Welcome back to Alchemy for Authors!
In this week’s episode, I sit down with bestselling author J.D. Barker to explore the art of fearless storytelling and the ever-changing landscape of publishing. We delve into how asking ‘What if?’ fuels great stories, J.D.’s unique approach to navigating both Traditional and Indie publishing, and why building a brand is essential for authors. J.D. also shares invaluable advice for aspiring Indie authors, his thoughts on the future of publishing, and how autism shapes his creative journey.
Join us for a deep dive into the mind of a master storyteller and discover & be inspired by the secrets behind J.D. Barker’s success.
Visit J.D.’s website here: https://jdbarker.com/
Follow J.D. on social media here: Facebook and Instagram
Preorder J.D’s book Something I Keep Upstairs here: https://jdbarker.com/books/something-i-keep-upstairs/
Enter to win a stay in the haunted house that inspired Something I Keep Upstairs here: https://woobox.com/vcevs2
Find J.D.’s other books here: https://jdbarker.com/books/
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Grab Stephen King’s book On Writing here: https://amzn.to/3C4rjVW
- Grab Stephen King’s book Fairy Tale here: https://amzn.to/40flNI6
- Check out my Author Resources page here: https://jobuer.com/author-resources/
**Please note: Some of these links may be affiliate links that help support the show.
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Find the full transcript of this episode below.
Episode 97: Fearless Storytelling & the Future of Publishing with J.D. Barker
Jo: Hello, hello, my friends. Happy new year. I hope January has you inspired for a wonderful year ahead, and you’re excited for what 2025 has in store for your author career.
I’m making headway with some of my writing goals, writing almost every day, and getting a short story ready for a book signing event that I’ll be attending in April. As I mentioned in Episode 96, I’ve been proactive with putting a plan together for what I want to achieve this year in my writing career, with my author business being more centre stage for me than it was last year. Saying that, I’m still moving at a slightly slower pace than I’d hoped as I’m still recovering from a little bit of burnout from the events of 2024. But I’m on the mend, and I know that how? Because I’m actually reading again. And I know this sounds totally ridiculous. But seriously, I found it so hard to focus my attention on anything last year and had several books that I was reading on the go at once with seemingly no ability to finish any of them. But over the last couple of weeks, I’ve actually indulged in a lot more reading time. I’ve rediscovered my passion for reading again, which it seems I somehow forgot how much of a pleasure it really is. And it’s so ridiculous when I think about how, as a writer, of course it was reading that opened the floodgates for this passion of mine in the first place. Another positive is that on the wake of reading more, I’m feeling inspired and writing again. So yay! Long may that last.
So just a shout out to the first book that I finished this year, Fairy Tale by Stephen King. Oh my gosh, it was wonderful. It truly took me back to that childlike nostalgia of why I love fiction. It reminded me of Christmas and New Year’s, spent at the beach as a child, reading, reading, reading, Wizard of Oz, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Pippi Longstockings. Now, I’ve moved on to reading one of my favourite books on writing, and one coincidentally that today’s guest mentions in this episode. It is called On Writing by Stephen King. My copy is seriously beaten up being over 20 years old already, but it is just as relevant today as when I first bought it. And if you haven’t read it yet over the course of your author career, then I really encourage you to do so.
Okay, on to today’s episode. Oh my gosh, I really can’t express fully how excited I am to share this interview with you. Sometimes I have a guest on who just makes me want to pinch myself. How freaking lucky am I? Today’s guest makes me feel that way. Like I could retire this podcast right here and now and feel like I ended on a high. Don’t worry though, Alchemy for Authors is not going anywhere. Here’s the thing though, I feel like I need to add this disclaimer. I was fangirling something stupid during this interview, tripping over my words and repeating “That’s cool! I love that!” all the freaking time, because somehow, I lost all ability to put proper sentences together. So as you’re listening to this, I do apologise for that.
Here’s something else that I want to share with you about today’s episode before we dive in. For me, personally, I think this was one of the most inspiring episodes to date. I have listened to it several times now as I’ve gone through editing it and what not. And I have so many takeaways that I now want to consider for my own author career. And just to get a little bit woo woo for a moment, if you’ve listened to the show for a while, you know that I tend to believe in, like, divine timing. Things often come into our lives right at the time that we most need them. Or we hear certain things when we most need to hear them. It’s the good ol’ universe conspiring in our favour, or that’s what I like to believe. If you’re stumbling across this episode and taking the time to listen to it, then I ask you to keep an open mind as to why you’ve been called to listen to it. Is there something in it that could help you on your author journey? I’m just saying keep an open mind.
Okay. And lastly, stay tuned to the end of this episode because there is an amazing competition open to you, my lovely listener, that is if you’re like me and you love spooky things and haunted houses, you’re going to want to check this out.
Right, okay, enough said about that. So I feel like I kind of need to do a drumroll for this episode, but I won’t. If you’re ready though, grab a drink, find a comfy chair, sit back and enjoy the show.
Hello, my lovelies. Welcome back to another episode of Alchemy for Authors. In today’s episode, I am chatting with New York Times and international bestselling author, J.D. Barker. J.D. ‘s work has been broadly described as suspense thrillers, often incorporating elements of horror, crime, mystery, science fiction, and the supernatural.
Stephen King read portions of his first book, Forsaken, prior to publication and granted J.D. permission to utilise the character of Leland Gaunt of King’s Needful Things in his novel. Indie published in late 2014, the book went on to hit several major milestones, including being nominated for a Bram Stoker Award.
J.D. has since gone on to write numerous titles which have appeared on bestseller lists around the world. He is also a frequent collaborator with James Patterson. J.D. splits his time between Englewood, Florida and Newcastle in New Hampshire with his wife Dana and their daughter Ember.
So hello, J.D., welcome to the show. I am super excited to have you join me today.
J.D.: Oh, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Jo: So just to begin this episode, I would love if you could share a little bit about yourself and your author journey for anybody that hasn’t come across your name yet.
J.D.: Oh man, I don’t even know where to start. So I just had my 10 year anniversary as a full time author. That was about two weeks ago, so it feels like I’ve been doing this for a lot longer. I’ve, in fact, been writing pretty much my entire life. It’s one of those things where I did it from a very early age. My parents encouraged it, but they also told me that you can’t make a living as a writer, you have to get a real job. So, you know, I finished up high school, I went into college, I ultimately got degrees in business, another one in finance. I got halfway through a psychology degree, and I was working in the corporate world as a chief compliance officer for a brokerage firm when the books, you know, basically started to hit. And then I eventually was able to quit that the day job.
Jo: Fantastic. That’s cool. So I’m presently reading your debut novel Forsaken. I’m so close to the end. I’m absolutely loving it. But I saw that you self-published that novel. Can you talk a little bit about why you chose to self-publish and what you’re doing now in that realm?
J.D.: It happened because I didn’t know any better. So, I had finished up, I had basically been working while I was doing the corporate job, I would come home at night and write to basically stay sane. So I was working as a book doctor and a ghost writer at night, helping other people basically fine tune their novels and get them to publication. And over those 20 some years that I did that, I had six different books that hit the New York Times list, all with other people’s names on the cover, which gets really old after a while, which is why I finally sat down to write my first book with my own name.
But I had no clue how to query an agent. So I literally bought a list of agents. I sent off a form letter. It said ‘To whom it may concern’ up at the top. To 200 different agents, I sent them the first three chapters. I didn’t look at any of the requirements, you know. Agents always want, you know, they want it to be a particular font. They want it to be 12 points or 10 points. They want a PDF. They want a word document. They want this. They want that. I didn’t pay attention to any of that. I just kind of sent them what I wanted to send them. And that was it. And surprise, I didn’t get a whole lot of response to that. So I decided, well, I knew I had a good book. I’m going to go ahead and Indie publish it.
But I made a conscious decision to put it out basically on par with something coming out of Random House. I didn’t want it to look like an Indie published title. I didn’t want it to look like I just hit the, you know, the go button on Amazon. So I hired professionals across the board for the cover, for formatting, for copy editing. Ultimately, we released the hardcover, an audio book, and the eBook all in the same day. And then six months later, we did the paperbacks. I kind of followed that traditional model, and I ended up selling a lot of copies. I sold about a quarter million copies of that book, which was enough to put me on the radar of the Traditional publishers. So when my second book was done, I had no trouble scoring a traditional deal for that one.
Jo: That’s wonderful. I really like that. Are you primarily Traditionally published now?
J.D.: And now I’ve kind of gone back and forth. So Forsaken was Indie published. Then my next two or three books I Traditionally published through HMH, which is now HarperCollins. I had another book through Putnam, which is part of Random House, but I really missed the freedom, you know. I got a taste of that freedom that you get as an Indie publisher, you know. ‘Cause you have literally no say in anything. You don’t get to decide your covers. Like all these different decisions that you get to make and you take for granted as an Indie, they kind of go away. And I also took a really good time, and a really close look at the financial implications of going the Traditional route. As an Indie author you make roughly 70 cents on the dollar, and on the Traditional side, you may get a big advance. Like, in my case, I got a couple 7 figure advances, which is fantastic. But, you know, you have to pay those back. That’s just, it’s a loan, you know, and you end up paying them back. You know, very small increments, like 15 to 20 cents on the dollar. So you’ve got to sell a lot of books in order to make all that happen. So I ended up publishing about four or five books through the Traditional model. Then I had a phone call with my agent and I said, listen, this is what I’m going to do with the next one. I’m going to keep English rights for myself. I’m going to Indie publish in English. And you’re still welcome to sell all the books, foreign territories, if you’d like to do that. And at that point I had been in, I’m in about 150 different countries, about 24, 25 languages. So it was still a pretty decent sized market, but I wanted to keep English for myself.
So I did a couple of books that way, and that worked out fantastic from a financial standpoint. The books were getting to a lot of places, but I couldn’t get them everywhere. You know, as an Indie author, you can’t get into the airports. You can’t get into places like Costco and the big box stores, the grocery store. So with my last book, it was called Behind a Closed Door, I had another conversation with my new agent and told him that I want to find a new way to put this book out. He had been shopping it through the Traditional publishers. We knew it was going to go to auction and I hadn’t pulled a book. And I struck up a conversation with the folks at Simon and Schuster, and ultimately I created my own imprint through Simon and Schuster. So I basically had my own publishing company, but I have Simon and Schuster on the backbone. So they handle all my printing, sales and distribution, which works out perfect. I mean, in my eyes, I basically get all the benefits of being an Indie author. I can put out whatever I want, whenever I want. But with one of the big, you know, top five behind me to handle the heavy lifting. So that’s what I’m doing now.
Jo: Yeah. Oh, I love that. I love that you still have a foot in both worlds, the Indie and the Traditional, which I think is fantastic. So if somebody was, maybe they’d just written their first book or whatnot, and was looking at getting that published, do you have any advice as to whether to start with the Indie route or to try the Traditional. Like, do you have any kind of thoughts on that?
J.D.: I’ve honestly learned a lot being in both camps. And like you said, like right now I’ve got, you know, my feet firmly planted in both of them and I’ll probably stay that way. But I learned a lot being on the Traditional side, just like I learned a lot being on the Indie side and I took those skill sets and kind of brought them over to the other side, depending on the book.
If you’re going to Indie publish, the one thing I tell people is, you know, I remind them of what I did. The book had to be on par with something coming out of Random House. So if you’re going to Indie publish, make sure you take it to that level because that’s your competition, you know. There were 2 million books published last year and yours is going to be one of them. You have to make sure that it can stand out and it can hold its own. What I see too many people do is they query agents, they get a bunch of rejections, then they decide, well, I’m just going to Indie publish and they don’t change anything, you know. They don’t, you know, like there’s a reason that book got rejected. It’s not because the agents are too busy to deal with you. There’s probably some kind of problem with that book and you need to address it. You need to fix it. So, like, all this, like, no matter how you publish, I think that book’s got to be a 5 star read coming out of the gate, just to give you a fighting chance against those other 2 million books that are out there. So, you know, I always encourage people to at least take that into consideration. Indie Publishing shouldn’t be an alternative. It just should be an option, you know. Like that book should be perfectly acceptable to the Traditional world. You, as the author, say no and decide to put it out as an Indie book. Not, you know, you don’t do it because you don’t have a route through Traditional.
Jo: Yes, I 100 percent agree with you. And I talked to so many authors, and well, even myself included, I have never actually put queries out to Traditional. I knew from the beginning that I actually wanted to go the Indie route. I like that control over everything. I still, you know, I get my covers professionally done, my editing professionally done, all of that good stuff. But I just like having that control, and the control over the pricing a little bit more too. But I know a lot of authors do sell the rights to their book for translations and that just because it’s easier. So yeah, that makes sense to me. So do you see more of this hybrid type of publishing coming about in our industry? Like do you see more and more people going that route?
J.D.: Yeah, I honestly see it as the next evolution of this thing, because what ends up happening, you’ve got, let’s say you take an Indie author who’s selling really well, you know. They write a new book, they can hold that book up and a Traditional publisher may say, okay, I’m going to give you a million dollars. If you let us put that out, we’re going to give you a million dollar advance. That Indie publisher is going to look at how long it’s going to take them to make a million dollars as an Indie. And if they’re doing well, they can do it on their own. They don’t need that Traditional publisher to do that. So like, that money isn’t necessarily an incentive to them anymore. The only incentive that the Traditional publishers have left is their foothold in some of these places that we can’t get as an Indie, you know. Like the box stores and places that I just mentioned. So I think the kind of deal that I put together, it kind of makes sense for both sides because, you know, I’m still able to work as an Indie, but I have the financial incentive of an Indie with the Traditional backbone behind me because I’m acting as publisher and as author. I basically still make about the same amount of money I would have as with an Indie published title, but those books are getting into all those different places.
And if you flip that on its head, if you’re the, you know, Simon and Schuster, if you’re Random House, if you’re Harper Collins, you know, it makes sense to strike these kinds of deals because you’re bringing in an author that’s a known commodity, they’re going to sell books. And the financial burden is on the author. So in my case, like I’m the publisher. So if I decide I’m going to print 50,000 copies of a hardcover, I have to pay for that print run. So if it doesn’t sell, that’s on me. If it does sell, they still make their money, you know, like one way or another, they do well. So like, it makes sense for both sides to do this kind of thing. So I really think that this is where it’s going.
Jo: Yeah, I really like that.
J.D.: The lines are just getting blurry, you know. It’s not really one or the other anymore. Everything is kind of a mix of everything in between.
Jo: I think, yeah, and I really, really love that. And there’s a lot of talk in the author community too about building a sustainable writing career. And I think it’s absolutely essential to be open to those possibilities in both industries, the Indie and the Traditional so that you can forge your own creation of a sustainable career, whatever that looks like for you. Do you have any thoughts on building a sustainable author career?
J.D.: Yeah. I mean, that was something that I looked at very closely before I even started publishing my very first book. You know, for me, it’s not necessarily about just selling the books, it’s about building a brand. So I’ve studied, you know, some of the biggest name authors from the get go. People like Stephen King and James Patterson and Dean Koontz and Nora Roberts. You know, like you walk into a bookstore, you buy their books because their name is on the cover. You don’t even care what the story is about. So that’s kind of my end goal. So everything that I’ve done from a business standpoint has had that objective in mind. If you look at any of my titles, my name is nice and large on the front of every one of my books, because I want that to be, you know, the forethought. When somebody walks into a store, I want them to see my name, then the title. Traditionally published books, they tend to go the other way around. You’ve got a nice big title and a tiny little author name. That’s great if you’re selling that one particular book, it’s not good if you’re trying to build a brand. So I look at everything from a brand standpoint, even my name itself has been trademarked.
Jo: Oh, fantastic. Yeah, that’s so great. And I really love that idea of the building the brand. There are so many things… so I obviously, before we were chatting, I did a whole lot of research, listening to other podcasts that you’ve been on and whatnot. And the thing that stands out for me is your career trajectory and everything, it’s really creative. Like you’re not, you don’t seem to be scared to try different new things, and you have a lot of collaborations with a lot of big name authors and that too. Can you talk a little bit about what it is, like your mindset or whatnot, that allows you to take these chances and do things like collaborating with James Patterson? Can you talk a little bit about that?
J.D.: Yeah. I mean, part of it is like I’ve got zero fear. I have no problem walking up to somebody and asking a question because in my mind, the worst thing that’s going to happen is they’re going to say no, you know. And I would rather hear a no than to not ask the question and not know what the outcome is. So I am not shy about asking for anything. And I pursued a lot of, you know, like I purposely kind of crafted certain situations. So my third book was a prequel to Dracula that I wrote for Bram Stoker’s family. Like, that wasn’t an accident. I purposely sought out something that I knew was going to be high profile. Because creating a sustainable writing career isn’t just about the books. You need the marketing side of it. And you can spend as much money as you want on the marketing end, but honestly, the only thing that really sells books is word of mouth. You need to get people talking about you. So I always have at least one project in the works at any given time that I know is going to create buzz. It’s going to basically be self-sustaining in the press, which, you know, creates that mother load of just people mentioning you, talking about you, social media buzzing about you. You want to have all that happen at any given time.
Early on I knew I didn’t want to be pigeonholed. Like when Fourth Monkey hit, the book sold really well. So every publisher wanted me to write, you know, the same book, but different over and over again. And, you know, like, I just, I can’t like, that scares me half to death. The idea of writing that same book and being trapped in that kind of career. I had a conversation with Dean Koontz very early on. I’ve kind of looked up to him as a mentor for years. And he told me that if you want to bounce back and forth between genres, if you really want to build a brand similar to his, you have to do it from right out of the gate. And he was right.
So like, you know, my very first book was horror. The second one was a thriller. Then I wrote another horror novel, then another thriller. And I’ve noticed that the fans have come along for the ride. And you know, they’re again, it’s building that brand. They’re buying a JD Barker book, not necessarily caring what the story itself is about. My Wikipedia page kind of reinforces that. If you read the header on my Wikipedia page, it says I’m a suspense author, and I may include elements of horror, sci fi, this or that. All of these things are carefully crafted because what ends up happening is when somebody like you, we do an interview, one of the first things you do is you look up my Wikipedia page that basically defines who I am. It defines how we’re going to discuss my career and my books. So I basically create it. It’s almost like creating your own echo chamber, or an information loop of what you want people to talk about.
Working with Patterson, I had a similar conversation with him about bouncing around through genres. And he kind of did it the wrong way. His very first book was called The Thomas Berryman Number, which nobody bought. Like, I don’t think he’s got a copy of that one. But his second book was Along Came a Spider, which was a huge best seller. And then he wrote 3 or 4 more books, very similar to that one. He had his big audience that came along for all that. And he got kind of bored with it. He wrote a book about a girl with wings, you know, which was so different that his fans completely backlashed on him. Because he had been five or six books in, like they expected to have that same story again and again. So you have to condition your readers to accept something different, so I try to make all these things as conscious decisions as, as I move along.
Jo: Yeah. And honestly, it is so good hearing this. As I was doing my research about you and everything like that, I was taking so many mental notes for my own career because I’m only, I’m like a baby author. I’ve only really put out a handful of books really, and mine are very much gothic suspense. But I like to bounce around a little bit. The key theme is I have a little bit of suspense and all my stories seem to have ghosts in them. So that’s my thing. But just hearing how you are kind of marketed as a suspense author who just kind of, you know, adds in that, that thriller or that sci fi or whatnot aspect to it, was really good to see. Because so often I think in the Indie community anyway, we’re told to choose a genre, stick to the genre. And I have never been all that good at following those kind of rules, or any rules. So that was pretty cool to hear that that’s, yeah, how you go about it.
J.D.: It’s honestly not just on the Indie side. On the Traditional side, it happens straight out of the gate. You know, you send your book off to an agent and they want to know what box you fit in. Not only so that they can, you know, understand what you want to do with your career, but so when they pick up the phone and talk to an editor, they can say that this person is a horror author. This person is a thriller author. They need to put you in that box. And then that editor turns around and they have to talk to the marketing staff at the publisher and they want to be able to tell you what box you fit in. So the marketing people can then turn around and tell the bookstores this is what shelf you’re supposed to go on. It’s like the industry is designed around that. But if you think about it, like it’s designed around bookstores before there was an Amazon, before there was an online Barnes and Noble, you know, where people could browse thumbnails. You had to walk a physical store and if you didn’t happen to walk to the right side of the store, you would never see anything. Now there’s algorithms that put these books in front of people. So, like, the dynamic of the entire thing has changed. So, you know, if you’re able to keep a concise theme between all of your books, like in your case, ghosts, you could write a romance with a ghost. You can write a Western with a ghost, you know. You can write a Victorian historical novel with a ghost. You can write an Amish steampunk with a ghost. You can take that in any direction you want to go. But as long as you’ve got that common theme, your readers are going to come along with you.
Jo: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I love that. So I just want to, um, gosh, there is so much that I want to talk to you about because I’m just so fascinated by your books and your career and everything, but you were saying, and I’m completely envious of this, that you have no real fear at just reaching out to other people and asking questions and trying new things and that. And I know that from my research and that, that you are diagnosed as autistic and you’re somewhat of an advocate for neurodivergency and that, in the creative realm. Can you talk about what role, if any, autism has helped you along your author journey?
J.D.: Yes, I was born in the seventies. So back then they didn’t diagnose any of this stuff. You are basically the weird kid they put in the corner. So, you know, I went through all of school without even knowing what this was, or that there was, you know, technically… I don’t want to say something wrong with me because I don’t really think of it that way. But, yeah, something different about me, I guess. I was diagnosed at 22. I was actually sent to an anger management class because I was fantastic at doing my job, but I was terrible at dealing with people, and my boss thought that it was an anger issue, you know, and it really wasn’t. But I was in with this therapist and we got about 20 minutes in and she stopped me and she said, have you ever been tested for autism? And I had no idea what that was. And she explained it to me. And she’s like, well, I’ve noticed, you know, during a conversation, you’re not making eye contact with me. You’re looking off over here. Your thumb and your forefinger are rubbing together, like literally every time you’re thinking, which is something I’m doing it like right now. You know, like she started pointing out all these things and then she started explaining what autism was. And like, once I understood that it really unlocked a lot of things for me and made a lot of things very clear for me.
I had, you know, I’d worked as a book doctor and ghost writer. One of the things that I had stumbled on very early is that I was able to mimic the voices of other authors. So if I read a couple of chapters written by somebody, I could continue that story in their voice. I would pick up on their cadence, their vocabulary, their writing style, and I could duplicate it, which is one of the reasons why I did so well in that industry. That’s something that basically came out of the autism, you know, because people that are like me, we mimic. In social situations, to give you an example, if I’m standing in a circle of people, somebody may tell a joke. I may not find it funny, but I’m going to laugh because the other people are laughing. So I kind of fake my way through these social situations. So what I basically stumbled into is I’m able to mimic in those situations. And I could also mimic on the page, which became very helpful when I was working on some of those titles. I’m also able to just keep very complex plots straight in my head. And you can’t really see my desk behind me in the video here, but there’s like, literally nothing on it, but my Mac, but I’m working on 8 different books right now. And they’re all up here, you know. It’s very similar to when I used to write computer code. So if I write the first line of code, I had to understand how that’s going to impact the last line of code and then everything else in between. And to me, writing a book is the exact same thing. Like, I see that framework in my head, so I understand how the story is supposed to, how it’s supposed to be played out. How it’s supposed to be built. All of those things come from autism. I don’t think I’d be able to do that, at least not on this level, without it. My wife calls them superpowers because it’s something I just wouldn’t have without this. And I often speak to the parents of autistic children now. Sometimes adults that have just recently gotten diagnosed and you know, I helped them find their own superpower. Because once you find that, particularly in a child, and you encourage that, you know, you can get them to come out of that shell that some autistic kids have and interact with you. And like, it helps the parents to break through. So I try to help a lot of people out with that kind of thing.
Jo: I absolutely love that. In my day job, I’m a teacher, and I seem to work with, uh, I teach a lot of neurodivergent students, and I was diagnosed ADHD when I turned 40, so quite late, but, like you said, that understanding just helps you unlock, you know, a better understanding of yourself and how you work and everything like that. And I also do see, there are downsides definitely to like, in my case, ADHD, but there are definitely those superpower things like hyper focus. I can binge write and that. I can go for a while without writing and then when I can sit down and I could do 10,000 words in a day. I love conversations about the positives that neurodivergency bring to the author sphere and whatnot. So, yeah, that’s cool.
J.D.: Yeah. I mean, that’s why in my mind, it’s not really a problem or a hurdle to overcome. It’s honestly just, it’s, you know, a superpower, I think is a great way to describe it. It’s just, it’s something different. And I think once you figure it out, you can double down on it and it can become a huge benefit.
Jo: Yeah, I absolutely agree. And just because I think it also brings that different type of creativity to everything, and how we perceive not only the creative aspect of the writing and the crafting, my books tend to have quite complex plots as well, but unlike you, I can’t necessarily hold it all in my head. I need to have it scrawled on various pieces of paper. But, yeah, it’s just, I really, really like that. That’s cool.
Because of my own interest in the supernatural and ghosts and all that lovely stuff, I want to talk a little bit about some of these things with you. For starters, can you talk a little bit about your book Dracul and how that came about because that’s a little bit about the collaboration and that there too.
J.D.: Yeah, that was a fun one. So Forsaken, the first book I wrote, it was up for the debut author’s award for the Horror Writers Association. So I had to go to StokerCon, you know, the award’s literally named after Bram Stoker. And while I was there, I did a book signing and I was sitting next to Dacre Stoker, who is Bram’s great grandnephew. And we were together for about an hour or so and, you know, we just got to talking. He was asking me about Forsaken and, you know, what I had done previously. He knew about me working as a ghost writer, so we talked about that a little bit. And I picked his brain about everything related to Bram that I could think of, because this guy’s like a walking encyclopedia of Bram Stoker lore. And you know, that was kind of the extent of it. I didn’t think it was gonna actually go anywhere, but I learned later that it was actually like an interview. Like he had known exactly who I was. He had read Forsaken. And he cornered me about a day and a half later and we ended up going out to breakfast and he said, listen, my family has been trying to find somebody to write a prequel to Dracula for a while now. We have all Bram’s original notes. We’ve read Forsaken, the family, and likes your writing style. We know your background. Is it something you’d be interested in doing? And, you know, I honestly couldn’t turn that down.
He sprung two things on me, which really surprised me. He told me that Bram originally wrote Dracula as a true story. Like he firmly believed in vampires from the get go. From the time he was a child to the moment he died, to the point where he actually had himself cremated when he died in a time in history when nobody did that, because he was worried about what would happen to his soul. But he wrote the book and he turned it into his publisher in England and they basically said there’s no way we can publish this because it’s going to scare people. Like, in the wrong way. Jack the Ripper was active in London at the time. People believed in the occult, they believed in the supernatural. They weren’t willing to put that book out. So they forced Bram to cut the first 120 pages out of Dracula. So where it actually starts with Jonathan Harker on the train is actually page 120. So that was, we knew that that was basically going to be the focus of our prequel. We wanted to write the story that Bram wasn’t able to tell.
And Dacre had uncovered something over, you know, the last just a couple of years prior to that. Dracula is an extremely popular novel. It’s the second most bought book in the world next to the Bible. But because it’s public domain, whenever they produce a copy, they tend to work off that public domain text. So they kind of all work off that same version, no matter what language you put it in. But what he learned is that if he went back out and he bought first editions of Dracula and translated them back to English, there was a very different story. And what ended up happening, like, in today’s world, when I write a book, I turn it into my editor and then that editor cleans it up and they farm it out to all the foreign publishers. Everybody works off that same text. In Bram’s world, he actually mailed copies of the book to his foreign publishers. So, the stuff that they forced him to take out in English, he was able to sneak back in when he published in Germany and France and Italian. So their still learning parts of the story that Bram basically snuck in, like all these little breadcrumbs.
So we wrote the book. We based it, you know, we had all Bram’s notes, his journals, his sister’s diary. We used tons of material. We kind of pieced together what we felt the first 120 pages was meant to be. But we needed to verify that. And I learned that there was only one copy of the original manuscript in existence. It had been found in a barn in Pennsylvania of all places. And it had been bought at auction by Steve Allen, one of the co-founders of Microsoft. So, I reached out to Steve Allen’s people and asked if there was any chance we could get in there and take a look at it. And they agreed. So, Dacre and I flew out to Seattle. They locked us in a conference room and some people basically wheeled in a bunch of carts with the original manuscript of Dracula. And unfortunately it started at page 122. The page number was crossed out at the top. It was replaced with a one. Bram had written the title up on the top, you know, all his handwriting.
So those 120 pages are still MIA. Nobody knows where they are. But what we learned as we flipped through, you know, like in today’s world, if you delete a scene, you literally delete it on your computer and it’s gone. In Bram’s time, because this was typed out, he crossed out the deleted scenes. He drew a line through them. So we went through the manuscript and focused on those deleted scenes and found that they referenced parts of the book that had been removed. So we were able to verify those earlier pages through the stuff that he left behind. So it was just a crazy fun process, you know, just seeing parts of Dracula written on things like laundry receipts, you know, cause Bram wrote on any scrap of paper he could find. It was just, it was fascinating.
Jo: It is. It’s absolutely just unbelievable to me. And I don’t know how I missed that, but I had no idea that Bram Stoker believed, like, believed in vampires, and yeah, I guess I’d missed that. But, yeah, I just find that that would have just been the most mind-blowing experience working on Dracul and yeah, how amazing.
J.D.: My favourite part of that book, when you read it, is the author’s note at the end, because we basically explained what was true in the story. And literally everything that you think is, it couldn’t possibly be true is actually based on real life. The fiction is like, it’s kind of completely flipped on its head.
Jo: This is what I really, really love. And I’m, yeah, I have to mention it, but I need to know where your fascination with the spooky and the supernatural stemmed from? Because I seem to have been born with that interest there, but I, yeah, I need to know a little bit more about your fascination with the spooky and supernatural.
J.D.: You know, I don’t know where that, like, I’ve often tried to figure that out. So I grew up, you know, like I mentioned, without a TV, I read a lot when I was a kid. Our house was in the middle of a forest. My dad had bought 10 acres in the middle of a giant forest and built the house like dead centre in the middle of it. So that was kind of spooky to begin with. Like, even though the house was only 2 years old, everybody in town considered it to be like the haunted house. So, like, we would make up, you know, ghost stories just about the house, about the woods around us at a very early age. So I kind of always had that happening around me. And even I was gravitated towards scary books, you know. Like, I just, I found those to be the most enjoyable. The first adult book I read was Dracula. Like, I bought it at a yard sale for 25 cents. Stephen King is, you know, like I’m a huge Stephen King fan. But I don’t know where that really comes from. I mean, I’ve got a daughter who’s seven years old and she loves spooky stuff too. And like, it’s not something that we encouraged. It’s not something that we put in front of her. She’s just, you know, as she’s gotten older, she likes it more and more. So I guess it’s just something that’s ingrained in us. I think we like the emotional response that it brings out, you know, we like being scared on paper.
Jo: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, I hope this is okay to ask, but are you a believer in the supernatural? Like, do you believe in ghosts and haunted houses and whatnot?
J.D.: I think I’m smart enough to understand there’s a lot of stuff I don’t understand. So I kind of. I try to keep an open mind to it. I’ve never seen anything to tell me that something, some of this is real. But I’ve never seen anything to discourage it either, you know, so I wouldn’t be surprised, like, if, you know, it’s just like aliens. Like, if somebody told me a spaceship just landed in New York, it wouldn’t surprise me. It’s like, there’s certain things out there that just feel like they’re, you know, intrinsic to society. It’s going to happen sooner or later. I think somebody’s going to spot a ghost or somebody’s going to explain it. But who knows?
Jo: I love it. I love that answer. That was, that’s awesome.
So you have a new, well, you have so many books coming out, like you’re such a prolific author. But I know in May you have a book called Something I Keep Upstairs, which is apparently inspired by a real-life haunted house. Can you talk a little bit about this book and how you learned about the, well, the inspiration behind it and that? How you came across this place?
J.D.: Yeah. So this one came up, came together in a very weird way. So I live on a little island in Portsmouth, New Hampshire called Newcastle. It’s right off the coast of Portsmouth. And I go for a run every day. I do a lap around the island. It’s for a little over four miles or so. And when I crossed the beach, there’s another little island about a quarter mile off the coast and there’s one house on it. And like, you can see it, but you can’t really tell what’s going on out there. It’s just far enough away where, you know, like every once in a while, you see a light on, but you don’t really know what’s happening on this particular island. So, for me, as an author, I’ve got this, what I call the, What If gene. So, like, I look at anything and it, you know, What If this happens? What If that happens? So, one day I was looking at this island, I’m standing there on the beach and I was just thinking, what would happen if somebody inherited that island? You know, like some kid that didn’t know anything about it, just inherited it. So that’s essentially the basis of Something I Keep Upstairs is a 17-year-old boy. He’s lived in Newcastle, the place where I live. He’s lived there his entire life. He learns that his grandmother has lived on this Island for, you know, for years. He’d been shielded from her. His parents basically didn’t, you know, didn’t allow them to get together. But she passes away and she leaves him the island.
So here he is 17 years old. He inherits a house on an island off the coast. He does what every 17-year-old boy would do with something like that. He decides he’s going to turn it into a party house, you know. So him and his friends hop in the boats and they head out there and, you know, they basically turn it into this place that they can hang out, free of parents, free of law enforcement. And you know, they do that for a couple of, you know, a couple of trips. They have fun with it. But the conversation kind of turns, and like the house isn’t haunted in their mind. It’s a perfectly normal house, but they have a little bit of that What If gene? And they think, well, what would happen if this was a haunted house? What would it take to make it a haunted house? So the tagline for the book is: For a haunted house to be born somebody has to die. So you know where the story is going. But they start off, you know, with little things, that Ouija board and stuff like that, but you know where they’re going to end up and that’s where the fun is.
But what I absolutely love about this is, you know, like I mentioned, the house itself is real. Like you can see it, and it’s right there. So we actually got together with the people that own that house. It’s owned by a town called Kittery, in Maine. And we worked out a contest. So part of the promo that we’re doing for this book is we’re going to give away an overnight stay in the haunted house. So basically one winner is going to get drawn. They’re going to be able to bring three of their friends. A boat is going to take them out to the house, drop them off and not come back for 24 hours. So they’re going to spend the night in a haunted house on a private island.
Jo: Which is just phenomenal to me. I just absolutely love that. Now, is that something that you would do? Would you spend a night, 24 hours in a place that was that isolated, said to be haunted?
J.D.: I absolutely would. And I actually did something similar, I guess about 15 years ago. There’s a prison in Belle Glade, Florida. It’s since been abandoned. And there was a TV show very similar to Ghost Hunters that was, they decided to film there and they let me come around for their film. You know, we basically were there overnight, stayed overnight in the prison. So I’ve done this sort of thing before, but I, you know, like I mentioned, I have yet to see an actual ghost, but you know, half the fun I think is in the hunt and looking for them.
Jo: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I’m going to make sure that I mention that competition and whatnot in the show notes as well when this goes live so that people can grab your book and enter the competition. And I just think what an amazing experience and tie into the book to spend the night in the place that inspired your story.
So, do you have a specific thing that inspires you? Like, do you have a character come to mind, or are you inspired by setting, or is there a plot idea? Like, what’s your kind of process for coming up with a story?
J.D.: A lot of times it’s multiple pieces that will just come together. I’ve got a program on my phone called Simple Note that I use to kind of write down virtually everything. It’s just a note taking app, but I’ve got a file in there for book ideas. So to give you an example, my last book was called Behind a Closed Door, and it’s about a husband and wife, and I had these two characters, Brendan and Abby Hollander, like in mind for probably three or four years. It’s a husband and wife. They’ve been together for about 10 years. They still love each other. But because they’re living, you know, more or less separate lives, they’ve drifted apart a little bit, you know. They get up first thing in the morning. They both head off to work. They get home after dark. They, you know, cram in a meal, watch three minutes, 30 minutes of Netflix and they’re passed out again. Yeah, rinse and repeat, you know. So they’ve kind of drifted apart over time. So at the opening, like I knew I wanted them to have some type of marital difficulty, so Brandon basically comes very close to cheating. He doesn’t quite cheat, but he comes close enough where they both realised they need to do something or this is going to go horribly wrong.
So I basically had that idea for a couple of years, just sitting in that document. I knew I wanted to do something with these characters, but I didn’t know what. So one night my wife and I were sitting around dinner and we were talking and she does real estate investing. She had just bought a house in Georgia, a fairly big place. It had seven bathrooms in it. And she was, you know, basically brainstorming on what you would have to do to get this house and turn it into an Airbnb or a VRBO, like an overnight rental. And I just casually mentioned a company we have here called Bath Fitters. They come in and in one day they will renovate your bathroom. It’s just kind of a cosmetic thing. But we just talked about it over dinner. And then that night we both started seeing ads for Bath Fitters pop up on our phones. They showed up on our phones and our social media feeds. I was watching TV and I saw a commercial. So I started researching this and realised that in our terms of service for our phones we give them permission to listen to everything. You know, so right now my phone is sitting next to me, it’s listening to this entire conversation. It’s grabbing keywords out of the air and those keywords go into a database and they use that, you know, they sell that information to other people. So I started thinking about, well, What If, you know, again, the What If thing, what happens if that information falls into the wrong hands?
So then we go back to Brandon and Abby. So I kind of brought those two pieces together and it’s sort of like chocolate and peanut butter, you know, like two things that shouldn’t belong sort of do. So I started this process, book with Brendan and Abbey. They’re in a therapist’s office discussing what, you know, basically just happened with their marriage. And at the end of the conversation, the therapist recommends that they download an app to their phones to help spice up their marriage. And it’s basically truth or dare for adults. It’s very benign, very simple kind of thing, but that’s kind of the genesis of the story. The people behind this particular app aren’t, you know, the people that we really want them to be. So what happens if all this information that they gather on us ends up in the wrong hands? So, you know, those two pieces came together and that formed the genesis of the book.
Jo: That’s great. That’s cool. I like that. I’m always interested to hear what kind of inspires other people and that What If question. I know for myself, it’s usually setting. I usually, look at a place and that usually inspires me first off and then the characters and the plot and everything else will come as well. I think I heard somewhere too, that you are a pantser or a discovery writer or whatnot, largely as well. So you might have a seed of an idea and then you write without plotting it down. Can you talk a little bit about your writing process?
J.D.: So I used to be. So I, you know, you can see my bookshelf behind me. There’s tons of books up there. There’s only one that’s on craft and it’s Stephen King’s On Writing, which is a fantastic book if you ever want to write books. But one of the things that he mentions in there is that, you know, he basically feels that if he doesn’t know where the story is going, the reader is not going to figure it out. So he comes up with his basic plot. He drops his characters in it and just kind of lets the story play out on paper, which is what pantsing is. We don’t know where that story is going to go. So I wrote the first couple of books that way. And I thought that that was the best way to write a book.
And then in comes James, James Patterson. He read Fourth Monkey. And then after a while we started talking, decided to write something together. He comes from the opposite camp. He’s a firm outliner. He writes 30 to 60 pages of an outline before he writes the first page of a book. So yeah, at first we thought we wouldn’t even be able to work together. We, you know, cause it’s such a different style. But I kind of walked away from the conversation that we had and didn’t think it was going to go anywhere.
And a couple months later, he called me up and said, you know what, let’s try writing a book your way. I’m going to pants a novel. He’s never done it before. So I’m the guy who got James Patterson to actually pants a novel. So I would write a chapter. I would paint him in some kind of crazy corner expecting there’s no way he’s going to get out of this. I would send in those pages. 15 minutes later he not only got out of it, but he wrote another 20 pages and put me in an even worse spot. So we kind of wrote the whole book that way, just trying to one up each other. And it’s the twistiest book I think I’ve ever written. But we ended up with a lot of words on the cutting room floor because when you get to the end of a book like that, you have to trim the fat. You have to make everything work. All these pieces have to come together. There’s a lot of work on those second, third, fourth drafts.
So we finished it up and he sent me an outline for another book. And he’s like, I want you to try this my way. Here’s an outline. So I wrote the next book. It was called The Noise, and it went so quickly. So seamlessly. Hardly any work on the, you know, revision side when we got to the end. It just, it convinced me that outlining was the way to go. Now that’s me, you know. Like every writer I know is completely different. I think you get, if you’ve got writers that are listening to this, everybody’s got to try and feel it out on their own, figure out what works for them and what doesn’t. But in today’s world, I outline pretty much everything before I start writing the book. And what I found is, you know, I mentioned that I go on a run every day around the island. I usually, you know, I use that time to think about what I’m going to write the next day. So, when I was pantsing a novel, I would spend that time thinking about, you know, what comes next in this story. But now I already know what comes next. I’ve got the outline. So I spend that same brainpower trying to figure out how to make what comes next better. So I end up with a tighter book than I think I would have if I had been pantsing it. So right now I’m a firm outliner, but that may change the next time we talk.
Jo: Yeah, well, I love that. See, that’s something that I just have to applaud you for, is your willingness to try new things. You don’t seem so, you know, set in this is the way that I do it and I must do it this way. So that willingness to go from the pantsing to the plotting and to trying different things with James Patterson and everything, like, that’s amazing. That’s really cool.
J.D.: Yeah, I always change it up. You can kind of see in the corner of my screen there. There’s a typewriter on the floor. So I’m writing a book on there every day. I type another sentence on it. I’ve got another book I’m working on where I’m writing in a long hand. And I find that if I use different methods, my voice is different with each book. So it kind of keeps the entire storytelling process a little fresh. So I just, I’m constantly changing it up.
Jo: I love this. And I’m really hoping that my listeners are going to be really inspired to give that a go as well to try these different things and not to get too stuck in one way of doing things. Just, yeah, from listening to you, I find it really inspirational.
So I have to ask you too, about your mindset. ‘Cause on this podcast, I do talk to a lot of authors who talk about, you know, some of the struggles that they have around, whether it’s the craft or publishing, and how so much of it is in your head. It’s the mindset part and imposter syndrome and whatnot. Do you experience that? Because you seem to be so open to trying new things and not fearful of like, doing just that. Does imposter syndrome ever creep up on you?
J.D.: Uh, I absolutely feel it. And I know a lot of the big name authors out there and I can tell you they all feel it too. You know, Dan Brown lives down the street from me. He’s writing the next Robert Langdon book right now. I can guarantee every once in a while he’s pushing it aside, you know, and he’s got imposter syndrome droning through his head. We all get that, you know. What cures it for me, honestly, is reading what I just wrote, you know. Like, I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing one day and then I sit back down the next day and I read what I wrote, you know, the previous day and I’m like, Oh yeah, I kind of do know how to do this and just sort of keep going.
So you can’t let those kinds of negative thoughts creep in, you know, just let the work speak for itself. You can get it done. It’s all practice. It’s all, you know, it’s work, you know, but it, the more you do it, the better you get.
Jo: Yeah, absolutely. Oh, that’s good to hear. Like, it’s always good to be reminded that everybody struggles with imposter syndrome every now and then. Like, innately, I think we all logically know that, but it’s always good to hear that from big name authors like yourself as well.
So, just as we look at wrapping up here, is there a last piece of advice that you want to share with anyone listening who may be just starting out on their author journey, or the best advice that you were ever given along the way?
J.D.: I mean, the one thing that I’ve learned is you need to try to write every single day. And even when I was working the corporate job, I was doing 60 to 80 hours a week, you know, doing a lot of legal stuff. I would find some way to crank out two to 300 words. And it’s not that hard to do. That’s one paragraph. You know, like I would do it at lunchtime. I could do it standing in line at the grocery store. I would just make sure I got those words down on paper. And you find that if you do it every day, it gets a little easier to do the next day, you know. When you’re just writing like on Saturdays or something like that’s near impossible, because you got to try and get your head back into the head game. It’s just, you can’t do it. But if you write every day, you know, even a little, a couple hundred words, that’s a novel in a year, you know. So you got your first draft done. So you can get it done doing that in small, small little pieces. I think where it gets overwhelming is when you look at a book, you know, four or 500 pages and you’re like, that’s what I need to be. That’s what I need to do. You know, that’s a big task. But, you know, you take it in tiny little chunks. It’s very doable.
Jo: Yeah. Oh, that’s fantastic. Yeah. I totally agree with you with that. And like I said, I tend to write, I’m a little bit more of a binge writer, so I don’t necessarily write towards a story every day. But when I’m working on a book, then during that period of time, whether it’s a couple of months or whatnot, I am writing every day because it takes nothing for my mind to get out of the story. So I need to be really immersed in that story until it’s finished. So yeah, I definitely, yeah.
So where can people find you? How can they connect with you?
J.D.: The easiest place to find me is https://jdbarker.com/, and on social media. It’s pretty easy at JD Barker. And the books are pretty much everywhere, any bookstore.
Jo: Yeah. Well, thank you so much. It has been such a blast and so inspirational chatting with you today, J.D. So thank you so much for coming on the show.
J.D.: Oh, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Jo: Here are some takeaways from today’s show:
- This should go without saying, but as even the best of us make mistakes, this is your reminder to pay attention to submission requirements when pitching to agents.
- When choosing to go the Indie publishing route, make sure your book is on par quality-wise with books published by the big name publishers. Quality matters, so invest in good covers, editing, and formatting.
- Don’t treat Indie publishing as the ugly stepsister to Trad publishing. Indie publishing should be a strategic decision you make to better your author career and meet the goals that you set for yourself.
- Be clear on your author brand as early as possible and keep this in mind when making business decisions going forward.
- The best form of marketing for selling books is word of mouth. Be visible and get people talking about you.
- If you plan on genre hopping, it’s best to condition your readers early on. And, if possible, try to have a theme that threads through all of your books.
- If you’re neurodivergent, consider how that benefits your author career. Find the positives, or what J.D. calls, your superpower.
- The “What if?” question is gold for inspiring new story ideas.
- And finally, J.D. advocates for writing every day to keep your mind in your story.
So there we are, my friends. I don’t know about you, but really, that barely scraped the surface of the takeaways that I got from this episode. In fact, listening to J.D. speak, I am now rethinking my relationship to plotting. Or lack thereof, if I’m honest. And my launch strategy for my books going forth. I’ll be looking at maybe staggering the release of different book formats going forward so that I can maximise the visibility of each book with multiple launches. So rather than starting with a hardcover and releasing the paperback six months to a year down the line, like J.D. did, and in line with what Traditional publishers do, I’m thinking that I might try paperback first, then eBook, audio, and hardcover six months to a year later. I’m still thinking about this and what it might look like, but I’m excited to experiment anyway.
Now, since this interview, I finished reading J.D.’s debut Forsaken, and honestly, I loved it. It had real Stephen King vibes for me, and I totally recommend it. I have the paperback of Dracul on order, so that’ll be next on my reading list. But seriously, was that not the most amazing behind the scenes look that J.D. gave us of how Dracul came to be? My mind was blown! And, how cool is it that if you’re that way inclined, you can enter to spend the night with three of your closest friends in the house that inspired his novel, Something I Keep Upstairs. The link is in the show notes to enter, and I recommend you do. I would love to live vicariously through you. Living in New Zealand on the other side of the world, it makes it a little bit difficult for me to get there. But if you win, then I want to hear all about it.
So anyway, I seriously came away from this interview absolutely buzzing. I still am. I am so inspired. And I hope that in some way it did the same for you. If it did, please ride that buzzy wave and share this episode with a friend and rate and review. I would love to grow my audience for Alchemy for Authors and keep this podcast going, and that is how you can help me do that.
You can also support this show by buying me a coffee at https://buymeacoffee.com/jobuer. That helps subsidise the costs behind putting this show together and is also greatly, greatly appreciated.
Make sure that you check out J.D.’s books on his website https://jdbarker.com/ and of course if suspenseful spooky reads are your thing, you can also check out my books at https://jobuer.com/. While there you can follow the links to Alchemy for Authors to catch up on any of your favourite episodes or read the transcripts. Or you can check out the link for my recommended Author Resources to help you along your path to author success.
So thank you again for tuning in, my friend. I am wishing you a wonderful inspired writing week ahead. Bye for now.
Author Brand, Author Business, author mindset, Indie Publishing, storytelling, Traditional Publishing