This interview was conducted in June 2007 by Something Wicked Magazine, when Viane Venter talked to Greg Hamerton about The Riddler’s Gift.
The average South African ‘best-seller’ comes in at just 4000 copies, and with writers typically seeing less than 10% of the returns, it’s anything but a get-rich-quick profession. In a market of ‘serious’ and ‘worthy’ novels, fantasy fiction is an even tougher nut to crack, but there are some hungry young newcomers who plan to do just that.
Greg Hamerton is the author of Beyond The Invisible and a guidebook for Paragliding South Africa. This year sees Greg’s fantasy debut with the release of the first tale in the Lifesong series, The Riddler’s Gift.
How did you become a writer?
Writing didn’t even feature on the radar when I was at school. It was never presented as a possible occupation. I did a B.Com to do the whole ‘go out and get a sensible job’ thing, which helped quite a lot in fact. It hadn’t entered my consciousness to become a novelist. I eased into writing with magazine articles on extreme sports and once published, I started enjoying seeing my own words in print. I progressed to Beyond The Invisible, which is half autobiography and half fiction. It was a natural first step to draw on my own experience. Writing is a merciless profession to go into though – that’s probably why they didn’t tell me about it at school, and writing non-fiction now seems like a school project by comparison to a novel. It’s also a lot easier to sell, because it’s specialist information that people attach a value to. Fiction is a really tough market to crack until you move into the tens of thousands.
Ant over at Sfbook.com runs an impressive site crammed full of science fiction and fantasy book reviews. In the 5 star review class, there’s a great selection of top fantasy books, like David Gemmel’s Legend, Robin Hobb’s Assassins Apprentice and Stephen Donaldson’s Lord Foul’s Bane. So I’m in the best company … Sfbook awarded five stars to The Riddler’s Gift.
