Best case scenario
Some authors spend years writing a single book. Allen Mercer has published six since January 2014.
The Eagle Point resident works full time as a global sales manager for an industrial company, as well as going on mission trips and being a husband and father of two. In every spare moment, though, he’s writing.
Mercer said he has been writing his whole life, and he published his first book in 2003. It was based on history stories he told his son, Justin, who now studies history at Auburn. For a while, it seemed that writing would remain just a hobby. Three years ago, however, a religious retreat made Mercer realize that he wanted to commit to his passion.
Three months of consistent writing produced Underlying Grace, a work of Christian fiction that he published in February 2014. Mercer said it can be difficult to write in that genre because of its narrow focus. One of his test readers commented that he wrote good action scenes, and Mercer decided to take the challenge of writing an action novel.
The result was Worst Case Scenario, a series about a Birmingham family surviving in a post-
apocalyptic U.S. Mercer said the books are “pure action all the way through.” He released the first three books on Amazon in March, and they began to get popular in the dystopian fiction genre. The fourth book came out in June and is what Mercer said put him on the map.
“It just jammed up the charts and I had a top 100 on Amazon, which is significant, and the rest of the series has picked up,” Mercer said.
The fifth book came out in September and outsold the other four, and Mercer said he’s finishing a sixth now. It’s hard to maintain that pace, he said, but he gets messages from fans wanting to know what happens next. He writes at night between conference calls and on his frequent plane trips for work.
“When you’re moving so fast—your readers want it, you can tell,” Mercer said.
Part of what has made Worst Case Scenario so popular, Mercer thinks, is that he portrays the apocalypse with a streak of humanity and goodness running through it. The end of the world doesn’t make characters forget the importance of family, community or their personal problems. In that way, the series bears some similarities to his Christian fiction.
“They may seem like they’re opposite ends of the spectrum, but somebody said to me the other day, ‘There is a lot of goodness in the books, even though there’s a lot of bad things that happen,’” Mercer said.
Each book is short, and Mercer said he imagines them as episodes in a TV show when he writes. Birmingham residents would also recognize the setting of most of the series. At one point, Mercer said one of his characters is hiking along U.S. 280 toward Chelsea.
“In my mind I can see the stop light over the mountain where she is,” Mercer said.
He draws ideas and character traits from the people he meets while traveling, as well as his family. Mercer’s wife, Christine, coordinates mission work in Central America for St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, and he has his son Justin and daughter Audrey, who is a sophomore at Briarwood Christian School.
With the number of people he meets, Mercer always has a bank of interesting characters to draw from. He said one of his favorite parts of writing is developing a character and deepening their backstory as the series goes on.
In addition to the sixth book in Worst Case Scenario, which will be out before the end of the year, Mercer also finished a sequel to Underlying Grace called Mighty to Save. That was released in October, and he’s already creating a three-part spinoff of Worst Case Scenario called Collapsing World. In the future, he’d also like to try his hand at military fiction.
Like every author, Mercer is hoping he can one day pick up his pen full time and support his family through his books.
“If I could pull that off, though, I would every day of the week. If anybody can go do their passion, I don’t care how old you are, go do it. That’s why I stay up late, because it’s my passion,” Mercer said.