A central Iowa TV sportscaster is out with his second book. Scott Reister says “Football Spy” follows the story of the first book that had little league baseball players threatened by a spy.
“Same characters, but now it’s football season. They’ve got a new adventure to go on. They’ve got to save someone. And the theme of continuing to win and figure out who the bad guy is and winning being life or death, that’s still there,” he says.
Writing the first book “Baseball Spy” had been a longtime dream of Reister’s. Writing the second book had its own hurdles. “I will never again criticize a sequel, because it is so hard to write a sequel,” Reister says. . And you watch all these movies, you watch the second one, you’re like, oh man, it’s not as good as the first. It’s really hard as a writer to come up with fresh character arcs because so much of writing is figuring out, okay, you know, what’s the emotional growth of this character? How does it fit into this exciting plot,?”
Reister would try to write in one-hour blocks at the library, and says there were many days he failed. “And I stacked all those failures up until finally I figured out, oh, okay, here’s a fresh character arc and here’s what I could do. The end result is awesome and I’m much better as a writer than I was then. So the end results, I love ‘Football Spy’, but it did take a long time and a lot of drafts and frustration to get to where I wanted to go,” he says.
(graphic from Scott Reister.)
Reister says the rating on this book was moved up to YA that includes ages 12 to 18, but he says kids down to eight years old could still read it, as well as adults.
“It is a little deeper emotionally with things happening in ‘Football Spy’. It’s, you know, it’s intense. There’s danger involved. You know, he’s got to keep winning his football games,” he says. Reister says the strong girl main character of Amber continues in this book and he because doesn’t want girls to see football and think it’s just a book for boys.
Reister took his spare time in-between work and family to promote the book and get out the word. He says his family has been there with him. “My kids have lived with this for a long time because ever since they were little, I’ve been trying to get this into reality. And when it finally came out and I opened that box of books two years ago with ‘Baseball Spy’, they saw, oh my God, it actually happened. There’s actually a book,” he says. “It was really a neat thing for them to see all the hard work pay off. Same thing with ‘Football Spy’ when it came out. So they’re all very proud of me and supportive.”
He says the pre-orders for the second book went so well that it became a top new release on Amazon as soon as it came out. Reister says he learned to be an author and also learned he wasn’t getting huge money for every book sold, but he’s okay with that. “I’m really proud of what I put out there and I love promoting it and talking about it, but I’m not stressing so much about like how many copies it sold. It’ll be fine, it’ll be great, but at the end of the day, it’s like, as long as you know you did your best as a parent or as a creative person, you can be happy with it, and I’m certainly happy with Football Spy,” Reister says.
You can find both “Baseball Spy” and “Football Spy” on Amazon, or go to Facebook and the Scott Reister author page.