My guest for this episode of the Crime Cafe podcast is crime writer J.D. Barker.

Don’t miss our discussion on writing across different genres and the benefits of collaborative writing.

You can download a copy of transcript here.

Debbi (00:52): Hi everyone. My guest today is a New York Times and international bestselling author whose work has been broadly described as suspense thrillers, often incorporating elements of horror, crime mystery, science fiction and supernatural. That’s quite a bit. His debut novel Forsaken was a finalist for the Bram Stroker Award in 2014. Several of his works have been optioned for adaptation to motion pictures. It’s my pleasure to have with me my guest, JD Barker. Hi, JD. How you doing today?

J.D. (01:32): I’m doing great, Debbi. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Debbi (01:34): Well, it’s my pleasure to have you on, believe me. I’m glad you’re here. I love that you have no problem with mixing genres in your work. I think that’s awesome. Would you say that there’s any particular genre that tends to be dominant in your writing?

J.D. (01:51): Well, it’s funny. I grew up, I’ve been writing my entire life, but I worked behind the scenes for about 20 some years. I worked as a book doctor and a ghost writer, basically helping other people get published, and one of the things I saw over and over again is an author would write a particular book and it would hit, and then all of a sudden they had to write that same book, but different for the next 20 books. The publisher just wanted that same book but different, and honestly, that scared me. I didn’t want to get caught in that kind of hole, so I made a conscious effort from the very beginning. I’m a huge fan of horror. I’m a huge fan of thrillers, so I basically bounced back and forth, and I think my Wikipedia page probably sums it up the best. I think that’s what you were reading from, but I describe it as a suspense novel as the common thread with little elements of horror, of sci-fi of this, of that and what that allows me to do. As long as I keep that thriller-suspense framework in place, I can branch out a little bit and the readers come along for the ride. It’s not so different that it frightens ’em off.

Debbi (02:51): That’s really cool. That’s great. So it gives you more flexibility

J.D. (02:54): And agents hate it, and publishers hate it because again, they want you to write that same book, but different. But I’m finding that the fans, they actually enjoy it because I’m not giving them the same book every single time. I think it gets old as a reader too, so it allows me to mix it up and just keep it fresh.

Debbi (03:12): Totally, I agree. Yeah, so you’re directly reaching the readership as opposed to going through what a publisher thinks this should work, which is something I’ve advocated a long time.

J.D. (03:27): Everybody approaches this from different angles, which is something else I picked up on over time. As a business model, publishers really only care about selling that book, the one they have in front of ’em, the one they signed you for. That’s really their only priority. But you as an author, you really need to look at your business, your model, your brand, and approach it from that standpoint. And you can really see the stark differences. If you walk into a major bookstore, you walk into a Barnes & Noble and you’re going to see pretty much the title of every book is huge. The author name is tiny little print at the top or the bottom. It’s an afterthought because the publisher knows they have to put it on there, but they just want to sell that one title. But if you look around that same bookstore at the brand name authors, the ones that we all know, the household names, you see Stephen King, Nora Roberts, James Patterson, John Grisham, their names are huge, and the title is nice and small, and they’ve obviously built up to that over time. But I think as an author, you really need to keep that in mind from the get go. And if you’re with a traditional publisher, push to have your name as large as it possibly can, and if you’re indie publishing do the same. I mean, there’s no reason not to.

Debbi (04:34): Wow, that’s great advice. Excellent. I agree with you. I have to say, you are definitely an example of a successful indie author. What did you do to develop a readership?

J.D. (04:52): I did a lot of different things. I wish I could pin it down to one in particular. I fell into being an indie author. It wasn’t actually my goal when I was working as a book doctor and a ghostwriter, that was all for traditional publishers, so I had fully intended to go that route. But when I finished up my first novel, it was called Forsaken. I went to query agents, and even though I worked in publishing, I had no idea how to actually query an agent. I never had to do it before, so I did it all wrong. I bought a list of agents, I think there were 200 of ’em on an Excel spreadsheet. I wrote a form letter literally to whom it may concern, and I sent every single one of ’em the exact same email. I sent them the first three chapters of my book as a PDF file, as an attachment.

(05:31): And for the most part, most of them ignored it because agents are very particular in what they want, and they’ll list the specs on their website. They want to see the first chapter, they want to see the first three. They want it in an Arial font. They want it in Times New Roman font. Every agent’s got their own little quirky little thing, and if you don’t do that quirky little thing the second you end up in their inbox and they catch it, they just hit the delete key. So I basically queried all wrong. I didn’t get any real responses, and I decided to indie publish. But I made a conscious effort when I did that to basically come out with something that was on par with something coming out of a traditional publisher. So I hired professionals across the board for editing, for formatting, for cover design. Ultimately, we released a hard cover and audiobook and an ebook on the same day with plans to put out the paperback six months later, which was the traditional model at the time. And I basically made it as indistinguishable from something coming out of Random House, and that worked back then in 2014. It allowed me to get in front of a lot of places that I probably wouldn’t have if people knew that I was an indie author, and I basically hit the ground running.

Debbi (06:35): Yeah, it’s funny you have the same kind of story that I had. I also fell into indie publishing. It’s like I had a contract with a publisher. The publisher went out of business nine months later, and it’s like, I can’t sell a series that has been published and then gone out of print nine months later. It just doesn’t happen.

J.D. (06:58): No, that’s a whole other animal.

Debbi (07:00): It was very frustrating. What year did you make the Times list?

J.D. (07:07): I’ve been on there a bunch of times now. I think the first time, let’s see, we’re in 2025. It was probably around 2020. It was with The Coast to Coast Murders, and I wrote it with James Patterson. We hit number two.

Debbi (07:18): Oh, wow.

J.D. (07:18): And I’ve hit number two a couple of times now. I just did it again with our latest book. It’s called The Writer. We got stuck behind Rebecca Yarros. She was number one. We hit at number two, and I really had hoped to hit number one with this one just because you can’t put number two New York Times bestseller across the top of your book. It just doesn’t look right. But Rebecca Yarros, she is a powerhouse. We weren’t able to knock her off that spot.

Debbi (07:44): Oh, well. I knew somebody who was second to JK Rowling, and I said, Hey, as far as I’m concerned, it makes you number one. So as far as I’m concerned, you may as well be number one. That is amazing. That really is amazing. Can you talk a little bit about what steps you took that took you from being indie author to having your work optioned by producers or whoever?

J.D. (08:13): Yeah. Well, I’ve had a lot of crazy things happen in my career, and basically I call it capturing lightning in a bottle. I’ve done it a bunch of different times. So with the very first book Forsaken, when I wrote it, I had to explain where the wife buys a journal and just to get the book done, I wrote that she walked into Needful Things, Stephen King’s store from his book and bought it there. I fully expected to have to change that because you can’t do that sort of thing without a bunch of lawyers knocking on your door. But my wife read it and she said, you know what? Before you change it, let’s see if we can get King’s permission to use it. So that’s essentially what we did. We found out he had a house in Florida. It was about 10 minutes from my mom’s house.

(08:49): So when we were visiting my mom, we printed up the manuscript, we hopped in the car and we figured, well, we’ll go over to Stephen King’s house. We’ll hope to catch him outside. Maybe he’s gardening or something. We’ll hand him the manuscript, he’ll give us a big thumbs up and we’ll be on our way. It didn’t work out that way. He lives on a little island off the coast of Florida called Casey Key. You go over this tiny little bridge, and if you make a left, you go to the public portion of the island where the restaurants and bars and hotels and stuff are, and if you make a right, you go to the entire half of the island that Stephen King owns. There’s immediately a no trespassing sign. Another sign there was a gate, and then another gate. We got about halfway to his house, and we just decided this is a really bad idea, and we turned around, went to a restaurant, and I called a friend of mine who knew Stephen King, told him what we were doing, and he said, oh yeah, don’t stalk Steve.

(09:32): He hates that. Here’s his email address. Just send him the book. If he likes it, you’ll hear back from him. If the book is garbage, he probably won’t reply. I sent off the book and a couple of days later I got an email back from King and he said, I love this. Go ahead and use the reference. Let me know if you need anything. I thought for sure at that point, I wouldn’t have any trouble getting an agent or a publishing deal or any of those things. But like I mentioned, I did the query process all wrong. So I ended up Indie publishing the book, and it came out, and sales were okay at the beginning, but with any other indie title, nobody knew who I was. Nobody knew about the book. I started running Facebook ads and Amazon ads. I did all the things that every other indie author does, but for me, it wasn’t enough.

(10:11): So I reached out to another friend who used to do PR out in LA for rock bands, and I asked her if she wanted to work a book, and we started discussing the book and looking for different angles to promote it, and I told her about this trip to Stephen King’s house, and she said, you know what? That’s the story. So she wrote that up. Ultimately, Publishers Weekly wrote it, basically a story about an author who made a failed trip to Stephen King’s house to try and get his blessing on something. But that story came out, and then librarians read it, bookstore owners read it, and that sparked sales for the book. And then ultimately, I ended up selling about a quarter million copies of that indie published title. So when that happens, the traditional publishers really take notice. So when I had my next book ready to go, it was called The Fourth Monkey about a serial killer in Chicago. I had no trouble getting an agent. The book ended up going to auction with multiple publishers involved, and when the dust settled, I had a seven figure deal for two books with HMH, which is now part of Harper Collins and a film and TV show attached, and all of that played out probably over a couple of days. It was extremely quick.

Debbi (11:16): Wow, that is remarkable. And you kind of put yourself in a position to make these things happen. That’s the thing. You reached out to a publicist that helped.

J.D. (11:26): Yeah, I mean, I’m really good at spotting the opportunity, and I don’t shy away from it. I would rather try something and get completely shot down and fail at it, but at least I walk away knowing that that I tried, and I tend to do that over and over again, and it’s worked out more times than it’s failed.

Debbi (11:44): That’s awesome. That really is awesome. You have a book coming out soon, don’t you?

J.D. (11:51): I’ve got a bunch of ’em. So writing with James Patterson, he’s not only taught me a ton about the writing process, but the business side. So I’ve got a number of books coming out with co-authors. I’ve got solo titles coming out, but my next solo title, it’s called Something I Keep Upstairs, it comes out in May. It’s a haunted house story. The tagline for the book is for a haunted house to be born, somebody has to die.

Debbi (12:12): Intriguing. How many books do you have coming out then with other people as well as your own?

J.D. (12:20): Just over the next 12 months, I’ve got 12 of them in the pipeline.

Debbi (12:23): Oh, my goodness. Wow. So collaboration is really working out for you, to say the least.

J.D. (12:29): Yeah. Well, I’ve doubled down not only on the writing thing, but also the business side. So, after The Fourth Monkey hit, that was traditionally published, I wrote a prequel to Dracula for Bram Stoker’s family that came out through Putnam. So another traditionally published book. I basically did a couple on the traditional side, but because I got a taste of being an indie author, I really missed that. I missed the freedom that I had. I started looking at the economics of it. As an indie author, you make about 70 cents on the dollar. If you’re with a traditional publisher, you might get a nice big advance check, but you have to pay that money back and you’re paying it back at like 15, 20 cents on the dollar, these small little incremental payments. So at one point I took a look at it and it didn’t make sense to me, so I called my agent and I said, okay, here’s my new book.

(13:14): It was called A Caller’s Game. I’m going to go ahead and publish it myself in English around the world, and you can go ahead and sell to the foreign territories. And at that point, I was in about 150 different countries, about 24 different languages. So she kind of took the book in that direction, and I published in English, and I really liked that. I called it a hybrid approach because I was able to hit all those different markets. I was able to control everything, but I still had that one particular problem that indie authors have. You can’t get into all the bookstores, you can’t get into Costco, you can’t get into Target or Walmart or airports. So for years, I tried to find a way around that, and if you fast forward to about a year and a half ago, I came out with a book called Behind a Closed Door.

(13:53): I sent it off to my agent. The book started going to all the publishers. We got a film deal right away, but I really didn’t want it to go to a traditional publisher, and it was about to go to auction. I got a phone call from somebody who worked at Random House, and she said, listen, we’re about to offer on your new book. When that comes in, you need to turn it down. And I asked her why, and she said, well, we’re about to lay off a number of people, and the editor who wants your book is on that list, got a similar phone call from Harper Collins, and then about a week or two later, all these layoffs happened across the industry. So that kind of solidified my thinking of not wanting to go to that model,

(14:27): But my last real job I had, I worked in finance. I was a chief compliance officer at a brokerage firm, and I had heard that Simon and Schuster had recently got bought by a private equity company. So I reached out to some friends of mine that I used to work with, and they put me in touch with a private equity firm. Ultimately, I had some discussions with Simon and Schuster, and over about a six month period, we negotiated a deal where I created my own imprint on Simon and Schuster. So I can basically act as an indie author. I can publish what I want when I want because I’m a publishing house, but sales, print and distribution are all handled by Simon and Schuster. So I’ve got them as my backbone, which means as an indie author, I can get my book into all these places that you can’t typically get into, and that’s what I’m doing today. So it’s a very different business model, I think, from a lot of indie authors, but I think it’s where the industry itself is going.

Debbi (15:16): Yes, I agree with you 100%. Wow, this is just amazing stuff. Thank you for sharing this. Speaking of sharing, and you see the cover.

J.D. (15:28): Yeah, so that’s one of my co-author titles. Working with James Patterson, one of the things that he taught me is the benefit of working with other people, and as a ghost writer and a book doctor, my first 20 years in this business, that’s all I did. I collaborated with others. So when I sat down to write my first solo title, that actually felt weird to me working on a book all by myself. I missed working with other people. Working with Jim has been a blessing, but I wanted to branch out and do some co-authored stuff on my own. So the one you’ve got there, it’s called Heavy Are The Stones. I wrote it with a woman named Christine Daigle, and in real life, she’s a neuropsychologist, so she was able to bring that aspect of her life into the writing process, and as an author, I can fake my way through being a neuropsychologist if I want to. I can do enough Google searches and watch some Netflix specials and fake it well enough to be able to pull it off. But when you’ve got that authentic voice in the writing room with you, you can’t beat that. So I look for that in my co-authors. I try to find people who can bring something to the table that I can’t necessarily replicate on my own.

Debbi (16:28): I love it. I reviewed this book actually a long time ago, and part of my review, in part of my review, I said, this just shows you how beneficial it is to collaborate with other authors. I mean, I made the point of saying it. It was like, this is brilliant, a great, brilliant approach here. Yeah.

J.D. (16:50): Well, if you think of just the writing process, whether you’re an outliner or a pantser or a discovery writer, however you want to phrase it, you’re basically coming up with that entire story idea all on your own, and if you’ve got a co-author, you’ve got somebody you can bounce ideas off of. They may come up with something totally out of left field that you’ve never thought of or vice versa, or you might run with an idea that they come up with. So it takes a story in a completely different direction.

Debbi (17:13): I can totally appreciate that. The weird part is that I’ve come to appreciate collaboration through screenwriting.

J.D. (17:21): Yeah, I mean, I think that —

Debbi (17:22): It is so weird

J.D. (17:24): At this point. I’ve got eight different projects in what I call various stages of Hollywood Hell. And a number of them are in development for TV shows, and there’s writers’ rooms, and when I do a Zoom call with those writers, there’s five, six, seven different people all working on that screenplay all at the same time, and the fact that all those different voices in there, they create this unique thing that none of them could come up with on their own.

Debbi (17:49): I have to ask you. In the background, is that Nighthawks I see on your wall?

J.D. (17:57): Yeah, it’s got Elvis sitting at the counter? It’s kind of hard to see.

Debbi (18:02): It’s got Elvis at the counter? It looks so much like Nighthawks.

J.D. (18:05): Yeah, it’s similar, but it is kind of like a spinoff of Nighthawks

Debbi (18:09): Of Nighthawks. I think that is so cool. I love Nighthawks.

J.D. (18:12): Yeah. I’m a huge fan of John Hopper.

Debbi (18:15): Me too. Yeah, totally. Let’s see. What kind of writing schedule do you keep?

J.D. (18:23): Well, it’s changed a lot. When I was in the corporate world, I was working at 60 to 80 hours a week, so I would squeeze in writing whenever I could. That might be my lunch hour sitting in traffic in line at the grocery store or whatever, and I would knock out maybe two to 300 words a day. Now I’m doing this full-time. I’ve been full-time for about 10 years now, so the schedule’s completely different. I get up at the crack of seven in the morning. I told myself when I left the corporate world, I’d never set an alarm before seven again. So I get up at seven, I grab my coffee from the kitchen and I just sit down on my desk and just start writing. I turn the internet off when I first get there. I don’t look at anything online, no email, nothing like that until I get my words for the day, and that’s changed a lot too.

(19:04): I mean, now I get two to 3000 words basically in the morning. I wrap up around 11 with that. That’s my daily word count. Then I flip on the internet and my inbox fills up with all the business side of this interview requests, talking to agents, various deals, things like that, and I deal with all that stuff. My quitting bell rings at three o’clock. I live on a little island off the coast of Portsmouth in New England, so I go for a run around the island. It’s 4.2 miles. I just do one lap. Then I come home and I spend the rest of the night with my wife and daughter. I really tried to separate the two worlds. When I first started, when my book started to hit in other countries, I used to get interview requests. I would come in at literally all hours of the night, and I tried to do all of ’em, so I would find myself up at one in the morning doing some interview in a country somewhere on the other side of the globe, but I almost burnt myself out, trying to keep up with that. In today’s world, I force everybody to schedule those things based on my schedule, so they’re all done by three o’clock in the afternoon regardless of where they are in the world.

Debbi (20:06): That’s a wise choice. It’s very easy to get burnt out if you get too engaged on the internet.

J.D. (20:13): Yeah, absolutely.

Debbi (20:15): I see it. I hear about it more and more happening with the online creators. It’s kind of scary. How much research do you do when you write a book? Before and during?

J.D. (20:30): Honestly, as little as possible. Research feels like work, and I honestly just making shit up. That’s the part I enjoy. I just had a call right before I jumped on here with you with somebody. We’re working on a nonfiction book together, and it’s a whole different animal because we have to make sure every factual detail is correct. We have to be able to back it up. It’s a homicide that was never actually solved. It’s an unsolved case, but we know all the players that were involved, so we have to be extremely careful. We’re naming real people. If you don’t do that properly, you can end up in a courtroom. It’s like the amount of research involved in that versus writing a fiction book. It’s night and day,

Debbi (21:12): Definitely. What are you reading now?

J.D. (21:17): Ooh, let’s see. I’m looking over at my coffee table for those that can’t see, so I’ve got a copy of Never Flinch, which is Stephen King’s new one. It comes out in about a month. I’ve got an an ARC of that, and right below it is, I’m not sure what it’s actually called, but it’s a new Hunger Games book. I had to order that one.

Debbi (21:37): Yeah, I read the first one. I never got to the next or any after that. I thought it was good. I liked it. Let’s see. What advice would you give to someone who would like a career in writing?

J.D. (21:53): I mean, there’s basically two pieces I think every author needs to do. I think you need to read as much as possible. I’ve never had any formal training. I’ve never taken a single class on writing outside of English class and school, but I’ve read so much that the story structure is just ingrained in my head, so when I’m writing a book, I know the twist needs to happen here. I know the third act needs to start here. Those things feel very intrinsic to me. It’s almost like going down a road and missing your turn. I feel like I missed my turn and I have to go back when I missed one of those points, and it all comes from reading. And the other thing I think you need to do is write every single day, whether you’re writing your book or you’re writing something else, I think you need to write, and I see writing almost like a muscle.

(22:35): It’s like going to the gym. You need to exercise it constantly, and if you don’t, then it gets weak. If you’re there every single day working it out, it gets stronger and stronger, and you’ll see that in your word count. If you set a goal of a hundred words a day, you’ll eventually start to hit that. It’s that much easier to get to 200 and a 300 at 400 before you know what you’re doing, a thousand. But if you dial it back, you take a week off, all of a sudden that gets more difficult to do. So write, write every single day.

Debbi (23:00): Absolutely. Absolutely. And it also helps a lot to know the business before you get into it. The business side of the publishing business.

J.D. (23:10): Yeah. I mean, whether you’re going indie or traditional, I think you need to understand as much of it as possible. I mean, you’re ultimately, you’re creating a product, you’re creating a widget that somebody else has to sell, and you need to understand that. I encourage most authors to try to go the traditional route at first at least, so they can get that experience and see how it’s supposed to work, and then go indie after that. If they decide that that’s the route they want to go. I run into people all the time that tell me I tried to get an agent. Agents kept passing on it, kept passing on it, so I put the book out myself. It drives me nuts when I see people do that because they’re almost shooting themselves in the foot. If agents are passing on your book, there’s a reason they’re passing on the book. You need to figure out what that reason is, figure out how to correct it, and then maybe resubmit it. But I really don’t think anybody should hit that self-publish button unless they’ve got a book that a traditional publisher would publish if you let them. It’s got to be that good. It literally has to be a five star read before you put it out in the marketplace, or it’s going to fizzle and die.

Debbi (24:09): I agree. Quality is very important. The quality of your covers, the quality of the book itself, all these things are extremely important. They’re part of your brand really. They show you’re serious. Running your stuff past an editor, taking their advice, take advice from, get a proofreader too. Get somebody to really look over the copy and make sure it’s perfect. All those things are important. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we finish up?

J.D. (24:47): No, that’s it. Just check out my new title, Something I Keep Upstairs. It releases May 13th.

Debbi (24:52): Alright, well that’s wonderful. Congratulations on that. And also check out Heavy Are The Stones. I’ve read it and I loved it. Yeah, it was a fun one. I was looking at my review and it was really interesting just to look at a review that I had done ages ago, and I thought, wow, I did love this book. I remember now how much I loved this book and why. Anyway, thank you so much for being here today, and I want to thank everyone who’s listening. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave a review. Also, this is the final episode of season 10. I’m officially done. I’ve officially done this for a decade, so I’m not sure how to feel about that. Either happy or freaked out, maybe both.

J.D. (25:44): Sounds like there should be cake.

Debbi (25:45): There should be cake. Yeah. Where’s the cake? The cake did not arrive. Anyway.

J.D. (25:52): All right. Well, thanks for having me, Debbi. I appreciate it.

Debbi (25:54): It was my pleasure. Believe me. Oh, your words are music to my ears, by the way. I got to talk to you about this when we do our bonus episode after this. Anyway, I’m still posting chapters for my work, book reviews and more on my Patreon page, so during the hiatus in the podcast. So check it out. I’m on Patreon. You’ll also find me on Substack doing various things. Until next time and until season 11 starts, take care and happy reading. Be seeing you.

*****

With thanks to my Patreon supporters!

PS: And May the Fourth Be With You.