We’re joined by New York Times Bestselling Author, J.D. Barker. We talk about how J.D. honed his craft, the haunted house that inspired his newest book, and co-authoring with other rockstar authors like James Patterson.
Books mentioned in this episode:
J.D. Barker’s “Something I Keep Upstairs”
Dacre Stoker & J.D. Barker’s “Dracul”
Stephen King’s “Needful Things”
Stephen King’s: “On Writing”
Inkspot Publishing receives a commission for any Amazon sales made through the above affiliate links.
Transcript:
Cathy (00:10)
I’m delighted to welcome JD Barker.
who is an author in his own right and also a co-author, which I’m really interested in hearing more about, with several other authors, most notably James Patterson, who obviously is a gold standard crime writer. And so I’m really interested to find out how that all came about. but before we get into that.
Do you want to just say a few words about yourself and how you got into writing, what sort stuff you like to read, just to set the scene a little bit?
JD Barker (00:47)
that’s a long story. How much time do we have? So I grew up with, I grew up without a TV in the house. And this was the 70s, so that doesn’t really mean a whole lot. There were three channels. There was nothing worth watching anyway. But we were reading at a very early age. I had started reading around three. By the time I got into kindergarten, I had read all the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drews and moved on to like Charles Dickens and stuff like that. I’ve got a sister who’s 15 months younger than me.
Cathy (00:49)
Quite a lot.
JD Barker (01:09)
So I used to write up, you know, just make up stories and I would write them out, I would staple them and I created a little library in my room. She would check them out, I would charge her late fees. So that’s kind of where this whole thing started. My mom encouraged writing, you know, at the time, but she always added this little caveat, like writing is a fantastic hobby, but you can’t make a living at it. You have to get a real job. And she kind of drilled that into my head, you know, so I did what I was supposed to do. I finished up school, went off to college, I got a couple of degrees.
ended up working in finance behind a desk. I was a chief compliance officer at a brokerage firm. But I would come home and I would write at night to stay sane. Back when I was in college, I worked for BMG Distribution and RCA Records in South Florida. I was essentially a glorified babysitter. So when they had a recording artist come into town, I’d have to pick them up at the airport, get them to the radio stations for their interviews, get them to their concert, get them to their hotel. Very similar to that movie, Get Them to the Greek. That was essentially my life back then.
Cathy (01:40)
you
It sounds like really fun job though.
JD Barker (02:02)
Yeah, it was a really fun job, but you know, I was in college at the time, which is expensive. And at one point I realized I’ve got some very famous people in the car with me. So I started to interview them and I would take those interviews and sell them to magazines. And that’s essentially how I broke into the publishing world. Because when you work for any kind of newspaper or magazine, everybody that you’re working with, they all have a novel at some stage of development and a desk drawer somewhere. It’s 400,000 words long. They’ve been working on it for the last 10 years. It’s almost done. Just needs a little something.
I was very good with grammar and punctuation and developmental stuff. So a lot of them would share those with me and I would tell them what they basically needed to do to tweak it and turn it into a publishable novel. So that kind of turned into a side hustle for me as I was going down the corporate path, I would come home at night and I would work on these these book projects.
Cathy (02:44)
projects for quite influential, well-known people.
JD Barker (02:48)
Initially, they weren’t, but then it evolved into that. I started getting hired by agents, by editors, by publishing houses to finish other people’s manuscripts, write memoirs for people, a lot of ghost writing projects. But I did that for 23 years while I was doing the corporate gig. So I was rising up the corporate ladder and coming home at night and doing the writing stuff to keep my head on straight. And over those 20-some years, I had six different books that hit the New York Times list that all came out with other people’s names on the cover that I had essentially written.
Cathy (03:16)
Yes.
JD Barker (03:16)
Which gets very
old after a while. So number six hit up and my wife pulled me aside and she’s like I know you want to become a full-time author Let’s figure out a way to make this happen. But at this point we were kind of stuck because I had a very good job I had a big salary. We had a big house. We had cars. We had a boat We had an expensive lifestyle. You couldn’t just you know flip the switch on that. So she came up with this Yeah, she came up with this crazy plan. We sold everything that we owned We bought a tiny little duplex in Pittsburgh rented out one side to some tenants and moved it to the other side
Cathy (03:34)
It is very difficult.
JD Barker (03:45)
basically got to the point where I could quit the job and live off of savings long enough to write that first book and that was 11 years ago.
Cathy (03:51)
Was that the fourth monkey? one? Okay. sorry.
JD Barker (03:54)
No, the first one was called Forsaken. Fourth Monkey was my second book. Forsaken I ended up, yeah, I
indie published the first one, but ended up selling a lot of copies of it, which put me on the radar of the traditional guys. So with my second book, Fourth Monkey, I had no trouble getting an agent and querying publishers and getting a trad deal.
Cathy (04:12)
Okay, brilliant. And the fourth monkey actually became part of a series, is that right?
JD Barker (04:17)
He had over one phone call it became a series. So my agent was shopping it and we got a film option while she was shopping it to the publishers and that lit a fire underneath the publishing houses. So all of a sudden the book got to the point where it was going to go to auction and she called me up and she said, listen, I know this is a standalone, but do you have an idea to keep it going to maybe write a second book? So I just scribbled out an idea really quick to write a second book for it, sent that off to her and then we ended up getting a two book deal with HMH, which is part of HarperCollins now.
and ultimately turned into a trilogy. ended up writing three in the series.
Cathy (04:51)
Okay, you’re obviously in a very popular genre, know, crime is so popular, but I have to say, you write extremely well. it actually, the prose is a real pleasure as well as the story. And that’s actually, it makes sense when you tell me that you’re reading the classics at a young age, because obviously you’ve had that embedded in you from a really early age.
JD Barker (05:02)
I appreciate it.
Cathy (05:11)
So. ⁓
JD Barker (05:12)
Yeah, I’ve never had any formal
writing training. It’s all come from that. I think I recognize the patterns of those types of novels. Twist needs to happen here. This needs to happen there. This is how you develop a character. When you study somebody like Charles Dickens, he really knew what he was doing.
Cathy (05:27)
Yes, that’s true. when I say I really appreciated your prose because it’s very invisible. You’re actually focused on the story and you’re not. And I really like that kind of writing, quite spare writing that just focuses on character and your dialogue is really, I’m actually listening at the moment to an imperfect murder.
which you wrote with James Patterson. I listen to a lot of crime and I am really enjoying it, especially the dialogue and the kind of snarkiness that the, know, Declan Shaw has when he’s thinking about the, you know, the other characters. It’s really well done. And I guess some of that must come from Philip Marlowe or…
JD Barker (05:48)
⁓
Cathy (06:10)
you know, flawed detectives and you have to be really careful not to stray into cliche territory.
JD Barker (06:16)
and a lot of times I do during the writing process, but then we strip that out when we go through editing. I actually got hooked on Grasshoppers writing that book, which is a really, really good drink. ⁓
Cathy (06:26)
⁓ yes. She’s just offered a…
the suspect has just offered a grasshopper to the detective at the part where I’m in in the book. So I don’t even know what a grasshopper is.
JD Barker (06:38)
Most people don’t. It’s like I wanted a really obscure drink that used to be very popular, like in the 50s and 60s and it just kind of disappeared. But I decided I’m going to bring it back. So now everywhere I go, I end up drinking one of those.
Cathy (06:48)
Okay, so
how do you make a grasshopper?
JD Barker (06:53)
I honestly don’t know what the ingredients are. I know it’s got creme brulee, or not creme brulee, creme de ment in it. It tastes a lot like Andy’s candies. So like if you like those Andy’s candies, it tastes like the liquid version of that. It’s like an adult dessert. But it’s green and mint. It’s one of those drinks, like I don’t want to know how to make it because then I would make it myself at home all the time. So it’s better if it’s better. don’t know.
Cathy (06:58)
Okay,
and minty, I suppose.
Okay, okay.
So can you tell me how the the collaboration with James Patterson came about?
JD Barker (07:21)
Yeah, so that was, I’ve captured lightning in a bottle a bunch of times during my career. That was one of them. Karma kind of lights everything up for me. Fourth Monkey was coming out and HMA sent copies of that book out to all the big name authors hoping to get a blurb, know, once that little quote for the back cover. And James Patterson was one of the guys who got one of those books. And at one point, he called me up to actually give me his thoughts on it, which, you know, like I picked up the phone, was a Palm Beach area code and.
guy says, it’s Jim Patterson. got a second. I’m like, Yeah, sure it is. I’m thinking it’s one of my friends pranking me or something. ⁓ Yeah, he starts talking and I realized it’s really him. And he gave me all his thoughts on the book. He told me what I did right, what I did wrong. And then we started talking about the idea of actually working together. We made plans to have lunch the next time I was in Florida.
Cathy (07:50)
Yes, I have a second.
JD Barker (08:04)
When I showed up for the lunch, he had a folder that was probably like an inch thick on me. He knew all about my history as a book doctor, a ghost writer, a lot of the projects that I worked on, things with NDAs, like somehow he knew what I had been involved with. But we started brainstorming and I was a pantser at the time and I’m guessing your audience knows those terms. And he is a notorious outlier.
Cathy (08:21)
just
for clarification, a panzer is someone who allows the plot to sort of evolve organically and just meanders along and sees where it goes, whereas a planner is someone who has a definite story arc and they have post-it notes all over the place and you know that’s what you’re referring to, right?
JD Barker (08:43)
Yeah, I mean, and that comes from Stephen King to a large extent. I’ve got a bunch of books behind me. The only one actually on the craft of writing is called On Writing by Stephen King. And one of the things that he, yeah, and he mentions in there that, you know, he comes up with his story, he comes up with his characters, he drops these people into the middle of some kind of crazy scenario and just lets it play out. But he doesn’t plot it because he feels that if he doesn’t plot it in advance, he’s not gonna know what’s happening, which means the reader’s not gonna be able to figure it out. And to me, that made perfect sense. So I wrote my first couple of books that way.
Cathy (08:50)
It is brilliant.
JD Barker (09:10)
But, know, Patterson, notorious outliner, he does 30 to 50 pages for every book that he writes. So when we had that lunch, it just didn’t seem like we would be able to work together. So we parted ways and a couple months later we talked again. He’s like, you know what, let’s go ahead and try it your way. Let’s let’s pants a novel. ⁓ So I would write a chapter, paint him into some kind of crazy, impossible scenario, thinking there’s no way he’s going to get out of this. And I’d send him those pages and like 15 minutes later, he’d send me a new chapter. And not only did he get out of it, but he put me in an even worse position.
And we just tried to one up each other. We had so much fun. Probably the twistiest book I’ve ever written. It’s called The Coast to Coast Murders. But when we finished that up, yeah, you’re in the UK, right? So I’m not sure if the title is the same. So sometimes they change the titles. Like Imperfect Murder here in the States is called The Writer. So it’s different everywhere. But we finished up that book and then he said, okay, we tried it your way, let’s try it my way. Here’s an outline.
Cathy (09:44)
exhale, check her out.
JD Barker (10:00)
So he sent me an outline for a book called The Noise. And when we wrote that, like it went so fast and so seamless, you know, he actually flipped the script and I became an outliner. I’ve been outlining my books ever since.
Cathy (10:10)
Incredible. So you actually influenced each other, I guess he tried, he tried, he was willing to try it your way, which is,
JD Barker (10:13)
Yeah, well.
Well,
I had this history of working as a book doctor and ghostwriter, 20 some years of basically collaborating, working with other people. So for me, it actually felt weird to write a novel by myself. And he’s very similar to that. He’s collaborated with so many other people that he’s very dynamic. He can change the way he does it person by person. So when you get the two of us together, we’ve written six books together. And I don’t think any of them have actually come together the same way. We’ve done each one in a slightly different format because we’re both comfortable just working with other people.
Cathy (10:45)
And also books tend to just gain their own momentum, don’t they? Whichever book you’re working on. that really does make sense. Yeah, exactly. And the characters also can’t be bossed around You try and put someone in a position and it just doesn’t work sometimes. So yeah, going back to Stephen King’s point.
JD Barker (10:52)
Yeah, yeah, they take on a life of their own.
Well,
that was honestly my problem with outlining because I had tried it before and it never worked for me because I would start writing the book and the first chapters, two chapters, three chapters, they would follow that outline but then the character would do something unique that took it off script. And then I would start chasing that and before you know it the outline is off over here, your story is over here and you just kind of keep going. But one of things that Patterson taught me is you can let those things happen when something comes out of left field.
You can still do it, but you go through the whole outline and you actually adjust the outline for that event. So the outline isn’t carved in stone, it’s dynamic, it’s changing all the time. And honestly, I really like that process because it allows me to really think through the story on a much more detailed, intricate level than I could as a pantser or a discovery writer.
Cathy (11:47)
Yeah, and I can see that. And so each book that you’ve written with him has been one chapter by chapter, you do alternates or have you found other ways?
JD Barker (11:54)
No,
we did that with the first one, with the second one he sent me an outline. We’ve got other books where I’ve written the outline and he’s done the writing. We’ve done pretty much every mishmash of the process you can think of.
Cathy (12:07)
So just to clarify, he is definitely still very much involved in the writing and he’s not outsourcing it.
JD Barker (12:13)
⁓ absolutely.
You know, that was honestly one of the things that I assumed. You know, I figured that he hired a bunch of guys like me and we all did the work and he was out on the golf course every day. But that’s not the case. He’s. Yeah, no, like the first time I met him, I went to his house before that lunch and he brought me inside and he had all these manuscripts literally everywhere. Every surface had a manuscript on it. They were on the tables. They were on stairs going up to his office. Every corner of his office had manuscripts all the way around.
Cathy (12:23)
I must admit that’s what I thought too.
JD Barker (12:41)
He knew where every single one of those was story-wise. He was working on all of them. One of the things that he actually hand writes, which surprised me, he doesn’t use a computer. So he had notepads everywhere and notes all over the place. But he’s very hands-on with every project that he’s working on and that he’s writing. Totally surprised me, because I figured I probably wouldn’t even talk to the guy once the project got started. But it was the exact opposite. We talk all the time.
Cathy (13:01)
Yeah.
It’s actually really nice to hear I mean, people write because they love it, usually, don’t they? They don’t write for any other reason. And actually, if you write for money or whatever, it shows on the page, I think you have to actually really love your craft. So.
JD Barker (13:18)
Well,
that’s true. mean, like I was writing for free long before people started to pay me for it. And if the money dried up, I would still write every single day, you because it’s something I enjoy doing. You know, one of the things that people don’t realize about Patterson is he wrote his first book, The Thomas Berriman Numbers, back in the 70s and sold that and it was published and it did okay. It didn’t, you know, didn’t hit it out of the park or anything. But he didn’t write, Along Came a Spider until the 90s, I think it was 1993.
He was working in advertising that entire time, writing books, turning them in and getting rejected, getting rejected, getting rejected. For 17 years, he got rejected. And then he wrote Along Came the Spider and all of a sudden that book took off. So I talk to authors all the time. How many authors would keep at it for 17 years writing book after book after book, hearing no and then just start over and write a new book? He’s just that tenacious. If he would have stopped at book 15 or 15 years in, there wouldn’t be a James Patterson today.
Cathy (13:54)
Yeah.
Exactly.
And what about the ⁓ process with other authors? Because you’ve co-authored a number of other books. In fact, one of them is Dracul, isn’t it?
JD Barker (14:20)
Yeah, I wrote a prequel
to Dracula for Bram Stoker’s family with Dacre Stoker, who’s, yeah, he’s Bram’s great-grandnephew. That was a lot of fun. You one of the things that I learned very early on is, you know, once you decide that you’re gonna co-author something, you have to figure out what everybody’s strengths are and what your weaknesses are. And then you kind of divide and conquer. And it’s almost like having two people in the kitchen making breakfast. If you both try to make eggs at the same time, you’re gonna trip over each other. But if one person makes bacon while the other person makes eggs, then everything works out.
Cathy (14:24)
That is so interesting.
JD Barker (14:49)
So you figure out who’s good at what and then you put everybody on task. With Drakul, he used to be a teacher. He was history teacher. And he is very good at Daker Stoker. Yeah, I hung out with the guy for about a day and a half before I said his name out loud because I wasn’t sure how to pronounce it. But he is very, very detail oriented. So if you give him a task, he will give you every possible detail related to that.
Cathy (14:56)
his name is Deke Stoker.
JD Barker (15:13)
But because of that, his writing style is very dry. It’s almost more suited for nonfiction than fiction. Whereas I’m coming from a totally different direction, I’m coming from the fiction world. So what we learned very early on is, I did all the writing in the book, but he provided all the facts, all the details. So if I needed to know what Bram Stoker’s room looked like when he was six years old, like, Dacre was able to tell me right down to the pieces of furniture in that room and how it was arranged. So he was able to add an authenticity to the story that I wouldn’t have been able to get on my own.
and he wouldn’t have been able to write the book on his own because he didn’t have the skill set that I brought to the table. So every collaboration is better because of the two people. It’s not something either of them could ever do on their own.
Cathy (15:51)
Yeah, exactly. so going back to Dracul, without giving any spoilers, what is Dracul about? Have you focused on, for example, which characters have you focused on in the prequel? yeah, yeah.
JD Barker (16:03)
Well, you’ve read Dracula, right?
Yeah, so Dracula, as far as I always knew, starts with Jonathan Harker on the train. turns out that’s actually page 102 of the original manuscript. Bram, when he originally wrote Dracula, he tried to sell it as a true story. The first hundred pages were very autobiographical. He was a character in the story. And he tried to basically push the narrative that vampires were real, and he explained why.
Cathy (16:11)
Yes.
JD Barker (16:30)
He fully believed in vampires. We actually found notes that he had written when he was 16 years old and he didn’t actually start writing Dracula until he was in his 40s. So this was a lifelong obsession of his. Even when he died, had himself cremated at a time in history when people just didn’t do that. He was worried that a vampire would actually come for his soul. He completely believed in this stuff. But he wrote Dracula as a true story. He gave it to his editor. His editor pushed it back across the desk and said, there’s no way we’re publishing this.
Because at the time Jack the Ripper was active in London, people were already scared of that, they believed in the paranormal. So when you come at them with facts about vampires, they weren’t willing to do that. Bram needed the money, so he allowed them to strip the first hundred pages out of the book. When we wrote Dracul, we basically recreated what Bram was trying to tell, that particular story. So we went through diaries and journals, everything that he left behind, and kind of pieced it all together.
But at the end, we got the book done and we needed to verify whether we had it right or not. So I tracked down what is known as the only known copy of the Dracula manuscript to be in existence. It was found in a barn in Pennsylvania. Nobody knows how it got there. It was purchased by Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft at an auction at Christie’s. So I reached out to Paul Allen’s people and arranged for Dacre and I to fly out to Seattle and actually see the original Dracula manuscript. And we were hoping those hundred pages would be there.
So that, we get to Seattle, they lock us in a conference room and take away our phones, make us wear gloves. And these very big, scary looking guys stood over us as they wheeled in the Dracula manuscript and watch us flip through these pages. And first thing Dacre and I did is we opened the cover, we looked at the first page and it said, I think it was 101 up at the top. was crossed out and a one was written next to it and Dracula was written in. So like it, you know, those pages.
Cathy (18:03)
⁓ no! So you all
that trouble for nothing?
JD Barker (18:07)
All
that trouble, yeah, those pages weren’t there. But what we quickly realized when we flipped through it, we started to focus on the deleted scenes, know, things where Bram actually cut something because all he did was draw a line through it. And we quickly realized those deleted scenes referenced those first hundred pages. So as we focused on the deleted scenes, we were able to piece together what the beginning of the book was and basically finalized Dracul. But my favorite part, like if you read Dracul, like the entire book is, you know, it’s very fantastical. It’s very scary.
Cathy (18:28)
But today’s…
JD Barker (18:35)
but it basically establishes why Bram felt vampires were real. But my favorite part is the author’s note at the end because we go into what is actually based on reality. There’s pictures, things to back it all up. And that’s the scariest part of the book, I think, is that author’s note.
Cathy (18:50)
That’s that’s fascinating. I haven’t read it. So I’m looking forward to reading it. Because I loved the book. It’s you know, the vampire myth is so romantic, isn’t it? of course, it’s horrifying. But there’s also a very deep romance there as well. And of course, the vampires have what everyone’s been searching for for centuries, which is eternal life, so the myth is so enduring. and in fact, one of my favorite movies is
the Francis Ford Coppola movie just because it was so gothic and so beautifully shot and know and Gary Oldman just steals the whole show of course.
JD Barker (19:25)
Yeah, I one
of the things that really got me is in Bram’s notes, he had the traits of vampires. He had a couple of pages of the traits of vampires. And he had researched vampire lore all around the world. And one of the things that he discovered is virtually every culture on the planet had a vampire legend in their history. And those existed long before we actually started sailing around the planet and talking to each other.
And that’s what really, I think, sparked a lot of this interest for him. The fact that there were vampires here, they were here, they were here, they were here. Everybody had legends of vampires before we actually started comparing notes. So it didn’t start in one place, it started everywhere. His general thinking was there was some type of truth behind it. These kind of things just don’t organically come out of nowhere. It was based on something. And a large portion of his notes was trying to figure out what that was.
Cathy (20:11)
So like the Jungian collective unconscious for example, know, interesting where we all come out of the primordial soup with a sort of blueprint and no matter where we go that’s really interesting. so when did Dracul come out?
JD Barker (20:16)
Yeah.
apparently right next to the vampires.
think that was around 2017, somewhere around there. It’s one of those books they bring out every Halloween, so it’s always in the bookstore windows on Halloween.
Cathy (20:40)
Yeah, important to capitalize on national holidays. So yeah, and I actually listened to your standalone book, something I keep upstairs, really very atmospheric book. And apparently you spent a night in the haunted house on which the book is based.
JD Barker (20:43)
Yeah, it’s the author version of a Christmas album, I think.
Cathy (21:03)
Can you? you didn’t?
JD Barker (21:04)
I did not spend the night there. actually, did a,
no, so the haunted house in the story is real. I live on a little island off the coast of Portsmouth in the U.S. called Newcastle. We stole all the names of our cities from you guys. And right off the coast of the island where I live, there’s another tiny little island that’s got one house on it. It’s only about an acre. And that became the house in my story. So when I first, it’s called Wood Island. When I first heard about the house was last used as a,
Cathy (21:25)
and it is called Wood Island.
JD Barker (21:32)
Coast Guard life-saving station. So it’s kind of like a way station. But it had been abandoned and the house had been empty for almost 50, 60 years and it was falling over. Now I can see it from our beach and it’s just far enough away where you can’t really tell what’s going on out there. You can’t tell what kind of disrepair it’s in. Sometimes you see a person, sometimes you see a light on. But it just got the author, what if Jean and me really going. I had the idea for the book for a very long time. The tagline for the story is for a haunted house to be born, somebody has to die.
So I knew what I wanted to write about. And then when I actually found that house, I knew that that was the house. The story itself is about a 17-year-old kid. His grandmother passes away, and he doesn’t really know her, but she leaves him a lot of money and leaves him this house. And he does exactly what you would expect. He turns it into a party house for him and his friends. It’s someplace for them to spend their final summer together before they all head off to college. But, you know, partying gets old after a while, and somebody raises their hand and says, hey, what would it take to turn this house into a haunted house?
So they start exactly where you would expect. There’s a couple of scary stories and somebody brings in a Ouija board. But the tagline for the book is always in the back of your head. For a haunted house to be born, somebody has to die. So you know where the story is going, but it’s all about the journey. But like the first time I went to that house, I learned a little bit about the history. I found out that a local guy had brought ⁓ it upon himself to renovate it and he wanted to bring it back to life. So he raised around six or $7 million.
And I got to know him a little bit. He took me out to the house by boat when he first started this process and the house was literally falling apart like all around us. But you know, like I knew that that was the house for my story. So while I was writing the book, he was renovating the house. When I finished the book, you know, he basically decorated the interior of this house to match what I have in the book, which is very cool because it’s like walking through the house from the story. And in today’s world, that house is now a museum. You can take tours, can hop on a boat and you can go out there and people,
They visit the house because they’ve read the book. Other people hear about the book when they’re out at the house. It’s a very unique thing. There’s people sometimes just sitting out there listening to the audiobook. ⁓ But it’s a lot of fun.
Cathy (23:25)
Brilliant. So ⁓ are
there copies of your book on sale in the museum?
JD Barker (23:31)
They are, sell them all, like Portsmouth is one of those ghost towns. You know, we’ve got a lot of ghost lore around here. There’s ghost tours. So like pretty much every gift shop in town has my book.
Cathy (23:40)
I’ve got to say there’s something super creepy about New England, isn’t there? It’s a really brilliant site to set. You know, obviously there’s Maine as Stephen King territory, but New England is not far away. is it the history, do you think?
JD Barker (23:44)
There is.
I mean, like when I bought this house, was abandoned. My wife and I had to completely take it down to the studs, but in our backyard is a cemetery. And like the real estate agent didn’t show that to us. She steered us clear of it. She didn’t want us to see it for the first couple of visits out here. And that kind of sums up what New England is like. ⁓ know, everything is very old. know, a lot of things like the tombstones out there are from the 1800s. know, Paul Revere rode his horse right down the street from me. There’s a plaque on the street. ⁓ You know, it’s like this part of the U.S. is about as old as it gets.
Cathy (24:17)
Yes.
JD Barker (24:22)
for the US. I travel all around the world and I realized when I first did that that the US is not old at all when you visit places like Budapest and Paris and places like that.
Cathy (24:30)
Well, everything’s relative.
Yeah, no, absolutely. Anyway, very atmospheric. and it was really great listening to I tend to listen to a lot of audio books if you’re short of time, you know, the brilliant thing about audio books is you can listen to them while you’re cooking or walking the dog or driving and it’s great.
JD Barker (24:50)
that narrator did a
fantastic job with that book.
Cathy (24:53)
Yes, yeah, definitely. And one of the one of the things in the book, the the house was a quarantine site during the the the war with the Spanish. Is that true? Or did you embellish that?
JD Barker (25:06)
No, I mean when I first learned about the house and I knew nothing about its history and then I started to research it. Normally I can write a book in about three months. This one took me four years because I kept running into like yeah I’m pretty pretty fast. I think it comes from writing with Patterson. But this one took me four years because I kept learning all these crazy things that had happened out there you know on this particular island. Like at one point during yellow fever it was a yellow fever quarantine zone. So if you got yellow fever in this area they would take you out there by boat and they would leave you there.
Cathy (25:16)
Three months.
JD Barker (25:35)
until you either got better or you didn’t. So a lot of people died in that area just because of yellow fever. During the Spanish-American War, when they captured a vessel, they would dock it out there and they would leave everybody on the boat until they either died of starvation or disease and then they would take the boat, because that’s what they wanted. They would throw the bodies overboard and feed them to the sharks, because there’s a ton of great whites and stuff in that area, because the water’s a little warmer, they follow the seals in. So it’s a very weird thing, because if you stand out on the beach and you look at it, it looks like a postcard, it’s idyllic.
Cathy (25:36)
Okay.
JD Barker (26:02)
But when you dig a little bit closer, there’s a lot of history and depth out there. I found a news story from the 70s. A guy was out there picnicking, and he found two bodies buried on the beach. And there’s a picture in the newspaper of the local DA, the law enforcement and stuff standing over these bodies. And this was like 1972 or 1973. It became like a hot potato because the island itself is right on the border of New Hampshire and Maine. It’s right in the water on the border. So nobody knew who had just jurisdiction.
Cathy (26:31)
which is very cleverly exploited in your book actually, the fact that Wood Island is between two jurisdictions and you know how the teenagers managed to exploit that.
JD Barker (26:42)
Yeah, well that’s what basically happened
out here in real life with those murders. know, like the Maine police said, it’s not our problem, it’s your problem. They pointed over at the New Hampshire side and New Hampshire pointed over at the Maine side. And ultimately they both decided, well, it’s federal land, it’s the feds problem. So the FBI came in. The FBI took over that investigation and then it just vanished. So in today’s world, like I contacted all the local FBI offices, all the local law enforcement.
Nobody’s got a record of this particular case. They don’t know who these people that were that were found. They don’t know what happened to the bodies that were found. Everything just kind of disappeared. so I included all of this in the book. But what that actually ended up doing when the book came out, it spurred so much attention. The FBI has reopened that investigation to try and figure out what happened. we, yeah.
Cathy (27:16)
Yes.
Are you? So actually
real life is imitating art. That’s fabulous.
JD Barker (27:28)
Well, they
got so many phone calls, you know, they couldn’t ignore it anymore. So the hope is now that, you those bodies are probably, you know, a pile of bones somewhere in a box in some medical examiner’s office. They’re hoping they’re going to be able to track them down and possibly through DNA figure out who those people are. But, you know, it caused them to reopen the investigation, which is pretty cool.
Cathy (27:48)
So if the bodies were found in the 70s, how old were the skeletons at the time? Do they know that?
JD Barker (27:54)
There’s no mention of it in the news.
The only documentation we found was that one newspaper article. And we know it happened because there’s actual pictures. But they had no idea how old the bodies were. There’s no mention of any of that. And everything just disappeared, including the case files.
Cathy (28:10)
so they could in theory have been decades old.
JD Barker (28:13)
It could have been decades, it could be hundreds of years. There’s just no way to know.
Cathy (28:16)
Yeah,
interesting. Well, there are obviously an awful lot of bodies underneath that body of water.
JD Barker (28:24)
Yeah, well we’ve
had a bunch of paranormal investigators come out. And I’m smart enough to understand there’s a lot I don’t understand, so I try to keep an open mind to this. But the general theory floating around is that when somebody dies, there’s an energy there that gets released. It doesn’t disappear, it just goes somewhere else. And if a lot of people die in the same place, it’s almost like a battery. That place can get charged with that energy. And there have been so many deaths on that particular island dating back hundreds and hundreds of years and probably before that.
It’s become a little bit of a hot spot.
Cathy (28:53)
Yes, no, it’s really fascinating. but actually, going back to the book I’m currently reading, this is Imperfect Murder, or the writer, as you say, it’s called in the States. There’s a lot of police procedural, which is really interesting, and I appreciate it. But I just wonder where you get your facts from, and how you research your books, because you have to, I guess you have to be quite true to actual procedure. Otherwise, there’s so
many people who just wouldn’t believe your story. Is that true?
JD Barker (29:24)
yeah,
if I get something wrong, get thousands of emails from people telling me that I got the… Yeah, I’ve got a couple of beta readers that are former law enforcement. I’ve got a friend who used to work for the FBI. I’ve got another one who used to work for the CIA. I’ve got another friend who was a regular police officer in a small town. I’ve got go-to people for this kind of thing. And I’ve studied police procedure quite a bit, so that all helps. But I try to get the facts as accurate as I possibly can.
Cathy (29:28)
But that’s good, it means thousands of people have read your book.
Yeah.
And how do you keep up to date with evolving procedures? And also, I would guess that police protocols change all the time as well, for whatever reason. The police are constantly under scrutiny. And how do you keep up to date with all of that?
JD Barker (30:10)
I try to stay on top of the documentation. I’ve got a couple of magazines that I read that are geared towards law enforcement to basically clue them in, this is the latest technology, this is what you should be doing, this is the latest procedure, this is how you should be doing it. So that helps quite a bit. Television shows help, documentaries, there’s no shortage of that information out there. If I don’t know how ⁓ something would typically be investigated, a lot of times I’ll just put a placeholder in there as I write the book and I go back and I fill in the blanks later. I’ll basically phone a friend.
and figure out how they would handle it.
Cathy (30:38)
Okay.
And I would guess that James Patterson is very well plugged into procedure as well.
JD Barker (30:44)
across the board. know, like we wrote, I think it was The Noise where we wrote there. was a scene where I needed to figure out if there was a way to get somebody aboard Air Force One while it was in the air. And I called him up and asked him because it was a book I was working on with him. And he’s like, I don’t know, let me call Bill, meaning Bill Clinton. ⁓ And the answer was only if you’re Harrison Ford, I think is what he said. Yeah, but yeah, we’ve all got our sources for various things.
Cathy (30:54)
you
Okay, okay.
Well, I am enjoying it a huge amount. It’s very entertaining and as I said, I really like the voice and the know, the the snarkiness of the characters. It’s really good. So No, please don’t spoil the ending but my guess is she did it but you know, I just don’t know how So anyway
JD Barker (31:21)
That book was a lot of fun. I love the ending. I don’t want to spoil anything for you, but the ending is a lot of fun.
Cathy (31:35)
you advocate for authors to actually take much more of an interest in the business side of authoring.
JD Barker (31:41)
I do, mean, it mainly comes like with my first book, I ended up indie publishing it. And mainly it was like, I tried to get an agent, but I didn’t know how to, I didn’t understand that process. Like I had worked in publishing for years, but never with agents, always on the publishing side. So I did it all wrong. I bought a list of agents. I sent everybody ⁓ basically a tomb and making certain letter.
I sent them all the exact same sample of the book. I didn’t go to their websites and see what they wanted. If you do that, every agent wants, this one wants a PDF, this one wants a Word document, this one wants an aerial font. They’ve all got their rules. I didn’t follow any of that. So I didn’t get a whole lot of interest. So I ended up indie publishing the book, but I sold a lot of copies of it. And that gave me a taste of the economics of being an indie.
Cathy (32:20)
How did you
do that? Why do you think your book obviously hit some sort of zeitgeist or, you know, because a lot of self-publishing just vanishes into the ether. You know, lot of self-published authors just sell a few books to friends and family and that is about it, even if it’s a good book. you know, often it’s packaging matters. Often they have terrible covers. I’ll grant you that and the type setting is bad.
JD Barker (32:42)
Yeah, I think.
Cathy (32:49)
and it looks like a self-published book so the presentation is obviously really important but even if you get that right it’s still not guaranteed you’re going to be successful. So what do you think it was about your first book that that sort of made it?
JD Barker (33:00)
No, I…
I tell people all the time, like when I published that book, I made a conscious decision to make it look like something that was coming out of Random House. Like that was my gold standard. So I hired professionals across the board for the cover, for the formatting. We put out the hardcover and the audio book and the e-book all came out on the same day. Paperback came out six months later. I followed their model exactly. But what actually took off, caused the sales to skyrocket on that was Stephen King. So in the story, I had to explain where the wife buys a journal.
Cathy (33:12)
Yes.
JD Barker (33:32)
During the writing process and just to get the book finished. I wrote that she walked into needful things You know Stephen King store and bought it there and full. Yeah Yeah, it’s one of them. It’s my I’ve actually I don’t know if you can see it But I’ve got the original pages from King’s typewriter back there in a box It’s one of my favorite Stephen King books But you know as I wrote that in the book fully expected to have to change it because you can’t just use a reference like that without you lawyers jumping down your throat But my wife read it and she said, know before you change it, let’s try to get King’s permission to use it so
Cathy (33:38)
⁓ yes, I remember that book.
JD Barker (34:02)
how do get Stephen King’s permission to do much of anything? So we researched this a little bit. It turns out he had a house in Florida that was about 10 minutes from my mom’s house. So when we were down visiting my mom, we printed up the manuscript, we hopped in the rental car and figured, well, we’ll head over to Steve’s house. We’ll catch him outside gardening or something. I’ll hand him the book. You know, he’ll give us a big thumbs up and we’ll be on our way. It didn’t work out that way. So King lives on a little island off the coast. If you go, you go over a little bridge. If you make a left, you go to like the half of the island where the bars and restaurants and hotels and stuff are.
make a right to go to the entire half of this island that Stephen King owns. There’s immediately a private drive sign, there was a no trespassing sign, there was a gate, and then another gate. We got about a half mile down this road and I’m watching the trees for snipers thinking this is probably a really bad idea. So we turned around, we went to one of the little restaurants to get lunch, and I called a friend of mine who knew King, told him what we were doing, and he said, yeah, don’t stalk Steve, he hates that. Here’s his email address, just mail him the book. If he likes it, he’ll get back to you. If the book is terrible, he probably won’t respond.
Cathy (34:35)
Yeah.
JD Barker (34:55)
So I emailed the book off and a couple days later I got an email back from King. He said, I love this. Go ahead and use the reference. Let me know if you need anything. know, I, yeah, well, you know, authors in general, I’ve learned over the years, like we’ve all, know, everybody remembers what it was like to be that debut, you know, putting that book out. doesn’t matter how successful you are today. You know, King remembers sitting in a mobile home writing Carrie. know, Patterson remembers working in advertising writing his
Cathy (35:02)
That is so generous of him, that’s fabulous.
Yes.
JD Barker (35:20)
first book. Dan Brown remembers writing, you know, Angels and Demons and some of his… Like they all… It’s very close to the surface. But anyway, so he let me use it. The book came out and it did okay at the beginning, but it didn’t, you know, light anything on fire. So I hired a friend of mine who’s a publicist. We started brainstorming ideas, you know, like what can we do to, you know, draw some interest to this book? And I told her about this, you know, essentially a failed trip to Stephen King’s house, because I never actually got there. But she said, you know what, that’s the story.
So she wrote that up and that story came out. And when that story came out, then librarians read about it, bookstore owners read about it. And that’s what really sparked interest and caused people to start looking at the book.
Cathy (35:58)
is amazing. And just for anyone listening actually, Stephen King’s book on writing, which we talked about a little earlier in this podcast, basically, it’s part memoir and part ⁓ sharing of the craft. And it is one of the best books on writing I’ve ever read. And I do have some favorites and and Needful Things, the the the little shop that you reference comes from a book by Stephen King, I
I remember when he… I read it years ago but it was very memorable because the shop Needful Things where your character buys her notepad…
If you walk into that shop, you will find the item or article that you’ve always wanted and that really speaks to you. And it will speak to you individually and you have to have it and it’s reasonably priced, but you find afterwards that it comes at a terrible cost. Is that right? Does my memory serve?
JD Barker (36:59)
That is exactly right and it’s probably still one of my favorite Stephen King books.
Cathy (37:03)
It’s really good. Yeah. And I, by the way, I remember when I was a teenager reading, you know, a bag of bones, his collection of short stories. And I shared, I shared a room with my sister when I was a teenager and I was reading it really late at night and I was absolutely terrified. And I, I had to go to the bathroom. And so I woke my poor sister up. She had to come with me because I couldn’t.
JD Barker (37:12)
Yeah.
Cathy (37:31)
I couldn’t go on my own. so Stephen King is just, you know, where horror is concerned is just the gold standard, I think, because I don’t think anyone’s ever terrified me so much. Yeah, he is. Exactly.
JD Barker (37:41)
Nah, mean he’s just a very, very good storyteller. It could be anything.
Cathy (37:48)
So you’ve mentioned when you first came on that you’ve done two podcasts today, so you’re often talking about your writing and your craft and your business, et cetera, and your co-authors. So what are you working on right now?
JD Barker (38:02)
⁓ you’re going to think I’m crazy, but I’m working on 12 different books right now at the same time. writing with James Patterson. Yeah, he’s kind of he’s been teaching me stuff on the business side as much as he has on the writing side. So over the years, I’ve developed a co-authored model very similar to what he’s doing. I struck a deal about two years ago with Simon & Schuster, where I created my own imprint on Simon & Schuster. So I basically have my own publishing house, but they handle my print sales and distribution. And I’ve been bringing bringing in co-authors to write books with me.
Cathy (38:07)
That is crazy.
JD Barker (38:29)
in addition to my solo titles and along with the stuff that I write with Patterson. So I’m very busy.
Cathy (38:36)
What’s the imprint? Okay, great. And where did you get the name from?
JD Barker (38:38)
It’s called Hampton Creek Press.
When I lived in Florida, the development that I lived in was called Hampton Creek.
Cathy (38:48)
Okay, yeah it’s very, it’s great name. So how do you keep track of 12 books?
JD Barker (38:53)
very, very carefully. ⁓ Honestly, I’m autistic and I have zero trouble remembering things like that. I have trouble forgetting stuff. Like I wish I could forget stuff as easily as I remembered it. But plotting out multiple novels, like you can’t really see my desk behind me, but like there’s literally nothing on it. Like I don’t have notes or anything like that. It’s all up here.
Cathy (38:55)
You
Okay, so you’re…
That is amazing.
That is incredible. Is there anything else you think that a literary bookish audience should know about JD Barker and how you do things?
JD Barker (39:28)
If you get a chance, something I keep upstairs is out now. That’s the book we were just talking about. ⁓ Or if you’re in the UK, The Perfect Murder or Imperfect Murder is fantastic. My books are pretty much in every bookstore. Would you pick one up?
Cathy (39:32)
Yeah.
Okay, great. Well, I’m so glad that I discovered your imprint, etc. And I’m definitely going to look out for Dracul. That is, you know, I’m a big classics fan and actually my next book will be a literary spoof based on the classics. So I really like writing in that voice. So I’d be really interested to see how you capture that, you know.
JD Barker (39:59)
There you go.
Cathy (40:04)
So yeah, fantastic. it’s been really fun talking to you. So, a total pleasure. And yeah, I’m gonna send you a book as well. I’ll get your address and I will send you a book, which I’m sure you will enjoy. It’s not horror it’s a domestic thriller, okay? So.
JD Barker (40:08)
thanks for having me.
Okay. I love a good domestic thriller.
Cathy (40:25)
Excellent, good. Well, it’s been really fun talking to you and I hope we’ll have you back again to talk about one or more of these 12 books you’re working on at the moment. So good luck with it.
JD Barker (40:33)
Absolutely. Thank you so much.