Educator moonlights as do-it-yourself novelist

06 July 2010

Trey Wood, LaGrange Daily News

In a world of do-it-yourself attitudes and abilities, almost no goal is out of reach.

Want to write, record and make money off your own rock album? You can do it, without a record company.

Want to film your own movie in high definition and have it seen by family, friends and strangers all over the world? You can do it, without a major motion picture group.

A Troup County school principal wanted to do something similar in scope. He didn't want to make a movie or write his own album, but some might think the goal would be just as much out of reach.

Long Cane Middle School principal Chip Giles is a do-it-yourself, published author. He already published a compendium of short sailing stories, and now he's an established writer with his own book, "The Conch Killers," about two yacht enthusiasts and Army veterans helping bring back a rich man's kidnapped daughter.

It's a story and a dream six years in the making, ever since Giles' wife, Kelly, started taking night classes at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

"I did not want her to have to go drive there after work by herself, park, face that whole downtown scene at night, so I went with her," Giles said. "While she was in class, I went and sat in the library."

A love of sailing, adventure and Key West, Fla., brought him to some of Florida's greatest crime writers, such as Carl Hiaasen, John B. MacDonald and personal hero Tim Dorsey. All wrote stories involving protagonists with extreme levels of character, part of the reason Giles became so enthralled with the writing style.

"That's kind of a hallmark of the south Florida crime fiction genre is these over-the-top, outlandish characters," he said. "If you're bad, you're really bad. If you're a buffoon, you're a real moron. Everything is extreme, and (there's) a lot of humor in their writing. And I was loving it. I ate it up."

He's not writing or marketing for his middle-schoolers, however. "The Conch Killers" is an adult-aged novel with curse words and violence, but he's already answered a few questions from parents about it.

"It does have words, and middle schoolers don't need to be reading those words," he said. "They need to be reading Harry Potter and Goosebumps and R.L. Stein and, heaven forbid, the Twilight books."

Coming up on his retirement from the National Guard, Giles is going to start spending more weekends writing and doing book signings. He's traveled to Atlanta and across Florida promoting his novel, and it takes up a large amount of his time when he's not being an educator.

"I need weekends now, need weekends to write, need weekends to go do book writings," he said.

"It'd be nice to have weekends to go cut the grass every now and then."

Marketing is a big part of being self-published, and Giles has no one doing it for him. His signings are set up on his own time when he can schedule them, and he's got to hound bookstores to solidify his signing days.

Thanks to the digital age, he sees a lot more online sales with devices like Apple's iPad and Amazon's Kindle allowing readers to do their reading without books in hand.

"Amazon can buy my books cheaper than I can buy my books. It's just the way it is," he said. "Amazon has changed this market. I'm telling you."

"If I sell a dozen books, that's a good sign," although it's a far cry from his goal of 10,000 book sales, which would make serious publishing houses take him seriously, as Tim Dorsey told him.

For now, Giles will continue doing things his way. He'll take pictures with everyone who buys his book at a signing and give them his personal bookmarks, he'll send them e-mails thanking them for their patronage, he'll go the extra mile to make sure that when he publishes another book, he'll have readers clambering back for more.

"You've got to give people a positive interaction, and it goes beyond just a good book and good writing. There's a lot of people who have good writing. There're a lot of good writing out there," Giles said. "There're a lot of people who write good books who will never be successful because you have to do more."

Trey Wood can be reached at twood @ lagrangenews. com or (706) 884-7311, Ext. 228.