What do you get when you mix a dad of three boys–aged 4 years, 8 years and 11 years old–with an irrepressible sense of curiosity and philosophy that anything’s possible?
You get children’s book author.
In spring of 2013, while on vacation, with his wife, sons and two sets of the kids’ grandparents, Wilton’s Rob Hunt found himself with a little free time–an opportune moment for creativity to strike.
“Maybe because there were so many other caregivers to the kids, but all of a sudden I had an hour, no work, no kids, and I just sat down and started to write. I had no idea where the story would go. I wrote the first couple of chapters with no idea of how it would end, and I just carried on from there.”
That story was Hunt’s first, called Kyle Evans and the Great Space Rescue.
Interestingly, he has had no formal training, education or previous interest in literature or writing. Hunt has a day job running a Wilton-based company that conducts research–mostly through focus groups–for media companies. He works with biggies like Nickelodeon, Disney, Dreamworks Animation and Direct TV.
“I studied politics and economics. A lot of my work now happens to do with kids, so I travel around the country talking to kids about websites and apps and TV shows, and showing them pilots of shows, all that sort of stuff. It’s a fascinating job and really is fun, as long as you’re interested in why people act they way they do.”
Hunt didn’t originally intend to become an author.
“When I started writing, I wasn’t thinking about publishing or agents, I was just writing. It was fun and exciting to do just that, just to think, ‘ooh, that’s exciting, I wonder what will happen in the story next!’ When I finished it, I edited it a couple times, I thought, ‘this is actually a story.’ I did some research online for which agents represented these types of books, and one came back and said, ‘I love this story, let’s work together.’ I was flabbergasted and very happy.”
He’s currently revising his first work, adapting it from a chapter book series into a novel aimed at middle schoolers.
Since then, he’s finished his second book, a thriller called Flicker.
“With this one, I wrote the last two chapters before I wrote the middle of the book. The ending was so clear in my head, I had to get it down so I knew exactly how it was going to end.”
It’s quite an exciting story, about a boy named Joel who wakes up on what seems like a perfectly normal morning–except his parents have disappeared. He goes to soccer practice and his coach has no idea who he is. From that moment on, person after person has no idea who he is. He finds another teenager, a girl in the same situation. Together they try to figure out what’s going on. “No one yet has guessed the end,” Hunt says.
Hunt wrote the book for 9-12 year olds, although he says adults have enjoyed reading it as well. “It’s very much a middle grades book. It’s written very appropriately for that age.” As a dad of three boys, as well as his work with his clients, he says he has a good sense of what works, of what they’ll connect to and what’s appropriate.
Purposefully, the stakes for the characters, says Hunt are very high. “Even though kids like stories that aren’t too scary or frightening, at the same time they have a very good understanding when it doesn’t matter enough, when it’s not thrilling enough. The book is definitely, for those two characters, all or nothing.”
He also gets a thrill himself of taking what he does for a living and pushing his own boundaries with trying something new. “Working with the media companies, it gives me a perspective that it’s not as easy as it looks,” Hunt says.
Hunt has also learned enough about the publishing industry to know that things usually take a very long time–aside from a few writers who have bidding wars over their manuscripts, most authors wait years to have something published. “You can have an agent and never get published as well. It’s a lot of luck and timing, and of course the quality of the work.” Just getting an agent, he says, was an achievement.
So for his second book, he decided to take a different course–and self-publish.
He had some children Flicker‘s target age range read the book to make sure it was as captivating as he thought it was, but Hunt’s three boys were a lso his own private focus group for his literary work, of course. When he was writing the first book, he’d read them the chapters as he finished them. “My 8-year-old would tell me to write more. He liked it so much and was so engaged in what was happening, it really encouraged me to finish that book. With Flicker, my oldest kept asking, ‘Tell me how it ends.’”
The first self-publishing step he took was electronically, and it was available on Kindle. But publishing it as a paperback was important, Hunt says, because he learned that kids in that 9-12 age group still do most of their reading in paperback. “Kids are the early adopters of so much digital technology. They don’t own CDs, they don’t watch live TV, they do everything on demand and digitally–except books. They like holding paper books.”
Hunt’s oldest son was involved another way–those are his eyes on the cover. And before deciding to use that image for the cover Hunt did what he knows best–market research. “Wherever I was, I’d stop kids on the street, and ask their parents if I could ask them a question. I’d ask them what they thought–with books it’s so important. That phrase, you can’t judge a book by its cover, is because people do judge books by their covers all the time. It was so important to make sure that it wasn’t too scary, but be sort of dark, interesting and say it’s a thriller.”
The book is available in local stores: the Toy Chest in Wilton (5 River Rd., in the Stop & Shop Plaza) stocks it as does Elm Street Books in New Canaan, Books on the Commons in Ridgefield and Byrd’s Books in Bethel. It’s also sold on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com. He’s hoping to arrange a reading at the Wilton Library and has donated a copy of the book there.
“I still have a hard time convincing myself it’s a real book. It looks like a book, so it must be a book,” Hunt says.
