Lisa: I’m here today with author Bruce Luyendyk. His brand new book is Mighty Bad Land: A Perilous Expedition to Antarctica Reveals Clues to an Eighth Continent. Antarctica, not a lot of people write about Antarctica. So why Antarctica? What got you interested in that?
Bruce: Well, it stems from my scientific expertise and interest in geology, specifically plate tectonics. I was in New Zealand working on a project with a colleague in the southern Alps. We noticed how difficult it was to do geology there in a place where there’s so much vegetation, so much rain, so much weathering.
We also noticed there’s a mountain range in New Zealand that might be a correlative correlate to the mountain range in Antarctica, a place called Marine Birdland. I thought it would be interesting to work on that mountain range to learn about the other mountain ranges. Antarctica versus New Zealand. New Zealand and Antarctica once were joined in the supercontinent of Gondwana, but we’re not exactly sure how or where. It’s kind of a notion of, well, the torn newspaper idea. The newspaper is torn and you’ve got print on one side and print on another side, and you can read both of those prints and likely to be able to match them up and have a convincing argument.
Was this part of a university or government funded research?
Both, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. federal agency funds competitive grants and to work in Antarctica and they provided the green light and also most of the money. Some money from university support, not a lot. And there was also some hidden costs that were provided by the logistical support from the U.S. Navy and some other government agencies. So basically, it’s a competitive process to apply for a grant to the national Science Foundation based on the hypothesis you want to test or like I just explained, about the matching up of New Zealand and Antarctica.
You got to Antarctica and was it what you expected?
It was as extreme as I expected. It was harder than I expected. Just about anything you do on the continent is hard work. It’s not easy physically and mentally also. When people ask me how was it in Antarctica, was it cold? I say, Yeah, but you know what? It was really hard, harder than I expected.
You’re a scientist and you did a lot of scientific work while in Antarctica. Would you call this for the science book or how would you classify this?
It’s a memoir adventure story about doing science. The first versions of the book were pretty too heavy on science content because I was aiming at a general audience of a knowledgeable lay audience who was interested in adventure travel and historical experiences in the Antarctic.
I went through enough publishers that told me, Well, you got to tone down the science. So I ended up creating an appendix in the book, which has got a pretty hefty science chapter. But the most the book is a book of a journey and experience, my personal experience and the experiences of my small team of six people in the Antarctic wilderness.
So there is a lot of adventure in it, I’d say. First of all, everyday living on your own in a place where there’s no supplies, I mean, if you need a paperclip, you’d better bring it. That’s an adventure. Just living day to day. Like, for instance, where do you get water? There’s a lot of snow around when there’s no water, so you have to melt the snow. How do you melt the snow? Well, you better have a stove and you better have fuel for the stove so you can get the snow and a pot to melt it in. So there’s everyday living, taking care of everything on your own with what you’ve been dumped out there with. And then when you’re doing the work, of course, you have to go out into the environment and face all of its unforeseen challenges and unseen menaces, and as I put it in the book.
So there’s a spectrum of activity from the humdrum survival, figuring out how to do this, to, Oh, we’re in trouble now. That type of story. So I can see that that would be a good a good story. So you do have and I can as a reader, I can see, wanting to get this book and reading this book to find out, you know, if if I was to go back in time and become an explorer or a scientist who goes to Antarctica, what would it be like?
A lot of people don’t know what Antarctica is like. Is that mainly why you wrote the book?
It took me a long time to decide to write it. I was employed fulltime as a university professor. I didn’t have any extra time to go into a book project which does absorb a lot of your presence so much, but I found that I thought about my experiences just about every day.
I could relate to a reader about my personal experience and the impact on me personally.
How do you feel about the finished product?
I’m pretty excited about it. One of the things I discovered when I wrote this was after I went through, you know, a couple dozen versions, was I really did this type of experiment, this type of thing, to test myself. And the story is I pretty much reached my limits more than once. But I found that the message for myself as I found that I was, of course, vulnerable, but I was very resilient.
And I don’t quit. I’m not a quitter. So this book shows what many people face in their lives, you know, some adversity and challenges and then how they handle them and how they come out with a resolution and a good feeling about it. So I feel good about the book. It shows me making some significant mistakes, but at the same time keeping the team together.
What was the hardest part about writing the book?
I think it’s been talked about by many people who’ve written memoirs, is to not keep secrets. If you’re going to write about your own experience, you can’t hold anything back because people will know. Readers know you’re doing that. They’ll stop reading or they won’t buy the book or nobody will recommend it. So it was hard to actually take the step to reveal real things and then how to write about it. It’s like being scared. How do you write about being scared or making the wrong decision or making a discovery? There’s feelings about all of those things, and feelings are pretty hard to write about. You can only write about your own introspection, about feelings. You might write about some of the actions, the things you’ve done. But as I said, that’s a tricky process.
You got a draft ready to put out there for publication. How did you go about getting it published?
I thought I had finished my book multiple times, but I was wrong because I changed it many times. I started with the chapters which were most vivid to me, and then I put the chapters together in the story and Shelly Lowenkopf helped with some key ideas.
Then I got an editor to help me write a book proposal, a nonfiction book proposal, because this is a memoir or nonfiction memoir. And that person, Elizabeth Lyon, who’s written several books on publishing and editing, she suggested I enter contests with what I’d written. So I entered a chapter or an excerpt to the Pacific Northwest Writers Association. They put me together with some people who had some really brilliant suggestions, which I followed and I was able to finish the first version.
I pitched, I think, a dozen agents Elizabeth recommended. One agent who’s in New York City, I’ve actually never met took me on. She signed me on for a contract and she started submitting to her favorites. And when she got back over the course of probably a year, she said that it was too scientific and therefore the audience is too narrow.
But I knew after I had written the book that it’s not scientific enough to go to a university press because it’s not a book on scholarship. It’s a book about a experience. So I had to repeatedly revise my book in terms of clearing the science, in terms of what a layperson could understand and putting it in the back of the book.
So eventually I got responses from publishers. One publisher, I won’t name who they are, said, Hey, this could work for us, but we really don’t have much to offer in terms of advance. So my agent said, We’ll go back to them. So that’s what happened. We went out to a few more publishers who didn’t like it. We went back to that one publisher that said, this could work. Well, we find out three months later that the editor had left.
So that was gone. We kept on plugging away and it went like three or four years into this where the opposite happened We went to one publisher who said, I don’t think so. And then my agent found that the acquisition editor changed. We went back to that publisher with a different editor, the new editor, and she loved it. So it worked the opposite. It was a year later between the first rejection and then when it was, it was accepted. So now with Permuted Press, which is distributed by Simon and Schuster, and I have a nontraditional contract. This arrangement is a hybrid contract. But what’s different is the agent gets 15% of royalty, but the author and the publisher share the profits. It’s profit sharing. So this is called, I understand, a hybrid contract. So it’s not for nothing, but you’re not getting a royalty and you could get a good big profit share. That’s a bigger gamble for, I think, an author, but not as much as a gamble for a publisher, because the publisher is not paying royalties. If this book is a bomb, then only paying me a share of whatever profit there is. If there’s any. That’s the way I interpret it.
So now what are you doing to promote it?
If you ask me, what’s the big surprise on writing a book besides letting go of the notion to start with that you really can you know how to write a book because you don’t know how to write a book until you started to write a book. And then you learn if you’ve got good people around you, you learn what not to do so you actually can write. So that was that’s 50% of it, I think, because the next 50% of that selling it, you got a book, now you’ve got to sell it. And that’s a complete black box to me. And so I had to hire a publicist to help me design marketing publicity plan.
So what we’re doing is social media and we’re doing personal appearances and we’re doing radio interviews and we’re doing podcasts. The social media, where we’re doing some of the usual suspects and we’re doing a blog. I’ve been blogging for four years. That’s really not getting the most traffic, but I’m doing Instagram and Facebook and LinkedIn and a little bit on TikTok because we have some videos, experiment a little bit on Twitter, which was too much of a moving target.
But I did find out two important things about social media. One is to get people to look at your blog post on Facebook, put your blog link there. That’s the way I’ve been successful in getting people to visit my blog. The second thing I learned is the impact of doing something on Facebook and Instagram, which is called boosting, which I never heard of until I had to. Boosting is some magical thing that Facebook does with your post, sending it to targeted audiences in different locales all over the world if you want. And then they charge you. But then it’s not a lot, anywhere from 15 to $30.
It’s on Amazon of course. So now on Amazon there’s a hardcover, there’s a Kindle and there’s an audiobook.
How did you get the audiobook done?
The publisher, Post Hill, went out and solicited audio folks and they came up with a recording artist or I think that’s the name of them who do books and they’ve got quite a book collection. This is interesting. I did get to audition people who would read my book. First of all, the publisher made a contract with the company that does audiobooks and suggested a few people who I auditioned, and their topic was for a person who did most of their technical books.
I could tell when I listened to this person audition that, yeah, if I wanted to read a book on climate change, this would be a person, you know, a scientific book. This person would be the person to listen to. But if I wanted to listen to an adventure book, probably not. So I auditioned a couple of other people and picked a person that was really into adventure. And he did a good book. So one lesson to me about how to how to go through that system.