Episode 013: Tim Tigner - From Spies In Moscow To Summers In France

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BOOKS MENTIONED:
- Betrayal
​- Falling Stars
- Red Notice
​- The Tracker
​- Pushing Brilliance
​- The Pillars Of The Earth

FULL TRANSCRIPT
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C. G. Cooper:
Welcome to Books in 30 with me, C.G. Cooper. Here at Books in 30, we discuss great books with some of today's top authors. Don't forget that you can snag the full list of books we discuss in this episode at cg-cooper.com/podcast, along with the full transcript. Welcome to our listeners and a big Books in 30 welcome to today's guest, Tim Tigner. Tim is a Soviet counterintelligence specialist, big words there, and veteran of the Green Berets. Tim worked out of Moscow throughout perestroika, then Brussels during the formation of the EU and more recently Silicon Valley as a startup CEO. He is both traditionally and self published with audiobooks read by the voice of Jack Reacher which gives you an idea of his style.
 
Tim's second novel, Betrayal, just spent three days as the number one novel on Amazon. Falling Stars, which debuts today, as we're recording this, is his sixth thriller. A little bit about Falling Stars: it's about devious devices, international intrigue and the deadly mistake of messing with the wrong guy. A short description, two distressed heroes, three dastardly crimes and the slickest heist of all time. Tim says, "Imagine Bin Laden meets Bernie Madoff and hold on for the ride." Tim, welcome to the show.
 
Tim Tigner:
Well thank you C.G. It's a great pleasure to be here talking with you and your fans.
 
C. G. Cooper:
Yeah, man. Can you give the listeners a snapshot of why you became an author?

Tim Tigner:
Why I became an author? It was a midlife decision for me. I was pretty successful in business but I wasn't happy at it and I had a long period of time when I was asking myself what I thought would make me happy. My mind kept going back to the thing that made me happiest to do which was reading thrillers. I was just never happier than when I was immersed in a great book. I finally got to the point where I sat down. At the time, I was living in an apartment in Moscow overlooking Gorky Park. I spent a long weekend trying to see if I could actually do what Ludlum did. He was my hero at the time. I thought if it came out well enough, that it might be worth pursuing at some point. I didn't get around to actually diving in with both feet until about six years after that point in time.
 
C. G. Cooper:
Counterintelligence specialist. You're friends with Andrew Watts or you know who he is and you said you listened to that episode and in that episode he mentions Red Sparrow and The Charm School. I finished Red Sparrow, I'm almost done with The Charm School as we speak. Have you read either of those books and how does that compare with what you experienced in Russia and the Soviet Union?
 
Tim Tigner:
The Charm School, Nelson DeMille's breakout novel, was one of my favorites way, way back when. I loved it and it's interesting to me that it remains his best selling book beside what his latest release is because of that. I've got both of Jason's books queued up in my reading list but I haven't gotten to them. There is a bestseller out there though, it's nonfiction, it reads like fiction which is called Red Notice by Bill Browder. It's become famous in a sideways type of way because it's the story that led to The Magnitsky Act, which is in the news headlines nowadays about this Russian adaption and all that stuff. Bill Browder was doing in the financial industry what I was doing in the medical industry which was starting things up in Moscow right after the fall of the Iron Curtain. He was dealing with big bucks and ran afoul of Putin and has been hunted by him ever since. It's a nonfiction, but reads likes fiction. I highly recommend that one to listeners who like espionage from a historical perspective.
 
C. G. Cooper:
Holy cow. It's funny because in Red Sparrow, a few people get on the wrong side of Putin because he's the actual leader in the book. I'm super tempted to jump into that too. Obviously, now I'm in the mood for it. Red Notice by Bill Browder, is that right?

Tim Tigner:
Yes indeed.
 
C. G. Cooper:
Awesome. Tell us about what you're reading right now or something you just finished that you'd love the listeners to check out.
 
Tim Tigner:
Sure. I picked up The Tracker by Chad Zunker. I picked it up because it kept popping up next to my books on the “customers also read” and it had a lot of high ratings so I was like, what's going on here? Here's a fellow, a Thomas and Mercer author, and I thought it was fantastic. A very fast paced hero gets himself in a tough situation, doesn't know what's going on, has to work his way out of it which is a scenario that I tend to use in my thrillers as well. The guy's in there and he has to figure out what's going on.
 
C. G. Cooper:
Drop them in the fiery pit and wait to see what happens, right?
 
Tim Tigner:
Exactly. That's the formula for all my books. Not that they're formulaic but I come up with a devious device or two, something that doesn't exist yet but could exist and then I stick it in the most devious hands I can think and then I tell the story from both the victim's point of view and the villain's point of view and it goes back and forth between the two. You can see the story from both side. I try to make them realistic, given all the things that are going on in the world and the country these days and all this crazy stuff with Russia and so forth. People who used to think my books were unbelievable are taking a second glance at them now.
 
C. G. Cooper:
Yeah, but that's, it's perfect fodder for us. It's being able to explore an idea, something that's in the news. I love it when readers walk away and they go, "Is this real or is it fiction? What did I just read?"
 
Tim Tigner:
Yeah. I love that. One thing I do lately with my books, because I was getting these unbelievable comments, is at the end of my novels now, 'cause it's largely eBooks, I put in links to videos and peer review publications that show these types of things. My book, Pushing Brilliance, the first in the Kyle Achilles series, involves a bio weapon attack on the president of the United States. At the end, I link to an article from The Atlantic which talks about how the Secret Service has to go around, at that time it was after President Obama, taking his hotel bedsheets with them, vacuuming everything up in order to prevent the Russians and the Chinese from getting a hold of his DNA. If you haven't read that, it sounds like crazy spy fiction stuff but no, this is what's actually going on out there.
 
C. G. Cooper:
There's a lot of stuff that goes on in real life that feels like futuristic sci-fi. That's a perfect example and I love that you include those links. I might have to steal that idea. I might have to because obviously as you and I are reading, whether it's the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Economist, whatever it, we're getting ideas from that. Being able to give that to your audience, it's a great extra tool for them to say, “okay, this is a real thing,” right?
 
Tim Tigner:
It is. On the question of tools, C.G., one thing I started doing was I now create a Pinterest board for every book. I do it for myself where I can just keep all of my research so I can go back and find it all but I also publish it at the end of the books so people can go and take a look and see, “oh, this is where that tool came from or that idea or what this location looks like” or so forth. It's a freebie in that you're looking stuff up anyway. It becomes a lasting resource. I'd recommend that.
 
C. G. Cooper:
That is very cool. When did you start doing that? When you first starting writing? Or is that a newer thing that you've put out?
 
Tim Tigner:
I first started writing twice in my life. Back in at the end of 2002, I was engaged at the time where I was running a major corporation out of Brussels and I told my wife that I wanted to give up business and become a writer. We had the corporate penthouse and the corporate Mercedes and the whole sweet setup and I'm like, “we're going to have to live off savings but we've got enough to get through for five years if we move to Florida where it's cheap.” And God bless her, she hung with me. I wrote three novels while those savings eked away. It was Coercion, Betrayal and Flash. I got an agent for the first one and she got it before Dan Brown's editor and so forth but I never got the big deal. And so I ended up going back to business and those books sat on my hard drive for six or seven years until I finally had a chance to self publish in 2013. Once self publishing didn't mean you were admitting defeat. Back in the early 2000s, if you self published you were giving up.
 
C. G. Cooper:
Yeah, definitely.
 
Tim Tigner:
I wasn't willing to do that. That first novel that I wrote got picked up a year later by Thomas and Mercer. At the time, the startup where I was at looked like the product wasn't going to pan out, so I hopped back into writing full-time, at the beginning of 2015. It was one of those conversations, “honey, guess what?” For the second time. Anyway, the second time around I started writing, that's when I started this Kyle Achilles series with Pushing Brilliance, that's when I started doing the Pinterest boards and some other things that I do on my books that I didn't do originally. It was interesting, just for the fellow authors that are listening out there, the first book that I wrote way back when and got picked up by Thomas and Mercer, 10 years after I wrote it. Then just earlier this year, a couple months ago, arguably the biggest agent in the business gave me a call out of the blue, asked if I'd like to collaborate and said he wanted to represent me and that was based on the second novel that I wrote.
 
C. G. Cooper:
Really?
 
Tim Tigner:
Both of those had sat collecting dust on my hard drive for seven or eight years. It's one of those persistence pays off stories. At least I find inspirational at times.
 
C. G. Cooper:
Amen. You just got to keep plugging. Bob Dugoni is a great example of that as well. We were laughing about the overnight success that he's become. Overnight, 20 years overnight, right?
 
Tim Tigner:
Right. Not just writing prolifically, but teaching it as well.
 
C. G. Cooper:
Exactly. What a good guy. All right, well let's move on to the loaded questions of the 30 minutes: Your favorite book of all time?
 
Tim Tigner:
My favorite book of all time is The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. Ken Follett, his breakout novel was Eye of the Needle, which became a movie, so a lot of people might know it. It funny, you typically don't become famous as an author until you've got a movie. When you tell people you're an author they're like, "Are you famous?" I'm like, "No, I don't have a movie yet." The Pillars of the Earth is a book that takes you back into the UK and France during medieval times. When you read it, you feel like you've lived there. You know what it's like to have lived on this planet a thousand years ago. It just gives one such an appreciation for what we have today. For how fortunate we are. For the history that's behind things. For the formation of things. It's very educational.
 
And then on top of that, it's the single best book I've ever read for character development. Which Ken Follett is the best author out there for character development. That and his book A Dangerous Fortune are the two that are the best I've read for character development. Ken is my kind of template author for great characters when it comes down to it.
 
C. G. Cooper:
This has been one of those novels that has been on my list for probably 10 years. Maybe you're going to push me over the edge to go get it. I'm one of those guys that I've heard so many good things about it, that I have a feeling once I dive in I'm going to want to read all of his stuff. My reading list is really long. My to do list is even longer so why should I jump out right now and go get it? Go download it, go buy it from the store?
 
Tim Tigner:
Because it's going to make you better as a person and as a writer. It's just such a masterful mind expanding thing. I spend as much of my free time as I can traveling just to places that are different from where I live because I find that opens my mind and exposes my thinking and it gets me better. Ken Follett's book, The Pillars of the Earth, just does that to a T.
 
C. G. Cooper:
All right looks like Audible's going to have give that one to me.
 
Tim Tigner:
Yes they are. It's a long one too. He spent three years on it and boy it's a good 1,000 pages or so but it flies by.
 
C. G. Cooper:
Cool. Alright, I’ll add it to my list. Next part, did you happen to bring a snippet of your work that you can read for the listeners?
 
Tim Tigner:
I did. I brought two short snippets for you. They're from Tim Tigner round two. This is from Pushing Brilliance which is the first book in my Kyle Achilles series. I just wanted to read the intros to the two main characters. The villain who was introduced, I'll start with page one, chapter one. And then the hero which is on beginning of the chapter that starts on page nine.
 
C. G. Cooper:
Great.
 
Tim Tigner:
Chapter one, The Kremlin
 
How do you pitch an audacious plan to the most powerful man in the world? Grigori Barsukov was about to find out.
 
Technically, the President of Russia was an old friend, although the last time they'd met, his old friend had punched him in the face. That was 30 years ago, but the memory remained fresh, and Grigori's nose still skewed to the right.

Back then, he and President Vladimir Korovin wore KGB lieutenant stars. Now both were clothed in the finest Italian suits. But his former roommate also sported the confidence of one who wielded unrivaled power, and the temper of a man ruthless enough to obtain it.
 
That's the introduction to my villain.
 
C. G. Cooper:
I like the nose askew part.
 
Tim Tigner:
It's nice to come up with some visual cue that points it in. Then introducing the hero, start of chapter four.
 
Time lies. It masquerades in symmetrical guise, using clocks and calendars as accomplices. They cloak it in perfect uniformity, regular as hatch marks on a ruler, stretching forward and backward without variance of size or scale or import. Anyone who has lived even a little knows, this is a grand deception.
 
I was about to be served with the most pivotal of days, and the longest of my 31 years. The day that would forever split my life into before and after. But of course, I didn't know. We never do. Time only lets us look in one direction. So I had no clue what was to follow that knock at my hotel room door.
 
That's when we meet Kyle Achilles the hero of my series.
 
C. G. Cooper:
Sweet. Thank you for reading that. Tell the readers one more time which book that is from.
 
Tim Tigner:
That's from Pushing Brilliance, book one in the Kyle Achilles series.
 
C. G. Cooper:
Awesome. Alright, let's get into some real fun. Did you happen to bring some mean reviews to read?
 
Tim Tigner:
Yeah, how much time in an author's life do we spend beating punching bags up over these things?
 
C. G. Cooper:
I know. How much time have I spent on the floor going “oh my gosh, do I really deserve to be a writer anymore?”
 
Tim Tigner:
Fortunately for both of us, the fives outweigh the ones by quite a margin so we keep going.
 
C. G. Cooper:
Amen.
 
Tim Tigner:
But what do you do?
 
C. G. Cooper:
You just laugh about it, like hopefully we're going to do right now.
 
Tim Tigner:
Yeah. This one (review) is one out of five stars. The title is, “Please don't support this author.”
 
First things first. I haven't read this book, I'm not going to. Neither should you. It's important not to support, quote unquote, authors like this. Go to about the author and Tigner make it sound like he's the savior of the free world. But there are a couple of problems with this. First, the bio isn't even grammatical. Quote, “there he led prominent multinational medical companies, worked with cosmonauts ...” unquote. And second, this world beating entrepreneur scientist and warrior doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. Really. Period not question mark. It all sounds bogus to me. The bogosity continues with the book description which includes quote, “you can download one of my thrillers for free at timtigner.com” unquote. Except you can't. You can download a novella, which strikes me as very different. As a host of other reviewers have commented that the plot of this book is unbelievable, I guess given the problems with the bio et cetera, one shouldn't be surprised.
 
How's that for a beauty?
 
C. G. Cooper:
Holy cow. That's a direct attack. That's a full frontal. Is he basically saying that you're fake? You're not a real person, that you're not real author? How many different levels could he come at you?
 
Tim Tigner:
I know. Amazon supposedly takes down reviews that aren't about books or personal attacks but no, I've never been able to get them to take a review down. Drives me nuts. Another one. One star, that was the title, “One star”.
 
“Don't even remember it so it must have been junk.”
 
This was some guy that reviewed 100 different Amazon items in one day.
 
C. G. Cooper:
He must have a really good memory.
 
Tim Tigner:
Yeah. Anyway, there's a few of those. I thought those were a couple of beauties.
 
C. G. Cooper:
Thanks for sharing, I know those aren't always easy, that's why we like to bring them up so we can laugh about it and hopefully move on. I try not to look at mine but my gaze always shifts down to that little tab on the right hand side. Thanks again for sharing. Are you ready to move onto some speed round questions?
 
Tim Tigner:
I hope so. Let me pull up my coffee cup here.
 
C. G. Cooper:
Alright, well cool. I've added a couple more. I promise they're not anything too invasive. Let me see. All right, let me see. Let me get these straightened out. Number one, what is your favorite thing about being an author?
 
Tim Tigner:
Complete control. I love not having a boss.
 
C. G. Cooper:
Except for the readers that post those wonderful reviews.
 
Tim Tigner:
There's got to be some. There's a hitch to everything.

C. G. Cooper:
Exactly. All right, a loaded question, what is the best advice you ever received? And this does not have to be exclusively about writing.
 
Tim Tigner:
Do the best work you can do.
 
C. G. Cooper:
Amen.

Tim Tigner:
It's in whatever, if you're going to do it, just do it the best you can.
 
C. G. Cooper:
What is one piece of technology you could not live without?
 
Tim Tigner:
Spell check.
 
C. G. Cooper:
Yeah, I wish they had an editor check too sometimes. I wish I could just press a button and make sure everything was exactly perfect.
 
Tim Tigner:
A Natural Reader is another fantastic tool. It allows you to have your books or anything read back to you in a semi-natural sounding voice. As far as cool, useful, new tools go, that one is tops.
 
C. G. Cooper:
Yeah, I've used that a couple times and it is very good. Is that the one that you can adjust the accents as well?
 
Tim Tigner:
The accents, the speed. There's lots of different things you can do.
 
C. G. Cooper:
Very cool. What is one thing you could change about publishing? About the industry, about the process, what's one thing you wish you could change?
 
Tim Tigner:
I'd like to see self published authors put on equal footing with published authors on Amazon. The same tools that they get. They get to do, they have access to additional advertising tools that we don't have. They can publish a paperback on the same day that we can. It's pub day for me today too. Amazon won't let you set or create space. Won't let you set your publication day in advance it won't publish on the day that you accept it but then it doesn't appear on Amazon for three days later. If you want your pub dates to coincide, your paperback's not available for three days after you're eBook publishes. Little things like that that add up.
 
C. G. Cooper:
Yeah, it's stuff that you and I deal with all the time. And then sometimes the paperback doesn't link to the Kindle and yeah, just all kinds of fun stuff that we can deal with. But that world is getting better especially with guys like you that are doing the right thing and you've been both traditionally and self published now so you can see both worlds and you can talk to people and say, "Hey look, the indies need help too." That's getting better but I'm completely with you. All right, number five, what genre do you wish you could write in?
 
Tim Tigner:
Romance.
 
C. G. Cooper:
Yeah? That's a good one, why?
 
Tim Tigner:
Because it sells like hotcakes. Holy smokes do women read that stuff.
 
C. G. Cooper:
Yeah, they do. Alright, here's another one. I'm curious about this one because of all the traveling you do and you have done. What's on your bucket list?
 
Tim Tigner:
For places to go?
 
C. G. Cooper:
Anything. Places to go, things to do, things to eat.
 
Tim Tigner:
I want to see the whole world. I'm pretty much plugging away at that, one country at a time. My goal is to spend a summer in a different country every year from here on out.
 
C. G. Cooper:
Awesome, I like that. Where's the next place you're going to spend a summer?
 
Tim Tigner:
It will likely be France because my daughters are screaming for that. We used home exchange last year and spent six weeks in Australia and it was fantastic.
 
C. G. Cooper:
That's one of mine. Australia and New Zealand I definitely want to hit. Alright, here's an interesting one, especially considering your background. If you could teach a college course, what subject or class would you teach?

Tim Tigner:
Marketing.
 
C. G. Cooper:
Marketing. Okay, and then the last one, kind of funny. If you could only eat one type of food for the rest of your life, what would it be?
 
Tim Tigner:
Something that doesn't make me fat. I've always had to battle with the waistline. So I'll take whatever help I can get in that regard.
 
C. G. Cooper:
Good. Well thanks again for joining us, Tim. Can you give a few last words to our listeners and let them know how they can find you and your work?

Tim Tigner:
Yeah, I love it if people would visit me at http://timtigner.com. That's like a tiger but with an N thrown in there. That free thriller that is the prequel to my Kyle Achilles series is available for download there. It's timtigner.com/free.
 
C. G. Cooper:
Timtigner.com/free. Thank you again to Tim. Thank you to our listeners for tuning in. This has been Books in 30 with C.G. Cooper. Don't forget to email me at cgc (at) cg-cooper.com to say hello or let me know of an author you'd like to see as my guest. Thanks for tuning in. This is C.G. Cooper, out.