VJ Books presents Marshall Karp!

Marshall Karp was born in Manhattan, but grew up in New Jersey.  It was Karp's high school English teacher who encouraged him to write. He went on to Rutgers University where he graduated as an English major.
 
He then got a job as an advertising copywriter and created two award-winning campaigns. The first commercial starred an unknown named John Travolta.  He was later promoted to a management position but found that he wanted more.  So Karp started writing at night and in 1982 his play Squabbles was produced.
 
After writing a couple of pilot series for ABC-TV, NBC hired Karp as writer-producer for the hit show Amen.  But he got homesick while in Hollywood, moved back east, and went back into advertising.
 
When the dot com days came around, Karp started an internet advertising agency, Compelling Content, and sold the company five years later, at which time he started writing full time.
 
Marshall Karp's first published novel was The Rabbit Factory, which was the first in the Mike Lomax and Terry Biggs series.  He continued the series with Blood Thirsty, Flipping Out (March 2010), and his most recent novel, Cut, Paste, Kill (June 2010).
 
Karp's most inspirational line to write by is “Right now – where is the heart and mind of the character you’re writing about?” It’s a constant reminder that the book is about them; not about him.  He says that he's just a conduit. And there are moments when the characters take over so completely that he has to call his wife and say “you won’t believe what Lomax just did.”