Q1. PLEASE can you introduce yourself to readers who would love to know more about you?
I’m Mark Bolton. I’m 55, married and live in Tampa, Florida USA. I was born and raised in the north of England in modest circumstances and worked hard to escape my rural upbringing and get an education in London where I graduated from City University in 1990. I spent most of the next 30 years working in investment banking and consulting in New York, London, Hong Kong and Mexico City.
Along the way, I took a five-year career break in the movie industry and that’s what brought me to Los Angeles in 2005 where I met my third (and best) wife, Jody. I’ve been resident in the US pretty much ever since. Jody came with a stepson and a stepdaughter a darling cat called Ozzy. My stepson was already a grown man when I first met him, but my stepdaughter was 11 and so she has been a huge part of my life and I have hers for the last 17 years.
Q2. What were the key challenges you face while writing your book?
The Gen Z money manual mastering our new economy.
One challenge was ensuring that I was addressing the top issues that mattered to Gen Z. I undertook extensive research both online and talking with my own family and others from Gen Z, millennials and their parents’ generation and my own – Gen X. In my last consulting job, I was deeply involved with helping companies better understand Gen Z to design products and services that would appeal to them. There are many organizations that publish good Gen Z research and I read voraciously the output of banks, consulting firms, marketing agencies and others synthesizing this research to give me what I believe to be the top challenges for Gen Z. I then tested this theory on social media by analyzing popular hashtags around Gen Z related financial issues to come up with my hit list of topics for the book.
The second challenge was that as a first-time author, although having written many hundreds of documents, and probably thousands of pages in my corporate life I never had to sit down and turn out a 200-page book in one sitting. As I like to make use of the very latest technologies, I made an early decision to dictate the book (on otter.ai – which, by the way, I also used for this interview) and then edit it. This turned out to be a disaster because the quality of the ramblings that poured from my mouth while sitting in the car or on a hike or at home was simply not good enough to be committed to print. So, the next stage that was supposed to be the edit therefore effectively became an entire rewrite of the book.
The third challenge was that at a point in my life when I was taking a career break, there was still the need to earn an income for family and home. And there were times when I was concerned over how long it was taking to write the book and how difficult it might prove to earn a return on that time. The phrase “vanity project” flickered into my head and it’s one that I’m deeply sensitive to avoid. Indeed, I hope I have avoided it by delivering a book that while certainly not Shakespeare does the job of addressing the key challenges and provides multiple practical solutions, tools, analytical approaches and links to useful websites and applications.
Q3. What books or authors have most influenced your own writing?
I’m a lifelong avid reader and have amassed a collection of several thousand books over my lifetime. So having read everything from Charlotte Bronte to Ralph Waldo Emerson to Shakespeare to Jeffrey Archer and back it’s tricky for me to pinpoint specific books or writers. However, Martin Amis comes to mind as a writer, whose novels and semi-autobiographical books I comprehensively enjoyed throughout my 30s and 40s. While I do still try to read fiction, sadly, much of my reading today is confined to practical nonfiction and in that respect a handful of publications, books and authors stand out. Mark Manson’s is a lot of fun to read and in an irreverent, challenging style that I very much enjoy. There is also a writer from the UK called Colin Turner who wrote Born to Succeed, a book that was immensely influential on me in my 30s and positioned me for a great deal of success in my career and business – he’s an inspiration that I mention in my book. More regularly, I’m an avid reader of the Economist magazine as I love the style of crisp, informative facts based but witty writing that is all too rare. I have tried my best to replicate some of that in my book. Though I declare in my defense that it’s my first effort and I’m certain I can do better next time!
Q4. What’s your favorite spot to visit in your own country and what makes it so special to you?
I’m both a US and the UK citizen and consider both countries home.
So, in the US my answer has to be Los Angeles and in particular, my favorite restaurant, which is called Geoffrey’s in Malibu. It has beautiful views over the rooftops south to the Pacific, is always comfortable with a gentle breeze, good service and good food. I love driving on the Pacific Coast Highway and I owned only convertible cars when I lived in Los Angeles. I miss the ability to have the roof down almost every day of the year. I’m very much an outside lifestyle person. I like to exercise outside – cycling, hiking, tennis – Los Angeles is extremely conducive to that lifestyle due to its delightful climate, low levels of humidity and rain and an absence of extreme weather.
My other quick answer will be the north coast of Cornwall, England – which by the way, looks much like the north coast of California. It has towering cliffs, spectacular sandy beaches, huge surf, mile after mile of stunning vistas and the cleanest blue water I’ve ever seen. It’s also complemented by great places to stay and many fabulous restaurants serving some of the best seafood in the world.
Q5. What inspired you to write the book the Gen Z money manual mastering our new economy?
I had the opportunity to take another career break this year and I wanted to do something important and worthwhile and potentially pivot towards ultimately becoming a full-time author. So, I wrote this book from what I’d seen and learned in my own family to help Gen Z kids around the country and around the world. Navigate is a complicated and confusing part of moving from teen hood to adulthood.
Q6. How long did it take you to write the book?
As I mentioned before, I made the error of dictating my book and it took me around six weeks to dictate the entire book. However, it took another six weeks to completely rewrite the book. So really, it should have taken six weeks in total to write the book to the point of the first edit but it actually took 12.
Q7. On what platforms can readers buy your books?
Besides being an author I’m also a businessman. So, I own my own publishing company Transform Media. We have a couple of books published including the one that I’ve just authored and they’re all available on Amazon in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy. Spain, and also in Australia and New Zealand. All my books are also part of the Amazon Expanded Distribution program so are available through wholesale channels for distribution to books stores, libraries and others throughout the world.
Q8. Tell us about the process of coming up with the book cover and the title.
I’ve known for a long time that I wanted to do something fairly big and fairly creative and I thought it might be a book. I threw around hundreds of ideas given my broad and deep career across financial services, entertainment consulting and elsewhere.
I wrote these up onto the whiteboard in my office and spent hours looking and thinking at each one to determine if that was something that I really felt that the world needed more information on that particular topic and I would be adding value to the pool of human knowledge. Of the few ideas that did, only a handful had the power to help large numbers of people. So, once I’d worked through all of those ideas that remained, I was fairly certain that writing a book to help Gen Z was the way to go. There are many broad areas in life that young people need help and support with health and wellness, relationships, career management as well as financial management. Given my professional background and deep knowledge of the financial sector – I’m having experienced or have family members experience many of the challenges that Gen Z faced. It was the most obvious first book to write in what will become a series under the umbrella ‘Don’t F*ck It Up’ (“DFIU”). The original title of the book was just ‘Money’ but I worked with a marketing consultant to select a title and subtitle to be both clear and appealing to the people that will most benefit from the book. ‘Mastering Our New Economy’ is a phrase that I hope resonates. In a very short period, we’ve moved to an almost all digital economy accelerated of course by the pandemic. Over the last 15 years, unknown to most of the public Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) has been growing in use deep in the bowels of business processes – virtually invisible to the end customer. But chat GPT and Bard, in particular, have changed this and there has been an explosion of end user AI tools, applications services business models. That is a key part of our new economy.
Q9. When writing a book how do you keep things fresh for both your readers and also yourself?
I learned in writing this book that timely anecdotes are a great way to illustrate a point, especially if they are prescient and witty. I can’t guarantee it but as much as I possibly can my future books will take this on board using more stories that illustrate points far more visually than just the plain advice on a page. It’s also a lot more fun to write witty anecdotes than bland text about credit scores or something dry like that!
Q 10. What is the most valuable piece of advice you’ve been given about writing?
I think it’s the guidance to keep your writing short funny and on point.
There’s a great temptation to show how much effort went into the production of a book by writing an immense amount of text – this particularly applies to self-help nonfiction books. Now I’m not talking about fiction here, where the arc of the story is important. But what I think matters is the value of the information contained within and frankly that doesn’t have to make it a 400-page book. However, there is a balance to be struck because readers need explanation. And bluntly when you’re paying $6 or $7 for a Kindle book and $15 to $25 for soft back to hardback then readers tend to expect a minimum number of pages. They expect the writer to have done some work in articulating clearly their ideas and expanding upon them. So, 30 pages isn’t going to cut it. Yet striking that balance between brevity/clarity and value measured by page count is a balancing trick that every writer and every editor has to perform every time they write.
Buy The Gen Z Money Manual on Amazon
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