. But it's hard. It's hard to write a book. People don't realize how hard it is.

And that's kind of why when I first became an author, everyone was like, oh, you're an author now. And you're like, yeah. And then you realize how hard the damn thing is. And people respect it because you know whatever i'm still i'm still using it to to pick up chicks on tinder anyway i don't know it's a weird place i'm six one so that helps uh evidently that's uh kind of the breaking point for for what the girls are searching for on the things. But lots of Tinder jokes and wife jokes today, I guess.

So he's abducted by armed men. Can you tell us if these are aliens or do you want to keep that a secret? You know, I don't want to. I can talk about it because I really didn't want it to be an alien book. It's just been overdone.

I wanted it to be an alien book. It's just been overdone. I wanted it to be something completely different. I don't know if I want to explain exactly what they are or where they come from, but it's definitely not from this world, but it's not from outer space. More like from a parallel universe. Oh, wow. That tells us something there. Parallel universe. I got chills down my spine when you said that. I don't know why, but that sounds really

creepy. So you wrote the book. Do you anticipate making this a sequel? Are you going to see how it rolls out? Yes. Yeah. I ended it leading off into a sequel,

which maybe now I'm kicking myself because that means I'm going to have to write it. Now you have to write it. Well, you know, you can hop around. Yeah, and I've already written another book that's completely different. That's a stand-alone, and I'm working on a new one now that's completely different. So I haven't gone back yet and written a sequel for it, but I will. It's a fun story. It's fun to get back into.

You know, a lot of the authors we have on the show, they're really prolific. They've written, like I said, 50, 60 books. What they'll do is they kind of have these different leads that they run, like Bob McKay or whatever the name of their character is. It's kind of like Bond. They just do different books on them. In fact, we have the Bond writer on the show. But they won't do them

back to back. They'll stagger them. They'll do the one character and then they've got a second series they're running over here and a third series. They kind of flip around to whatever uh works for them in uh in their in their thing so yeah just just have fun with it besides you want to keep people waiting right right and the other thing too is you don't want to get boxed into always writing the same character over and over again i recently watched re-watched the movie Misery. I remember that one was Stephen King's.

And I learned that Stephen King wrote that in a way because he felt he was being kind of trapped in his genre and he wanted to kind of break out and write other things. And that's what the character was about. He had written all these characters about this, or these stories about misery that was so popular. And then, you know, kill them off and write something different.

And that didn't make, um, what was her name? Uh, Kathy Bates. Kathy Bates. I was very happy when she learned that. you must love horror because I can only watch that movie once,

like a leg breaking part that part still that cringes that is something else there's only one time I can watch that but you know people that love horror and thrillers and stuff that's a real thing for them

in fact a great thriller I was thinking of just now was The Shining during my great thriller I was thinking of just now was The Shining. During my editing process, I was – Yeah, during my writing process, I started writing to my friends because I was doing 12-hour days of writing, and I started writing to my friends. I think I'm at the all work and no play part.

I think I'm at that part where I'm just starting to write. You probably want to take a break there, Chris. Step away from the thing there and go chill out. I think I blew through a 40 weekend of everyone was out playing, which made it worse.

They were doing the holiday. It was July 4th holiday. Oh, okay. And, like, everyone's playing. I'm seeing it on social media. Everyone playing. And I'm like, I'm getting this done.

All work and no play. All work and no play makes Jack a Doughboy. That was a great movie, too. The thing, what a classic movie. There's so many people. The thing was like the Beatles, I think, showing up on the Ed Sullivan show. Like so many people were just

like that set them off down a course of writing for stuff. And Stephen, is it, what's his name, Carpenter? Oh yeah, John Carpenter. John Carpenter. I mean, what a prolific genre.

I mean, I wouldn't want to be... Whoever did the special effects for the thing. I mean, it still comes up today, and that's from... Didn't they do a remake of the thing? They did. It didn't do that well. They ended up doing, I think, a lot of CGI special effects. And, you know, sometimes that just doesn't do as well as the the old traditional practical

effects that they used to use yeah was there was there any techniques that you used in developing the story uh any uh any any sort of uh plot twists that you put in there that you can tease out yeah there's there's a lot of plot twists because our main character, even though he doesn't appear to know what they're talking about, there might be something more to him that's going to twist around later on in the story. Obviously, when he's fighting and he's fighting off the bad guys, it's pretty surprising how well he can really take him out.

There's a little twist. There's a little bit more to find out who the main character is. And then, of course, find out who the intruders are, what their purpose is, what are they doing here, where do they come from. I had an intruder once, but it was a mouse. Let's

plug some of your other books here in this series too as well. You've got a lot of great reviews on the show, or on the Amazon. So you've got a lot of fandom I think going on over there. Here's I can tell. It's tough to get all the reviews, but I've been getting

a good number of them. So I'm getting some fans and getting some hardcore fans. Have you gone over there and offered your book on goodreads.com? Yeah, so I'm on Goodreads. Yeah, that Goodreads, man. That's something else. Yeah, I've got a lot of reviews on there. Yeah, that thing, I bought the, what was it, the thing where they give away like 100 copies? Well, you can do 100 e-books.

We gave that away, and then we give away like 10 signed copies. I think it's like 120 bucks or something you pay or 240. I don't remember. I think it was two different versions we did. But we did that under the recommendation from one of our friends who does a lot of romance novels. And she's pretty, she's like 30 or something, who's been on the show. She's like, hey, you go over and do that. And that worked really well. I sold a bunch of crap, got a bunch of videos.

So if you haven't tried it, you might want to give it a whirl. They have two pricing things. But they give away your book, and it's basically like an ad. So what it does is there's all these people that subscribe to this giveaway list. And so what they do is they sign up to potentially win, like a sweepstakes, maybe 10 of your books that are signed. And then we did the whole thing with the book plates. I learned that from a lot of the authors we have on the show,

selling the book plates or offering them as a freebie. And really the book plates, all they are is like little stickies you, they can put in the book and you know, people customize them. We made ours customized and you sign them, you know, people customize them. We made ours customized. And you sign them, you know. So the nice thing about the book plates is they can, you can personalize them, but it's not hard copied in the book. There's people that actually trade the book plates.

It's freaking crazy. crazy if you google if you if you google the book plate trading uh and stuff what they'll sometimes do is they'll take your book one of your books and they'll like be like okay i got the book plate but i'm not going to stick it in this book i'm going to save this for the big book they sell and then put the autograph in there and uh there's people they just have collections of book plates they never put them in the book it's like insane insane. And they'll sell them, too, if you're a famous author. So they kind of play that game. But it's like a whole stamp collecting thing. It's crazy.

But, yeah, that Goodreads thing, you have to be careful. Like, we gave away 100 e-books. That didn't pan out too well. Yeah. But for some people, it does. I mean, you know, your genre where you're selling so many other books, and so people that are going to probably get the free e-book are probably going to go buy the other books. But for us, we just have

one book. But that Goodreads thing, and there's people that it basically, there's a place on Goodreads you go to and it has like all the free giveaway books. But what's cool is when they sign up to, like you'll have thousands of

people sign up for to get those 10 free ebooks or whatever 10 free books uh we mailed the hard copies on the 10 free books but there's thousands of them that will sign up for it and you do it like three months out and then what happens you can still do it now but what happens is they'll get they instantly get it put on their bookshelf and so it ends up like an advertisement on thousands of people's bookshelves. Oh, okay. And then it's on the advertisement on that page

and then, it reminds me, I should go back and buy another one. And then what it does is as soon as your book gets released, it will send them all an email saying, hey, this book is released. So it's like the greatest hack of their database ever. No, it's a really good, that's a really good one.

I've done similar things like that with other promos where I've been building my newsletter fans, things like that. So they will, you know, I will submit to like a contest and people will, like you said, they'll go through and they'll look at all the books that are out there that you can possibly get free with a giveaway. And they'll click on it and they click to sign up for your newsletter. And it is kind of like, so I build a lot of my newsletter fans that way. And it is like casting a broad net.

You get a lot of them. A lot of them really end up not being that interested. But that small handful that you get really can be a gold little pocket of some good hardcore fans you can build. That reminds me. I need to go talk more on Goodreads. I need to go over there more and play that game over there. So let's talk about some of your books. What was the first book that you wrote I had up here?

And I think it was Damage Incorporated, the hit list. Is Metallica, by the way, a favorite of your metal genre? Yeah, they're definitely up there in my top ten favorites. What's your favorite metal band? You know, my favorite band of all time, not necessarily metal, though, it's Rush. Ah, we are kindred spirits, my friend. Ah, very nice, yeah. Yeah, Rush.

They're more progressive rock, I would imagine. Still getting over Neil Peart's death. Oh, I still, yeah, that hurts. Yeah, it really hurts. What's your thoughts on this? I know we're kind of a little off topic, but how many people are Rush fans out there in the audience? We have a lot of Silicon Valley nerds.

Would you still like to see Geddy and Alex play together? I would, yeah. I think they're incredible. You know, both of them have done their own solo projects, and I like them. They're just too good of artists just to not keep playing and not keep writing. I saw something, I think it was yesterday, Mike Portnoy, he's another fantastic drummer, that said, of course I would love to join those two and

be their drummer, but I don't know that I'd ever want to see Rush again. They'd probably have to put a different name on it. I'd be fine with calling it Rush. Would you? I would. I just want to see him play again. Yeah, I mean, that's all we care about. It'd be an homage

to, I mean, it's still, I don't know, it's, I hate that whole, I mean, it's still, I don't know. I hate that whole thing where it's like, well, we can't play together anymore. You know, it's like, no, come on, man. I mean, they were really, I mean, yeah, Neil Peart was a great drummer and a great lyricist. Right. But most of the music came out of the two of them. Right, yeah, they would write the music, he'd write the lyrics.

Yeah, you're right. You're absolutely right. And I think Neil Peart would probably be fine if the right person was to... I agree with you. Their solar projects are kind of okay. That recent one from Alex is... Yeah, that's... I love you, Alex.

I'm sorry, man. There was a really dark one on that one, too, that really surprised me. Yeah, I was like, I don't know. This is a single, and I'm you, Alex. I'm sorry, man. There's a really dark one on that one, too. That really surprised me. I was like, I don't know. I listen to the single, and I'm like, man, stick in your lane. Stay in your lane. There you go. You're a rocker, man.

But, you know, it's so I think I feel mostly scarred by it because I skipped the last tour. I just wasn't feeling up to it or something was going on. I remember what, and I thought, uh, yeah, I'll just get to the next one. And I knew Neil was getting,

having problems with his arms and stuff. Um, and Alex was had arthritis problems. So you get, so you start damage incorporated. Right. And, uh,

you've written two books in that series. Is that correct? Right. Yeah. So I wrote the first one and it seemed to do really well. A lot of people liked it. A lot of people wanted to hear something more. And that's definitely a concept that's a lot of fun to stretch out and do more with.

Just recently, just for fun, I wrote a short story that's in that damn jink world and that turned out to be a lot of fun. So I might put that somewhere. I don't know where I'll put it yet, but yeah, that world is fun, the damn jink world. Do you go through a process where you force yourself to write every day? Some writers do that. They do

an hour a day. I would like to. I try to. And it's just hard. The weekends are the easiest part for me. And it just becomes kind of a ritual that I've kind of made it a habit to get something done. But then also I'm trying to do marketing. Yeah. Oh, that's rough.

The marketing is hard. But, you know, you just got to build it and play all the platforms. You just signed up for LinkedIn. LinkedIn's a great platform for stuff to build and talk on. People actually have money over there. We were telling that joke earlier. I'm not sure there's a lot of people with money on Snapchat, but they do have a lot of pictures, I guess.

Lots of Snapchat jokes today. I like the lead on this or the byline on this. Death is only an end. Getting there is the fun part. Everyone should take that attitude in life, right? Yep. I can relate to that. And that's what's fun about these books.

They are thriller and horror, but there's a little bit of a subtle humor in it. It's just kind of having fun with it because what you do is you go to this damaging company and if you want someone taken out or maybe you just want revenge for whatever reason, they can make anything happen and they summon up these demons from another world to go out there and and take out whoever you want and they'll bring out their worst fear and then make them come alive and take them out that way there you go it stretches the imagination a lot which is fun

to come up with these different uh creatures and demons and different ideas like, oh, what really scares people? You can get into phobias like snakes and spiders and things like that. Ah, way on the phobias there. Yeah. So there's a lot of fun with that. Does your wife like reading your books or do you scare her with all the snakes and spiders? She's read some of them and she does like them. And I know my mom has read every one of them because,

you know, she's my mom and I know that's not what she likes to read. And there are some that I have to give her a little warning with for a second. Oh, the, uh, the,

uh, you know, that was the thing I, I'd be worried about being married to a horror, a thriller writer, because I'd read like some of the stuff in the book, and I'd be keeping one eye open at night on you going, I don't know. I just want to be careful I don't write something about someone demented

and takes out their wife. Yeah, killing the wife or something like that. I can never date someone who watches CSI shows all the time. Because you're like, you're really planning something. You're just looking for the right method to do it and trying to get away. I think that's what most people who watch CSI shows are doing. They're just trying to figure out a way to office spouse. And they're just trying to figure out how to do it without getting caught.

And me, conversely, seeing people get caught on CSI makes it go like, well, you probably shouldn't have killed somebody because they do always getting caught. And where me, conversely, seeing people get caught on CSI makes it go like, well, you probably shouldn't have killed somebody because they do always kill you. So don't do that, folks. Exactly. And I'm not smart enough to do anything like that. As a matter of fact, writing a good mystery novel,

the whodunits and those kind of things, I take my hat off to some really good writers that can do that really well. That's intelligent writing. Even though mine have some mystery in it, it'd be hard to write something like that. Of course, I have a friend that always tries to get me to write romance, too. Maybe you could do a horror romance. Every time I try to do a romance, someone's head gets cut off and it goes great and bad.

Well, you know, there you go. So, you know what you could do? Is this even a genre, romance, horror? You know, I don't know, but maybe that's something. I could give you some off my Tinder. I could actually have some tales. I've been seeing all my life. I can give you some horror stories.

I haven't cut anyone's head off, but there's still time. Right, I just triggered all the FBI warnings. Okay, we've had them on the show. They know us. Let's see. The death is only an end. Getting there is the fun part. That reminded me of the Dire Straits song, Heavy Fuel, where he says,

I'll write my suicide note on a $100 bill. That brought that back for me. Let's see, what else? What are some of the other books that we have? One of the more popular ones is The Other Side of Elsewhere. That's this one right here. This one was a lot of fun to write because I put a lot of my childhood in it. And I always wanted something to, you know, do my little, you know,

put some of my own childhood adventures in. And so that's what I did. And, you know, it turned out, you know, it takes place in 1982 in the summer in a small town of Riverton here in Utah. And of course, a lot of, you know, strange things happen. And what's funny about it is I wrote it, and when I

was done writing it, I wrote it long before Stranger Things. And then Stranger Things came out, and I started watching that, and I'm like, hey, wait a minute. You ripped me off. And I wondered if I almost didn't even try and publish it, you know, because I thought, oh, I don't want people to think I ripped off Stranger Things. I thought, well, why not?

Write their coattails a little bit maybe. Yeah, right on. I like Stranger Things. This one's a lot like it. There you go. Well, the 80s were such an interesting time. I grew up in those times yeah you know it's so funny i you both grew i i grew up in california but spent my teens in utah

going to high school and it's so funny how in high school in utah you would you would i can still see it now coming out of the school into the high school parking lot and there would be pickup trucks with guns and the gun racks and stuff. And that was just like normal. Like you could never do any of that today. No, and then it's a good thing too. Yeah, it's a good thing.

Yeah, it was just like I had friends that go deer hunting after school. Especially during deer season. They were always taking a buck and skinning it up and and having all that sort of fun but uh but yeah romance horror that should be like that could be like a whole new genre these days um yeah they meet you i can tell you some stories you meet people on first dates and you're just like you're just like your your brains and they're

screaming going run run run, run, run. Your fight or flight is kicking in. I remember writing a movie once back in the 80s with my friend. We would always write movies. And there was a movie we found called Psychos in Love. They were both serial killers, and they ended up finding each other and finding true love. What's that song? That's a better one.

Lawyers in Love by Jackson Brown. Lawyers in Love. You could just hijack that and rename it Psychos in Love. It pretty much describes the situation in dating these days. So the other book, let's touch on the other side of nowhere. I'm sorry, the other side of elsewhere. Right. And then you wrote Liberty Justice. That was was last year tell us a little bit about that so that one uh is a straight straight up thriller i think a lot of people would really like this one uh especially

if if horror is not your thing or supernatural uh this one and i don't know really where it came from, but it's about a 13-year-old girl that's trying to deal with her mother who's addicted to heroin. And she's basically taking care of her mom. And then, of course, things go bad, and the drug dealer comes to the house accusing her of her things, and a big fight ensues, and he ends up being killed in self-defense but they're scared now of the police catching them

and maybe she's going to go off to be pulled away from her mom. So she takes her mom and they go get in the van and they just drive away and now they're on the run from the police and then the guy that they killed his brother is the big drug kingpin,

and he hires a really tough, sadistic killer to track him down. So there's where, you know, it's actually quite a fast-paced thriller, but there's a lot of heavy stuff in there dealing with the addiction and the strained relationship between the mother and the daughter. That was a really, you know, it was rewarding. That's what I'll say, a rewarding challenge for me. There you go. It's probably my best writing, really.

Oh, wow. Oh, wow. So, you know, sometimes there's good writing and sometimes you're just kind of like, oh, that's okay. I remember doing that. I think there's about five lines in my book that are good writing and the rest is fine. Five really good lines. I just had really good stories, like just really messed up business stories from my book. But it could have been a horror. Some of the stories are in there. really good stories, like just really messed up business stories, uh, for my book. But,

uh, I mean, it could have been a horror. Some of the stories are in there. Um, but, uh, tree of souls you wrote two years ago. Tell us about that.

It looks like that was a collection. So that one's a collection of short stories. So that one is really my, my scary stuff. Um, and I, I put it at my crypticon award winning, uh,

short story, old Betsy. And that's about an old hanging tree that feeds on people. So it's pretty crazy, but it's a good fun story. And then, of course, I put a lot of other

stories in there. I did one that a couple of them that are definitely homages to oh, man, it's H.P. Lovecraft. Like H.P. Lovecraft, the old classic horror writer from an old age. And then there's a Western in there that's kind of a scary Western, and there's some other ones that are just kind of weird. So that was a lot of fun because short stories, I just love short stories

because a novel is so daunting to write, and it takes so long and so much out of you. But writing short stories can be a lot of fun. Yeah. So I just wanted to throw this together and put it together. And, you know, the cover, you know, know my son is an artist and so he did the cover for me oh wow um uh the tree and those are all the faces oh those are faces on the tree i didn't see that in the little picture wow yeah his his artwork turned out incredible scary scary i noticed you won some awards on your website 2021 Writers Digest Award winner

yeah that one actually I won for the same story the old Betsy won that one that little short story is kind of the little short story of the good there you go that's also the one that won me the Crypticon

award and you've done some screenplays too as well. Yeah, I did some screenplays. I kind of got in a period where I was really writing a lot of screenplays and submitting those. And I had an agent at the time that represented screenwriting. But she ended up having to retire. She got really ill and she lost a son. She just ended up having to retire. She got really ill and she lost a son. She just ended up having to retire. And so my scripts didn't ever go anywhere. And I just kind of put those on the shelf and I kind of took a break for a while. You know, I just kind of, you know,

you have to take care of your family and, you know, life just gets in the way. But then eventually I got back into writing again, back to my first love of writing books. And so that's when I wrote Damage Incorporated. And I just went for it and went around the publisher to publisher it. Awesome sauce. Well, you're on a great path. And so how many books? I mentioned you have one and maybe one other one in the works you got coming out yeah so when i just finished uh i i like it a lot

because it takes place in the southern canyons of utah you know those nice red canyons and zions canyon and things like that um that one's a really good thriller i don't have a home for it yet. I'm looking for a publisher or possibly an agent to represent that, try to step my game up a little bit higher. You should. Yeah, I think you'd be able to pick one up with as many as you have. You know, one of my friends who's the CEO of a major company, I'm going to say they because I don't want to give away who they are. Um,

but, uh, I called them up and it was like, Hey, you know, I've got a couple of chapters. We're looking to shop this to a big publisher. Um,

and they got a pretty good payout from a publisher. Um, but they got more than most people do, but they didn't get like, you know, anything super, but I was really surprised. Uh, as soon as I reached out to them, they said, Hey, we need to get on a phone call. I was like, uh, okay. And you know, they're very successful. So just their time alone, I was like,

and, but they're a good friend of mine. Um, and they, they go, Hey, we need to get on a phone call. And I was like, okay. And they go, don't fucking do it. Publish independent. And I was like, what? What? I mean, I saw you everywhere. You sold the book, and it's everywhere. And they're like, no. They're like, we got an advance.

We're still trying to break even on the advance. And it even wasn't that much money. But it was more so like most of the advances are, you know, just for 5,000, 10,000, maybe 5,000 is like, I guess is about the average. But you have to sell that much to get just to break even. And then they hit you with all sorts of, you know, it's like the movie business. They hit you with all, you know, all our advertising costs and stuff. And, you know, I don't know.

You've got six books in the can. I don't want to scourge you from going that route because you could definitely get picked up. But, you know, we've had so many authors on the show, and, you know, they've told us that one of the frustrations they have is sometimes they don't get to pick their titles. Sometimes they don't get to pick their copies of their books. The copyright thing, the book publishers own it.

So like me, after I launched my first book, within about two weeks, I decided I didn't like the structure and I want to put the back to the front, front to the back. It basically was like just flipping them. And I wouldn't have been able to do that. There was some other additions and a couple quick edits we want to do, but I think there was some, some like a paragraph or quick edits we want to do, but I think there was some, some like a paragraph or something I want to throw in some place.

And, um, I wouldn't have been able to do that without, um, within, without, with a copyright, a big publisher that had been like,

no. And if you do really want to change something, you have to fight like hell for it. Um, they, they really like having that thing in the can when they launch it and then they spend like that was the other thing that we were talking about she's like chris if you publish that book with a big publisher it's going to take a year to two years to finally get before they publish it and the editing process is a nightmare um you

know if they cut your book up um you're you're going to have to rewrite it for them. I mean, they just, they literally have control. And, uh, so yeah. And then the time was like huge. I mean, even my writers that write every four months and come on the show frequently, they've been on like four or five times now. Um, they, you know, they, they write in three to four months and, but it takes like a year to get the book out. And so it's kind of frustrating. I think that's why they write every four months.

So they can just keep the book. Yeah. Yeah. The publishing house I'm with, it's Red Adept Publishing and they're an independent publisher. And they've been great because, um, before ran into them it was it was just me trying to do whatever i could do but when i got with them there's 60 other authors with that publishing house now we're all on facebook and we're friends and we talk back and forth we help each other we read each other's work um i've learned so much from the other writers and from my publisher and editors that I never would have learned on my own.

So they've been a really good house to be with. But you're right. The publisher owns the book when you sign that contract. Oh, yeah. I can't just go and change the price and put it on sale or anything like that. I do have three of these books we just talked about are self-published, and I did that pretty much just because I wanted to. I want to try and test my waters that way versus the other.

I think still my books that I've published through Red Adept have earned me more than the self-published ones. Well, that's good. That's good. Doing the ARC thing too, the advanced reader copies, you know, we get them all the time from the big publishers, the ARC copies, sometimes six months in advance. There's some we have kicking around here that they, I'm like,

you're never going to publish that damn thing. And then they'll send us like a different copy or a different cover. And you're just like, man, man you guys are working on that one um but uh there are copies you know for reviews and friends and and getting that to drop so that you can get everybody to that's the other thing about that goodreads thing once when it drops you'll have people that will jump in and do the reviews on the first day and i think you can send them you when your book drops, you can send them a massive newsletter through Goodreads that says, hey, the book's dropping.

Please go do reviews. I'll love you forever. You know, that sort of thing. But yeah, it's really, you know, building that fandom, building, you know, the thing. It looks like on your website here, we should probably plug,

people can join your newsletter so they can keep updated on what you've got going on. Yeah, i send one out monthly and sometimes i'll throw a little short story in there for free or some little contest or you know something that or just i like getting feedback from people too sometimes i'll put fun little tidbits in there and maybe reviews of other books i've read that i like you know what the other thing you could do since you know a lot of other people in the genre you could be put a podcast together I'm kind of I know I'm kind of partial

here but I know the power of them you could have other authors on and you know people in that people in that genre they're really addicted to it and they love it they really are they're like a Rush fan so they'll they'll

consume the books and um so you know having other offers authors on that are horror writers or thriller writers and that whole genre anything more we need to know about what you're up to what you're doing and how you do it really just uh not too much um you. I just want to love it when people check out my books. That's another thing about getting on my newsletters. Those people always get my articles first. Those people get free reads all the time. Those are people that I will give all that kind of stuff to. So anybody that likes my writing, that's a good place

to start. There you go. Follow me on my newsletter. There you go, guys. Order up the book, wherever fine books are sold. You can go check that out. The newest book. The Intruders. The Intruders. A lot of creepy people. The Intruders. Yeah, sounds like my Tinder profiles.

I'm just kidding. That's not a nice thing to say. It's probably my profile that's up there. Anyway, July 5th, 2022, if you're watching this 10 years from now, The Intruders is out. You can order it. And by then you'll probably see that Brett has put out a ton more books and become famous.

So that'll be awesome to see. Thanks for coming on the show, Brett. We really appreciate it. Well, thank you so much, Chris. This was a lot of fun. Thank you. And thanks, my audience, for tuning in. Go to YouTube.com, 4ChestChrisVoss.

Oh, give us a plug one more time on your website, too, so we get that in at the end. Oh, definitely. What's the dot com on that? Oh, sorry. It's www.brettmckaybooks.com. There you go go check that out order up the books and get to know him much better

I'm sure you're going to see more from him thanks for tuning in go to youtube.com fortune.chrisfoss goodreads.com fortune.chrisfoss all those crazy places on the internet that we're at

thanks for tuning in be good to each other stay safe and we'll see you guys next time