At some point around the late 1970s when I joined the team producing news for Good Morning America at ABC News, I became aware of a colleague named Terry Irving.
I was based in New York, and he was in Washington DC, but news was produced in both places, and we talked on the phone and intercoms as we rushed to meet deadlines at 7:01 and 7:31 and again at 8:01 and 8:31, and later if news broke while GMA was on the air on the west coast (3 hours behind east coast NY and DC). In time we worked together on big events like elections and presidential trips. Then I was sent to London and in 1983 to Warsaw as bureau chief. In 1990 I left ABC News and broadcasting to start my own PR agency.
Committed to Washington DC, Terry went from ABC to FOX, MSNBC, some dotcoms, some consulting, and eventually CNN. By 2010 he was out of TV news and looking for something different. Overseas and after I was no longer at ABC, we lost touch. If it weren’t for a Facebook group called ABCeniors, we might still be out of touch. A year or so ago, I started following ABCeniors and saw that Terry often posted news tidbits about people we had worked with and chapters from the books he’s been writing.
Terry is also on Twitter (@terryirving) and that’s how we now communicate, although we use email too. What I like is that he’s writing about what he knows and doing it very well. One of the books he’s writing is “Courier,” a thriller about a motorcycle rider who picks up film shot by professional crews for a major TV network bureau in Washington DC. That was Terry’s first job with news, and he is an expert on motorcycle riding, something I never knew about.
He turns out to relish the roads and highways of the US capital. The courier gets chased by baddies and has to figure out how to bypass traffic and get the film – which has to be developed and edited – to the news studio in time for the evening news broadcast. “Courier” is set in late 1972 when President Richard Nixon had been re-elected and after the robbery at the Watergate apartments that didn’t seem like a big story but culminated in the resignation of Nixon in 1974. It’s also when the city is enduring the big dig for the future metro system –part of the story as well.
The first two chapters of “Courier” are available on line: See www.terryirving.blogspot.comfor an idea of the book’s flavor. When I read them, I emailed Terry that the story was good. In return he sent me the full manuscript of “Courier” and asked me to write a review. I started reading about 6 pm and finished three and a half hours later. Then I wrote the review: go to the Facebook page for “Courier”: http://www.facebook.com/terryirvingcourier and scroll down quite a while.
What happens next? Terry has a deal with Createspace which is part of Amazon. For USD 2500 he gets “editing, proofing, a book cover, a choice of interior formatting options, and all the technical bits (ISBN number and Library of Congress listing, etc).” That includes distribution on www.amazon.com and Amazon.com.uk plus five other retail channels and 25 copies for friends.
Terry adds, “the print process is, of course, FREE. It’s free because they don’t print the book until someone orders it. Welcome to the Brave New World of Print On Demand.” None of this prevents a publisher from contracting to publish copies of the book in the normal way. Terry hopes that will happen soon. Meanwhile, he’s already written most of the next book about courier Rick Putnam and his friends. It’s called “Warrior.”
He’s also written the e-book “The Unemployed Guy’s Guide to Unemployment”: see it at http://unemployedguysguide.blogspot.com/ and started a new blog for seasoned journalists whose careers have always been in writing but who now want to dip a toe into self-publishing: www.getmerewrite.me. I know some people who have self-published, but they’ve done one book and stopped. Terry is more interesting because he’s going about it in an organized manner testing the limits of social media to promote his work. I hope he succeeds. He may be a role model for some of us.
By Alma Kadragic (@almakad)
