This transcript was generated by AI and only lightly edited, so there may be errors or typos.

[00:00:00.000] – Alan Petersen
Hi, everybody. This is Alan Petersen with Meet the Thriller Author. And on the podcast today, I have JD Barker, who is a New York Times and international bestselling author of numerous novels, including Dracul, the 4 MK Thriller series. He’s currently collaborating with James Patterson. So really excited to have JD Barker on the podcast.

[00:00:44.660] – Speaker 2
Hey, Alan, how are you doing?

[00:00:47.100] – Alan Petersen
I’m doing good. Yeah, really excited to have you on the podcast. Thanks for coming on.

[00:00:51.720] – Speaker 2
Oh, anytime.

[00:00:52.740] – Alan Petersen
So just to get a little bit about your background here. So I’m curious about your background before you got into writing and just curious if the storytelling was always a route that you wanted to pursue. Just tell us about that journey for you.

[00:01:10.260] – Speaker 2
Oh, boy, how much time do we have? I’m one of those guys. I was an overnight A Success that was like 20 years in the making. I grew up writing. I grew up without a TV in the house. We were hit in the library when I was a little kid. We had a book in my hand pretty much from my first memory. By the time I got into kindergarten, I read all the Hardy Boys, Nancy to Drew’s and moved on to Charles Dickens and stuff like that. I used to write stories just for fun, and I had a sister who was 15 months younger than me, so I would staple the pages together. I created a little library in my room, and she would check out the stories. I’d charge her late fees. It’s like this dates back a really long time. My parents encouraged it. They saw writing as something that they wanted me to develop, but they also told me over and over again, You can’t make a living as an author. You have to get a real job. Writing became the hobby, and I went through the motions. I finished up high school.

[00:02:01.940] – Speaker 2
I went to college. I got a degree in business, another one in finance. I got a degree in IT. I got halfway through a psychology degree and ended up working in the corporate world in finance. But I would come home and write at night to keep saying because that was my go-to. At the time, I was working for a lot of newspapers and magazines early on. That evolved into working as a book doctor and a ghost writer, which is basically something I could do in my off hours. I just enjoyed it. It’s always has been a part of my life.

[00:02:31.450] – Alan Petersen
Yeah. And I’m curious about that, too, because I always hear about the book doctors and the ghost writers in the background. It’s like this, like nobody really wants to talk about it. But I think it’s a fascinating part of the business. Can you tell us a little bit about that and how did you get into it? And I’m sure it’s helped a lot, too, now when you’re writing your own stuff now.

[00:02:53.450] – Speaker 2
Yeah, I fell into it. Back when I was in college, I worked for BMG Distribution, which is a division of RCA Records. I was essentially a glorified babysitter. When they had a recording artist come into South Florida, I’d have to pick them up at the airport, get them to their hotel, get them to the radio station for their interview, get them to their concert, and then get them back on their airplane. I had some very famous people in the car. At the same time, I was going to college, and student loans are expensive. I started to interview those people, and then I would take those interviews and sell them to magazines like 17, and Teen Beat, and Tiger Beat, and all these magazines that were around back in the day. When you work for newspapers and magazines, you quickly realize everybody Everybody’s got a novel in a desk drawer somewhere. They’ve been working on it for 10 years. It’s almost done. It’s 400,000 words long. It just needs a little something. They would give those books to me. I was really good with grammar and punctuation, so I would go through the book and help them clean it up, and then That turned into giving them developmental suggestions.

[00:03:47.590] – Speaker 2
It evolved into working as what I called a book doctor. Somebody would hand me a manuscript that was, in my opinion, half baked, need a little bit of work, and I would clean it up and fine tune it and get it ready for publication. Word of that spread. Keep in mind, I was doing all this while I was working in the corporate world. This was my night gig. So agents would call me. They get a manuscript that they love from somebody, but it needs a little bit of work before they submit it to editors, so I would help them clean it up. I’d get phone calls from editors. They would buy a book that they absolutely love, but it needed something. And I would get calls like, this person can’t write dialog to save their life. They need to cut 40,000 words, but they’re too close to it. I was a hired gun, so I had no problem making those changes. And I did that for 20 some years. And over that time, I just really got to learn what the folks in New York really wanted to see out of a best selling book because they were very candid with me about that.

[00:04:39.260] – Speaker 2
So when it came time to write my own, I felt like I had a really good toolbox.

[00:04:43.570] – Alan Petersen
Wow, yeah. Was that the… So Was your first book, it was Forsaken, right? That was your first published novel?

[00:04:49.210] – Speaker 2
That was the first one that I wrote on my own. I ended up with six different books that hit the New York Times list, all with other people’s names on the cover when I was working as a ghost writer, which just gets old after a while. So Forsaken was my first attempt to sit down and write a book on my own.

[00:05:03.630] – Alan Petersen
Oh, yeah. You can’t tell anybody because you have to sign those NDA clauses and all that. It’s bittersweet. Your work is a best seller, but your name is not anywhere on there. Nobody knows. How does that feel?

[00:05:16.630] – Speaker 2
Yeah. Like I said, it gets old, but at the same time, that’s where I really learned to write. The fiction ones, I think, are the ones that hit home the hardest because that was thoughts that came out of my mind, story lines that came out of my and somebody else was getting credit for it, and that hurt. But I did a lot of work writing memoirs and books along those lines, too, which were also ghost written. To give me an example, I’d sit down with a politician. We’d spend two or three days together. I’d record a ton of interviews, get them talking, get conversations going, then take all that back to my desk at home and hash it out and turn it into a book and try to write it in their voice. That really helped me, I think, with dialog and just creating different characters, because when you’re writing a memoir, a lot of times you’re writing it in first person, but it’s somebody else’s first person. So I learned how to do that. Even though I spent all this time working on these different projects, I didn’t write Forsaken until I was 43, I really feel like I needed that learning experience to get to where I am today.

[00:06:15.320] – Speaker 2
If I would have started publishing my own books back in my 20s, I don’t know that I’d be doing as well as I am today.

[00:06:20.590] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, it probably helped it, too, with the whole business and the marketing part of it, too, because you really, like you said, you understand what the market wanted. People who are just writing like I mean, you have to write what you want to write, but you have to also write the market. If not, you’re not going to do very well. And you probably already understood that pretty decently, I would imagine.

[00:06:38.490] – Speaker 2
I had a pretty good handle on it and the business side of things, too. How to work with magazines, how to get interviews, and a lot of the PR stuff. I already had a lot of relationships established on that front.

[00:06:49.480] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, it’s so fascinating because you’ve done it all, which is really cool. You’ve done traditional publishing, you’ve done indie publishing, you’ve done hybrid. And that seems to be the big… I keep hearing hybrid publishing a lot now. Can you tell us a little bit about that and what are your thoughts about it and the future of hybrid publishing?

[00:07:06.840] – Speaker 2
Yeah. So For Saken, I indie published. I purposely… I spent a lot of time and money, though, to make sure that it didn’t look like an indie published title. I created an LLC so it could be tied back to me as a person. There was a company behind it. I paid professionals for copy-editing, for formatting, for the cover. I purposely wanted it to look like something coming out of a random house, not something coming out of some guy’s desk at the in Pittsburgh. I think all of that’s important. But when I indie published, I like that control that I had because I was able to handle virtually every aspect and every decision was mine. The economics of being an indie author are very solid. You earn roughly about 70 cents on the dollar. But I sold a lot of copies of that book, and that put me on the radar of the traditional guys. When it came time to sell my second book, which was called The Fourth Monkey, I had no trouble getting an agent. I had no trouble getting a publishing deal. The book sold for seven figures with a movie and a TV show attached.

[00:08:01.780] – Speaker 2
So I had both feet firmly planted in that camp. So I published a couple of books traditionally through… At the time, it was HMH, which was later bought by Harper Collins. I wrote a prequel to Dracula for Bram Stoker’s family that was put out by Putnam. So I had a slew of books that came out on the traditional model, but I quickly saw how little control I had over those. The second you hand in that manuscript, everything is somebody else’s decision. The cover, the size of your name on the cover, everything about the book, you no longer have the ability to weigh in on that. I didn’t like that. And the economics are different. As a traditionally published author, I got some big advance checks, but you have to pay those back, and you pay them back with very small increments, usually about 15 to 20 cents on the dollar instead of the 70 cents on the dollar you get as an indie. As I was racking up the sales and the books were increasing my exposure, I started to weigh all of that. Then I wrote a book called A Caller’s Game, and when I sent it into my agent, I told her, We’re going to do this one different.

[00:08:59.260] – Speaker 2
I’m going to retain all the English rights for myself, and I’m going to indie publish that through my own press. You can go ahead and sell to the foreign publishers like you normally do. Let’s try and split it up and see what happens. At that point, I was already in about 150 different countries, 20 some different languages. So that worked out really well because I got basically the financial impact of being an indie author, but the book still made it into all these other markets. But what I noticed is as an indie author, there’s still places you can’t get to. You can’t get into Costco, you can’t get into Target, you can’t get to Walmart or grocery stores or the airport. Even when you sell a lot of titles, you can sometimes sneak in, but it’s not as easy as it could be. About a year and a half ago, I wrote a book called Behind a Clothed Door. I sent that off to my agent and he started shopping it. We immediately had a film interest, so we knew that it was going to be a pretty big book. It looked like it was going to go to auction with the traditional publishers.

[00:09:52.560] – Speaker 2
Right before that was supposed to happen, I got a phone call from a friend of mine that worked at Random House, and she said, Listen, we’re about to offer on your book. When that happens, you need to turn it down. And I said, Why? She said, well, we’re about to lay off a lot of people and the editor who wants your book is one of them. You don’t want to get caught in that limbo. I had a similar conversation with somebody at Harper Collins. So I started some back channel conversations. I had worked in finance before. I knew some of the people that were involved in the private equity purchase of Simon & Schuster. So I started a dialog with them. And ultimately, I signed a deal with Simon & Schuster where they allowed me to create my own imprint on Simon & Schuster. So they handle all of my print sales distribution. But because I have my own imprint, I can put out whatever books I want whenever I want, which gives me that indie freedom, but with a traditional publisher behind me, which is how I put out behind a closed door in my last couple of titles.

[00:10:43.140] – Speaker 2
I really do think that that’s the future of where this industry is going. Because if you take a step back, if you take a look at it, just any indie author who is doing really well, they’re selling a lot of books on their own. A traditional publisher, they see that and they will walk up to them, they will offer them a big old check for their next book. Most Most indie authors are going to turn that down because even though it’s nice to get that money, they don’t need it. And they know they can earn a lot more as an indie author on the back end if they just put it out the way that they’ve been putting it out. But if you flip that on its head and do something similar to what I did, that same author can still put out their book on their own. They still get the financial implications of being an indie author, but now they can get it into all these places they couldn’t get to before. That, to me, is a game changer, not only for the authors, but also for the publishers, because in a deal like mine, I’m the one taking the financial risk when I do a publication.

[00:11:30.860] – Speaker 2
I have to pay for those print runs. It’s not Simon & Schuster. So if the book tanks, that’s on me. If it does well, they still make their back end. So they don’t have the liability that they would normally have. So it’s a win-win from both sides to do that. Simon & Shuster was the first one to the table to do it, and I think it had a lot to do with them being purchased by private equity. But everybody else is sniffing around. I know Random House is making similar deals and looking at it, and the other guys are, too. So I think in 2025, you’re going to see a couple of these come to play.

[00:11:59.570] – Alan Petersen
Wow, That’s fascinating. I had no idea that the imprint was basically with Simon & Shuster, one of the biggest publishers of the world. That’s so fascinating. If you’re a If you’re big in the indie market, though, like you said, because you tried it when you were having a lot of success, like you said, to get it to the airport without the backing of one of the traditionals, it’s going to be very, very difficult, right?

[00:12:29.850] – Speaker 2
I mean, it’s- It is because there’s still gatekeepers there. Like, Versaken sold enough copies as an indie published title where I eventually did find that at airports and random bookstores around the country. If you sell enough copies, it will get there. But you have to be diligent of how you do that. I used to print books in bulk. A lot of indie authors, they start off printing one at a time. Somebody orders a hard cover, Ingram Spark prints that hard cover, they ship it off for them, which works fantastic, but the margins just aren’t there. I’ll make a lot of money doing that because it’s expensive to print one book at a time. As indie authors evolved, what I ended up doing is I would print 2,500 copies, 5,000 copies, 10,000 copies, and then I would warehouse them, which gets my print cost down. Then print became a viable option for me. But the Simon & Schuster thing was the next logical step in all of that. I do think you’re going to see bookstores looking at indie authors a little closer, but you have to have the right distribution. Ingram Park by itself, I noticed a few years ago, wasn’t enough.

[00:13:33.450] – Speaker 2
A lot of bookstores wouldn’t order from Ingram. They definitely won’t order from Amazon. So if that’s the only place your book is, you’re not going to get in another store. But I worked out a deal a few years back with a company called Baker & Taylor, which stocks a lot of libraries and a lot of bookstores as a distribution company. And that got a lot of my indie published titles into some of those places that were more difficult to do. So I’m always looking for something a little different. I basically look at the traditional model, figure out what they’re doing, and If it’s a hole on my side, something that needs to be filled, I try to find a way to make that happen.

[00:14:04.900] – Alan Petersen
Wow. That’s so fascinating. So when you’re doing these deals, do you at least find somebody to call over there? Did you just call them up?

[00:14:12.500] – Speaker 2
I learned a long time ago, it’s best just to ask the question. I’d rather hear no from somebody than to not ask the question at all and not know what that answer is. Whenever I want to do something strange, something outside the box, I pick up the phone, I shoot off that email, and just see where it Yeah, that’s fascinating.

[00:14:31.600] – Alan Petersen
I said we talked a little bit offline. I heard you. I was at the author nation conference this November in Las Vegas, and I was fascinating to hear you talk, and that’s something that you said, that even You wanted to write for the Dracula world, and you made that happen. You made some calls. Can you tell us a little bit about that process, too? Because that was fascinating for me to hear of that over at author nation.

[00:15:00.710] – Speaker 2
Yeah, Dracula, that came about in a very weird way. So Forsaken was a horror novel, and it was up for the Bram Stoker Award for best debut. So I went to the Horror Writers Convention. And while I was there, I was sitting next… I sat next to Daker Stoker, who’s Bram’s great grand nephew, and we were at a signing table together for about an hour and a half. And we talked quite a bit. He picked my brain on the ghost writing stuff, the Book Doctor stuff, and things that I had done in the past, and I hit him up for any intel I could get on Bran Stoker. We had a really good conversation, and I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was part of a job interview. He already knew who I was. He had read Forsaken. At one point, he pulled me aside and said, Listen, our family has been trying to find somebody to write a prequel to Dracula for a while now using Bram’s original notes. We think you’re the guy. Is that something you’d be interested in. I wasn’t going to turn that down. If you look at my career, I’ve sought out particular projects that are going to get me in the spotlight.

[00:15:54.320] – Speaker 2
I try to weave those in. I got the idea from Keana Reeves, of all people. Keanu Reeves hates making action movies. If you ever see an interview with him, he doesn’t like doing the John Wick movies. He didn’t like doing the Matrix movies. He likes doing the independent films. He likes doing the stuff where he actually gets to show his acting chops. But he knows that he has to make those big blockbuster movies in order to do the other ones. From a book standpoint, I tried to do the same thing. Writing the book, the prequel to Dracula, I knew that that was going to be a high-profile project. It got a ton of press. We got a film deal out of it. That raised my profile as an author, which helped sell the other books. As soon as one of those is behind me, I start looking for the next one. I don’t know if you remember a movie from the ’90s called Flatliners. Fantastic movie with Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, Kevin Bacon, Billy Baldwin. All these people at the start of their career, nobody knew who they were back then. They all went on to do these crazy, great things.

[00:16:50.150] – Speaker 2
But it’s a fantastic movie, and I’ve always loved the premise of it. The guy who wrote it is on one of my other projects. A while back, we started talking about the idea of rebooting the franchise. As soon as he got those rights back, he called me, and I was all over that. I’m currently writing a novel to reboot a film franchise. The book is going to come first. We’re pretty sure the movie is going to happen because the studios have already chimed in and said they want it. We’ll see how that goes. But if you Google me, you’re going to see that that got a ton of press. We basically announced it when we started the project. We’ll announce it again when the book gets shopped. We’ll announce it again when we get the film deal. Every time one of those news stories comes out on the various international press or international press, it helps sell the other books. I’m always looking for stuff like that to keep things going.

[00:17:36.160] – Alan Petersen
As a writer, was your confidence level a bit? Were you nervous to take on something like Dracula? I mean, the whole world knows that that character?

[00:17:46.990] – Speaker 2
I don’t really get nervous. It’s a tough one to explain. Dracula is one of those books. It was the very first adult book I ever read as a kid. I picked up a copy for 25 cents to the yard sale, and I showed it to my mom, and the cover was crazy, scary-looking. I was like, There’s no way she’s going to let me buy this, and she let me buy it and read it. I was hooked from the moment I read that. I read that book over and over again. It takes on… You get different messages out of it as you get older, you go on through life and you read it again. The chance to play in that particular play box or sandbox, I couldn’t turn it down. Daker Stoker told me two things, though, that really sold me on the project. He told me that when Bram wrote Dracula, he wrote it as a It was a true story. He completely believed that vampires were real. He did his entire life, even to the point when he died, he had himself cremated because he was worried about a vampire coming for his immortal soul.

[00:18:39.740] – Speaker 2
He completely believed in all of it. When he wrote Dracula, that was part of the story. He turned it into his publisher in England, and they pushed it back across the desk and said, No way we can put this out. People are going to get too scared. At the time, Jack the Ripper was active in London. People believed in the supernatural, so it wasn’t a stretch, and they weren’t willing to do it. They made him cut the first 120 pages of the book. So Dracula, the story that we know starts with Jonathan Harker on the train. That’s actually page 120 of the original manuscript. And Daker told me, When we write the prequel, we’re going to focus on the story that Bram wanted to tell in those first 120 pages. Which was just, there’s no way I could pass that up. Seeing the material that Bram had on his desk when he wrote the original Dracula, all of that stuff just completely broke me in.

[00:19:24.840] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, that’s really cool. And so speaking of the conferences, Can you tell us a minute, though, you do several conferences a year, like Author Nation? Are you going to be there in 2025? Are you going back to Author Nation? What were your thoughts on the conference?

[00:19:39.860] – Speaker 2
I loved it. We were talking a little bit off the air, and it’s funny because Author Nation, it was 20 books to 50K before. That was something that on the traditional publishing side, they told us to stay away from. That was an indie conference. You don’t go to it if you’re a traditionally published author. They drove that point home. I think the rebranding of Author Nation is huge. I think it’s to open a lot of doors. But one of the things that I noticed is I was on the board with ITW, International Thriller Writers. They do Thriller Fest in New York. Fantastic conference, a lot of really cool people. But it’s very good at helping debut authors and helping promote the really big names, but not so much for the people in the middle. They don’t really have a whole lot that helps you get from that debut to the big name. It’s just a void. That’s not unique to ITW or to Thriller Fest. If you went to the romance conference, it was the same deal. Bouchercon is the same thing. They don’t They don’t know what to do with those midlisters. What I got out of Author Nation is they fill that void.

[00:20:36.780] – Speaker 2
They teach you what you need to do after you write that first book and what you need to do for the next 50. I think that’s extremely important for authors to understand. If you go to something like Author Nation, you’re going to walk away with a handle on marketing, on publicity, the craft itself, dealing with multiple genres, the business side of things. They’re going to fill all those empty boxes that you may not find at other conferences. Right now, I’m very excited about it. I see it as one of the biggest best conferences out there.

[00:21:06.910] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, and I think that’s so important for a writer, especially. I know I have a lot of aspiring writers that listen to this because writing the book is just Basically, it’s just the start, especially if you want to get it in front of readers. A lot of writers don’t like to think about business and marketing, but you have to, right?

[00:21:24.400] – Speaker 2
Oh, yeah. There’s no way around it. In 2024, there were 2.4 million books published on Amazon. That is insane. If you wrote one book, you somehow have to come up with a way for your book to rise to the top of that list for other people to discover it, for it to take on a life of its own. I write books with James Patterson. We’ve written, I think, five together at this point, and we have tons of marketing conversations, just as much on the marketing side as we do when we’re actually writing the book. That’s James Patterson. I know a lot of the big name authors. They spend a good half of their day, just like I do, working on marketing, working on PR, doing the business side of things. In TV and movies, they always paint this romantic picture of an author sitting down next to their typewriter. They write their book and the stack of pages grows next to it. Then they box up the manuscript, they send it to their agent, and they’re done with it. That’s just not how it works, not in the real world.

[00:22:16.430] – Alan Petersen
If it ever was that way, it’s not that way anymore. It keeps changing all the time now.

[00:22:22.350] – Speaker 2
Yeah, you’ve got to be completely hands-on. That’s not unique to be an indie. Traditional publishers, it’s the same thing. You speak to any New York Times best seller, they’re going to tell you they spend just as much time on podcast and doing marketing stuff as anybody else does.

[00:22:36.010] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, that’s what I’ve noticed, too, with this podcast. Even like real big names and stuff, they’re paying for their own publicist and PR people, too. To to reach out to podcasts like mine. It’s interesting to see that. You really have to be involved in your career.

[00:22:52.820] – Speaker 2
Well, I noticed something very early on. Initially, I chased a lot of the big publications. I wanted to get reviewed in the Washington Post or the New York Times or this magazine or that magazine. When those started to come in, I noticed the reality of it. If you get interviewed in the New York Times, that interview ends up online, ends up in the print magazine. But when it lands in somebody’s inbox, they click on that link and they hit a paywall. They can’t actually see it unless they subscribe to that newspaper or that magazine. That alienates a ton of people. Now, if I get a review by a blogger or somebody who’s got a good TikTok account or whatever, they do that interview, they do that review, then they get out on social media, they promote it to their fans on all the various platforms. Their fans talk about it, they promote it. So I’ve seen, realistically, I get a lot bigger response out of just a person an influencer than I do a lot of these big publications. I’ve been on the Today Show in multiple countries, and that doesn’t move the needle as much as some influencers do today.

[00:23:55.360] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, that’s amazing. I’ve noticed that on Amazon now, they have a Book Talk hashtag on some of the books, books that are going viral on TikTok. Amazon is not jumping on that, too. So it’s fascinating to see that.

[00:24:10.930] – Speaker 2
Yeah.

[00:24:11.730] – Alan Petersen
So I got to mention, you mentioned you’re working with James Patterson. So I have to ask about that because that’s probably one of the best-selling authors in the world, probably, right up there. What was that like? How did that come together for you?

[00:24:28.180] – Speaker 2
Every author, you write a book, the next step you do when you start marketing it is you want those blurbs for the back cover. Greatest book ever, buy a New York Times best selling author. When we finished up a book on the traditional side, our editors, they always sit down and make a list of people that they can send that book off to. Patterson is always on that list. Stephen King is always on that list. There’s certain people that get every book. We sent him a copy of The Fourth Monkey, and I never really expected much to come out of it. I ended up getting a phone call from him. It was a Florida Area Code, and I used to live in Florida. At first, I thought it was somebody I knew, and I picked up and he said, Hey, it’s Jim Patterson. You got a second? He started giving me his review of the Fourth Monkey, and I got a couple of minutes into that conversation, realized it was really him. We had a really good talk, and I told him that I’m in Florida quite a bit because my family is down there.

[00:25:18.000] – Speaker 2
We made plans to get lunch. When we sat down for lunch, we started hashing out ideas for a co-author titled Together. But it came away with a stalemate because he was a hardcore outliner. At the time, I was a pantser. I’d never worked with outlines before. It just felt like our styles weren’t going to work together. When we left that lunch, we didn’t think we were going to end up doing anything together. Then a couple months later, we talked again. He’s like, You know what? Let’s try it your way. We ended up pantsing a novel. It was called The Coast to Coast: Murders. I would write a chapter, I would send it off to him. I would paint him in some impossible scenario, thinking he’s never going to get out of this. Fifteen minutes later, he would not only get out of it, but he sent me pages back and put me into something worse. It’s the twistiest book I’ve ever When we finished that up, he’s told me, Now that we’ve tried it your way as a Pantzer, I want you to try it my way. Here’s an outline. He gave me an outline for a book called The Noise.

[00:26:10.320] – Speaker 2
Honestly, after I wrote that book with him, it went so smooth having that outline in front of us that I haven’t looked back. I’ve been outlining everything ever since. He takes credit for converting me to the whole outlining thing.

[00:26:24.050] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, that’s huge that you got him to write without an outline because that’s his whole… He’s huge. I saw his master class on outlining was for me was… That’s basically what I do now. I try to outline like James Patterson does with the synopsis of every chapter.

[00:26:42.210] – Speaker 2
Well, what I’ve learned is I write every day until about three o’clock, and I live on a little island off the Coast of Portsmouth in New England. I go for a run around the island. It takes me about an hour and a half, and I use that time to think about what I’m going to write the next day. When I was pantsing a novel, all that brainpower went into what comes next in the story, what comes next, what comes next? If I’ve got an outline in front of me, I find that that same brain power goes into how do I make what comes next better? I already know the story, but now it’s time to tweak it and take it from an eight to an 11. It’s a really cool process. I encourage everybody to try it both ways. Nobody writes the same. I’ve evolved. Everything I do has changed over the years, and it’ll probably continue to change. I think everybody needs to try both ways and just figure out what works best for them.

[00:27:27.850] – Alan Petersen
You recently published a heavy with Christina… How do you pronounce her name? Is it Dagle?

[00:27:34.500] – Speaker 2
Yeah, Christine Dagle. Yeah, I got it.

[00:27:36.410] – Alan Petersen
I noticed, I saw that you have several books coming out next year with co-authors, so I’m curious about that process for you. Do you take some of what you learned of James Patterson with these other authors that you’re now working with? Can you tell us about that co-authoring world?

[00:27:52.130] – Speaker 2
Yeah. There’s so many ideas in only so many hours to actually write them. One of the things I love doing, I love working with other authors, which comes out of the book Dr. Ghostwriter years. I always collaborated with other people. I’ve been seeking out people in today’s world to write some of these co-authored titles with me. What I find, like with Christine Dagle with heavier the Stones, she’s a neuropsychologist That’s what she does in her day job. We needed that in the book. I could go out on Google and I could do a ton of research and I could fake my way through it and get something down on paper that sounds realistic. But having a real neuropsychologist on board in the writing process, it adds this authenticity to the story that I really couldn’t recreate on my own. I also find that when you have two authors, you end up with a completely different book because obviously I’ve got my own ideas, but she’s got her own. Between the two of us, we end up taking the book off in a completely different direction. I really enjoy that writing process. I’m currently working on a ton of co-authored titles.

[00:28:51.670] – Speaker 2
I’m trying to supplement my solo titles. I think I’ve got 12 of them coming out over the next year or so, but I’m having a ball releasing them.

[00:29:00.100] – Alan Petersen
I got to ask about the writing process because I’m always curious about that stuff. What do you use? Do you use Word or some other software program?

[00:29:10.560] – Speaker 2
Primarily, I use Scrivner. I’ve never liked Word only because when you get to the tail end of a novel, it takes forever to open the file, and that always makes me really nervous, like it’s going to get corrupted or something. Scrivner works great. I’ve tried a bunch of different methods, though, so you can see it behind me. There’s a typewriter on the table behind me, next to my fireplace there. I’m writing a book on that, so every day I just type a couple of sentences on it. I’ve got another book that I’m working on where I’m writing it longhand on a notepad, and I find that the different mediums that I use, it changes my writer voice, so the story is different. I’m constantly changing it up.

[00:29:45.660] – Alan Petersen
Do you usually write in the same spot or you change that up as well?

[00:29:49.890] – Speaker 2
Nowadays, because I’m doing this professionally, we’re in my office right now, my desk is right over here off to the side, so I’m in the same place every day. I’ve got a routine down. Back when I first I started doing this when I was working in the corporate world, I wrote anywhere I could. If I was standing in the line at the grocery store and I had five minutes, I would whip out my iPhone and try to hammer out a couple of hundred words. It’s just evolved over time. But today, a normal day, I get up at 7:00, I go straight to my desk, I grab some coffee on the way, and just start writing whatever book I’m working on straight off the bat. I leave the internet turned off until I get my words for the day. I try to do about 2,000 to 3,000 words or so, which I wrap up around 10:30. Then I flip on the internet, then the whole business this world comes flooding in. So emails from my agents and interviews and publishers and all that stuff, I start dealing with that. I do that until 3 o’clock, and that’s when my quitting bell rings.

[00:30:40.920] – Alan Petersen
What about when you’re writing, when you’re trying to get those 2,000, 3,000 words in? Do you have complete silence? Do you listen to music? What’s your cup of tea for that?

[00:30:52.220] – Speaker 2
Years back, I used to listen to a Thunderstorm soundtrack on noise canceling headphones, mainly because I was in the corporate world and I would I have to go off in the corner of the lunch room. I was in a cubicle at one point, a lot of stuff going on around me, so I did that to drown things out. But what I learned is it creates a Pavlov’s dog situation. Every time I hear that Thunderstorm sound, my brain immediately snaps into writer’s mode. Even today, even though I’m in a nice office, it’s soundproof. I still put on noise canceling headphones and I still listen to a Thunderstorm soundtrack, whatever I write. I learned over time to always get up in the middle of a sentence. I don’t write until the well runs If I run out of ideas, I used to write like that. I would write 5,000, 6,000 words, and it’s like squeezing water out of a rock by the time you get to the end of it. I would literally have no more ideas. I was like, Okay, I’m done for the day. But you get burnt out doing that because then you sit down the next day and you stare at a blank screen for an hour trying to figure out what comes next, and you can’t sustain that way.

[00:31:48.540] – Speaker 2
In today’s world, I quit in the middle of a sentence. I literally get up when that bell rings at three o’clock. It doesn’t matter where I’m at. My brain continues to work that story because I already know what comes next, so I don’t have that anxiety. Community. I just continue to grow the story as I go through the rest of my day. When I start back over the next day, I hit the ground running.

[00:32:08.860] – Alan Petersen
It’s also so interesting because you’ve built a very recognizable brand as a thriller and horror writer. So just for advice for the writers listening to this, especially if you’re independent, can you give us a little bit about that, about branding? How should we be thinking about these things? Because you’ve done such an amazing job with that.

[00:32:28.790] – Speaker 2
Brand is extremely I’ve studied every aspect of this business as much as I’ve worked in it. I walked into a bookstore and said, okay, why are people buying this one? Why are they buying that one? Publishers will fight you on it if you’re in the traditional world, like the typical book with a traditional publisher, the title of the book is going to be very large, the author name is going to be very small because they’re pushing that title. Honestly, that’s all they care about. They don’t really think that much about building brand anymore like they used to. But if you think about the big name authors that actually do sell based on what they on brand recognition, you look at their books, their name is huge, the title is small. You walk into a bookstore, it’s prominently placed. The first thing you see is their name, and people buy it because of that name. You buy a Stephen King book because it’s Stephen King. You don’t necessarily know what it’s about. It doesn’t really matter. That’s always been my goal. Everything that I do is I try to gear towards that. My name, JD Barker, is actually trademarked.

[00:33:24.310] – Speaker 2
I’ve got a specific way that it’s printed on certain titles. It has to be a certain size. Even when I negotiate a contract with somebody like James Patterson, there’s a clause in the contract that says my name needs to be the same font size as his, which is done on purpose to get that brand recognition. I’m always thinking about that stuff.

[00:33:44.470] – Alan Petersen
You mentioned before that you’ve had some books being adapted into films. What’s that process like? How involved are you in the adaptation process? Or is it that once it’s optioned, are you out of the picture? How does that work? Because you’re so involved in everything else.

[00:34:00.290] – Speaker 2
Yeah. Well, I’ve got eight different ones in what I call various stages of Hollywood Hell. Nothing’s been filmed yet, but everything’s been optioned over and over again. Ideally, the only one that’s never actually been optioned is forsaken because it’s got the Stephen King tie in. We’ve had studios that have wanted it, but then they hear about that and they just feel that the legal side of it is going to get too tangled up because it’s tied to needful things, which is optioned by another company. They don’t want any part of that. No two books have come together the same way. Behind a closed door, my one, we sent the book off to publishers, and then we started getting phone calls from the folks out in Hollywood. There’s these people called scouts that are employed by the traditional publishers. A lot of times they can be a low-level employee. They’re a secretary, they work in the mail room, they do this, they do that. But they’re paid specifically to seek out any title where there’s film worthy or TV show worthy. If there’s buzz about that in the publishing house while they’re reading it, they get paid to report back to Hollywood about that.

[00:34:57.830] – Speaker 2
We started getting phone calls for that one from Hollywood before we even sold anything on the publishing side, and ultimately signed an option for that one. With The Caller’s Game, which was my fourth or fifth book, Ridley Scott’s company picked that one-off straight out of the box, almost. But None of these have actually been filmed. They’ve just been optioned over and over again. I’m sure sooner or later one will get there. Behind the closed door is honestly moving the fastest. 4 MK, my fourth Monkey series is doing really well. It was originally with CBS, now Lion Skates got it, and they seem to moving forward. You never know what’s going to work out and when it’s going to work out. Everything is always different.

[00:35:36.690] – Alan Petersen
Well, it’s disappointing. It must be to be in that hell. It must be nice though, because every time it options again, you get paid again, right?

[00:35:44.040] – Speaker 2
That’s the thing. I used to know a guy named… His real name was Dallas Mary, he wrote under the name Jack Ketchum. And he’s like, you can make a living just off those option payments. Because what ends up happening is when a book gets optioned and that option expires, everybody sees it as a known commodity. A lot of the other production companies, they’ll step up and they’ll buy it again just to make sure that they’ve got it on their roster. They may not do anything with it, but they’ve got it. Dracul was a good example of that. In Prequel to Dracula, there was a ton of buzz. We sold the film rights to Paramount before we sold publication rights. They bought it attached to Andy Michetti. He was supposed to direct. Andy did It for Stephen King and a bunch of other high-profile projects. We thought that that was going to be enough to get it done. But what I ended up learning after the fact is Andy is attached to a lot of different projects. Whenever he’s free, he basically looks at a list. Here’s all the movies that I could make. Dracul was one of those, and he didn’t pick it.

[00:36:38.640] – Speaker 2
Because it was on that particular list for Andy Michetti, nobody else could pick it either. So it just sat at Paramount for forever. Eventually, they released it, and now we got it with somebody else. So, yeah, you just keep juggling these things. It can be a wild ride. A Caller’s Game with Ridley Scott’s company, I got a phone call one night saying, Jennifer Garner loves it and she wants to do it. Jennifer Garner had what’s called a first look deal with Netflix. So then Netflix was on board. Netflix had $100 million budget pegged for the book. And all these things played out within a week or two. And then a week after that, I got another phone call. Jennifer Garner has to pull out because of a scheduling conflict. So Jennifer Garner went away. Netflix went away. The $100 million went away, and we’re right back where we started from. So it’s this crazy, crazy roller coaster. I honestly, I just keep my head down and just write the next book. For me, it’s a numbers game. I figure sooner or later, something is going to get filmed.

[00:37:27.730] – Alan Petersen
Yeah. That’s the best advice right there, isn’t it? Like or writers. The best thing we can do is just keep writing the books, too, because then we have more to sell, more to market.

[00:37:38.750] – Speaker 2
Yeah, people are going to pick up on it. Hollywood is looking for stuff in different places. If I went back 10 years ago, at the start of my career, the only thing they looked at were traditionally published books. If you were an indie, you weren’t on their radar, they purposely avoided you. That’s changed completely. They don’t really care how the book is published anymore. It’s all about story. If they think the story is good, If it’s getting a lot of four or five-star reviews, people are resonating with it, they’ll look at that. They’re combing Netgalley quite a bit to try and get ahead of each other and try and pick out the books before they’re published. That’s a good source. I’ve got a film and TV agent who does a fantastic job of selling these things. The second they’re available, he lands them with somebody else. He just keeps those things shuffling.

[00:38:23.890] – Alan Petersen
That’s fascinating about Netgalley because I know there’s just some co-ops that you can get your book at Netgalley. Even Even just for that, it might be a good strategy.

[00:38:34.080] – Speaker 2
Yeah, I love Netgalley. Every book that I put out, I always make sure it’s out there for at least 30 to 90 days. It’s a great way to get preliminary buzz going on a book. Then when the book actually hits, when publication It’s all those Netgalley reviews flood Amazon. See, you end up with a nice, decent amount of reviews straight out of the gate, which is good, too.

[00:38:53.390] – Alan Petersen
All right, JD. Well, before I let you go, I always ask my guests because I’ve mentioned before about the aspiring writers that are listening to this podcast? Any advice you have, especially if the runner become like thriller, horror, suspense type writers, supernatural?

[00:39:07.620] – Speaker 2
The most important thing, I think, is just to write every single day. Writing to me is very much like going to the gym. It’s like working a muscle. If you do it every day, you get stronger, you get better at it, it gets easier. I think that’s key to a lot of this. If you write every day, even if you’re working, like I was in the corporate world, I hammered out 200-300 words, that’s enough to get a novel done in a year. As long as you’re persistent with it, you’ll get it done.

[00:39:33.170] – Alan Petersen
All right, great. Well, thank you so much, JD. For being on the podcast, it was great talking to you.

[00:39:38.580] – Speaker 2
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

[00:39:41.180] – Alan Petersen
All right. Thank you so much. We.