Have you ever watched movie actors doing promotional interviews and it’s really clear that they’ve been answering the same questions for different outlets all day, and they’re just over it?

It’s not the same for writers, as most of us don’t do all of our promotion in the same day, but sometimes it feels a bit like that. When you have a new book come out, there are a few weeks* around that where you’re doing a lot of promotion.

*I say a few weeks, because while we’re always promoting, it’s heaviest right around the launch of a new book, and while most of that goes live in the week of the book launch, a lot of interviews, both written and audio, are pre-recorded.

Having just gone through a book release, I thought I’d share my thoughts on some of the best practices I saw from interviewers/podcasters. To do that, I reached out to some of my writer friends to get their feelings as well. Some of this might be my own pet peeves, but I think enough of it is generic that it can be helpful across the board.

Please don’t read this as me being unappreciative of people who take the time to promote books and authors. We love all of you. I seriously mean it. I’m going to do your interview, regardless of the questions. Please see it this way: We’re in it together. You’re creating content for your platform, and I’m the subject. If you give me better questions, I’m able to give you better answers, and you get better content. We both look good.

Here are my thoughts.

1. The questions that I hope to never see again (but absolutely will). There are some questions that most authors are just tired of. The ones we joke about among ourselves (not in a mean way, just in a ‘they keep asking me this’ kind of way.) They’re not bad questions. They’re just things we answer over and over again.

a. What made you want to be a writer? There’s nothing wrong with this question. But unless you’re interviewing a debut writer, we’ve all told this story dozens of times already and you’re going to get the same story. It hasn’t changed.

b. When did you know you wanted to be a writer? Same as above.

c. Where do you get your ideas from? If you take nothing else from this post, take this: Please just retire this from your list of questions. This one is both too common and too broad. I get my ideas from so many different places, I can’t possibly answer it. I honestly don’t know a writer who likes this question. Ideas are like Roy Kent. They’re here, they’re there, they’re every-fucking-where.

d. Tell me about this book. This one is okay, except you’re probably going to run the back cover copy on the same page — or maybe you won’t. But I don’t know that yet. So do I rehash the back cover copy? (This one is absolutely fine in a podcast type situation or any kind of interview where we’re talking. In fact, it’s kind of a must.)

2. Questions that are too difficult or complicated to answer well. There are some things that are too nuanced for a short answer, so unless you’ve got time to unpack it, it’s difficult to answer it at all. On the other side of this, if you’re doing a podcast and you do have time to go deep into one specific topic, you could make a really good conversation of it.

a. What are your favorite books of all time? I hate this question on multiple levels. First, I have a complex relationship with books, and this is an ever-changing list, so I’m loathe to commit it to record when it might be different in six months, depending on how I’m feeling.

Second, how dare you make me choose just a few. I love so many books. It’s like asking someone who their favorite kid is. Yeah, of course they have them, but they probably don’t want to say it out loud.

Third, some of my favorite books of all time might be problematic, so I don’t want to mention them without having the discussion about those aspects of the book. For example, in military SF, one of the best books of all time, in my mind, is THE FOREVER WAR, by Joe Halderman. But I can’t recommend it without adding in caveats. The book was written in 1974, and it has some outdated views about LBGTQ+ people. Not hateful or mean, but potentially harmful still, as a product of when it was written. Halderman himself has acknowledged this, and said if he was writing it now, he’d do it different. Essentially, he wrote gay men as androgynous, and if you look at the early seventies when he wrote it, you can see how he got there, with David Bowie being as popular as he was and other aspects of gay culture being more underground and not necessarily available to outsiders. Does that make it right? No. But back to my point: do you see how that seemingly simple topic is so complicated?

a2. Along the same lines, ‘what is your favorite book that you read recently?’ is a question I dread. This has pitfalls on a couple of levels. First, if the writer isn’t up to date on their reading (because some writers don’t read while they’re drafting, for example). But even when you ask it to someone you know is constantly reading the newest stuff, like me, it’s a hard question. Because yeah, I’ve read six or eight books in the last few months, mostly from this year, and I’ve got a lot to say. But guess what…some of those authors are going to read my interview. And now you’re making me pick one of them ahead of the others in public, where they can see it.

If you want me to talk about books, I’m super happy to do it. But give me some wiggle room. ‘What are some books that you’ve read lately that you can recommend?’ is a great way to get me to talk about new science fiction. Or, if you want to give me even more room to give you a great answer, ask it broadly — what are some books that you’d recommend in your genre? Or narrow it down and make it more specific: if people love your work, who else might they like? Or ‘who are some newer authors that you love that people might not know about yet?’ Or who is your favorite SF writer from the 1980s? (It’s CJ Cherryh. And yeah, that question is probably only a good one for me personally, not everybody. And yes, I know some of her best work was done in the 90s. It’s a complicated question.) Seriously though, anything that doesn’t make me generically pick ‘favorites’.

b. Who are your influences. This actually falls into two categories. I could have put it into the questions that I get asked way too often. Seriously, I think I’ve mentioned that Elizabeth Moon is the author who made me want to be a writer at least a dozen times in different interviews.

But it’s also too hard to answer. I’m influenced by so many things. Some of them are other writers, some of them are from other mediums. Trying to narrow it down to just a few is hard.

On top of that, what is an influence? Like I read NK Jemisin and I just get lost in the creation of her worlds and the brilliance of her prose. You would be hard pressed to find even a hint of Jemisin in my work. But what she does with words is just inspiring to me. She makes me see what words can be. So is that an influence or not? I wouldn’t list her as one. But here we are.

3. Specific questions are better than general questions. My favorite interviews are ones where the person has read the book already. I think most writers feel that way.

First, any questions specifically about this book are more likely to be something I haven’t answered a bunch of times before.

Second, it can let you take some of the generic questions and get fresh answers. So instead of ‘where do you get your ideas from?’ you can ask ‘where did you get the idea for this specific element in your book from?’ Or ‘What made you make this choice here?’ Obviously you have to worry about spoilers, but you can work around it. I got a question in this last round of promotion about how I developed the power armor that my characters use in combat.

Say you were interviewing my friend Claribel Ortega about their new book WITCHLINGS, and you see that it includes houses and sorting, and you can obviously see the parallels to another famous story. If you ask why they did that, you’re going to get a great answer, because I guarantee you they didn’t do it on accident, and they’ve got a really interesting reason.

But even if you haven’t read the book, being more specific is good. Just a little research can go a long way. For example, instead of asking me where I get my ideas, if you read the back cover copy of my book, you’ll see that my main character is named Gas. If you ask where I got the idea for Gas, I get to tell you a story that I haven’t told many times before.

Any time you ask me to talk about a specific element of this book, there’s a chance that I’ve never answered that question before, and that’s a good thing for both of us. It lets me tell you something I haven’t shared before, and it makes me think. Both of those things are likely to result in a more interesting answer for you and your readers/listeners.

Ask about themes. If you know a theme from the book and you ask the author why that was important to them, you’re going to get to get a lot of really good answers. Because I promise, it was important to them. There are a lot of things in a book that happen by accident. Theme isn’t one of them. And when you get somebody to talk about something that’s important to them, you’re going to get a well-thought-out answer.

Or take the ‘favorites’ question that I mentioned above as not being a great question, but make it specific to my book. THE MISFIT SOLDIER is a heist story. If you ask me about my favorite heist stories, what is usually a repetitive question becomes original.

4. Random, off-the-wall questions. This is going to be hit and miss, but that’s okay. It’s one of those things that at least gives you a chance at getting an awesome, original answer. Think about it this way: what is the question that you ask that nobody else does? Maybe I won’t have a great answer, but on the other hand, maybe I will.

5. Things that really matter to you personally. Include something that you love right in the question. That gives me the chance to respond to you as a person, even if I don’t do that in my books. For example, an author friend mentioned to me that she loves getting questions about easter eggs in her books. For me, I don’t use them. But if you frame it in such a way that it’s clear that you like them, even though I don’t use them myself, I can talk about some of my favorite easter eggs from other people’s books and at least give you something interesting.

6. If you’re doing an interview where you’re sending all the questions at once, make it clear that the author is free to skip some number of questions if they want.

This is a format thing. If you were interviewing me personally, you’d adjust as you went, right? You’d hear my answer to one question and something neat would come out of it, and you’d follow up. On the other side of that, you’d hear when a question wasn’t working the way you hoped, and you’d go another direction. When you send all the questions together by email, we lose that. Often I find myself with a question later in the interview where I’m basically having to rehash my answer to a previous question. I try to make it sound natural, but a lot of times I’d like to skip it because I don’t have anything else interesting to say.

Those are my thoughts. Writers, feel free to add to this in the comments. Interviewers, chime in as well.

Again, none of this is me taking a shot at anybody. If you’re out there promoting books and authors, we love you. Keep at it.