EXCLUSIVE: Baen Books Sci-Fi Author John Van Stry Talks Being A Mega-Bestseller Without Getting Recognition

John Van Stry is a science fiction and fantasy author with a giant following on of tens of thousands of readers through Amazon Kindle. He recently teamed with Baen Books for a series. He came up in the Wild West of indie publishing to become a perennial bestseller on the Kindle ecosystem, yet few know much about him, as Amazon doesn’t seem to garner people fame like the traditional publishing world. He’s also responsible for a lawsuit that changed the course of digital publishing, perhaps saving dozens of publishers from going out of business because of his work.

So why isn’t he better known among the public?

Van Stry sat down with Fandom Pulse for this exclusive interview on his incredible career to give insights as to what it’s like to be an Amazon Kindle superstar.

Wolfhounds is a really successful series on Amazon with over 4,700 reviews for book one. What is it about?

The Wolfhounds series is about a young man who was 'abandoned' by his father, before he was born. His mother, who was a noble, was thrown out of her house for not telling who the father of her child was and she died when the child (our hero) was 12.

Nobles are born with cybernetic interfaces. AI is a mainstay of the galaxy and the nobles oversee them and make sure they don't go crazy. Your noble rank is determined by your interface and the Imperial Family had the most powerful ones in existence. The Imperial family has ruled for around 2000 years.

Now our protagonist ends up living on the streets and eventually joins a gang - this is in 'Empire City' on the capitol planet of the empire. He's not exactly a nice person. He's about to go to jail (he needs jail time to move up in the gang world) when the judge (who he recognizes as his father, whom he met -once-) packs him off to the Imperial Navy.

He ends up being assigned to the most elite group there is (for unknown reasons at first) they're down in cold sleep as they're preparing for a mission, when there's a coup and the entire Imperial family throughout the empire is hunted down and killed.

The Wolfhounds' leadership decides to take it back, but they need a figure head, so they take the kid who was sentenced by the 'bastard prince' and sent to join them, figuring they can tell everyone he's an actual Imperial. Our 'hero' did not KNOW that his father (who he hates for abandoning him) was an Imperial. He's quite shocked when he finds out - but he doesn't confide in anyone about this, because he doesn't trust anyone after years of living on the streets and being betrayed many times.

It develops from there.

The series is about him coming to terms with his heritage and taking back the empire from the 'Democratic People's Republic of Solaria'. Who are really cruel and vicious types. It's been quite popular. Every book so far has been a number 1 best seller and in the top 200 if not 100 of all books on Amazon.

Your new book in the Wolfhounds universe, Misplaced, is teaming with Raconteur Press for release. Tell us about this.

Misplaced is primarily about one 'Eric Wolfram (last name unknown) when he was 4 and his sister was 6, their parents (nobles) were murdered by elements of the DPRS, after the coup in Solaria while trying to flee to another star system. Eric remembers almost nothing of them, his sister not much more. They don't even know their last name (which would let them know what noble house they came from).

This story takes place 2 years after the end of Wolfhound's book 6. They've been hiding out their entire life so far, worried about being found and murdered. They live on the main planet of the Kingdom of Iraklis (three systems, it's a large kingdom) and they've been taken in by a man who is one of the largest fences on the planet. He's raised them and treated them well. Eric is 18 at the start of the book, and is starting to look at striking out on his own.

He starts off engaging in high end heists with two others he knows while doing trade school to try and go legit.

That all goes sideways and he ends up on a privateer sailing under a letter of Marque from the King of Iraklis. It goes on from there.

And your new book from Baen Books, can you tell us about it?

Sometimes In The Fall is the continuing story of Dave Walker (now Dave Doyle). This takes place 200 ~ 300 years in our current future. Earth has become fairly dystopian. FTL has not been discovered, but Gravity is full understood and gravity drives are common. The entire solar system has been colonized, and Earth doesn't care about anything beyond the moon's orbit.

In the first book, Summer's End, Dave - fresh out of engineer's school - gets a job on a 'tramp freighter' as a ship's engineer. Dave has a dark past and a few really big secrets.

Sometimes in the Fall picks up Dave's life after he's settle on Ceres, gotten Married, and helped his family flee Earth to live on Ceres.

There's a lot that goes on in these two books, you can't really pick up book 2 if you haven't read book 1.

What was it like coming up on Amazon in the Wild West of the early days? How many readers did you pick up in the process?

It truly was the Wild West. It started off well; folks would share what they knew and how they were doing on some of the (then) small forums. But as the scammers and the get-rich-quick people moved in, those quickly became worthless.

You also had a lot of unethical behavior once those folks moved in, like the people who were paying for reviews, and once famous, outed the services that they used so no one else could follow. There were also a fair number of people who would attack anyone doing better than them, and on places like goodreads and kboards there were a lot of bullies and trolls. Which both places protected (nobody knows why, either).

So you were very much on your own, and there really wasn't anyone out there who actually was successful giving out worthwhile advice. The people selling books or giving courses on how to do it were all scammers. But those books and courses sold a lot!

The biggest problem for me were all the people claiming how good they were doing on a particular board I used to (and still do on occasion) go to. They all kept giving me advice, and I started realizing that all of the advice was bad, and that these people didn't know what they were talking about. So one year's end I posted how much I made that year (which was 5 figures - this was when I was writing part time, btw) and wow!! You'd have thought I put kittens in a blender! Turns out none of these people were making even 4 figures a year. They thought selling a hundred books made them experts, and I was selling a couple thousand. That was when I learned my first lesson: Never take advice from someone who isn't willing to tell you how much they're making (and even then, check their standings to make sure they're not lying).

Once I abandoned listening to anybody else, and used my own knowledge, was when I took off. I also built my brand on old time known retail beliefs, the biggest of which was 'volume'. I was always the lowest priced author out there. Even when I was one of the biggest selling. Only now am I starting to charge what everyone else does.

As for how many readers I picked up? Tens of thousands. But it took years and it didn't happen overnight.

As an author in the Kindle ecosystem, you don’t get a lot of recognition outside of Amazon even though you outsell at least 90% of the field, probably even more. What’s it like quietly knowing you’re more successful than a lot of authors people might think of as household names?

It used to be frustrating, and I definitely outsell well over 95 percent of the tradpub authors in the Sci-fi and Fantasy fields. My only real competition these days are from the other Indy authors.