Podcast

Transcript

John Goodwin  (00:08): Hello and welcome to the Writers and Illustrators of the Future Podcast. This is John Goodwin, your host. This contest has been created to provide inspiration for writers and artists and the ability for them to have their creative effort seen and acknowledged. If you’ve been listening to this podcast or are new to it, I thank you very much. We are here today in Salt Lake City at the Salt Palace Convention Center during Fan-X, a huge pop culture event. So that’s this dull noise you hear throughout the whole interview here.

Today’s guests are Dan and Robert Zangari. It’s a father-son writing team, which I’ve not done before, so I’m very excited about this. And it’s gonna be kind of cool too, because this will probably be episode 400 of the podcast. So it’ll be a good way to celebrate that. So Robert is an multi-award-winning and best-selling author of classic epic fantasy novels.

Robert Zangari (00:40): Yeah.

John Goodwin (01:05): And his father Dan, I’m assuming is also a multi-award winning and best-selling author of classic epic fantasy novels. I’m at the show here and when I was sitting down with Robert, he said, You want my dad to join us? I said, Absolutely, I didn’t know he was here. So anyway, so we’re gonna have both father and son. And they’ve been responsible for creating the Legends of Kalda, which is epic fantasy, and he’s…

Are you both also the owners, co-owners of L O K Publishing? [Yes. Yeah.] Okay, good. So it’s an indie press specializing in high-quality fantasy fiction. So let’s just get into this. So welcome Dan and Robert.

Robert Zangari (01:44): Thank you. Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here, John.

John Goodwin (01:47): No, this is great. So I got lots of questions and to begin with though, Dan, since you’re the one that started this whole thing, since without you we wouldn’t have Robert. So how’d you get started with writing yourself?

Dan Zangari (02:03): Well, it was kind of, I was always interested in science fiction and fantasy, reading as you know, a youth teenager growing up and just started coming up with ideas of my own and when he [Dan] was young, about five or six years old, I started thinking about actually putting these stories down that had been in my head on the paper.

So I started in 1991 just concepts, drawing maps. That’s kind of the way I started. It was just laying out the maps of the world that I was thinking about. And it just kind of went from there and it kind of grew over time. And later, when he was a teenager, I started actually trying to write the books. And I had a friend that I worked with who did murder mystery writing. She was an independent author. And I asked her if she would read the first few chapters of what I was writing. And she read it and she said, It sounds pretty good but sounds like you’re starting in the middle of your story here. You know, why don’t you start from the beginning and where all this started?

And so we kinda went back and I worked with Robert and we started working together and just laying everything out. So I kinda came up with a general concept, the overall storylines, and Robert is a really good writer and he’s been the one filling in all the details and, you know, character storyline development more in the details and aspects. So but but yeah, I started a long…

John Goodwin (03:57): Yeah, what were you doing that writing became either a release from or something you grew into.

Dan Zangari (04:05): Well Yeah. So I’m an aerospace engineer by education. And I was working at the time and it was just more of a to help my mind get out of all of the technical stuff of engineering. So it’s it was kind of like a mental release or mental escape. ’cause I always liked reading, like I said, fiction and fantasy books again as more of an escape from day to day stuff, being an engineer. So it was more of a kind of get my brain thinking in a different direction.

John Goodwin (04:44): Okay, that makes sense. Okay, I can think with that. And yourself, Robert, so then…

Robert Zangari (04:50): So when that, so I’m gonna go back from when I was five. I still have memories of watching my dad sit down, he put a card table up in our family room. We’d have like Star Trek the Next Generation on ’cause you know the new episodes were coming out. And I remember him drawing on graph paper and we actually still have those.

John Goodwin (05:07): Wow, that’s cool. Yeah, ’cause you got amazing maps in in the book there. So you’re the author of those maps.

Robert Zangari (05:14): Well, actually I am too. But so he had the rough ones and I’m like, that’s let’s make this a little more you know accurate. And so I took a lot of the maps that he had done and just kinda overlaid them on an atlas of Earth and was like, Okay, that’s, let’s draw these continents out to how they would actually look like from a cartographer’s standpoint. And then, so but, so I took his original design and refined it. [That’s not Earth.] It’s not Earth. Right. Yeah.

But similar size planet.

John Goodwin (05:45): Okay. So now you’re getting into writing. So you said obviously you’ve not always been a good writer because when you first started you couldn’t hold a pencil. So at some point. So how did that how did it evolve? Is that what you’ve always done has been a writer?

Robert Zangari (05:59): I’ve always liked the idea. And because he was working on this for years when I was growing up, I always imagined it’d be really cool to write with something with dad and you know, be authors and be on an interview. And I always had that image in my head and it was a dream of like that’d be really cool to do, but I don’t know if I’ll ever do it. But I think I really found my love of writing when I was a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

And I wrote in my journal every night. And because I didn’t want to forget anything, I was so detail oriented. I would write five pages in my journal of what we did for the day. This is what these cool houses look like that we went by. And this is the conversations we had and this is how I felt about certain things or whatever. And by the time they done it, the journals and I came home with twelve journals. I would ship them home to my parents and they would be reading them and be like, he didn’t mention that when he emailed us. He didn’t mention that when they emailed us. Is he okay? Yeah, well, he’s still alive, so that’s kind of where I first started finding the passion of I really enjoy this. My first foray into publishing actually was a nonfiction book.

It was a martial arts book that I was using to promote my martial arts business that I started after I got home from my mission. And then I, that’s where,…

John Goodwin (07:27): Did you go to Nicaragua or something?

Robert Zangari No, I went to Knoxville, Tennessee. I got to speak Southern. Also lost my teeth there.

John Goodwin (07:35): Good, good.

Yeah, very good.

Robert Zangari (07:40): That’s where you know, coming back and I was like, this is cool. I like writing. I wrote that book. I produced it in like a couple months and got it edited onto the market. And my dad was like, Hey, I’ve been working on my books for twenty years. Do you wanna come help me finish them? And I’m like, Yeah, sure. You know, and at the time I had just lost two of my oldest two children.

John Goodwin (08:16): Wow.

Robert Zangari (08:37): They would be, gosh, eighteen and sixteen. Sixteen. And so that was kind of the catalyst that brought us together was my dad was like, Do you want to do this together? Get your mind off of it. And I was like, Yeah. And that was in the spring of 2011. And you know, I had heard my dad’s stories. I knew all these characters growing up. I even, we’d drew some of the settings. Like we have this pyramid fortress and I had done the whole design and everything and we ’cause we played D&D. And so it was like, okay, if this was a D&D thing, what was the layout like? And so I des, I had already designed the fortress when I was 16 and you know drawn a whole bunch of creatures. And so I always had this connection and I just never realized until that moment when my children were gone that I was like, my dad was like, Come on, let’s do this. And I think that was really the turning point. And I was like, Okay, I wanna write. And we wrote well, we finished what is the original The Dark Necromancer that was released in 2013. I think we finished that in what, nine months? It came out to be two hundred and fifty-seven thousand words.

Dan Zangari (09:23): Nine months, yeah.

Robert Zangari (09:28): We ended up shopping it around with a bunch of publishers. Yes, it was it was a short one, you know, by our standards, right? and I mean most publishers were like, It’s too big, you gotta cut it in half. And we’re like, No, no, no. We wanna keep it that size. So we ended up, you know, going the self-published route.

John Goodwin (09:45): Is that is that when you started L O K publishing or is that [Yes.] Okay, good. Yep. What does L O K stand for?

Robert Zangari (09:51): Legends of Kalda just the abbreviation.

John Goodwin (10:12): Okay. Yeah. I didn’t wanna like I started looking up like what is L O K and I couldn’t find it when I did my initial glance, but that makes sense that it would be there. So as you continue on writing, so you still do projects together? Yes. Yeah.

So how what’s your I guess what’s your sequence that you do on creating a book. Because I’ve talked to various partners, writing partners that, you know, are very famous and everybody has their different, you know, thing. And one of the things that Larry and Jerry, Larry Niven and Jerry Purnell, say and Sean Williams and I forget who’s writing with, somebody’s got to be the final say so. Kevin and Brian Herbert. You know, it’s got somebody’s got to be the one that says yes or no, the final say, otherwise you’re gonna get into the bickering back and forth. So how do you work it out like in terms of the hierarchy?

Is it like okay, he’s dad. So if he says Yep. Thank you, Robert, we’re doing it this way. [Yes.] So then how do you start off with a book and concept and then I’m assuming if you’re writing it together, like with Kevin and Brian, Kevin Anderson and Brian Herbert, Kevin’s the is the geek. He’s the science guy and Brian’s the religion side of Dune. And so they kinda like they’re the ones that default to Yeah. When they say yes, they’re the ones that have the ultimate say on that. and then Brian because it’s his it’s his legacy, his dad, so he’s got the final, final say. So with yourself then, do you divvy up like, okay, you’re the specialist in this and you’re the specialist in that?

Dan Zangari (11:38): So the we’ve pretty much, so over the years in developing the whole story, I kind of laid out in a general sense the general storyline. So I kinda think of myself as I do the broad strokes, bright color kind of stuff, and he does the more detail, he takes that concept and refines it down to okay, this is what’s gonna happen during these sequences. So I kind of laid out the groundwork and he does the detailed work. And then what we’ve done in the past is once he finishes a chapter, I would look at it and make any tweaks, and we go back and forth like that as we’ve gone through and so we wrote the first three or four books.

And realized because they weren’t really selling well, realized we needed to revamp the, not so much the story itself, but the way it was laid out and the writing style. So and so this is where David Farland comes in, Dave Wilverton comes in, is helping him polish that writing style so that when we, so that we came back and said

Robert Zangari (12:46): And the writings.

Dan Zangari (13:03): Okay, let’s rework these first four books. And by the way, we’re gonna actually start really now from the beginning, which is what A Prince’s Errand is, is it really was originally when we did The Dark Necromancer, A Prince’s Errand didn’t exist. It was almost like a prelude kind of thing. Right. So we ended up writing that in more detail.

But so what we tend to do now is since we have a lot of the story laid out, he’ll write a bunch of chapters. And I’ll go through and I’ll read several chapters at a time. Mm-hmm. And we’ll get feedback back and forth like that. But I mean he’s pretty much knowing the storyline, he’s pretty much sticking to the story. So when I read it, it’s like, okay, yeah, yeah. And then I’ll read, I’ll read something that he’ll add, I’ll be like, well actually that makes more sense.

And so now we’ve run into some situations where we are he’s writing the details and he’s like, okay, I’m stuck here. We got to get out of this sequence, or we gotta get out of this little trap we created in the storyline. How do we do that? And then we’ll, him and I will discuss it and say, okay, well, what if we thought about this? And I’ll read it and I’ll be Well, what if we did this? Or what if we did that? And then so we’ll adjust things as we go as we discuss it. Right. But it’s a pretty good I think it’s a pretty good collaboration. We’ve we haven’t actually had any situations where we’ve really disagreed on anything that he’s written or any interpretation that he has of things that I’ve written down. We really haven’t had, it’s more like I, we’re kinda like in the same vein. It’s kinda…

Robert Zangari (14:52): We’re insane.

John Goodwin (14:56): Yeah, well it’s good you’ve also got the timeline of your story thunked through. You’ve got you know you’ve planned it. You’re not just like pantsing it. You’re not just like wow this is kinda cool. What if it goes this way? Like where’s that? You know, it’s just right where you’re following like that. So now how many series do you have?

Dan Zangari (15:00): Yeah.

Robert Zangari (15:16): The main series, which is Tales of the Amulet, and we do have some that are planned. And really Tales of the Amulet is his Magnum opus. Right. And I’ve got ideas like The Prisoner of Tardalim is a little just a little side story about one of the characters, and but it’s still we consider it part of the Tales of the Amulet series because the event that happens in that book is so critical for everything to be set up correctly so that the story works.

John Goodwin (15:49): Good, so why don’t you go ahead and at this point we use this to do your describe this story. Give the, you know, when you’re pitching the story, like what is this story?

Robert Zangari (15:58): So I like to tell people, so when we are usually pitching both, I’ll say that A Prince’s Errand is about a band of adventurers that are about to retire and they go out on one last hurrah and they discover information about an amulet that could control dragons, but no one’s seen a dragon in hundreds of years, except the crazy old conjurer in the woods that says, I fought a dragon when I was in my twenties.

And nobody believes him because he’s crazy. And that’s the story of Amandala Ramian in The Prisoner of Tardalim.

John Goodwin (16:32): Good, yeah. No, he’s it’s obviously it’s at least it seems obviously that’s gonna be his hero’s journey. Yes. Yeah. And he’s quite the quite the rogue. He is.

Robert Zangari (16:43): He is. We wanted to have some character growth there. And maybe we put him in a very disadvantaged place in his life, but it just shows how much he ends up growing because when people read him in the, when he’s an old man, he’s seventy five when in the main events of the series, they love him. They’re like, He’s so funny, he’s crazy. And that’s like, Yeah, this is how he goes crazy. So you get to see the evolution and see him change as a person because he’s just a dumb twenty-two-year-old kid that’s rich and his I got power, I can do all this, whatever. And you know, from a standpoint, that’s kind of an unlikable person for some people. And that was one thing that when Dave and I were outlining the story, it was like, you gotta, you gotta save the cat. [The phrase “save the cat” refers to a storytelling moment where a main character does something kind or heroic early in a story—such as literally saving a cat—to make the audience like them and root for their success.]

And so that’s why there’s that scene at the beginning when he gives that guy in the alley some money and is like, here, take it. And so that was our save the cat moment for him.

Yeah. And then and then when he gets to meet Ilden at the tavern and they’re talking and you know, a lot of people have told us we do the buddy friend bromance really well. And I think that’s partially because him and I are buddies. Yeah. We’re both only children. And so I think when you’re an only child you see things differently and you see relationships differently. Because you’re like, I’m the only kid. I’m alone.

And I think for me, like I see that and I often will have that in my characters. Like these guys they have these friendships that last. And they’re just bonded. And I have a couple friends that I’m still like that with, you know, thirty-five, almost forty years later, that they’re my brothers.

John Goodwin (18:32): Yeah. I mean his mean, his brother doesn’t seem to be a much of a friend. Right.

Robert Zangari (18:38): Right, yeah. Yeah, it’s like Aaron Till is like you need a shape up kid. you know, I wanted to have that dynamic between you know, you see that they…

John Goodwin (18:47): And says, You’re the better one. Yeah. What do you mean? You know, not trusting that a little bit like, why are you saying that? You’re just trying to get me to say yes to this mission they want me to go on to. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So on the… So now on writing these series, so like it’s you know, I’ve seen some of the reviews, you know, it’s like Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time and then I really loved David Eddings, The Belgariad, which wasn’t mentioned in reviews, but I really like that’s that but all these hero journeys, you know, that type thing. So then then is it the name pronounced Amendhal? Yes. Okay. Amendal. Yes, Amendhal. So in this case he’s got his hero’s journey, which I mean I personally really enjoy that type of stuff. And he’s just like how many times does he get beat up before he finally gets to the end, you know? Yeah. And then obviously he’s got to grow. But, you know, when he runs into things like you know, he’s last breath, but then a magic leaf falls on his head and all of a sudden he’s got another chance, you know, whatever type ’cause you got fantasy. So one of the things that I’m always fascinated with when I read fantasy with magical systems is how you came up with your magical system because it’s, you’ve got a lot of magic in here. It’s not you know, sometimes it’s just like with I mean different whichever’s different series with Brandon, you know, you’ve got, you know, the different metals that create this and you got others that have, you know, their systems where this gotta be balanced with you can’t if you use up, then something else has to be given to balance it, you know.

And on yours you’ve got the various, now they’re all considered mages, but they all specialize in different forms of magic. So you’ve got your conjurer, which is what Amendol is. So is that the top level, the conjurer, or is that…

Robert Zangari (20:42): No, they’re all kind of I think the top level is the Grand Mage. And in Amendal’s, their society there they don’t have any Grand Mages. And that’s you know, they’re the headquarters of the mages. They specialize in all the different channels of power. But you know, we when we first started, you were kinda going on a D and D style. And I think when we were first looking at the initial drafts, it was like this is, this feels a little too close to D and D. That’s you know, we want to have these things, we want illusions, we want to be able to, you know, use these, you know, a magic missile type thing. Well that’s okay, let’s change it to be these, you know, magical orbs. And maybe we have these different things that do you know, we got elementalists that can do fire and water and lightning and things.

So we’re like, Okay, let’s come up with something and that’s draw it on the lore of the world. And so the world of Calda is all about dragons. It’s the birthplace of dragons. And humans and elves are not native to this world. And so it’s a world of magic. And we like the number seven. And so we wanted to have seven channels of power. And so we ended up kind of saying, okay, if this particular thing, like the illusions or the telekinetics, we’re gonna put that into like the manipulation channel. And then we’re like, well we want conjuration because we want these guys to be able to make things and we also want to have be able to use portals. And so we’re like, okay, that’s kind of shunt that in its own little thing. And then remember we talked about, well, what about healers? Like we don’t really have any priests, but I mean we got different gods and everything. And so we’re like, well let’s make actual healing magic. That’s the apprentice, yes. And then we’ve got the…

John Goodwin (22:44): That’s the Aprinus? Apranus. Okay, good.

Robert Zangari (22:50): Transmuters and so they’re all about matter manipulation. And so there’s a whole line about that. And then let’s see, we got the elementalists, the arprentics, the barjanists. Yeah, and we all wanted something like barrier magic. And because we also were coming at this from a D&D standpoint, we’re like, if we ever adapted this into a game, how can we try to balance this and what could we have?

I’m like, well, what if we just had a whole group of people that specialized in creating barriers? And because we have, we had things that were in the ideas that he had laid out where like there’s this one place that is a city and it’s protected by magical barriers.

We’re like, well, why don’t we just make that like a whole thing of the channel of magic? And so that’s kind of where we decided let’s lay this out, let’s kind of put some world building symbolism into it and then we’ll just kind of stick to those rules and be like, okay, this we gotta do that. But we do kind of cross things. So we imagined the channels as like a three-dimensional spider web that there’s these main branches that come out, but sometimes they connect into others and they create new types of things like the life draining magic is like an inverse of the arpren magic. And we end up having some different things within the manipulation channel where you can do certain things. and there’s magical objects that can channel things, like you’ll see in the book. VM has a magical device called a Tevisrol.

John Goodwin (24:42): That yeah, that she can use. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, see they’re always they’re going on these journeys trying to find them. Yeah. Yep.

Robert Zangari (24:49): And so when we looked that, we’re like, we got the magic system. Now we were like, well, how do we manifest the magic system? And we’re like, well, incantation, you know. So we kinda because it initially started off as very soft, we were kind of approaching it like the Eddings where it’s the will and the word. And it’s like part of the way that we’ve structured the way incantations are is you have to say certain words and you have to use your mind in balance with those. If those two are ever out of sync, the magic will not manifest. And if you’re interrupted, then you gotta start all over again. And you’ll, there’s you’ll find something very interesting with Amendol about matching will to word and it in later on in the book, which was a lot of fun for us. Because we didn’t wanna just have one blanket thing. There’s three ways of manifesting magic without with the incantations. And then we also decided we wanted three ways of manifesting magic, period, which was incantation, magical devices, and then magical fauna, which we get later in in the series where we elaborate a little more on that.

So you, we’re kind of obsessed with the numbers three and seven and so we’re like, okay, how do we stick within these you know, these bounds? And that’s how we kind of we’re like, okay, let’s play with this and we wanna have certain things and we like we want to be able to have the rules so that way we can use the magic to complicate things later on. So it’s like magic isn’t just solving everything. In fact, magic is a complication in many circumstances that’s like okay, how are we gonna overcome this?

John Goodwin (26:45): Good. So now when you did it, so like were you the DM on this one, the Dungeon Master on controlling and building the magic system and it’s okay, I’m gonna we got this, this, this, we got this seven and then it’s up to Robert then. Okay, so I said what they are and you said what it is.

Robert Zangari (27:03): Yeah, you fill in the blanks. Yes. Right.

Dan Zangari (27:06): Right.

John Goodwin (27:07): Okay, good. So, it’s interesting ’cause like I said, you know, talking about the other authors that hero’s journey, I got originally interested in fantasy reading Andre Norton’s The Witch World series. Okay. And I don’t know if you’re familiar with her now. She was, she was one of our Writers of the Future judges way back when and just an amazing woman, but it’s portal, you know, so you got Earth, which is Science is the everything’s done by science, you go to witch world and it’s all done by magic and science isn’t part of it. You know, it’s just a total black and white, you know. And this one guy goes through a portal, so he’s an engineer and he ends up on the witch world. And so it’s, it makes for an interesting, you know, conflict there.

But the one thing that I’m always most critical of in fantasy is the integrity of the magical system, you know, that how much you stick to it. So it’s not like, they get into a dilemma so Bing No sword now there’s a sword. You know? Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Dan Zangari (28:20): We we’re yeah the same I have the same concern. So when we’re doing something laying it out, it’s like, okay, this has to make sense. It has to be believable and it has to be within the system we’ve already set up. Right. We can’t do something that’s gonna be, where did that come from? Where do they come up with that? So it has to be believable within the world that we’ve built.

John Goodwin (28:48): Right. Yeah, exactly. All right, here we go. New floor. Yeah.

Dan Zangari (28:55): Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah. No.

Robert Zangari (28:57): We’re so, we’re both engineers. So I went to school for biomedical engineering. He’s aerospace engineer. So we approach everything in the fantasy world from an engineering mindset. So we’re like, okay, we gotta make sure this actually works. And then we kind of like test things out. And it’s like if the storyline is here and these things have to happen, because this is what he told as the original thing years ago, we can’t let the magic system deter that.

Right. And so it’s like that’s, make sure everything is jives and is cohesive. And I think with having an engineering mind that helps us develop the magic system and you know, we don’t really get too hard into the rules, but we know the rules and we’re like we can’t break these rules and they keep evolving ’cause we keep finding new things and we’re like, Okay, nope. Nope, that’s you can’t have that, so we gotta make sure that this can only do this and vice versa.

One of our editors on A Prince’s Errand, she’s like, Do you have like the complete thing mapped out for the magic system? And I’m like, No, it’s ever evolving and it’s like three hundred pages. So I mean we could send it to you, but do you really want to get the technical notes?

John Goodwin (30:14): Got it, yeah. It’s interesting because I know I spoke with you and you were familiar with Writers of the Future, but you hadn’t read anything by L. Ron Hubbard, which I gave you a copy of Typewriter in the Sky. But one thing, one of the greats from I guess the Golden Age, yeah, you had John W. Campbell. He was the one who ran Astounding Science Fiction, and he wrote a letter to L. Ron Hubbard saying, “I’m glad you’ll be with us on the Arabian Night stuff. And you needn’t worry about having it yours. I’ve been telling a few of the boys to read Washington Irving as an example of pure fantasy and complete acceptance of magic, enchantment, etc. And adding that they aren’t to do Arabian Nights because the field is preempted by you. It’s been held open for you. I’m reserving the Arabian Knights to you entirely.”

So he wrote Slaves of Sleep and Masters of Sleep. And there’s The Ultimate Adventure, which are you know, so the magic systems there, it’s you know, you’ve got, you know, he also studied engineering and just kept it very you know, without having you draw yourself in the corner and all of a sudden pring you know, here’s a sword to get you out, you know, and the sword can do anything. Yeah. You know, you touch it, turns red light, then you can do this, blue light, you can do that. It’s like doesn’t do that type of stuff. It’s all Arabian Nights, you know, based on like comparable to the Thousand and One Arabian Nights type stories that he did that type of stuff. And it was very, very popular, very fun. The Ultimate Adventure is just a great story there.

But the the dedication that you did then with Dave Farland. He was, Dave was an amazing man. He, when I first met him, he was Dave Wolverton, ’cause that was in Writers of the Future Volume 3, he was the grand prize winner. And he later became the coordinating judge. And I was in constant communication with him up until, you know, his passing a few years ago. But he was I mean, he was nicknamed like the story doctor.

You know, and he was always helping writers. He just, he loved to do that and lived to do that. And it was such a loss to the whole science fiction fantasy community when he passed. How did you meet him? Just because you’re here in Utah?

Robert Zangari (32:34): Yeah, we, so actually I saw a commercial on the TV before Fan-X was coming. We were already planning to be here. We were ex…, we had already set up our exhibitor booth and everything. And it was like a couple days before the event, there was a spotlight, I believe. And I remember hearing it and it was the story doctor. And I was like, Okay, I need to meet that guy.

And that was my plan. I wanted to meet him and Anthony Daniels. And so I think it was the second day I finally made it over when Dave was there. The first day he wasn’t there. He was I caught missed him. And then I met him the second day and told him that, yeah, I’m an author and I’ve got a booth here with my dad. And I said, I looked at your classes, but I saw that they’re booked and there’s not anything that’s gonna happen you know, no new entries for a bit. And Dave gave me his personal email and he said, just email me and I’ll give you access. And I was like, What? Really? And I was like, Yeah, just email me. Shortly after that I never I I didn’t get in contact with him because I ended up getting a divorce from my first wife and that I didn’t reconnect with Dave until I think it was twenty early 2018. Yes, I believe it was the February 2018. So was almost two and a half years later. And so I asked him like can I take you up on that offer? And he’s like, Of course. And so I decided I’m going to take every single one of Dave’s classes and just blow through this. This is my, you know, crash course into being a professional writer ’cause we’re like I wanna do this right. And this guy knows what he’s talking about because he’s helped all these other people. Right. And I I’d never had a chance to attend his classes when he was at BYU because I was at the University of Utah. And so that never worked out. But I was, you know, I’m like, okay, I wanna learn everything that he knows.

So I was kind of the annoying little kid that, you know, was just gloming on to everything and like I’m here at every class. And when I think it was the third or fourth one I took from him was the outlining class, the master plotting, I think is what it was called. And that I had initially come because we had a side series that we wanted to do that was a more of a murder mystery still set in our fantasy world. So I wanted to, I wanted to take the robot series from Asimov and do something like that, but in a fantasy world with some of our characters and setting. And I wanted to have, you know, the three different locations and I had this whole plan. And after the second day we had done all these exercises and I went up to Dave and I said, you know, I came here with this certain intent. And I’m getting all these other visuals for this action piece, this more traditional fantasy adventure. And he said that’s what your brain wants to write. So that’s what you gotta write. So of the fifty scenes that we came up with in that outlining class, 43 of them are in the Prisoner of Tardalim.

John Goodwin (36:19): Wow. That’s pretty cool. Yeah. Did you, do you study these stuff as well?

Dan Zangari (36:24): No.

Robert Zangari (36:25): He went to a couple of

Dan Zangari (36:27): I went to a couple of yeah, Latouille. A couple of his…

John Goodwin (36:33): Latouille?

Robert Zangari (36:34): L T U E down in Provo. [Life, The Universe, and Everything]

John Goodwin (36:39): Okay, good.

Robert Zangari (36:42): He calls it Latouille and it’s like, yeah, whatever.

John Goodwin (36:48): Yeah. Yep. All right. So now on Writers of the Future. So you said when we talked earlier that you had entered multiple times and then pro’ed out so that you couldn’t enter any longer. But so was Dave the one that introduced you to Writers of the Future? Or how’d you find out about it?

Robert Zangari (37:05): Dave had talked about it in one of the classes and I was like, okay, it’s if that’s the thing that is gonna take your, take you know, set off your career, then I need to pursue it. And so I wrote a bunch of short stories. I mean, that it was hard to do because we’re used to the big huge books and it’s like, wow, gotta learn the short story craft and you know we entered a bunch of our short stories and this was after I had taken classes with Dave and one of the short stories I entered we, I actually wrote during Dave’s death camp that he did the weeklong summer thing that he had, did in Saint George. And one of the times he’s like, Yeah, I recognized the character name when I was going through it.

And then you know, we released A Prince’s Errand and when that ended up when we put it into audiobook, it was one we pro’ed out and it just accelerated our sales. And by the time we realized that we couldn’t do it anymore, we had pro’ed out twice. I guess and so it’s like, okay, I can’t win that award. Cause we had entered a bunch of other awards for A Prince’s Errand and we won the Chanticleer International Awards for the Osma Division.

We won the American Fiction Awards that year, the Dragonfly Book Awards, the Global Ebook Awards, and I can’t remember the others off the top of my head, but there were seven. And Dave had told me, said, Go enter each of these, ’cause I had sat down with him at lunch and he’s like, How do I get cover quotes? That I really wanna have a cover quote from, you know, be able to use that and see those credentials.

And he was like, enter awards. Just enter them and use them as your marketing material for when you get the feedback. And if you win, great. And if they don’t like it, then it’s fine. And so that’s what kind of catalyzed our whole becoming multi award winning authors because it was true. Yeah.

So he, so our career as authors is doing wholly to David Farland. And that was one of the reasons why I dedicated the book to him. Because he helped so much with that. Like in when I went for the weeklong thing, we worked on the first half of the book there and workshopped it. And so it was like, okay, well how do I make this better? What do I do in this situation? How can we you know provide more tension here? Is you know, what do we do to make this more interesting? And Dave was critical.

And it was amazing, like how much he enhanced the story and then how much he taught that got me to the point where I’m like, okay, this is much better than what we were doing before writing-wise. Cause we were, I was trying to be edgy, you know, I’m a young twenty something year old kid. And I’m like, okay, Dad, if we’re gonna do something really cool, why don’t we do something like an omniscient third person narrative? In present tense. And you know, it’s like that you don’t see that. And it as a reason you don’t see that. And it that was us thinking, okay, we could do something new. And it’s like, no, you’re just trying to mess up the technique and we realized that was not how to be edgy and cool.

John Goodwin (40:49): Scott Card, Orson Scott Card would have seen that, he would have like thrown you on your ear. Said English language is not present tense, it’s all past tense, you know, ’cause everything’s talk spoken in past tense. And if you don’t do that then nobody can you know, I walk through the door and I pick up my fork and I chew my food and like nobody talks like that. It’s just all of a sudden it throws a person out of the story.

Robert Zangari (40:53): Right.

Robert Zangari (41:13): Nobody talks like that.

John Goodwin (41:18): Yeah, one thing that Dave was such a fanatic supporter of Writers of the Future and he loved L. Ron Hubbard’s writing, you know, and I’m looking forward to your reading, you know, yes the book that I gave you. The, because the contest that he created was based on his stories, because he wrote lots of essays in the 30s and 40s to help other aspiring writers. And so all the essays are in there, and we created an also a free online writing workshop.

That Dave Farland did several of the videos for, Orson Scott Card did several and Tim Powers. And then we’ve added now a few other of our judges on there, Nnedi Okorafor and Kevin Anderson and Robert J. Sawyer. And we’re about to have a video from Jody Lynn Nye up there as well on the craft of writing, you know, different aspects of it. Which anybody listening to stuff, I’ve said it many times, but I’ll say it again. You know, these are the professionals, these are the ones that they that’s their livelihood is as a writer and they write short stories as well as long form. And they talk about the value of short stories. So you’ve only one of the things I was looking at then when I was looking at like this the book here, so is it on the table of contents? It seems like there’s a lot of things. There’s almost like a series of connection of short stories, you know, pieced together to make it I’m looking at this like, wow, you know, and just so is that how it came together?

Robert Zangari (42:50): No, we, our short stories were like things that we cut from A Prince’s Errand. And we’re like, Well, how can we expand on this thing and not be too, you know, weighed down and like, well, let’s turn it into a short story. So, Defender of Stone is about the living statues that we have in our story and you see them in A Prince’s Errand. Yeah, but you really get a good idea of their working in Defender of Stone. And so that was one of the things we were like, okay, let’s see how that…

John Goodwin (43:26): Wondering how that, ’cause that it seemed like he got short stories, but just a big novel. It’s like I got thrown off. So then that just those are just your extra scenes that got cut.

Robert Zangari (43:35): And other stuff. And one of them is like it’s kind of an alternate prologue to A Prince’s Errand, and that’s The Price of Penitence. And that was one of the stories I had submitted to Writers of the Future that Dave’s like, wait a second, I recognize this stuff. And so that one it  was just kind of an alternate thing, and it’s like we didn’t go with that one because it was not as action paced as the other prologue that we have. That’s published.

So we ended up, you know, looking at different little things we wanted to do and expound on and be able to write more about. And some of the upcoming short stories are other questions that readers have had, like, well how did how did the Mindalarn Empire get started? And that’s birth of an empire. That’s

John Goodwin (44:06): Yeah. Sure.

Robert Zangari (44:33): That’s one that’s going to be showing the roots of it. And then we have Of Smugglers and Fairies. And that’s one about Fench, which is the little guy that’s on the cover of The Prisoner of Tardalim. And that one was we wanted to explore his character more because he was so fun to write in The Prisoner of Tardalim. And he’s fun to write regardless. But to see him in the earlier phase of his life versus where he is at in Tales of the Amulet. We wanted to kind of see a midpoint. And so we’re like, let’s do one with him where, you know, he’s a very long-lived creature. So he’s a toddler, but he’s five thousand years old. And so he’s dealing with the loss of Amendel’s dad because this is years after The Prisoner of Tardalim. And he’s like, he sees them as family and he’s like, I can’t lose them.

John Goodwin (45:05): I get it.

Robert Zangari (45:32): And so he’s looking for something that could extend Amendal’s life. You know? Yeah. And so all these little things of what we want to do. There’s one, the floral of Chakrell, and that’s one we’re gonna follow a dragon botanist as he’s looking at the world and seeing how the magical plants are doing. Because during our dragon war, the botany or the fauna, flora of Calda was decimated. There was, there’s another magical power outside of the seven channels, and the, per the antagonist of that dragon war used that and it changed the face of Calda. And so now it’s been 6,000 years, and so he’s going around and looking about what how is the world changing and we get to see a little more in how the plant magic works. So you, we kinda look at short stories as how can we expand on what we’ve built. And so they’re just nice little side snippet pieces of fiction that people can read and be like, okay, that’s really cool.

John Goodwin (46:47): Good. Now one question I’ve got ’cause we’re all about ten minutes left here. So you’re a publisher, but so, and I’ve talked about this in other interviews I’ve done, like in 2024 there were over four million ISBNs—books—published in the US and in 2025 over five million. So discoverability is a real challenge once you have a book. And so you started your publishing house as a solution to getting your books out there or, so what sparked that how do, so for people listening so like I got books, what do I do? How do I get myself heard and how do I get above the din of everybody else saying, Read me?

Dan Zangari (47:30): Yeah, so we kinda realized we kinda tried to market the original The Dark Necromancer to a couple of the big publishing houses. I went out and was looking at different strategies and we said, Hey, you know, we wanna kinda have some control over our what we put, what we write, what we put out.

So that’s when we decided, well, let’s look into self-publishing and what we need to do to do that. And I was talking to a friend that said, Well, you’re gonna need to have a business model and you’re gonna need to set up your own business and do that kind of stuff so that you can self-publish and get your brand out there. And so that’s kind of what drove it a little bit was okay, let’s set up a company, our own publishing company and then start from there and start doing what we need to do to advertise and get our brand out there. So it was more of a kind of the solution to the not being able to find the big publisher to publish our books.

John Goodwin (48:45): I mean I it’s not an uncommon strategy that people have used to do that. ‘Cause I noticed when I went to Amazon and looked up different books there, y’all have L O K Inc, you know. So on doing your books and so you’ve got a line of how many books?

Robert Zangari (49:03): I think we’ve got there’s I think there’s at least twenty-nine active titles for me on Amazon. ’cause it says like forty, I think, but some of those are our older titles. But as far as our lineup, we have twelve books planned for the series. And I think at least thirty something short stories.

And then the Rising Wonder anthology I put together for Fan-X initially and we have ten of those planned. I might do more. Dave inspired me to do anthologies because of his work with Writers of the Future. And I thought that’d be really cool to do one day. And when we started sponsoring a big mega booth that gave me the idea of how are we gonna get people moving around the booth.

And it was like, Well, why not get a signature page in an anthology and sell it there and it gives the authors something extra to sell. And that was four years ago. And it sold out when we were here at the con and it did really well. I think we’ve sold at least three thousand copies of that, probably over the last couple of years with very minimal effort, mostly just at shows. but it was…

Dan Zangari (50:11): Yeah.

John Goodwin (50:27): Yeah.

Robert Zangari (50:31): …fun to have another thing to market and be like, we also got this, and then we decided we’re gonna put some of our exclusive short stories in there. So our very first volume of Rising Wonder, the guy that writes the epigraphs in The Prisoner of Tartalim is that’s his story. So it’s because he’s, you were quoting a book, and it’s him having that book and trying to sell that book. So he’s at a book signing essentially.

And he gets whisked off into an adventure. We’re like, what would it be like to be an author? And then you have to, you know, go somewhere. And of course he’s a conjurer, so he’s equipped to go places. But it was a fun way to kind of expand on that. And that was one of the things we’re like, that guy. Dad, who is that guy? Dad’s like, I don’t know. You roll with it.

John Goodwin (51:24): Yeah. That’s good. So now on, ’cause there’s, I noticed that you use Book Funnel, and then what have you found for yourselves the best way to introduce your line or yourselves as authors to a new audience? ‘Cause that’s like I said, being able to be discovered is the biggest thing. You, you’re obviously here at the show and that’s a very, and we do that too. I don’t know how many shows do you do?

Robert Zangari (51:51): We’ve done, we let’s see, last year we did sixteen. This year we’ve only done twelve. I ended up cutting back a little bit because we’re expecting another child. And so we’re like, well, okay, I gotta help take care of things at home so I can’t do as many shows. And so that’s kinda one thing that we end up doing is the shows are a big part. But what has really worked well for us is Facebook advertising and being able to promote Sales deals. A lot of the ebook purchases that we’ve had for Rising Wonder have come directly from Facebook’s sales.

John Goodwin (52:30): Do you do offer like buy one, get one free or here’s a, you get them to here’s a free short story that you get for the emails addressing that you can, then do the email marketing to them?

Robert Zangari (52:43): Yeah, we do. For our own personal stuff we do that and I think as Rising Wonder gets bigger I’ll probably end up offering Rising Wonder one for free and be like, Hey, get this one for free and then as the lost leader, yeah.

John Goodwin (52:55): They’re hooked him into it.

Yep. Good. And then so do you do email marketing or most…

Robert Zangari (53:02): Yeah. our mailing list is about I think it’s about five a little over five thousand now. And we do our email marketing through Shopify. So we ended up we used to use MailChimp and when we switched over from using Square a couple years ago, I was looking at Shopify ’cause we needed a new website and I was like, Okay, I could consolidate so many things into just one payment and Shopify gives you ten thousand emails a month. And we would only send out maybe once a month newsletter. And so we’re like, well, we got five thousand. We got enough to do two. And let’s just go that route. And then I believe Shopify has a. I haven’t looked into it recently, but I know that there’s like a small fee for like every thousand emails after that. But it was still significantly smaller than something like MailChimp or Mailywrite. So we

We also sell directly on the website, which we have our audiobooks and our ebooks in there as well. We do have, we haven’t, we’re restructuring the print copies so that we can have the API that’s built into Book Vault so that they can print and ship automatically. And so we’re looking at that as one of the other routes in addition to the other retailers that we advertise to.

And so that’s gonna be something we end up doing probably within the next year or so. But the one thing that is really I think that has helped us build is also working with top-notch creators. So the audiobooks that we have made are done by Michael Kramer. So we’re like, okay, if we’re gonna go, we’re if we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna shoot for the moon. And one of the times I was talking to Dave, he’s like, if you got the resources

to be the super lead, be the super lead. Because trying to be the super lead at an established house is gonna be hard. You gotta wait for somebody to die off. Can’t be the super lead at Tor. That’s Brandon. So there’s we that was another reason why we kind of were like, we’re gonna lean a little more into this. Cause it was like, we wanted to make our books look professionally published, and so we hired a…

Robert Zangari (55:24): …top-notch illustrator that worked on Dungeons and Dragons and the EverQuest online franchise. And we just loved his dragons. So we’re like, Kareem, we’re gonna hire you and have you do our covers. He also does international covers for like Tad Williams and Naomi Novak. So we wanted to kind of approach it as we’re not just throwing something out there. We’re gonna have a very professional product.

And I feel like that helps with the marketing because people see that and it’s like even though yes there are millions of other titles they’ll see that and like that’s narrated by Michael Kramer. I like Michael Kramer. I’m gonna go buy that. And that’s I think…

John Goodwin (56:08): Sure, people audiobooks will definitely, they’ll either buy an author because they will like the series or they’re like I like his voice, so I’m gonna do that.

So now with on your series, when you do series, do you find there’s a certain make break point once you need to get three or four or five books out and in a series before it tips over enough people are now drawn into it that that book goes good, then that, then you go back and also they buy the first four books there. Now that they’re like, Wow, I really like this series. Now I’m gonna go back and find read the whole series. Is that something that happens at all? Have you observed?

Robert Zangari (56:44): No, actually. I think we’re kind of the oddballs because we had A Prince’s Errand out and within probably six months the book was already in profit from the amount of sales that we ended up having. And it was, I know it’s not necessarily the same way for a lot of people.

And so it’s for us it was like, okay, well, we got enough to make this financially feasible, let’s do the next one. And so it was kinda like I think we were very lucky in that regard.

John Goodwin (57:30): Well, I’m not so much a believer in luck. I’m a believer that a person makes their own luck. So there ’cause I don’t want people to listen like, okay, so that they got lucky. So you know we’ll rephrase that. So you had either is a hustle that you did or something you’re doing that you’re very proactive to build an audience and to get people to connect with you.

Robert Zangari (57:50): I yes, I think getting the…

John Goodwin (57:53): Dad’s got an answer.

Dan Zangari (57:55): Well, I was gonna say, I think it’s a combination of a couple of different things. It’s the events we do, we get out in front of people, the cover art, how it looks. I’ve we’ve had a lot of people that have looked at our books to come up to our booth, look at our books and be like, That I really love that. You know, they say don’t judge a book by its cover. Well, people do that.

And they come up and they look at our books and they’re like, I can tell this is epic fantasy. This is a cool cover. This is like, you know, a 1980s fantasy cover. And that’s what we were shooting for. Epic, epic fantasy. So I think it’s just getting out there and going out there and going to different events and doing different things.

And then having of course once they read the story they like it, but having the professional look, like Robert was saying, that’s helped out a lot. Where people will look at that and that’s a lot of people are still buying A Prince’s Errand and wanting to come up and we’re always selling that at whatever event we go to sell we’ll sell A Prince’s Errand and that’s

Robert Zangari (59:16): Yeah, we always sell out of that.

Dan Zangari (59:20): Our first one and

John Goodwin (59:22): I think so that’s good in that ’cause we’re now over over time. I but just so the punchline is which is what I was hoping to drive home is like a book isn’t just like, okay, I wrote a book and I’ve, I threw together some nice artwork here. I went and now like I go to AI and I make my cover and then I don’t really bother, you know, editing. I just it went through my AI and it still got edited.

It, that’s not a book. You need to have a, you, it needs to be properly edited. It needs to have a real live professional cover on it to make it work. And you if you try to scrimp on the shrimp, it’s like you put all this work to writing a book and then you just totally let it go by the wayside because you’re not gonna put the effort into it to make it a final product.

Dan Zangari (01:00:08): We learned our lesson when we started out, we kinda went on the cheap with covers. Cover art and that and we learned our lesson that that wasn’t helping us. So we needed to back up. We needed to change the writing style. That was also not helping. So we were kinda revamped things. Yeah, and that has really changed things. You know, you can you can give up.

John Goodwin (01:00): That’s the editor and that’s the cover.

Dan Zangari (01:00:38): People could just have been in our position that said, well, this isn’t selling. I’m just gonna go do something else. And we decided, no, this is a good story. We like it. We think other people are gonna like it. So let’s fix it and make it so that it will be likable to other people and that they’ll wanna read it.

John Goodwin (01:00:59): Good.

Robert Zangari (01:01:00): I think there’s one thing about the, as far as the ethic of what to do is I put a lot of study into looking at other covers in the genre, looking at the way things were done and learning exactly how those things are placed. And so looking at like I looked at David Farland’s covers and I was like, Okay, look how is the typography laid out? What kind of typography is used?

What kind of drop shadow is there? And then looking at the interior of the books, and it’s like, okay, how is this laid out? One of the things I did early on was I would look at a book and then I would just take a page. Like I did this with Rune Lords 1 and I retyped that page. And then I was playing with the formatting to figure out what do I need to do to get those all those words on that page. And that helped me figure out, okay.

This is how this is about the structure of where the margins are and this is the correct weight because trying to I notice this with this a lot of self-published books, the spacing between the words are different. And I think what if you want to be successful, you have to be able to look at the, you know, things like the formatting and say, Okay, I need to make this indistinguishable from a traditionally published book.

Yeah. And so and that does take a lot of work because you gotta study. You gotta look at you gotta, you know, analyze everything. And so for anybody listening, I think that’s the big thing is you gotta break down what is popular in your genre and look at the physical media, look at the ebooks, look at the audiobooks, and not necessarily copy, but recreate, learn the formula of how to do it.

John Goodwin (01:02:54): Exactly.

Robert Zangari (01:02:55): And I think that’s what’s given us the success we’ve had.

John Goodwin (01:02:57): That’s awesome. All right. So how does somebody find you? Where do they go to find you and to check out like we were talking about this one series here, so in terms of the book one for your for your writing and then how does somebody find you if they want to reach out?

Robert Zangari (01:03:16): So our website is Legends of Kalda, K A L D A dot com. And you can also search our names, Robert Zangari, Dan Zangari. We’re the first things that pop up. So we’re, you got those unique names, so it’s really easy. We’re both on Facebook. I don’t think he’s on any other platforms. No. but I’m also on Instagram, TikTok, X.

And you can find us on Kickstarter. we like to do Kickstarter, so we have a profile up there. and we do events all over Utah. As far as online you can reach us at any of those platforms.

John Goodwin (01:04:08): Right. Well, thank you very much, Robert. And thank you very much for being a Dan and Robert team that you know, ’cause I’ve not done this type of interview before with a father son, you know, so this is this is very cool. And I’m sure there’s others out there as well, you know, mother daughter or mother son, however it goes there, but just, you know, a family, creation, which is really, really, really awesome.

Anyway, thank you, and thank you for listening.

Writers of the Future and Illustrates the Future are contests created by L. Ron Hubbard to provide a means for the aspiring writer and artist to have a chance for their creative efforts to be seen and acknowledged for over four decades. We’ve also been syndicated on the United Public Radio Network and can be found and heard in over 150 countries.

Visit Writers of the Future dot com to listen to past episodes of this podcast, to sign up for the free online writer workshop, enter either contest, and see the past volumes and winners.

Again, thank you both very much.

Dan Zangari (01:05:10): Thank you,

Robert Zangari (01:05:11): for having us.