Please introduce yourself and tell us about your background as a writer.
I’m David J. West, and write most anything that strikes my fancy, a whole lot of sword and sorcery and weird westerns and branching out into historical and some Lovecraftian stuff. I like to write what I want to read and have found that sometimes it helps to coax the algorithms so I have been putting a lot of my sword & sorcery under the James Alderdice pen name – not a secret by any means, just working that angle for marketing’s sake. I came to the conclusion that even with the ebook revolution going on these last ten odd years, it takes some work to market and be read, so I had to go through all the stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. I really used to want a publisher to do all of that and I wanted to just sit and write books, but these days the author has to do the work.

Now that I’ve accepted it, I’ve even helped some friends and small publishers with their marketing angles. It all came down to wanting to share what I love with others – what I would call old school pulp regardless of the perceived genres. In my mind, I do what my favorite did which was dip my toes into a little bit of everything.

What are the most prominent influences on your writing? How do you incorporate those influences without being derivative?
As mentioned above, my favorite is Robert E. Howard. I am a huge fan of his fantasy, but also the historical and horror stories, the weird westerns, mysteries, etc. I’m also a really big fan of Karl Edward Wagner, he is so underrated. More people need to find his work. A huge majority of my favorites are dead. Tolkien, Louis L’Amour, Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, Homer, Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, A. Merritt and Fritz Leiber.

Living authors I greatly enjoy are David C. Smith, Schuyler Hernstrom, D.J. Butler, Joe Abercrombie, Steven Pressfield, Bernard Cornwell, and Mike Mignola.

I’m also inspired by film, I especially like samurai movies by Akira Kurosawa, Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns and Guy Ritchie British gangster movies. I also read a lot of history, typically the weirder and more obscure bordering on conspiracy the better.

I feel like blending all of these influences together and spun through my own personal view of life is what makes my work my own unique, because it is so hard to do anything new under the sun – so I think our own filter is the only way to truly do something original.

Many authors say marketing is one of their biggest challenges. What tactics have you found to be most effective for getting your name out there?
We want to be read, so we put stuff out there and ask friends and family to support us but that will only ever go so far. So I try to put the best face on things, good covers, editing, and putting the best description you can on every book. You gotta track down all the reviews you can get and if you are set up for it, I would run some paid advertisements – minimum 10 reviews before I would even try. I like to do some social marketing, but try to make sure that I’m following an 80/20 formula in that I am letting 80% of what I do socially just be fun and stuff I like, so I’m not battering people with “Buy my book! Buy my book!” If people like you, they will give your book a shot. So I would say, be true to yourself, but be available enough for people to like you and see if what you are doing is for them. There is an audience for everything out there somewhere.

How much do your audience’s expectations factor in to what you write? Does this ever cause you to hold back from experimenting?
I started with doing what I want, and sometimes if I get some feedback from readers I will think yeah, I can work that in somewhere, but for me it would still have to be in line with what I do. I have done a couple of ghost-writing projects and those have been some of the hardest things for me to write because they were not my personal passion projects. Going outside what I want to write is really hard work, because I just don’t want to write someone else’s stuff.

I think I like to try and experiment on my own. My usual system is 3rd person POV but I try out 1st person once in awhile. I was so inspired by M.R. James’ English ghost stories a few years ago that I had to try and do that but for western America in Whispers Out of the Dust and it was a lot of fun to collect up ghost stories told in a western flavor.

Have you had any new stories published recently? Are you currently working on any?
I had a weird western with my recurring character Porter Rockwell in Pulp Rock out earlier this year. Porter will return in Fistful of Demons out in just a couple months and I’m feeling stoked that I have a very pulpy story that will be included in a Baen books antho Worlds Long Lost headlined by Orson Scott Card that will be out this December. I went all out with an astronaut transported back to ancient Sumeria and fighting Annunaki.

One of these days I also want to be in a DMR collection because they are top notch S&S! (That could happen soon! This fall we’re going to open for submissions for the first in a series of S&S anthologies entitled Die By the Sword, so keep an eye out for that.—DMR)

Name one newer and one older book you have read and enjoyed recently. (“Newer” meaning from the past year or so, and “older” meaning written before 1980.)
One of my favorite older books is Night Winds by Karl Edward Wagner, I reread it every year because I just enjoy his prose so much. I got such a kick out of Joel Jenkins’ collection of weird western stories headlined by his character Lone Crow – a solitary and misunderstood Indian who carries a blessed six-gun.

Any final words?
Enjoy what you do and that passion will shine through in whatever you are working on. Keep at it.