A former V.I. communications executive says he used his imagination to take on the issue of workplace bullying and misplaced aspirations by writing a horror story. For Kevin Hughes — formerly of Choice Communications and Broadband V.I. — the book “Corporate Climbing” is a first foray into a literary genre that few authors of color delve into.
Although it appears that elements of folktales, fantasy and horror have appeared in works by some well-known writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison. In an interview with The Source, Hughes said he decided to use a horror theme to introduce the main character — a Caribbean immigrant making his way in the American corporate world using unconventional ways to deal with an abusive boss and to get ahead.
When he is not scaring up tales of an ambitious guy dabbling in the dark arts, Hughes is the administrator of the District of Columbia’s State Broadband & Digital Equity Office.
The book was released by Premium Book Publishers in November 2023. The author said he wrote his novel during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-2021. ”It was during COVID actually, when we’re all on lockdown. And that really gave me the opportunity to kind of sort of really allow myself the creative time and vision that I think is necessary to produce a good book,” he said.
“I created this whole fictional universe. Fictional characters, dialogue, situations. And so as a first time writer, it forces you to really go inside yourself and really create these people and bring them to life so that the reader feels connected to them,” he said.
Hughes said his process began with drafting an outline, creating a relatable character and laying out a plot as if it was a movie script. Making it easy for readers to connect with the protagonist was key, he said. “ … You had to use your imagination more than you already thought you might,” he said, “And the idea came to me of creating a book that was really based on someone, a main character who was very identifiable, very likable, who just gets himself in a bad situation. And then it gets difficult for him to get out of it.”
Hughes’ book, “Corporate Climbing,” is available online through a national bookseller. Its success so far, however, is hard to measure. According to a book marketing website, Scribe Media, unless an author is self published, it may be hard to gauge the number of books that are sold. But sources like WordPress.com say the average first novelist can expect to sell between 200-300 copies in the first year. Those who can sell 1,000 copies or more can look forward to continuing sales.
But still, the author is confident. “I think that those are very, very relatable themes and ideas that people will enjoy, so whether you like or are interested in horror or not, I think that you’ll find the book interesting,” he said, “because there’s a lot of reality baked into this fictional story.”
