For most of his adult working life, Jim Malner wrote copy for his own advertising agency, and along the way, learned a thing or two about marketing products. So, when Malner decided he wanted to turn his writing skills to fiction, that was his starting point. Where, and in what genre, was there a void that he could potentially fill? Malner suspected he knew the answer before he asked the question, but did the research anyway and found a gaping hole in the literature:

Where were the action-adventure sports novels?

In a quick Amazon search, Malner found the field of sports romance novels overcrowded, but couldn’t find anything in the sports action/adventure field. Seeing an opening, he decided to fill it. In 2019, he self-published “Big League,” a story that blends the rags-to-riches success story of a small-town Saskatchewan hockey prospect with the world of Russian mobsters and professional assassins.

If it sounds like something you might read in a Robert Ludlum or Lee Child thriller, well, that’s deliberate. Malner, the president of Consumer Strategies Group, played hockey semi-professionally in Great Britain and is the brother-in-law of sports agent Ritch Winter.

But he is also a fan of authors in the Ludlum/Child vein who annually top the New York Times bestsellers list. And yet, until Malner did so, no one had linked two of his favorite subjects – hockey and international thrillers that have readers hopscotching from one exotic locale to another in pursuit of the bad guys.

In fact, Malner was such a fan of Ludlum’s work that when he took vacations, he would sometimes retrace the steps of a Ludlum protagonist through his various adventures around the world.

“All the places in his stories really existed – and I thought that was cool, that you could do a walkabout of a Ludlum novel,” said Malner. “I liked the international intrigue in his novels, but I love sports too. Hockey is my favorite sport, so, I thought what if I could mesh the two together – hockey and political intrigue. Because political intrigue is the No. 1 selling genre out there. I thought I could fuse it with sport.

“When I went looking to see what kind of hockey books were out there, without fail, the singular style of hockey book is ‘The Boys on The Bus.’ They’re all fact-based biographies. When I went on Amazon to do the research, I found the No. 1 selling hockey books on Amazon – because they rank them – were these romance novels, with a hockey backstory. And these things sell a ton of copies. When I looked at their sales, they were actually outselling the regular hockey books.

“So, I figured those are the two choices. They’re either fact-based hockey books or they’re these hockey romances. But there was an opening for a hockey thriller. I thought there’s got to be more guys out there like me who, when we’re sitting by the pool in Palm Springs, all we want to do is be entertained by some characters in a sport we know and really like – because there are only so many fact-based hockey books you can read.”

Malner’s plot in “Big League” is loosely based on the events that surrounded the fall of communism and the rise of the Russian underworld that followed – and how it affected hockey there, and abroad. Malner is hoping to write six books and set each one in a different sport. In addition to writing his own titles, Malner is also trying to develop the genre – and hopes to find other writers who want to produce works in that genre – and help get them to market.

Nor does he have any illusions that what he’s crafting here is the next “War And Peace.”

“I started writing these books and they are pure entertainment,” said Malner. “They were never written to be an award-winning literary gem. I’m a marketing guy. I come from the world of marketing. When I studied the standard novels that sell, they’re around 347 pages – because people don’t want to read a 1,000-page book. Everything I did was geared to satisfy the appetite of the average reader – from word count to page size to how many chapters you should have. I was writing a novel that would appeal to the largest part of my target audience – 18-65-year-old males. Those are my readers.”

Or so Malner thought.

The last time he checked his sales, Malner found 44 percent were actually bought by women.

“Now, it could be that women were buying them for their husbands or their teenage sons,” he said. “I’d be at a book signing and some women had their 12-year-old sons with them – and I said, ‘yeah, this isn’t probably the ideal hockey book for them.’ But if you look at the Amazon comments, half of them are from women – and they liked the book. It’s like, ‘huh? OK. Cool.’

“But my books are all about marketing. It’s like with boy bands. There’s a recurring formula that works. And a lot of people told me, my book would make a fabulous movie. They’re the literary version of ‘Top Gun.’”

Ideally, Malner would like to get “Big League” turned into a movie like “Top Gun,” though that can be an expensive undertaking in an industry mostly shut down by the coronavirus pandemic.

“With all the different video content companies, I’m not saying that will necessarily happen,” he said. “But I’m more focused on that – than in writing a series of books about a recurring character.”

Last year, Malner got his book into the hands of Calgary Flames captain Mark Giordano because Winter represents Giordano and gave him a copy to read by the pool during the annual NHL awards ceremony in Las Vegas. Giordano played the 2007-08 season in Russia for Moscow Dynamo, in the early years of the KHL, and so presumably, that part of the story would have resonated with him. Also, the main character of “Big League” is an undrafted, rookie camp walk-on, who eventually makes the team and forges a career.

“Mark loved it – because it’s his story,” said Malner. “He said, he couldn’t get over the fact that that’s his story. He liked that. Another couple of people said they liked learning how a rookie camp works.

“Everybody picks and chooses what they like in the book.”

One of Malner’s most heartening moments came this past Christmas when he was vacationing in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, and came across a tourist on the beach, reading “Big League.”

“I put the picture on the Facebook page for ‘Big League’ – because that’s exactly what I had in mind. He looked to be about 30. He was just a guy. He probably played a sport. It was such a funny coincidence – but that’s what marketing is, trying to find a hole in the market where nothing exists and you try to weasel your way in there. I believe there’s hundreds of thousands of guys who played sports – and it doesn’t matter what sport – who this would appeal to.

“And I also thought: The cover is really important. I always thought, if I was walking through an airport book store and if I saw a hockey player with a gun scope trained on him, I’d have to go see what that book’s all about. I couldn’t walk past that.”

Malner is semi-retired now and thus has more time to devote to his writing. When he was juggling fiction with his advertising agency, he would sometimes be away from his manuscript for a long time – and it would difficult to get the writing cadence started again. Once he started writing on a more consistent basis, he found he got better at dialogue.

He is currently working on No. 2 in the series – tying together tennis and terrorism – and he’s been doing the research by visiting the Grand Slams (before coronavirus) and the Masters 1000 series. He’s also spoken on background to a Special Forces soldier (and ex-Mossad agent) who was undercover in Lebanon, to give him a glimpse into the world of international terrorism.

“That’s the amazing thing about writing,” said Malner. “When I wrote ‘Big League,’ I’d played hockey at a fairly high level, so I understood the sport and the characters in the sport and some of the weird things that go on in the KHL and what goes on with some of these Russian oligarchs. So, I found it was a much easier book to write than the second one, where I’m doing all the research from the ground up.”

The premise of the second novel involves a tennis player stumbling across a terror plot to blow up the royal box at Wimbledon.

Last summer, Malner went to Wimbledon to do some research a couple of weeks after the tournament ended, on a rainy day in late July, and found he was one of only three people taking a tour of the grounds that day.

“The tour guide asked me: ‘Why are you taking the tour?’ and I explained I was writing a novel, and I wanted to do some research on Wimbledon. Everyone thought that was really cool until I told them the story what was about – and then there was this little meltdown. But it turned out fine, because I called up my website and showed her what I did and she introduced me to her GM, who it turns out, is a hockey fan. I didn’t know this, but there’s a hockey rink near the grounds, where the Wimbledon Lions ice hockey team plays. So, when he saw my book, it calmed the waters a bit – and he took me to meet the Wimbledon security guys and I got a lot of good background.”

Self-publishing can be both expensive and time-consuming. You can actually buy a book directly from his website – where the order comes directly to him and Marner will fill it himself. He actually takes an envelope, stuffs a book in it, and takes it to the post office to mail to purchasers. It’s a little old school, but Malner doesn’t want to leave any stone unturned.

“There are all these different ways of distributing books nowadays, and you have to learn them all,” said Malner. “With this pandemic, more and more people are reading. But if you look at the trend moving forward, it’s all going to be digital. Plus, we’re running out of publishers. There just aren’t that many of them left in Canada. Self-publishing – and digital downloading – is only going to get bigger.

“I can run a campaign on Google for two weeks and sell 50 books and I’m barely breaking even on the advertising costs – but it does start to show you, this is a much more predictable pattern of retail than trying to get a publisher and then hoping to get your book in the store.

“My vision from Day 1 was to create a genre of new books that does not exist right now – and currently, I’m the No. 1 best-selling author in the action-adventure sports novel category – and I want to see if that can grow that into something more.”