Vince Flynn: Power and Politics

Flynn started writing about terrorism because be believes, 'that's where the future's going'.

Vince Flynn had heard the warnings before: Don't pay to publish your own book. You'll end up in debt, with boxes of unsold books cluttering your basement. But in a canny business move, Flynn sold 25 percent of his first book, Term Limits to a group of investors before self-publishing it in 1997.

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The gamble paid off, and Flynn, using the sales acumen he learned at Kraft General Foods, parlayed Term Limits into a book deal and a successful career as a writer of political thrillers.

Flynn - whose seventh book Consent to Kill recently hit bookstores and has soared up the best-seller lists - says unpublished writers should be careful if they're thinking of going to a vanity press and looking to him as an example. "Most writers, their strong suit is writing," Flynn says over breakfast at an Edina restaurant. "So I tell them, it's (self-publishing) a last resort, it's a last-ditch effort." But Flynn knew how to market himself. After working two years for Kraft as an account sales executive, he knew the right people to talk to when he spread 200 copies of Term Limits around at Twin Cities bookstores to get the buzz going.

"Instead of bringing a box of Grape-Nuts into a store, I'm bringing my own book," says Flynn.

The fifth of seven children, Flynn, 39, was born to an Irish-Catholic family in St. Paul. His dad taught English and coached basketball, football and baseball, and his mom is a wildlife artist.

After graduating from the University of St. Thomas, Flynn began working for Kraft. He left the company in 1990 after getting an aviation candidate's slot in the Marine Corps. But his hopes for becoming an officer were dashed when Flynn was told he was medically disqualified because of two seizures he suffered as a child. So he decided to try writing thrillers, figuring "if (Tom) Clancy could do it, why can't I?"

But Term Limits - about a group of assassins targeting fat-cat congressmen - was "rejected by everyone in New York," Flynn says. He pulled the book from the remaining editors who were looking at it and with $25,000 (euro21,255) - raised from five investors that included a family member, a bar owner and a college friend - printed 2,000 copies in August 1997. The run sold out in three weeks, Flynn says.

That led to a deal with Pocket Books, which published "Term Limits" in hardcover in 1998. The hardcover edition didn't make the best-seller lists, but the 1999 paperback version did. Flynn's next five books - Transfer of Power, The Third Option, Separation of Power, Executive Power and Memorial Day - all made the best-seller lists, with sales going up for each book. Flynn's books are sold abroad in 12 countries. More than 5 million copies of his books - both hardcover and paperback - are in print in the United States. Atria Books is printing 300,000 copies of Consent to Kill, the first of four books under his new contract.

Flynn, who had to overcome dyslexia, doesn't mind reviews that say his books are light on character development. "Guess what, if I load up on character development, the page turner ceases to exist, and suddenly I've written a literary novel ... that, like a rich piece of chocolate, puts people to sleep after a couple of bites."

Emily Bestler, his editor at Atria, says Flynn's copy "has gotten stronger over time."

Consent to Kill again features Flynn's character Mitch Rapp, a seemingly indestructible CIA counter-terrorism operative. This time Rapp is out for vengeance after a Saudi billionaire puts a bounty on his head.

In Memorial Day (2004), Rapp races the clock to foil terrorists' plans to detonate a nuclear warhead in Washington during a Memorial Day weekend celebration of the new World War II Memorial. Terrorists are again the villains in Transfer of Power (1999) when they seize the White House and take hostages. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold War, Flynn says he decided to write about terrorism, telling himself, "That's where the future's going. That's going to be the next big menace."

Flynn begins his books by writing two to five pages a day and ends up writing up to 20 pages a day. He works at an office away from the suburban home he shares with his wife, Lysa, daughters Ingrid, 5, and Ana, 3, and 10-year-old stepson Dane. At home, Flynn's business office is packed with his own books as well as those by other thriller writers. He has a vast CD library (Flynn will crank up music, such as Led Zeppelin, when he's writing) and a bulletin board full of clippings.

Last spring, Flynn served as a consultant for the upcoming season of "24," the real-time Fox action series starring Kiefer Sutherland.

"He just had one great idea after another," says "24" co-creator, writer and executive producer Joel Surnow, who had read a couple of Flynn's books before bringing him in. "We just thought we got a lot of value out of it."

But otherwise, Flynn hasn't had much luck in Hollywood, although he holds out hope that Consent to Kill might at least be optioned for a movie.

"Hollywood will not touch these right now," he says. "They have no issue whatsoever making a movie that just rips the Catholic Church. ... I cannot understand why they will not come out and get critical over Islamic radical fundamentalism."