American Kingpin

Short chapters that each end on a question keep readers going. American Kingpin is built as 58 short chapters, each designed to make the reader say "just one more." Each chapter ends on a hook that gives away enough to pull the reader forward but not enough to reveal the outcome.

Bilton seeds the question and pays it off soon after, because an answer that sits 200 pages away feels like a cheat. He calls this quality propulsivity and learned it from screenwriting and murder mysteries.

How I Write▶ 23:57

Set out the themes before the main story so they echo later. Before Silk Road begins, the book establishes ambition and early failure: it shows Ross Ulbricht failing early in his career and reading Von Mises and Friedman, so later beats feel set up.

Bilton fixes one theme before writing and wants every scene to braid back to it, or the reader gets lost.

How I Write

After an intense scene, slow the pace so the reader can breathe. After the library raid where Ulbricht is arrested, Bilton jumped straight into another wild scene, and his publisher Nikki Papadopoulos told him the book needed to slow down. He added a calmer chapter in Korea following the seized laptop being built: chips going in, the assembly line, the plane.

Bilton, a classical pianist, compares writing to music with passages that speed up and slow down. "We've gone through the crescendo of the story, now let's take a beat and come back into it."

How I Write▶ 11:44

Introduce characters one at a time, only when readers are ready. Readers meet Ross first, then his girlfriend Julia, and each new agent arrives only after the previous one is settled. Bilton copies film grammar, where the first person on screen is the lead.

A stream of names makes readers flip back or reach for Kindle X-Ray. Bilton says knowing what the reader knows, and when to tell them more, is his main strength.

How I Write▶ 14:08

A repeated trait lets readers recognize each agent instantly. HSI agent Jared has a Rubik's Cube on his keychain in his early scenes, and the IRS agent reads every email three times because he believes it lifts recall from 20% to 60%. The interviewer remembered "the Rubik's Cube guy" before the name.

Bilton plants these traits in early appearances after drafting, partly to cut through the FBI, HSI, Secret Service and IRS acronyms.

How I Write▶ 15:28

Small human details let readers step inside a flawed protagonist. Ulbricht buys a flower for the woman at the flower stall, the kind of detail Bilton uses so readers can picture themselves in the character even when he does bad things.

He learned this after a draft reader of his Twitter book wrote "I hate them all" on page 160, which sent him to study how murder mysteries keep readers close to killers.

How I Write

Bilton gave no verdict on Ulbricht and let readers decide. He deliberately presents the good, the bad and the ugly rather than saying whether Ulbricht deserved his sentence. People constantly ask him, and everyone gives a different answer.

"You don't tell the reader what to think. You present them with the good and the bad and the ugly and let them decide."

How I Write▶ 1:13:23

A timestamped database rebuilt events from chat logs and social posts. Bilton put chat logs, interviews, tweets, Facebook posts and Venmo records into one database and let the timestamps line up, then took locations and photo geotags to Google Maps and visited the places himself.

To find an unlabelled campground from an Ulbricht weekend trip, he timed the drive from the Golden Gate Bridge at 48 minutes, searched every wooded area within that range and walked it. He sat in the same seats and ordered the same food, then kept only two or three sensory details, including smell, in the scene.

How I Write▶ 34:08