Rupert Isaacson: Welcome to Live Free Ride Free, where we talk to people who
have lived self-actualized lives on their own terms, and find out how they
got there, what they do, how we can get there, what we can learn from them.
How to live our best lives, find our own definition of success,
and most importantly, find joy.
I'm your host, Rupert Isaacson.
New York Times bestselling author of the Horse Boy.
Founder of New Trails Learning Systems and long ride home.com.
You can find details of all our programs and shows on Rupert isaacson.com.
Welcome back to live free ride free today.
I've got JD Barker, he is a best selling author.
He writes thrillers suspense with a twist of the supernatural.
He has had endorsements from no less than Stephen King.
And such like royalty.
He's also autistic.
In terms of living a self actualised life, from where he began In his American
childhood to where he is now, as many people know who listen to this podcast,
autism, A U T I S M, auto Greek word for the self, this can often mean difficulty
with a relationship with the exterior world, let's say, so it's intriguing
to me that we're talking today with a storyteller, a communicator with
a condition that is often perceived As not being massively conducive
to storytelling and communication.
Yet, here he is, and he's doing extremely well at it.
His books are available on Amazon.
You'll If you type him in, you're going to see a plethora of them.
With excellent reviews, if you're a thriller reader, you're going to want to
read him just for the sake of his books.
But let's dive into the world of J.
D.
Barker.
J.
D.,
thanks so much for coming on.
Please give us a little bit of an idea about who you are and
how you got to where you are.
JD Barker: Well, thanks for having me.
I, I, honestly, that's the first time I've ever heard that the, you
know, the Greek root of the word.
And all of a sudden it makes sense.
I've never, never actually thought about it before.
Yeah, so I'm one of those, I was born in the 70s.
You know, so back then they didn't diagnose this sort of thing.
You were just kind of the weird kid they pushed off into the corner.
You're kind of shunned by, you know, your peers, by adults.
And I just, I went through life that way.
I had no idea, you know, I wouldn't say something was wrong with me.
I knew I was different.
I was reading by a very early age.
I was reading when I was around three years old by the time I got into
kindergarten, I read like all the Hardy boys and Nancy Drew mysteries and moved
on to Charles Dickens and a bunch of the classics you know, always very
good in, in school always terrible.
When it came to social situations, I couldn't relate to other people.
You know, and at first I thought it was just because I was doing
things that the other kids weren't.
You know, I was reading.
At, at, at a young age.
Other kids weren't doing that yet.
I just, I didn't really relate to 'em.
I actually related to adults I think a lot better than I did with kids.
Mm-hmm . But, you know, I went, I went through school, I just kind
of fumbled my way through it.
Got into college.
Ended up getting a couple of different degrees.
I got one into.
business, another one in finance.
I got an IT degree.
I got halfway through a psychology degree and found myself
working in the corporate world.
The last real job I had, I was a chief compliance officer at a brokerage firm,
which is as horrible as it sounds.
It's very similar to being like internal affairs at a police department.
You have to monitor all the activity taking place at a brokerage
firm, make sure that nobody is breaking any rules or regulations,
compare every transaction against.
a bunch of, you know, documented rules and basically look for any kind of anomaly.
So problem solving, so I was very good at that.
I ended up writing computer software to process a lot of
it, to deal with a lot of it.
I did a great job with that portion of my job but when I actually found a
problem, I had to leave my office and I had to go to talk to other people.
And that's where the real problems kind of came into play because, you
know, I would have to basically go to.
Hey, you made a mistake and here's why which automatically
put them on the defensive.
And then I had to try and communicate the issue with them
and try and come to a resolution.
You know, after a while, someone on
Rupert Isaacson: the autism spectrum,
JD Barker: yeah, you know, so there were a lot of clashes.
But my boss, you know, to his credit, he was smart enough to recognize.
I was very good at, you know, a portion of my job, not good with the people skills.
He thought I had anger issues.
Cause you know, everybody tries to put this into some type of.
You know, explanation, put it in a box.
So he sent me to an anger management class.
And I sat down with the therapist for the initial interview.
And we got about 20 minutes in and she stopped me and she said, Have
you ever been tested for autism?
Rupert Isaacson: And
JD Barker: I actually had no idea what that really was other than that movie.
How old
Rupert Isaacson: were you at this point?
JD Barker: I was 22.
Okay.
So, so it was a while ago early 90s.
You know, so she started to explain that, you know, well, as we've been
talking, I've noticed you don't make any eye contact you tend to, you know,
stare at this one particular spot on my wall whenever you're speaking, you
rub your thumb and your index finger together whenever you think and she
just started rattling off these things that I've done my entire life and never
really thought twice about and then she mentioned autism and she spent her daytime
working with autistic children, which is why these things jumped out at her.
Were you shocked?
Were you
Rupert Isaacson: insulted?
Or did you think, ah, well,
JD Barker: You know, at first I was taken aback because I didn't know what it was,
and like I said, the only exposure I ever had to it was Rain Man, you know, that
movie with Tom Cruise, which is not a very good depiction, you know, it's, it's
nothing like the real, the real thing but she asked if I'd be open to getting
tested, and I, I did, and then ultimately we landed on a diagnosis of Asperger's
syndrome which in today's world, you're just on the spectrum somewhere.
But back in the day, they had a name for it.
And from my standpoint, you know, it gave me a problem with a name
on it that I could actually solve.
So at that point I started researching everything I possibly could.
I read books, I saw movies, documentaries, any piece of
information I could get on it.
And basically started trying to tackle this thing.
And essentially we, we created a list of things that, you know, problem things
that I felt were problems in my life.
You know, like the social situations, you know, social skills.
But we also made another list of the things that I was able to do that other
people couldn't which, you know, today's where I, I doubled down on a lot of those
because I was able to do a lot of things that, you know, somebody that's quote
unquote normal, wasn't able to accomplish.
You know, so I, I spent the last 30 years, you know, basically
trying to dig out of that.
that whole.
You know, a lot of these things I was able to correct or fix.
She taught me how to make eye contact in a conversation.
You know, the funny thing is that when I make eye contact, I can't pay
attention because I'm literally telling myself in my head, keep eye contact,
keep eye contact, keep eye contact.
It feels weird to me.
It feels awkward.
I don't want to do it.
So I forced myself to do it and oddly, like my wife knows, you know, we've
been married for over 10 years now.
She knows that if I don't look her in the eye, that I'm actually paying attention.
You know, so like, she's picked up on that.
She picked up on that very early on.
But, you know, I basically started to work through as many
of these, these things as I could.
I mean, the social thing, that's never gone away.
I don't think it ever will.
But I've learned to mimic my way through social situations.
And, and oddly like that, that kind of tied back to the writing career.
Cause initially I was working on, projects I was working as a
book doctor and a ghost writer basically working with other people.
And I would mimic other authors
Rupert Isaacson: That's that's a big jump from being a corporate guy, you know
telling people that they're messing up.
It come it comes back There's a jump there in the story
JD Barker: Yeah, no, it comes back to me reading at such an early age, you know,
books were basically my safe place, you know, when I wanted to get away from
the real world, I'd open up the cover of a book and it just evolved, you know,
from, you know, reading other people's stories to wanting to create my own.
I had a sister who was 15 months younger than me so I used to write
stories up, I would staple them together and I created a little library
in my room and she would check those stories out, I'd charge her late fees.
fees.
You know, like this, this, this went way back to, you know,
probably five, six, seven years old.
But that's, that's basically where, where it started.
But I had been told that in an early, early age, you can't
make a living as a writer.
You know, it's too, too difficult a profession.
You have to get a real job.
Which is how I ended up in the corporate world.
But I would come home at night during all that time.
And I would, I would write, like that was how I stayed sane.
You always
Rupert Isaacson: actually wanted to be a writer.
JD Barker: Yeah.
Yeah.
I've, I've always done it.
So I, I did that for about 20 some years.
You know, basically the two different jobs.
And over that time I had six different books that hit the New York Times
bestseller list that I had written, but they all came out with other
people's names on the covers.
Because they were, they were ghostwritten.
That gets old.
After a while, you know, somebody else basically taking credit
for teaches you the craft.
It did, you know, and I wrote a lot of memoirs and I think that's what
really did it for me because I had to get into the head of another person.
I had to speak in their voice and tell a story from, you know,
somebody else's perspective.
And I think that's what really taught me how to create characters
and be able to, you know, dig into fiction at the level that I did.
Ultimately when that six book hit, my wife pulled me aside.
She said, listen, I know you hate your day job cause I hated the corporate
thing but I was kind of trapped.
I had a big salary.
We had a big house.
We had cars, we had a boat.
We couldn't just walk away from it cause it was expensive.
So she came up with this crazy plan.
We sold everything that we owned.
We bought a tiny little duplex in Pittsburgh you know, which is a
steel town in the middle of the U S.
I bought a duplex, rented out one side to some tenants.
We lived in the other side, got our expenses down to next to nothing.
And I basically, we lived off a savings long enough for me to write a
book on my own and get it out there.
And luckily it just, everything took off.
The first book sold really well.
The second one sold even better.
Some TV shows and movies came along.
And I've been on that rollercoaster ever since.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
So, people will obviously want to know what were those books you helped
ghost ride that got onto the New York times bestsellers and what were these?
Books that you then got your not just became your own bestsellers,
but TV and film and so on.
But just before we go into that, let me just backtrack with you.
As a child, you say books were your safe place.
Did you feel unsafe in the world?
JD Barker: You know, I don't know that it was unsafe, I didn't, you know, in
the 70s, like, we didn't even think that way, like, cars didn't have seatbelts,
you know, like, we, we would jump, we would jump our bike off the, you know,
off a ramp and go 20 feet across the, you know, the road, like, we, we didn't
think about safety back then it just, you know, like, I would feel like certain
situations, I just didn't understand them.
You know, like kids would be playing, I would try to fit in.
It always felt like I was imitating those actions which wasn't fun.
And I would see these other kids who looked like they actually
were having legitimate fun.
And I didn't understand why it was fun for them and not fun for me.
And at a young age, you know, that gets very frustrating.
And at some point I would break off and I would grab a book and that would, that
would call, that would call me back down.
Rupert Isaacson: So it wasn't so much about being bullied
or picked on or singled out.
It was more just feeling why can't I fit in?
JD Barker: Yeah, I mean that kind of stuff was happening too, but you
know again in the 70s everybody did it, you know I picked on other kids
they picked on other kids, you know We'd lock each other in lockers.
Like it was just it was a very different time than it is today
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, you're absolutely right.
I remember it Okay, so, you know in some ways I'm quite similar I also used to
use books as a safe place when I was at school why for you you said you read
the Nancy Drew and those mysteries very, very early, like at three, why mysteries?
JD Barker: You know, I, I think it was really just because that's what was on at
hand and my mom owned an antique store and we used to go to a lot of garage sales or
yard sales and she would literally pick up books by the box, you know, like 2 for,
you know, 50 books to stuffed in a box.
And initially, you know, I think 1 of those boxes had a mix of those
Hardy boys and Nancy Drew's in there.
So I just, I really fell in love with it.
Mysteries like, I love the puzzle aspect of it.
So I think that might have been part of it.
But in general, like, you know, in today's world, I read across the board.
I'll read a romance novel, I'll read sci fi, westerns.
I don't really care what the story is about as long as it's a good story.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm hmm,
JD Barker: mm hmm.
And then you said you got into the classics at how old?
That was when I got into kindergarten, so five,
Rupert Isaacson: six years old.
You were reading Dickens, Victorian English, at five or six years old.
JD Barker: Yeah, I mean, to this day, Great Expectations is still my
favorite book to the point where I actually wrote a retelling of it a
few years back called She Has a Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be.
And it's my wife's favorite book, and I travel all over the world at
this point, and it's the one book people put in front of me and tell me
it's their favorite everywhere I go.
Oh, interesting.
And
Rupert Isaacson: why do you think that Victorian classics Got you at that age.
And how did you deal with the fact that that English was so far
from American vernacular English that you'd have had around you?
Did you, you, you instinctively understood it or you actually had
to have someone help you with it?
JD Barker: No, I, I got through it pretty well.
I think, you know, because I always saw books as being in another
place, almost like this magical realm that I could kind of go into.
So the fact that, you know, English was different.
You know, to me, it just kind of fit, you know, it was, it was no
different than finding a dragon in a story or, you know, a warlock or,
or something else, you know, it was just a different way of, of talking.
I probably didn't understand that, you know, in some part of the world,
people actually spoke that way.
You know, not, not at that age but in the books, it, it made sense.
I do remember that when I picked up great expectations, the first time
we were at the library and they had a section of the classics and all the books
basically had the same kind of cover.
So they look like they belong together, like a big set.
And that's what initially attracted me to him because, you know, like I had gone
through the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drews.
They all had a similar cover, so it all felt like, you know, this one big
project, you know, that I had tackled.
And seeing another possible project in all of those, you know,
the classics laid out like that.
I think that's what initially attracted me to it, but, you know, Dickens in general,
like his writing is just fantastic.
His writing is fantastic.
Rupert Isaacson: I'm just thinking back now myself to Dickens.
But there, you know, there are, what, what intrigues me is that it's It's
not just the use of the language, there's also vocabulary stuff.
So, you know, for example, if someone is drinking sack or drinking hock
or something like that, you, would you have then gone and figured out
what sack, what are they drinking?
What do they mean?
They're drinking hock, you know?
No.
JD Barker: Most of the times when I ran into something like that, I
just kept reading through it, you know, because it was no different
than somebody making up a word.
You know, like when I read don't know, like doing when I got older you know,
like there's a lot of made up words and fantasy novels and things like that.
So like, I think my brain just kind of tied that all together is just,
this was just some made up word.
Like I didn't know that it was actually a real thing.
Okay.
Right.
Rupert Isaacson: The, the, the, the, the big picture rather
than the details effectively.
Yeah.
But what is intriguing to me is that it's to some degree a little
bit like learning another language.
And your young brain at that time, obviously being very
plastic would have been firing many, many neurons, I'm thinking.
You know, dealing with these other worlds that, As you say, you weren't
aware were actual worlds at that point.
So, okay, so then you get into your early stages of mysteries.
And of course, a lot of Dickens, they are actually mysteries, most of them.
There's usually, you know, a big puzzle that has to be deciphered.
And if you boil Dickens down, it's usually a bit of a suspense
novel with a romantic twist.
Yeah, absolutely.
Then you get into helping people.
to ghostwrite and write memos.
How does that happen?
JD Barker: Well I was in college, one of my first jobs I worked
for BMG Distribution, which was a division of RCA Records.
And I was essentially a glorified babysitter.
So they'd have a recording artist come into South Florida, I'd have to pick
him up at the airport, get him to the radio station for interviews, get him to
their concert, get him to their hotel, and get him back on an airplane when
it was time for them to leave town.
And this was some very famous people.
So to really date myself, but we had people like Tiffany and Debbie Gibson and
new kids on the block Madonna bunch of hair bands, poison, Motley Crue, Bon Jovi.
Yeah, so I realized very quickly, I was running up a lot of debt, you
know, going to school is expensive.
And I had some very famous people in a car with me sometimes for a week at a time.
So I would interview them.
And then I would take those interviews and I would sell them to a lot of the
magazines that were around back then, like 17 and teen people and tiger beat And
when you work with anybody at newspapers and magazines, you quickly learn that
they've got a novel that they've been working on for the last 10 years, you
know, it's in a desk drawer somewhere.
They're almost done.
It's 400, 000 words.
It just needs a little something.
I was very good with grammar and punctuation and just
kind of the rules of writing.
So those people initially would give me those books to kind of
go through them and clean it up.
Then I started offering developmental suggestions, you know, like
the story takes off here.
This part should come out.
You know, I think your character would develop me.
It's a little work here.
And that basically turned into a, you know, the side hustle as working
as a, a ghost writer, a book doctor, basically helping those people tweak
their novels and get them to the point where they were ready for publication.
Over time, word of that spread yeah.
And so agents would call me, you know, or editors would call me, they'd acquire
a book that they absolutely love, but they couldn't get it published
because it needed work and they couldn't get the original author to
do it because they were just too new.
And, you know, if you go to a debut author and you say, you've got to take
40, 000 words out of this book, you know, that's a difficult thing, but
they would bring me in as a hired gun.
You know, I had no skin in the game, so, you know, I would just
take their direction and, and they didn't sugarcoat anything with me.
And it's funny because in today's world, you know, I'm a published
author, you know, if I get a phone call from my editor, they'll you.
You know, if they've got a problem with a book, they'll usually
tell me two or three things they absolutely love about the book.
Then they'll tell me that one thing that they need me to fix, and then they'll
finish up that phone call with one or two more things they love about the book.
They kind of sandwich it in between of, you know, the, the bad news
between a bunch of good news.
But when you're a hired gun, they didn't do any of that.
They, they would just tell me everything they hated about the book,
tell me what needed to be fixed.
And I think that's, I learned a lot about the writing industry through
those conversations and what the folks in New York were really looking for.
Rupert Isaacson: Absolutely.
JD Barker: I
Rupert Isaacson: think that if anyone who's listening is.
Wanting to write and publish a book, the two things to know are the most important
thing about a book is its structure.
The structure's got to be so good that it's invisible.
And that's what keeps you going.
And the other thing is the editing.
And really the editors should be on the spine of the book alongside the author
because I'm a great believer that any book that I've read that's worth reading,
it's largely down to the editors.
But it sounds like you've got a crash course in Editing effectively.
JD Barker: Absolutely.
And I totally agree about books are made in the editing process, not
necessarily in the writing process.
Rupert Isaacson: I agree.
Okay.
So give.
A couple of ideas of some of the memoirs that hit big and other books that hit
big that you helped to ghost write.
And then let's go into your own work.
JD Barker: I wish I could talk about that, but that, that whole industry,
like there are NDAs, NDAs for everything.
Yeah.
I mean, in today's world, I write books with James Patterson, like
he's constantly bugging me, you know, about the, those titles.
He wants to know who I worked with in the past and I can't even tell him.
There I, I, I wish I could, but it's just one of those things.
Okay.
That reminds me of
Rupert Isaacson: a very good story.
Do you, you know, who you, you, the famous actor not Christopher Plummer
gosh, Saruman in Lord of the Rings gosh, you know who I'm talking about and he
was in so many horror movies and, um, let me just find him quickly because it's,
it's a great story along those lines.
It's Christopher Lee and Christopher Lee had been a special ops intelligence dude
during World War Two, and he was always being pestered by journalists about this.
And he has a famous story of.
One person just wouldn't let go and wouldn't let go and wouldn't let go and
so he finally said can you keep a secret?
To this guy and he goes yes, yes, so can I?
And that was the end of the interview So now I get it Okay, so but nonetheless you
were brought in You have to sign the NDAs.
You can't talk about them, but you learn the craft then you float your
first book Tell us about that book
JD Barker: Yeah, so at that point when I sat down to write it, it was called
Forsaken I knew I wanted to write a horror novel because that was always my
favorite genre to play around in and, you know, at that point I felt like
I knew, you know, how to craft a good book, beginning, middle, and end it's
funny because you could take any one of my books and drop them into a three
act structure they all fit, but I've never had anything Formal training,
like my formal training comes from all the reading that I've done in the past.
Right.
That, that structure is basically ingrained in my head.
Like I, I know when I take a wrong turn while I'm writing mm-hmm . You know,
I know a twist needs to happen here.
The climax needs to start here.
Like, it all just feels organic to me.
So I sat down, I wrote Forsaken in the book I had to explain
where the wife buys a journal.
And just to get the book finished, I wrote that she walked into Needful
Things, you know, which is the story from Stephen King's novel fully
expecting to have to change that, but it was just a, you know, something
I did to get the book down on paper.
My wife read it and she said, you know what, before we change
that, why don't we see if we can get King's permission to use it?
And ultimately I was able to do that and that, that's what launched my, my career.
You know, the fact that he was wanting to take that chance.
How did you
Rupert Isaacson: contact Stephen King
JD Barker: to get that permission?
You know, the story behind it is, I think, what actually launched the book.
So, it turns out he's got a house in Florida that's about 10 minutes
from where my mother lives.
So we were, we were down there visiting.
We printed out the book.
We hopped in the car and figured, well, we'll head over to Stephen King's house.
You know, he'll be outside gardening or something.
I'll hand him the manuscript.
He'll give us a big thumbs up and we'll be on our way.
It didn't work out that way.
So, he lives on.
Yeah, he lives on a little island right off the coast of Florida we call
him Keys down there he lives on K.
C.
Key you go over this tiny little bridge, if you make a left, you go to the entire
portion of the, the island where bars and restaurants and stuff like that
are, if you make a right, you kind of go to the half that the king owns, and
there's immediately a private drive sign and no trespassing sign we got
about a half mile in and there was a gate and then there was another gate.
I started looking up in the trees thinking there's going to
be a sniper coming at us next.
And this is probably a bad idea.
So my wife and I, we turned around, we went to a little
restaurant down near the bridge.
I called a friend of mine.
His name was Dallas Mare.
He wrote another, the name Jack Ketchum.
He passed away a few years ago, but a really nice guy.
I knew he was friends with King and I told him what we were up to.
And he said, Oh yeah, don't stalk Steve.
He hates that.
Here's his email address.
Send him the book.
If he likes it, you'll hear back from him.
If the book is shit, he probably won't reply, but, but leave him alone.
So I emailed off the book with a, you know, a couple of little paragraphs
explaining what I was up to.
I didn't expect to hear from anybody.
And then about a day or two later, I got an email back from King and he
said, I love this, go ahead and use it.
Let me know if you need anything.
And you know, ultimately the book came out, I, I indie
published that very first one.
Sales were okay at the.
The start, but nothing spectacular.
And I hired a friend of mine to do PR somebody I had worked with back
in the music business years earlier.
And I told her about this failed trip to Stephen King's house and she said,
you know what, that's the story.
So she reached out to a bunch of publications and ultimately Publishers
Weekly wrote a story about this new author trying to get to Stephen King's house
to get his permission for use in a book.
And that story came out and librarians read it, bookstore owners read it.
And, you know, all of a sudden they started ordering the books and that's
where, where sales really took off.
Rupert Isaacson: What's interesting to me about that is that, A, he had
the time and the bandwidth to read that book because, you know, I mean,
I'm sure people send you manuscripts.
Do you have the time to read them, you know, maybe
JD Barker: no, you know, like I, I probably get, I, I know he gets over
a hundred books a month cause I've gotten to know him a little bit.
And you know, he doesn't read hardly any of them.
I take it at the time.
I didn't.
Yours.
I didn't realize how rare of a thing it was, you know, being autistic,
it's one, one of my superpowers, the way my wife describes it is
I don't take no for an answer.
I don't really see, you know, the possibility of a failure, you know, like
I personally, I feel like I would rather ask the question, turn me down that
they're not asked the question at all.
So I just always approach things that way.
Why do
Rupert Isaacson: you think he picked yours out of that hundred in the month?
JD Barker: If I had to guess just because it came in, you know, through that email
address, you know, which probably nobody has you know, and, and, you know, I was
recommended to him by a mutual friend.
You know, so it was a, but I mean, like he's, he's just an all around.
Very, very nice guy.
So I send him every book that I put out.
And I had one a few years back called a caller's game.
And I shipped it to him from Amazon and I got a phone call from the
Amazon driver when he was delivering.
And he said, listen, it's pouring rain out here.
I left the book at your gate.
You know, can you come out and get it?
You know, and this wasn't my house at Stephen King's house.
So I, so I emailed King and I told him that, you know, Amazon left this book
outside, he got his umbrella out, got his raincoat out, went out there in this nasty
weather just to get that book, you know, from, from his gate and bring it back
into his house, you know, like a lesser guy would have probably just let it out.
You know, left it out there to rot, but like, that's just the kind of guy
that he, that he is, you know, he, he remembers what it was like he wrote,
you know, when he wrote Carrie, he wrote that in a trailer, you know,
between a washer and dryer, you know, like he came from nothing, you
know, and he knows what that's like.
And, you know, that, that struggle is, is very real.
I think for all of us authors.
Rupert Isaacson: Absolutely.
The other thing that surprises me is that of course he might've decided sure
you can use it, but as you know, authors don't necessarily own their books.
So if someone was to ask me.
If they could use something from my book, I'd have to check with
my publishers because effectively they own that book, not me.
So, why didn't his publishers kick up a fuss and say, No, no, this J.
D.
Barker guy, he's got to pay, you know, 20k to use that.
Blah, blah, blah.
JD Barker: King has been in this industry for a very long time and he, you know,
he knows the business inside and out.
I'm sure he, he looked, you know, he looks very closely
at every one of his contracts.
He knows what he can do and what he can't do.
But I totally understand what you're saying.
Like, I've got a fantastic agent who is very good at spotting those things.
Usually, you know, removes that kind of stuff, you know, from, from a contract.
But I've got film and TV deals in place now where certain
characters are owned by a studio.
Yeah, so I can't put out.
I can't use my own characters in some situations without getting
in the studio to sign off on it.
And the funny thing is, you know, the forsaken, you know, like
it's, it's the only book that I've written so far that hasn't been
optioned at some point for a movie.
And usually the, the turning point is because they find out about King's
involvement because, you know, they, they love the story, they're ready to make it.
It's, you know, a nice quick little cheap horror movie that they could film,
but then they hear that it's tied from.
Yeah.
To needful things and the lawyers get ahold of that and they're
like, yeah, but you know, needful things is optioned by so and so.
That means we have to get permission from these people.
These people have to sign off on it.
It gets, it gets so muddy that everybody just kind of walks away
slowly and doesn't do anything.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
I mean, Hollywood hates a lawsuit.
I.
In the in the horse boy which is the main book that people know me for.
I used a very, very small excerpt from a Dr.
Seuss book because that's what I used to read to my autistic son and boy, oh
boy, the hoops I had to jump through just to get, you know, this tiny little
thing and it cost me quite a lot of money too, but it was worth it because
obviously it's part of the story.
I went through that with once you get into.
Go ahead.
JD Barker: I went through the same thing with frosty the snowman.
So I've got a book.
I wrote called the 5th to die and in it, they find a body inside of a snowman.
And I just wanted to use a couple lyrics from that song.
And I don't know if the rules are different where you are, but in the US,
it's based on a percentage, like, the words are basically a percentage of the
actual song that you're allowed to use without permission anything over that.
Particular number, you have to get permission, but frosty, the snowman
has so many repetitive lines in it.
You can't really get away with the whole lot.
So, yeah, we had to chop it down and just use little pieces, but it's, you know,
it's 1 of those songs where you can take off 2 words and everybody knows the rest.
Exactly.
Get away with it.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Okay.
So, of the books, give us a sort of chronology of the
books that you've written.
They are and where they've gone, like which ones have gone to TV, which ones
have gone to film, which ones have been option, but they haven't been made.
Just give us a bit of a geography of your work.
JD Barker: Yeah, so the 1st 1 was forsaken.
We've already talked about that.
While that was coming out, I wrote a serial killer series called the
4th monkey 3 different books based on a serial killer in Chicago.
That 1 went into the publication rights sold.
We also sold it for a few.
Feature film and for a follow up TV series with CBS while that was going on.
I wrote a prequel to Dracula for Bram Stoker's family.
That one was picked up by Paramount with any machete attached to direct.
I think the next one that I wrote after that was a caller's game, which was
picked up by Ridley Scott's company.
She has a broken thing where heart should be the Charles
Dickens retelling that 1 was done.
It's currently in development as a, as a TV show.
There's so many, I'm trying to get my, it's funny, I think I've got
12 books out there at this point.
So did
Rupert Isaacson: those
JD Barker: early ones get, get made?
No, that's the thing, like, in Hollywood, like, everything has been optioned,
some of them over and over again, nothing has actually been filmed yet.
At this point, it's kind of a numbers game, you know, like,
I've got so many in the works, you know, something is bound to happen.
But, like, it is com Completely out of my control.
One of the things that I've learned is when something gets optioned
usually they, they go in for a year.
They go in for like 18 months, maybe two years at the onset.
But as soon as that option expires, the folks in Hollywood know that it's
a known commodity, so they tend to jump all over it, and somebody else usually
scoops up that option right away.
So things haven't been out of option but things can get really crazy.
A friend of mine told me once, if you watch the credits at the end of a movie,
you know all those names flying by.
It takes five or six minutes to get through all of 'em.
Every one of those people had to come together and be there in
order for that movie to make it.
To the screen and you know, it's like this perfect storm that has to happen.
Oh, so I, I, I so hear you.
Yeah.
So like stuff, stuff can fall apart.
I mean, to give you an example, a caller's game with Ridley Scott's company.
At one point I got a phone call saying Jennifer Garner had signed on.
She loves the book.
She wants to make it.
Jennifer Garner had a, what's called a first look deal with Netflix.
So now we had a studio.
Netflix greenlit a hundred million dollar budget for the project.
All this stuff happened probably within about two to three weeks.
Then we got another phone call.
Jennifer Garner's got a scheduling conflict.
She's got to pull out, you know.
So our star went away, then Netflix went away, and the budget went away.
You know, all this stuff, you know, within a month, you know, it's
like this crazy roller coaster.
So honestly, like I, I keep my head down and just kind of write the next book.
I know sooner or later it's going to happen.
But I try not to get too wrapped up in all that stuff.
Rupert Isaacson: Well, one of the things which I found with this Cause
I've had a couple of books optioned and then they stayed in option for gosh, a
decade, you know, and then one day and yes, all sorts of actors were attached.
It's exactly as you described it.
It all goes very quiet.
And then you get a phone call saying, ah, you know, this big person.
Or it's a person you've never heard of that they tell you is big.
Particularly as you get older like me and you sort of don't
know who the celebs are anymore.
And then it goes away for this sort of thing.
That actress goes and has a baby or it turns out that, as you say,
scheduling conflict or whatever.
But what I've found is Sometimes I don't wait around, sometimes
I just go and make them myself.
And so I made a documentary, I made two TV reality shows that way called The Quest.
Have you not considered just being a producer and making one of them yourself?
For the cra
JD Barker: At some point I might but, you know, like, I
know how to write a good book.
I know a good book is gonna bring me, you know, a nice payday.
I do really well with them.
So, like, I just don't have the, the bandwidth to branch out to, to
do other, other things like that.
Like, that would just take, there's, once we figure out how to get 27
or 30 hours in a day, then I could probably take something like that on.
But, but right now it's just not happening.
And is all your publishing self publishing, or are you with
several different mainstreams?
I've been all over the place.
So the, the Serial Killer series I mentioned, that was with HMH,
which is now part of HarperCollins.
I've got books with Random House.
I indie published my first book.
And then I, I kind of did a hybrid approach for a couple of books because
when, when you indie publish, you know, the economics are fantastic.
You make about 70 cents on the dollar.
Traditional publishers are good because they'll You know, they give
you a nice big advance check, but you've got to pay that advance back.
And usually it's for pennies on the dollar.
So you've got to sell a lot more books to pay that money back than
if you were to indie publish it.
So after I got about four or five books in that, I started
becoming very aware of that.
And I, I wanted to try and take some of the control back.
So I did a hybrid approach.
I basically told my agent, I'm going to retain English rights for myself.
So the various countries that speak English, I'm going to put those out.
And she's more than welcome to continue selling in all the foreign
territories for each of my books.
And I'm in about 150 different countries, a little shy of 30 languages.
You know, so I've got, it's a pretty decent pool.
She's still got to play in.
But I did that for a couple of books and I really liked it.
Then about a year and a half ago, I wrote a book.
called Behind a Closed Door, and I sent it off to my agent, and at that point, I
was with a company called Writers House.
They started shopping it, and while they were shopping it, we started getting
phone calls from the folks in Hollywood.
We ended up selling the film option before we sold anything
on the publication rights.
The, the publishers got wind of that, so then they, you know, all
the publishers all of a sudden wanted this book because it's been optioned.
So the book was about to go to auction, you know, meaning there were more than one
publishers that wanted to get involved.
And I got a phone call from a friend of mine who worked at Random House, and
she said, listen, we're about to offer on your book in this auction, and when
that happens, you need to turn it down.
And I asked her why, and she said, well, we're about to lay off a
bunch of people, and the editor who wants your book is on that list.
And there's nothing worse than having a book, you know, that loses its
editor at a publisher, because that book can sit there in limbo forever.
I got a similar phone call from somebody at HarperCollins about a
week later, and then all these These layoffs happened all across the
industry which really spooked me.
So I reached out to some friends of mine that I used to work with in finance.
Simon and Schuster had just recently been bought by a private equity firm.
So I started these back channel conversations with Simon and Schuster,
and ultimately I created my own imprint through Simon and Schuster.
We struck a deal where I basically created my own publishing imprint.
Through Simon and Schuster, they handle all of my print sales and distribution.
So I kind of get the best of both worlds.
I can put out whatever books I want, whenever I want, but through
Simon and Schuster, which means they get in all the places I
couldn't get to as an indie author.
So you'll find my books in the big box stores.
You'll find them in the grocery stores, the drug stores you know, any
place where, where books are sold.
So that's where I'm at today.
And I honestly love it.
I think it's the best possible position I could be in.
Rupert Isaacson: I agree.
Now, of course wading through the fine print of all those
contracts is a difficult thing.
Does your agent still handle all that?
Even when you're semi indie?
JD Barker: It, it depends on the contract, and I've, I've got multiple agents.
I've got one that handles domestic sales, another one that handles foreign.
I've got a film and television agent.
And I've got an attorney who kind of, you know, oversees all of it.
So depending on what's coming down the pike, I, I, you know, I, I tend to
pass it off to the right pair of eyes.
I try not to review that stuff on my own, but, but, but I can, I mean, I, I
was, I was a chief compliance officer at a brokerage firm for two decades.
You know, that, that's all legal experience.
I've, I've been through more contracts than.
You know, that I could name so I'm capable of doing it, but it's always good.
Even, you know, even if I was an attorney, I would still get a second pair of
eyes to look at some of these things.
Publishing contracts tend to be pretty straightforward, but a film
and TV contract can be 300 pages long.
And, you know, they might say the same thing five different ways in
different spots in the contract.
It's, it's best to have the right person to look at that sort of thing.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
How did you go about getting your first agent?
I know, so, the reason I'm asking that question is, again, I know a lot of
people really want to write, and when they have something good whether it's
an a proposal, if it's non fiction, or they've actually written the book as
fiction, because Again, a little bit of insider information for the listeners.
If you're going to write a memoir or something like that, you can often
get a publishing deal with a very good proposal, but for fiction, you almost
always have to write the whole book.
But once you've got that getting an agent, of course, as you know, is.
Not just extremely useful.
It's kind of key.
How did you go about getting your agent?
And what advice have you got for people now because the industry's
changed a lot since we came into it so how did you get your first agent?
And then what would you say to people who are coming into to it
now wanting to find a good agent?
JD Barker: Well, the first time around, I did it completely wrong.
I had no idea what I was doing when it came to like, I knew how to write a book.
I had no clue how to get an agent.
So I actually bought a list of 200 agents just an Excel spreadsheet
with all their contact information.
And I sent out a mass email literally to whom it may
concern, you know, here, here's.
What my book is about, here's the first three chapters.
I sent everybody the exact same thing, which is not how you're supposed to do it.
If you go to an agent's website, everyone tells you exactly what they want.
They're all different.
You know, this agent wants a PDF file.
This one wants a word document.
This one wants one chapter.
This one wants three.
They want it in an aerial font.
But this one wants Times New Roman.
Like every one of them is different.
You have to appease them.
You have to do what they're asking because they will just hit that
delete button the second it comes in.
If it's not in the right format, you know, without even looking
at what the book is about.
So the first time with Forsaken, I sent all those out and I, and I didn't get
an agent, I got hardly any responses because I basically did it wrong.
When it came time for the second book, the fourth monkey, I had a
really strong sales record behind me which makes things way easier.
You know, because they were able to pull up my sales record.
They could see what I was capable of moving, you know,
on my own as an indie author.
That's something that's very attractive to the traditional publishers because
you've got a proven track record.
So I had no trouble getting an agent the second time around.
I think I'd make very
Rupert Isaacson: How did, well, how did you move all those
copies as The indie author.
I mean, I know that you had this great story about trying to get to Stephen
King and then him, obviously reading your book and so on, but nonetheless, to
actually move copies is another thing.
How did you do that?
JD Barker: Yeah, I mean, the Stephen King helped a lot because it, you
know, it kind of spurred things.
You have to have a good book.
That's key.
A lot of people think they don't even consider that, but you
have to have a five star read.
It has to be the kind of book where somebody reads it and
they tell five people about it.
Because word of mouth is what really sells books.
That particular book, and luckily a lot of mine have had that That
kind of power, you know, people just tell their friends about them.
They read one.
They've got to read the next five that I write, so I've been really
lucky when it comes to that.
I did a lot of advertising very early on Facebook and Amazon ads
before it was really popular.
I did a lot of translations early on before indie authors were
really doing that sort of thing.
I hired my own translators and put the books out in different
countries all on my own.
You know, and, and the margins are much better.
And I took that same, you know, that money and I was able to roll it back
into more advertising and it just becomes this self fulfilling machine.
So you were basically
Rupert Isaacson: using your savings to do those translations, buy those ads,
because that's the other thing is people have to know that the book exists.
They need to know that it's out there.
What would you say it costs you?
To put that first book out,
JD Barker: I think I spent about 1, 000 on the cover, maybe another
2, 000 for formatting and editing probably all in maybe 5, 000 or
so to, to get it out the door.
The audio book, I think I paid 400 per finished hour.
So that was about another 4 or 5, 000.
But I made that back like within the first month easily on audio books.
You know, they're, they're not quite as lucrative as they used
to be, but they, you can still, I mean, they're a huge profit center.
Yeah, I think every author should be doing that sort
Rupert Isaacson: of thing.
That's not cheap.
So you're 10 grand in there.
What did you spend on the advertising?
JD Barker: Oh, I mean, there is points in my career where I've spent 000 in a month.
I've done that within a week of publication on one book.
I spent, I think, 15, 000 in seven days.
Right.
It's all about, for me, it's about watching the metrics.
As long as the money coming in exceeds the money going out.
Rupert Isaacson: But that first book, your first time author, you,
you know, you're doing a bit of a financial white knuckle ride.
What would you say?
Okay, wait.
So we're 10 grand in for the production.
What would you say it cost you in the advertising and going back remembering?
This is what?
20 years ago or 15
JD Barker: years ago, it was about 10 years ago.
I, I don't, I, I couldn't give you a number without going
back to the spreadsheets.
I, I, it, it got significant at one point.
But you know, your dollars, we know it's not cheaper back in those days.
No, I mean, like I was getting click throughs at like, you
know, 5, 10 cents back back then.
Like in today's world, you just don't get that.
There's, there's, it's too crowded of a market.
So it's just, it's completely different.
You know, book bump back then, like you would get one book bump deal
and you'd move, you know, 5, 10.
Thousand copies in a day you know, like that just doesn't
happen anymore with book.
Bob, I'm, I'm always looking for like the next biggest thing, you know, from what
I've been able to tell over the years, if I see all the other indie authors out
there talking about it, doing something at that point it's, it's too late, you know,
like it's time to find the next big thing.
If you do what everybody else is doing, you're just going to
kind of get lost in that mix.
Rupert Isaacson: And how do you find, how do you go about
finding that new big thing?
Again, there'll be, there'll be young authors out there
needing this information.
JD Barker: Yeah, so that, I think the autistic person in me is, is what
really leads that charge, you know.
I, I look at a problem and I look for a solution to that problem.
So, to give you an example TikTok.
When TikTok first came out You know, I started watching it, trying
to figure out, like, how can an author move a book on tick tock?
And, you know, I quickly realized nobody wants to see me dancing around
in a bathing suit, holding up my book.
That's not going to work.
It's not scalable.
It's, you know, it's, it's one of those things, like, it's just not, you
know, I couldn't do it enough of that.
Like, so what I ultimately ended up doing, I, I hired a couple of college kids.
They combed through book talk, which was the hashtag used for tick tock.
And they started gathering email addresses of all the people that were.
pushing books on Tick Tock.
And ultimately I put together a list of about, I think it's 3, 500
to 4, 000 book talk influencers.
The smallest one's got a thousand followers.
The biggest one is a little shy of a million.
And we created a company called best of book talks.
So once a week we put out an email that goes to those influencers.
I get ARC copies from the traditional publishers for free.
That I can give to those influencers.
So it's very similar to book Bob, but for influencers.
So they get an email of five or 10 titles.
They can say, okay, I want this one, this one, and this one.
And my company arranges the, the ARCs to go to them directly.
So now I've got this giant tool that has this mailing
list that goes out once a week.
Anytime I want to push my own titles, I can put them in there and get
them in front of that large group.
You know, millions and millions of followers all in one shot essentially
for free because I'm piggybacking on a company that I already own.
Versus, you know, me trying to create videos just hoping to go
viral and create something, you know, like everybody else is doing.
So that, that's the kind of thing that I do.
I look for What gave you the
Rupert Isaacson: idea to start, that's brilliant, what gave you
that idea to start a company to supply these people with books?
JD Barker: My accountant, because if you once you start doing anything
that brings in any kind of revenue, it's best to break it off from the
other revenue generating sources.
So, you know, became an LLC.
Then it became a corporation.
I've done that quite a few times over the, you know, over
my career, just creating stuff.
You know, it's like throwing spaghetti at a wall.
I mean, for every 10 things that I create, one of them might actually work out.
But if I don't try, you know, like, none of them are going to work out.
So I'm always trying something different.
Rupert Isaacson: And in order to get, so, so when you're putting the
titles, I presume you still do this in front of these booktok influencers.
How do you get these titles?
How can you be sure that you can deliver them?
Because that's distribution effectively.
How do you become that distributor?
JD Barker: It's all already done in advance.
So while the influencers are signing up and working on that portion of the
list, getting the email and requesting books, publishers are basically bidding
for those spots within the email, just like if you're as an author, you try to
get a spot on book, Bob, you have to pay book Bob to be on that particular email.
So every book that's listed is a bought and paid for a spot
from the traditional publishers.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
But I guess, I guess for me, what I'm trying to understand is you are, you are,
are you sending them physical copies or are you just No, we just, we pass them
recommending that they read something?
JD Barker: No, we, we give them two options.
So they can either download the ebook, you know, which we, we set up the,
the download link so they can actually download directly to their Kindle
or they can request a physical copy.
And if they request a physical copy that their information goes into a
form and that data gets transmitted to the publisher, and then the
publisher actually mails them out.
So we don't physically have to touch anything.
And how how do you choose which titles to put in front of them?
We get a lot of submissions from the, from all the publishers.
So we just kind of pick through them and, you know, pick our, our favourites.
What we feel is, is going to work.
You know, over time we've learned what the audience on TikTok is looking for too.
Like we know they're not going to resonate with like a children's book.
Westerns don't do particularly well.
It's, it's really fantasy and romance and thrillers, you know, come third.
So, you know, we've learned that over time.
And we, we keep that in mind as we pick the titles.
So it's mostly fantasy.
Fantasy tends to be the biggest right now, yeah.
Across the board.
This sounds like a full time job.
How do you have time to write?
I hire other people.
I mean, you know, it starts off as an idea coming out of my head then
I usually rope in, you know, one of my assistants or somebody to help me
then it just kind of grows from there.
I mean, at this point there's four different people that work
on best of book talk alone.
They're in the middle, like, right now, if things Continue tick tock is
going to get shut down here in the U.
S.
As of this coming Sunday.
So they've been scrambling to try and figure out what comes next.
So we've, we've already purchased all the domains for like best of
books to Graham and, you know, like basically all the other platforms.
The nice thing is in, in, you know, in that particular world
and influencer, they don't just put book reviews on a tick tock.
They tend to put it out on all the different social media platforms.
So it's going to be a sideways step for all of them.
It's just at this point, nobody knows where that sideways step is going to be.
Rupert Isaacson: Interesting.
I mean you say you just hire other people, but of course that takes, you know, There
must be a point where you're prototyping an idea like that, best of booktok,
where you have to just do it yourself and bootstrap it and then see if it works and
then Hire other people because of course that's expensive or do you take do you
take the risk and just hire right away?
JD Barker: No, no, it tends to grow like I tend to do, you know, like
99 percent of the work at the very beginning Then I bring in other people
on a 50 percent of that Just kind of whittle away at it until I get into the
I fall into more of a supervisory role
Rupert Isaacson: How long would you say you're having to do all of it
before you can hand it over to say 50%?
JD Barker: It really depends on the entity.
I mean, that that one took off straight away.
You know, as soon as we put it out there, we got reception from the publishers.
We got reception from the influencers.
I knew it was going to grow, and I knew I'd be able to scale it right now.
We're trying to decide.
Do we want to scale into other languages?
Do we want it?
We're only doing one email a week, and we could easily create one
email for thrillers, another one for fantasy, another one for romance,
put out three or four emails a week.
So those are the kind of conversations we're having internally.
Rupert Isaacson: So, with something like that, you're, you're writing,
now you're sort of influencing.
The next step, presumably, sounds like publishing.
Are you going to become a publisher?
JD Barker: Well, I, I sort of already am with my arrangement with Simon Schuster,
so I've, I've got that covered too.
Rupert Isaacson: But in terms of publishing other
people and becoming a house?
JD Barker: I've thought about it.
I'm doing a lot of work with coauthors, which I'm really enjoying.
You know, I've got a ton of ideas, but I've only had so much
time to write books on my own.
So every once in a while, I'll come up with an idea and I'll create it and bring
in somebody else to write it with me.
And I love doing that.
I mean, I've got a book I just.
That released in November called heavier.
The stones.
I wrote it with a woman named Christine Daigle, who's a
neuropsychologist in real life.
You know, so she was able to bring that mindset and that skill
set into the writing process.
And, you know, as an author, I can fake my way through it.
I can do a bunch of Google searches.
I can research and I can kind of create a character.
That's a neuropsychologist and make it seem authentic.
But having somebody who really does that in real life as part of the writing
process, you know, you can't beat that.
So, you know, I'm working with a ton of co authors just to try and.
Yeah.
To strengthen that and, you know, increases the number of
books that I'm putting out.
So it's kind of a win win for everybody.
Rupert Isaacson: And when you work with co authors, are you
doing a work for hire thing?
Are you paying them a fee and then they also get a percentage of a royalty?
How does that work?
JD Barker: Accounting for something like this can get really complicated if
you do it as on a split you know, split royalty basis, so I just do it as a work
for hire you know, they're basically coming in, you know, mainly for the
exposure and for the learning curve I can teach them how to write a thriller,
a solid thriller from start to finish.
And most of the authors that I bring in, you know, they're good, but they're not.
And then the flip side, when the book comes out, it's coming
out through Simon and Schuster.
It's coming out worldwide.
You know, so they're, they're basically, they've got a book with their name on
it and all these places they could never get to on their own which means when they
write their next book, you know, it makes it that much easier because an agent's
going to look them up and they're going to see they've had titles, you know,
at all, you know, all these different places, all these different languages.
They've got a proven track record, which makes it that much easier.
So, yeah, Again, it's, it's a win win for everybody.
Rupert Isaacson: So you give them, you give them room on the, on the book jacket.
You say this is, you know, J.
D.
Barker with so and so, or J.
D.
Barker and so and so.
JD Barker: Yeah, yeah.
I make it very clear that it was written with somebody else.
I give everybody the credit that they have coming to them.
You know, it's coming out of the world when I, you know, I didn't get that credit
when my name wasn't even on the cover.
I'm very cognizant of it to make sure that they get what they deserve.
Rupert Isaacson: And how do you find your co writers?
That's not, that's not necessarily an easy thing to find.
Especially good ones.
JD Barker: No.
You know, a lot of them, it's funny because they'll have a book coming out
and their agent will send me an ARC copy or their publisher will send me
one so I pick up on people that way.
I meet a lot of authors at writer conferences a lot of authors in today's
world, they know that I'm doing this, so they talk to each other, you know, I
get a lot of recommendations that way.
There's never been a shortage.
It's really about, you know, picking the quality of the, the names that
come in, the, the process, you know, the people that come through my door.
Rupert Isaacson: Well, indeed.
And that's not always.
A given, right?
Because you
JD Barker: No, I mean You don't necessarily know how
Rupert Isaacson: well they write until you try.
JD Barker: I really think that writing is, you know, like there's a writer's
gene, you know, like somebody can either tell a story or they can't tell a story.
Yeah, yeah.
I think you're born with that.
All the basics, the grammar rules, punctuation, all that kind of
stuff, like that can be taught.
But that writer gene, the storyteller gene, can't be.
So I really look for that.
If I find somebody who I feel can tell a story But need some work on something
else that I can fix, I'm, I'm all in.
But, you know, they could have perfect grammar, perfect punctuation,
their pacing might be great, but if they can't tell a story, you know,
it's like reading a textbook, and you know, it just, that won't work.
Rupert Isaacson: So you're looking, in general, for sort of first
time authors who might be looking for a break, would that be right?
And have they already written something so that you can test
whether or not they're any goods?
JD Barker: Some have, some have written full books, other ones have only written
short stories some work in the newspaper or magazine or, you know, they're doing
something else online where they're writing, but not quite at the novel
stage you know, so that it all kind of depends if they've got a book out there,
then obviously I've got an easy sample.
I can read if they've never written fiction before.
I'll give them some kind of an assignment to see what they come up with.
You know, everyone is different.
I don't think one project has come together the same way as another one.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
And then in terms of when you are co authoring, it's an intriguing thing,
and I think a lot of people listening to this would, you know, see an opportunity
there, because there will be among our listeners some decent writers there who
maybe could see this as an opportunity.
Roughly what percentage of the book would you say they write?
JD Barker: They, they write almost all of it and, and that's, you know, on purpose,
you know, not because I don't want to do the work, but because if I write it,
they're not going to learn anything.
So I hold their hand through the entire process.
We come up with the title together.
We come up with the tagline together.
We write the backup book blurb, you know, which is a text that you'd
find on the back of a paperback.
I make them do all that stuff.
Create it, you know, at the get go before we do anything
related to the writing process.
Like, whenever I write a book, the tagline is always on a
piece of tape on my monitor.
I read it every single day before I start writing.
Same thing with the, the, about the book, you know, the back of book text.
Like, I feel like if you read that every day before you start writing,
it's always going to keep you on task to make sure you write the
book that you're supposed to write.
So I forced them to create all those different parts.
Once we've got those, I walk them through the outlining process.
You know, we, we outline the book from start to finish.
And, you know, I.
I keep we keep going at it and going at it until it's perfect, you
know, I basically teach them what they're what they're doing wrong.
I tell them what I would change in it.
You know, we just we keep going back and forth on it till we get an outline.
That's solid.
And then we start the writing process and I hold their hand chapter by
chapter sentence by sentence and walk them through everything that I've
learned, you know, working with people like James Patterson and then when
Rupert Isaacson: you And then when you If you were to average
it out, what would you say that co authoring process takes you per book?
Is it a year?
Is it two years?
Is it six months?
What is it?
JD Barker: You know, everybody's different.
I got an email this morning from one where he literally just said, We just
had our two year anniversary, and here's the final, you know, finished draft.
You know, he just went through like my, my last round of edits and
comments and stuff, and he just cleaned it all up and got it back to me.
So that one took 2 years.
I've got other ones that are done in 6 months.
You know, for me personally, I, I can write a book in 3 to 4 months.
Everybody's different.
The nice thing about this is there's no rush.
You know, I, I, I want it to be perfect.
I want it to be right.
And I, you know, if it takes 5 years, if it takes 10 years, I don't care.
But I, you know, I'm not going to rush something through just
for the sake of getting it done.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
But of course, you know economically these people presumably they have day
jobs or side hustles or other things that they're doing What's the what
would you say is the average rate like?
If someone's listening to this, I think, well, maybe I'd like to have
a go at that co authoring thing.
But I'm not yet, you know, a, a, a very, a known author.
So my place in the marketplace is very much in the sort of beginner.
What, what could somebody expect?
What's the average that someone could expect to, to earn in a, for
a job like that, work for hire?
JD Barker: I don't want to get into the economics of it because
it's different for, for everybody.
I mean, I approach it based on their, their financial situation from a time
standpoint, I would say probably a year on the short end somebody who's
not familiar with writing a book.
You know, if they've only got experience in nonfiction or, or short stories or
something like that, it's probably a year and a half to 2 years from start to
Rupert Isaacson: finish.
Right?
I'm just, just thinking, you know, some people might think, oh, my
gosh, would I be able to like, you know, live for a year on that?
I would imagine the answer would probably be no, right?
They'd have to have other sources of income, no?
Probably.
JD Barker: Yeah, no, I mean, the point of this isn't, isn't the money you
know, what this really stemmed from like years back, I was mentoring a
lot of authors, you know, I was, you know, basically teaching them how to do
this, but they paid me for that and I felt icky about taking money for this
kind of thing, but I had to charge because it kind of weeded people out.
Well, it also takes time.
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
JD Barker: Yeah.
So, but I basically flipped the model on its head and instead of them paying
me for, for a mentorship situation, I pay them for the finished book.
So they do walk away with something, you know, rather, rather than, you
know, what they were doing before.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
And then you said that you co authored with James Patterson,
who's obviously a huge name.
How did that come about?
JD Barker: He read The Fourth Monkey.
We, the publisher sent it to him hoping to get one of those blurbs,
you know, one sentence on the back.
And he, he read it and, and felt strongly about it and reached out and
asked if I wanted to co author with him.
Rupert Isaacson: Fantastic.
So he also wants to get More books out there than he himself has time to do.
So did he some degree mentor you through that model?
JD Barker: Yeah, absolutely.
I mean he's he's been a huge mentor, you know, not only on the writing
front, but also the business side
Rupert Isaacson: Wonderful and on on his books, would you get
your book on your your name?
JD Barker: Yeah, we actually have fine.
Would it just be
Rupert Isaacson: them
JD Barker: in, in the, in our contract, it, it says that my name has to be printed
in an equal font size to his mm-hmm
Um, in, in, in America o other countries.
It's, it's different.
I think, I think you're in the uk, right?
It's so like some places that rule applies, some places it doesn't, but he
knows that I'm doing this for exposure, you know, so he's, he's got no problem
with, you know, giving me the name recognition and I bring a pretty big
audience to every book that we coauthored together, which, which is helpful.
Rupert Isaacson: And if somebody wanted to get into coauthoring obviously
there's a contract involved, I presume.
Would you have your agent or your lawyer draw up that contract?
Would you encourage them to get their own Representative to check
that contract over like what would your advice be for a newbie?
JD Barker: Yeah, I would never sign anything, you know without having you
know, the proper set of eyes look at it You know, so even if I send a contract off
to somebody else I always encourage them to you know, get their attorney to look at
it You know, make sure they're comfortable with all the language in it In a business
like this you have to you have to be very
Rupert Isaacson: careful No doubt, but I mean there's gonna be people
who are like, you know Barely, you know, paying the rent, how are they
going to afford to get an attorney?
Like how can they, if they're sort of young and hungry,
get to grips with the contract without, without that, or do they have to just
sort of go get the money from somewhere and actually find themselves an attorney?
I, if it were me, I know I would.
Yeah.
JD Barker: If I was, if I was penniless, I wouldn't put my name on something,
you know, signing an agreement without understanding exactly what's there.
Rupert Isaacson: Because I presume it also has to be a, an entertainment
attorney or a media savvy attorney.
It can't just be sort of your friend that does real estate
law or something like that.
JD Barker: Yeah, exactly.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, that's that's fascinating.
So effectively, yes I mean that does sort of make you a little bit.
It sounds less like a publishing house and more like the old Renaissance
painter studio idea where you might, you know, buy a painting that's
after Raphael or you know or might even say Raphael Titian, but
it came from the Studio of that painted because he couldn't possibly
paint all the commissions himself.
So we'd have, you know, teams and teams of young artists who would
eventually, of course, make it and then go off and create their own studios.
Yeah,
Let's just quickly give, give everyone all the, the titles and, and the websites and,
and social media that they need to find to get to including your book talk stuff.
And then if there's just any closing words you'd like to.
We'll do that.
So how, how do people find you if they want to buy your books, if
they want to work with you, if they wanted to protect, to, to approach
you for co authoring or something.
How do people do this?
And give us your title list as well, so people can find you on Amazon.
JD Barker: Sure.
So the easiest place to find me is JD Barker dot com.
If you're interested in the coauthoring thing, there is a contact button
on there with with a little form.
Just fill that out and send your information and
I'll reach back out to you.
The books can be found pretty much everywhere.
I'm in bookstores all around the world.
You know, everywhere online.
I've got a number of titles coming out over the next couple of months.
We don't talk about Emma comes out in February first week of February.
I've got another book called the writer that I wrote with James Patterson
coming out in beginning of March.
And my next solo title comes out in May.
It's called something I keep upstairs.
Which is probably the scariest book I think I've ever written.
I, it took me about four years to actually get that one done because I, I
kept freaking myself out and had to put it aside and kind of come back to it.
But I, I got it done.
I'm glad that it.
I'm glad that it's finished and comes out in
Rupert Isaacson: May.
JD Barker: Alright, well I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
Rupert Isaacson: Thanks for coming on.
It's been a pleasure.
Bye.
Bye Thank you for joining us.
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