Today on the Published Podcast, we're joined by international bestselling fiction author J. D. Barker. J. D. is best known as a suspense thriller author and has collaborated with Dacre Stoker, Christine Daigle, E.J. Findorff, and most frequently, James Patterson.

In this episode, we will discuss the magic of co-authoring — the advantages of partnering with other writers, and how to navigate the creative process to build successful partnerships and do more than you could do alone.

Automatically generated transcript:

Welcome to Published, a podcast by Greenleaf Book Group, where we'll discuss the ins and outs of the publishing industry, from writing a book and finding the right publisher, to gearing up for a book launch. And now, here's your host, Greenleaf Book Group CEO, Tanya Hall.

Welcome back to Published. Today, we're joined by international bestselling fiction author, J. D. Barker. J. D is best known as a suspense thriller author, and has collaborated with Dacre Stoker, Christine Daigle, EJ. Findorff, and most frequently, James Patterson. In this episode, we will discuss the magic of co-authoring, the advantages of partnering with other writers, and how to navigate the creative process to build successful partnerships and do more than you could do alone. If you enjoy our show, please take a moment to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. It means a lot to have your feedback, and it helps us to make sure we are answering your publishing questions. Now let's dive into the interview. All right, JD., welcome to Published.

Hey, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to this one. So why don't we start by having you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about what you do and what you're known for as an author.

Wow. So I'm one of those people, I was an overnight success that took about 30 years. So it's kind of a pretty long back story. In today's world, I'm a New York Times bestseller. I'm in, I think, about 150 different countries, a little shy at 30 different languages. I just had my 10-year anniversary though as an author from my first book being published. So things can change very rapidly in this business. I've been writing pretty much my entire life. I'd also been told you can't make a living as a writer, so I did what I was supposed to do. I went to college, I got a couple of degrees, ended up working in the corporate world, but I couldn't give up the ghost, so I would come home and I would work on writing projects at night. Initially, I started off interviewing celebrities way back when I was in college. And when you work for newspapers and magazines, I quickly learned that everybody that you're working with has a novel at some stage of development in a desk drawer somewhere. It's 400,000 words long, they've been working on it for 10 years, it's almost done. I kind of became the guy they would hand those to for ideas. I do developmental edits, copy editing, whatever they needed. But over time, that turned into a little side hustle as a book doctor and a ghostwriter. So essentially, when I graduated college and got into the corporate world, I would come home and I would work on those types of projects at night, which kind of filled the need, the writer bug, and it kind of put that at ease a little bit. Over that time, I did it for 23 years, six different books hit the New York Times bestseller list, all with other people's names on the cover that I had written, which gets very old. So at one point, my wife pulled me aside and she said, listen, I know you want to become a full-time author. We were kind of trapped because I had a real strong salary, we had a big house, we had cars, we couldn't just walk away from the lifestyle. So she came up with this crazy plan. We sold everything that we owned. We bought a tiny little duplex in Pittsburgh. We rented out one side to some tenants and we lived in the other side, essentially so I could quit the job and live off the savings long enough to knock out that first book. That was 10 years ago.

Wow. What an amazing story and what an amazing wife you have. That's awesome for someone to have that type of support and obviously, it's paid off.

Yeah. I know a lot of authors at this point and we all seem to have that person in our corner, that cheerleader, somebody to nudge us along. I would still be working a job in the corporate world that I hated if she hadn't pushed me into this, so I'm forever grateful for that.

No, I love that. That's great. Well, let's start by digging into the co-authoring thing. That's the focus of our episode today. Could you tell us a bit about what that entails? Maybe some of the different forms that collaboration can take?

Yeah. I've been working as a book doctor and a ghost writer. I pretty much always collaborated. I was picking up a project that somebody started or somebody needed help on. Sometimes an agent would call me or an editor would hire me to work on something that they acquired. But I always worked with other people. So when I started writing my own books, I felt like something was missing. So I started mentoring other writers and I kind of filled that void doing that. James Patterson read my second book, The Fourth Monkey, and ultimately we ended up working together after that. We've written five books, I think, together at this point. It was just a huge learning curve working with somebody like that. Not only from the writing standpoint but from the business side. I personally have a lot of stories I want to tell. There's only 27 hours in the day so I can't knock them all out myself. So I've kind of created this model where I'm bringing in co-authors. Basically people that are good at writers, they have what I call the writer gene. Like I feel like there's storytellers out there and there's people that want to be a storyteller. But like certain people have that gene, they always stand out when I'm teaching a class. So I wrote them into a co-authoring project where we kind of work together. I help them work through where they have difficulties and teach them what I've learned over the years working with people like Patterson. I wrote a prequel to Dracula for the Bram Stoker's family. I've collaborated on a lot of stuff. So I kind of hand them that knowledge and walk them through the entire process. And then ultimately we put the book out through, I've got my own imprint with Simon and Schuster, which kind of gives them a leg up because if you're a first time author, you're trying to break into the world, all of a sudden your first book is in 150 different countries, 30 different languages. You can find it at Costco. You can find it at the grocery store. When they write that next book on their own, they're a known commodity, which makes it a lot easier for them to find an agent and find a publisher. It's a win-win for everybody.

Yeah, that's so interesting. The connection with Patterson sounds like a tipping point in your career. Did he reach out to you?

It was a weird thing that just developed. Fourth Monkey had gotten acquired by HMH, which is now part of HarperCollins. One of the things that editors always do is they mail off ARC copies, advanced reader copies of the book to all these big name authors, hoping that at least one of them will give you that little blurb for the back cover. Patterson happened to be on that list. He got the book and he read it, and then ultimately we ended up talking on the phone. He's in Palm Beach most of the year, and I've got family down there. So we just made plans to get together for lunch. I didn't really think it was going to go anywhere. I just figured it would be a cool opportunity to meet somebody that had been there, done that, and might be able to offer a little bit of advice. But he came to the table with a folder, two inches thick about me and my entire background, everything I had worked on. My sales history, like he did some serious research. And we kind of hashed out the idea of working together, but we butted heads because he's known for outlines. He's a hardcore outliner. I've always been a pantser. So we were approaching this from two different worlds, and it didn't seem like we'd be able to do anything together. So we left that table that day, and it didn't really go anywhere. And then about a month or two later, I got a phone call from him. He said, you know what, let's go ahead and try it your way. We'll pants a novel. So I'm the only guy who's ever gotten Patterson to pants a novel. I would write a chapter, paint him into some kind of impossible scenario, hand it off to him. 15 minutes later, he'd write his way out of that, put me into something even crazier. And we wrote this book that way. It was called The Coast to Coast Murders. And when we finished it up, he sent me an outline. He said, okay, we've done it your way. Let's go ahead and try it my way. Here's an outline for a book called The Noise. I want you to see the difference. Honestly, it converted me. I've outlined every book ever since. And essentially what I learned from it, I live on a little island off the coast of Portsmouth in New England. Every day, I go for a run, about four miles, and I use that time to think about what I'm going to write next. So when I was pantsing a novel, I was always basically figuring out what that next scene is going to be about. Where is the story going? What comes next? But now that I have an outline in front of me, I use that same brain power to figure out how to make what comes next better. And by doing that, I think I'm ending up with a tighter book, a stronger story. I mean, honestly, there's a lot less words on the cutting room floor when I'm all done. I breeze through the second draft and I move on to the next project much faster. So I am fully converted thanks to Mr. Patterson.

Interesting. So yeah, it sounds like a more efficient way to write. And I assume by pantsing, this is alluding to the seat of your pants.

Yeah, I'm sorry. It's one of those terms we throw around. I always assume everybody knows what it means. But yeah, that's where it comes from.

I got it. Okay. I figured. I thought I'd check. I'm guessing a lot of people are scratching their heads about pantsing.

Yeah, I think in some parts of the world, they call it discovery writing. But it's essentially like Stephen King is probably the most well-known for this. If you read on writing, which is his book on the craft, he basically says if he doesn't know where the story is going, the reader is not going to figure it out, which is totally true. But what ends up happening is you end up writing a lot longer story because you're feeling it out on your own. To give you an example, when I was writing Coast to Coast Murders with Patterson, there was a dinner scene that I had put in there. It was about probably three or four pages long, maybe a thousand words. It wasn't very long. But there were certain points that I felt had to be communicated. So I had them talk about it at dinner and put it into dialogue. He sent it back to me. He said, is there any reason we can't just change this all to, they had dinner, three words. Then he just came up with two places to dump in two sentences that he had pulled from the dialogue somewhere else in the book, which was just so much more efficient. But for me as a pantser, as a discovery writer, I had to see that scene visually. I had to see them having dinner in order for those things to come to fruition. But in the end, it could be edited out. I do quite a bit of that when I write a book. I'll usually write about 160,000 words on a title. I cut 40,000 to 50,000 words out. It's almost like cooking a piece of steak where you trim the fat and just get it down to the leanest piece of meat possible. It's how I see the process.

That's really interesting. So your background as a book doctor and a ghostwriter, it's interesting to hear how your process has changed. Did that inform how you approached co-authoring?

You know where I think it's really helped me? I did a lot of memoirs. I worked with a lot of politicians and a lot of sports figures, people that had a very colorful life. I would sit down with them and I would interview them sometimes for a couple of days and I would put the interview down on paper, I would transcribe it and then turn that into their memoir. That really taught me character development because I basically had to take somebody I didn't know, I had to write a book in first person from their point of view. Doing that over and over again just taught me how to develop characters that feel like real life individuals because that was essentially the job back in the day. So if I had to credit it for anything, it would be that.

That makes sense. And what would you say are some, you've touched on this a bit, but the advantages of partnering with another writer and then I guess along the same lines, when should someone think about strategically, like that is a choice I'm going to make to get this book done. Is it when they're trying to break in, as you described earlier?

Everything in this business I think needs to be a business decision. Ultimately, you're creating widgets, you're creating a product that has to sell. So partnering up with somebody like me, I've got a ridiculous number of books in my background that I've already written. So I can bring that experience to the table. I can basically teach somebody what I've learned, where I made mistakes, and help them avoid a lot of those. I like writing with other people because it allows another perspective to come into the storytelling process. To give you an example, I have a book called Heavier of the Stones, that I wrote with a woman named Christine Daigle. In real life, she's a neuropsychologist. She was able to bring that entire mindset, her degree, and all of her experience to the writing process. I can fake my way through it. I can do enough research on Google. I can watch enough Netflix to put a person together, create a storyline. But nothing beats having that authentic voice behind you. That being said, a lot of her writing, it needed work. She was able to communicate these things in very good detail, but it wasn't necessarily paced like a thriller. The dialogue wasn't quite there. I was able to help her with that and not only make the changes, but explain why I was making the changes so that she was able to do it with her next book. Again, a lot of that comes from me working with Patterson. I mean, if you take his masterclass online, which is fantastic, working with somebody like James Patterson is essentially the same thing as the masterclass, except for he calls you and tells you everything you're doing wrong. That's essentially the vibe that I try to create with my co-authors. I hold their hand through the entire thing and help them get it right.

I've heard that his masterclass is amazing. It is certainly on my to-do list. Check that out. So I hope that our listeners will do the same. So for people who are intrigued by this and maybe don't have a direct line to James Patterson, how does one get started co-authoring a book?

I mean, there's a lot of ways for it to happen. If you're trying to break into the industry, one of the first memoirs that I wrote was for a football player down in Miami. And I had an NDA, so I can't tell you who it was. But I essentially had access to the team, and I was hanging out with them on the field. And I struck up the conversation. It's like, have you ever considered writing a book about your life? A lot of people would be interested in reading that. And he told me that he gets asked that all the time. The publishers have come to him offering very large advances for that book, but he's not a writer. So ultimately we paired up, we split the advance that he got, which was very large. And then I wrote the book for him, which gave me the opportunity to break into that. And a lot of times it's just about asking that question. I could have easily just stood there on the field, enjoyed the game, and moved on, but I felt like that was an opportunity. I didn't want to let it pass me by. Worst case, somebody's gonna tell you no. But if you don't ask the question, you don't even get that. If you're considering working with somebody else, I feel like two writers need to complement each other. It's almost like having two chefs in the kitchen making breakfast. If you're both trying to make eggs, you've got a problem. But if one person is making bacon and the other one's making eggs, you end up with a decent breakfast. So you have to divide and conquer a little bit, figure out what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are, and work from there.

Yeah, that makes sense. I love that metaphor. I like that you're putting a business lens on it. It's just like any business world scenario, you're looking for the opportunities. If you're just sitting on your hands waiting for them to fall on your lap, that's probably not how it's going to work out for you.

Yeah. I've gone to a lot of writers conferences, and sometimes you might get caught in the elevator with a very big name author. You're in there for 15 seconds and you've got a choice to make. You can either stand there in silence and watch those little numbers take by, or you can strike up a conversation and possibly it turns into something. I've always been the guy who will start that conversation and see where it goes.

Yeah. It's paid off. That's great. Let's talk about the process itself. I imagine it's quite different when you've got a co-author. You again touched upon some of the process that you and Patterson have worked through, but how's the workflow different when you've got a co-author?

Well, a lot of times I have to break people of habits because we're all fumbling around in the dark when it comes to being an author. Everybody's got a different process and there's no right or wrong way to do any of it. So even what I teach them isn't necessarily what's going to work for them in the end, but I think having new tools in their toolbox will make them better. But I walked them through the entire process. We come up with the idea for the story together. I forced them to come up with a title. I have them come up with the backup book blurb. I feel like all of that is very important to have in front of you before you start the writing process. In my case, the tagline for the book, I always have it on a piece of tape on my computer monitor in front of me. So every day when I sit down to write, I see that tagline. And it's very similar to like a movie poster if people aren't familiar with the tagline. So my most favorite one is In Space, Nobody Can Hear You Scream from Alien. It's like the perfect tagline. It's a couple of words, but it completely sums up. This is a sci-fi story. It's scary. It's this, it's that. That's what a tagline should be. But like those things can inspire you. So if you've got your title in front of you, you've got your tagline in front of you, and you've got those 200 words that will ultimately appear on the back of the book, and you read that every day before you start writing, it's going to hold you to that task. Once we have that, we work through the outlining process. We create our characters. We create our plot. And we drill down and just keep going over it and over it until we get it right. And then we start the writing process. But I don't let people fall back on their habits because that tends to be what ends up happening. They come to the co-authoring thing. They know I'm there to teach them, but they immediately want to do it their way because that's how they've always done it. And you have to be open-minded when you work with somebody else if you're there to learn.

Absolutely. And I imagine in that process, there's the potential for some creative differences. How do you resolve those?

Luckily, for better or worse, I'm autistic. I've got a form of autism called Asperger's. And everything I approach is very logic based. It's not emotional, so I don't get attached to anything. So if somebody, if they write a particular paragraph and they like it, if they can make a good argument for keeping it and I feel that it needs to go, I'll listen to them. But I'll explain my side of it too, why it needs to go. Very similar to that scene I mentioned with Patterson. I felt it needed to be there, a thousand words, but he replaced them with They Had Dinner. The best books in the world aren't created in the writing process, they're created in the editing process. So you can't be married to your darlings. You have to be willing to make those cuts.

Yeah. So it sounds like some open-mindedness and a collaborative mindset are important for people to have if they're going to pursue a co-writing relationship.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's like anything else, it's a partnership.

There was something really interesting in your background that I'd love to talk about, a little bit of a tangent, but you wrote a Dracula prequel, Dracula if I'm saying it right. And so, you had the opportunity to be a co-author with Dacre Stoker and Bram Stoker through his journals and notes, which I think is so fascinating. And it's probably a very unique challenge to collaborate with an author you can't actually speak with in that sense. So, can you talk a little bit about how you approached that, what that experience was like, what you learned?

Yeah, that one came together in kind of a weird way. My very first book was called Forsaken, and it was up for the best horror novel or best debut horror novel the year that it came out. So, I went to the Horror Writers Convention, and at one point I was sitting next to Dacre Stoker at a book signing, and we were together for about an hour or so. I picked his brain on everything related to Bram Stoker. He knew about my history as a book doctor and a ghostwriter, so he asked me a lot of questions about that. Then we kind of, you know, walked away from that, and I didn't realize it at the time, but it was a job interview. He pulled me aside later at the conference, and we had breakfast, and he said, you know, listen, my family and I, we've been trying to find somebody to write a prequel to Dracula for a while now. We've got all of Bram's original notes. We've got diaries that he's left behind. We've got journals that the family members have left behind. Would you be interested in doing it? The real selling point for me, though, Dracula is one of my all-time favorite books. It's the first, what I consider to be an adult book that I read as a kid, and it scared the bejesus out of me. And like, I've read it a million times since then, and I always get something new out of it. But in my mind, the book starts with Jonathan Harker on the train, and I always thought that's the way the book began, but Dacre told me that that was actually page 120 of the original manuscript. Bram wrote a big section of the book prior to that, that was very autobiographical, that basically explained why he felt vampires were real. And he was a firm believer in vampires, to the point where he actually had himself cremated when he died at a time in history when nobody actually did that. But when he gave this book to his publisher, his publisher pushed it back across the desk and said, no, we can't sell this as a true story. You've got to cut all this stuff out. Bram needed the money, so he made those cuts. That to me was huge because the story that Dacre wanted to tell was basically those first 120 pages. But that was tricky business because they don't exist anywhere. You know, Bram cut them out and nobody knows what actually happened to them. So we kind of had to piece everything together from his diaries, you know, from the notes that he left. And Bram wrote a ton of Dracula in a day timer. He was a theater manager, so it just made sense. You know, I mean, it does this at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. He wrote that in a day timer. He wrote stuff on laundry receipts, any kind of scrap of paper. Like, he would just use anything. But we ended up piecing this whole story together. And then while I was researching, and I learned that Paul Allen had bought the only original copy of the Dracula manuscript known to be in existence. It had been found in a barn in Pennsylvania, and nobody knows how it got there, but he bought it. So I reached out to his company and asked if there was any way we could actually see it. And he agreed, so we flew out to the Seattle area. They locked us in a conference room, took away our phones, made us wear gloves, and then they wheeled in the original Dracula manuscript. And the first thing Dacre and I did is we flipped it over to the first page, hoping those 120 pages would be there. But they weren't. It started on page 120. 120 was crossed out at the top, you changed to a 1, chapter 1 was written on it. So at first we were a little disheartened. But as we started to flip through it, we realized, like in today's world, if you make an edit, if you delete something, you literally just hit delete on your computer, it's gone forever. In Bram's world, he had to draw a line through it. There was no computer. So we started focusing very heavily on those deleted scenes that we found later in the manuscript. We realized that they actually referred back to the first 120 pages. So we were able to piece that story together like that. But by the time I finished that project, I mean, it felt very much like Bram Stoker was in the room with us. We lifted a lot of his text for portions of the book. I had to mimic his voice in order to write other parts of it. It was a fantastic experience.

I love that, and now that's on my to-read list. That's such a cool story, and I'm a little jealous of that experience. Like, what an amazing opportunity.

Yeah, it was fantastic.

Yeah, good for you. Well, you've shared so much fascinating advice and insight and experience with us today. Any parting thoughts for folks who might be considering bringing in a co-author or even becoming one?

Just like I mentioned, don't be afraid to ask that question. You never know who's looking for a co-author. Even big name authors, a lot of times they get caught having to write a particular book in order to fulfill a contract. If they've got a series, they may have to continue that series because that's their bread and butter. But I can guarantee if you sit down and talk to them, they've got some other book that they want to write that they just don't have the time to write. Sometimes you can pull that off if you work with a co-author. So don't be afraid to ask the questions when you run into somebody. It could be anybody. I mentioned a sports figure, singers, and anybody like that with a public profile. Ask the question. Worst thing they're going to do is say no.

Great advice. And if folks want to learn more about you and your work, where should we send them?

Easiest place to find me is jdbarker.com. The books can be found in pretty much every bookstore. I've got a number of them coming out. I think my next one is, we don't talk about Emma, it comes out in February. I've got my new book with James Patterson comes out in March called The Writer, and my next solo title is Something I Keep Upstairs, which comes out in May.

Awesome, JD., thank you so much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me, I appreciate it.

That's it for our episode today with JD. Barker. We hope you enjoyed learning about co-authoring and building relationships with other writers. For more information, visit greenleafbookgroup.com/episode94. You can also find advice for writing, publishing, and promoting your work in my book, Ideas, Influence, and Income, which you can learn more about at ideasinfluenceandincome.com. A big thank you to Madison Johnson, who produces the Published Podcast, and to our five star reviewers. Thank you for your support and we will be back with another episode on the last Tuesday of next month.

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