@0:00 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Hello everyone and welcome to the shades of entrepreneurship. This is your host, Mr. Flores.

@0:14 - J.D. Barker

Today I'm here with J.D. J.D. How are we doing? I'm doing great.

@0:19 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

are you? excited about this one because J.D. is an author and he actually does a lot of cool books.

One of them actually being forsaken. And some of them are kind of ventured into an area where I actually love to read, which is the sci-fi world.

@0:34 - J.D. Barker

But before we get into all of that, J.D., go ahead and introduce yourself. Who is J.D.? Well, New York Times bestseller.

I've got books all across the board at this point. jump around between horror and thrillers. I've written a bunch of books with James Patterson.

I think we've got five or so out there. A few movies and TV shows in the works. Having a ball.

Basically making a living, making  up.

@0:58 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Can't beat that. I love it.

@2:00 - J.D. Barker

I enjoyed it too much. So while I was in school, I got a job with BNG Records, which is a distribution company.

And if you've ever seen the movie, Get Them To The Greek, that was essentially my job. I'd have to take up recording artists at the airport, get them to the radio station, get them to the concerts, them, you know, hotel, wherever, and get them back on their airplane when it was time to leave town.

And to really date myself, this was people like Tiffany and Debbie Gibson and new kids on the block and Madonna, then we got all the hair bands, Guns N' Roses, Poison, Motley Crew.

But I quickly realized, you know, I've got some very famous people in the car with me. Sometimes for a week at a time, I've got student loan debts that are bracketing up, you know, how can I pay for these things?

So I started an interview on them. And I sold those interviews to magazines like People and Teen People and 17.

And that's kind of how I broke into the industry. And when you work with anybody in a newspaper or magazine, you quickly find that they've got a novel and a desk drawer somewhere that they've been working on for, you know, five, 10 years.

It's 500,000 words long. They think it's almost done. And I kind of became the go-to guy. for people to hand those off to.

I would run through them and fix, you know, grammar and punctuation and help them with story development and help them get it to the point where it's a publishable novel.

So I kept doing that, you know, while I was getting my degree. So ultimately I got my degree in business and finance.

I ended up working for a brokerage firm in Palm Beach, Florida, and it kind of went up through the ranks to the point where I was a chief compliance officer.

I was there for 20 some years, and I hated it. I mean, it was a horrible job, but it paid really good.

know, so we had the nice house, we had the cars, we had a boat, all the trappings of that, you know, that nice big paycheck.

But I hated the job and I would come home at night and I would work on books in order to stay sane.

And at the time I was doing mainly ghost writing a book doctor project, you know, tweaking books that other people had written and getting them out there for publication.

And over those two decades, I had six different ones that hit New York Times list, all with other people's names on the cover.

And that gets really old after a while. So when that six one hit up, my wife pulled me aside and she came up with this crazy plan.

She knew I wanted to be a writer. So we told everything that we owned. We bought a duplex in Pittsburgh, rented out one side, lived in the other side, and sat down at the kitchen table and looked at the bank statement.

I remember the day she showed it to me, she said, it looks like we've got about 18 months worth of savings for you to write that book.

Go. And it's been a wild rollercoaster. first one I ended up self publishing, but it sold about a quarter million copies, which was enough to put me on the radar.

The traditional guys with my second book, I scored a seven figure deal with was H and H at the time.

Now it's our upper Collins with a film and TV show attached. And it's kind of been that same roller coaster, wild ride ever since.

@4:37 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

That is remarkable. You know, I think the one thing that's actually quite remarkable is having the foresight to when you're with the BG group and having the opportunity to have all these stars in your car, and then just looking at that and saying, you what, I think I have an opportunity to one, continue to tap into my passion, which was riding, but also create source of revenue from it.

You know, that that that idea, I think that in itself is the kind of essence of entrepreneurship right there.

@5:07 - J.D. Barker

Yeah, I mean, and I don't know that being an entrepreneur entrepreneur can actually be taught. I feel like it's almost a gene or something you're bought with because you tend to spot it, you know, in random places and you find it, it's like being a rain maker, you know, you could be totally broke and somebody could put a pine cone in your hand.

And if you're an entrepreneur, you'll figure it out and turn that pine cone into a million dollar business inside of a year.

So for me, it's kind of always been that way. I've been very good at that sort of thing. Even when the book started to sell, know, we had some nice paydays at the beginning, but I kept having flashbacks to the music business.

You I had so many people that I had worked with that had that one big hit, you know, they brought in literally millions of dollars off of one song.

And you know, they bought a Ferrari, they bought a house on Miami Beach. They had all these things. then, you know, four or five months later, I saw the Ferrari disappear and then it became a Toyota, you know, and the house was gone and they were in an apartment and then they vanished altogether.

Like people just, you know, it. generally don't know how to manage money. I was working in finance, know, like when the books hit, you know, so I looked at that very closely.

So when the money started coming in, we actually took all of it and we put it into real estate, which we still do today.

We ended up buying rental properties and then we flipped it. I think 59 houses when we were in the Pittsburgh area, you know, and at this point we don't want whole bunch of rental properties, you know, more less as a side hustle that's turned into a full-time business of its own.

So we're always, my wife and I are always looking for opportunities.

@6:30 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

What would you say, you know, going through that, the different interviews with your, you know, opportunity to kind of interview some celebrities, what would you say was one of the most unique stories that you remember to this day?

@6:44 - J.D. Barker

There's a couple of them. So Madonna, very early on, she was on her Vogue tour when I worked with her and we talked and she told me that she did basically the same process for every album that came out.

She would make a list of what other people were doing to promote their albums at the time and then she would create a list of

things that didn't appear on the first list, know, things completely outside of the box. And that's what she would have her marketing people focus on.

And Madonna obviously did really well doing that. And if you remember, I'm old enough to remember her hitting every single album just kind of came out and took over the world.

And it was because of that, it was because of that particular mindset. So that is always stuck with me, I think, that she called it zigging instead of zagging.

So anytime I get any type of idea put in front of me, I weigh it against what everybody else is doing.

And I try to find some way that we can and turn it into something original.

@7:33 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

That is a brilliant idea. I really like that concept because at the end of the day, I think, you know, business in general, that's kind of the goal of entrepreneurship as well.

you can find a solution, okay, well, how can you make the solution better, right? can you make it more efficient?

@7:48 - J.D. Barker

Absolutely. I'll give you another example. I've working with James Patterson. picked his brain, you know, it's leaning at this point on the business side of things.

A lot of people don't realize that he actually came from the business world. He was in advertising in New York when he started.

writing. He wrote the Toys R Us theme song, you know, which everybody back to the day knew. But when his first book hit, his very first one was called The Thomas Bareman Number.

It didn't sell at all. I don't think he even has a copy of that one. The second book was called The Long Game of Spider.

And it did okay as a hardcover when it first came out, but it didn't light up the charts the way that he had hoped that it would.

And, you know, any regular author or your most authors anyway would kind of just, you know, accept that and shrug their shoulders and move on with their lives.

Jim wasn't willing to do that. he put up $500 of his own money and he filmed a television spot.

And nobody used TV back in the day to promote books. And it was a very simple spot. It was basically, you know, I think it said something like your wait for the next silence of the land is over.

And then a spider kind of crawled down from the corner of the screen. And that lit up that particular book and it turned it into an international bestseller.

And that's what sparked his career. So again, I think it's that entrepreneur gene, know, some people haven't, some people don't.

And you find that little spark. you know regardless of what else is going on around you.

@9:03 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, no, that's again another great analogy in regards to like trying to find like think outside the box, folks.

So I really, really enjoy that analogy because again, it's simple yet creative, right? And to your point, nobody was in that area yet.

@9:18 - J.D. Barker

No, and simple and creative, I think that's key because I found like in the book world, you know, if you write a story, the smallest amount of words that can be used to describe it, like if you describe a story in three words and five words, that book is going to be a hit.

If it takes you a paragraph, it takes you two minutes or whatever to tell somebody what a book is about, that book is going to hit the shelves and it's going to vanish.

You know, you take something like the movie alien in space, nobody can hear you scream. Like that particular tagline tells you everything you need to know.

And like, you know, hearing that tagline from marketing standpoint, that is going to be a hit. You know, so we weigh that heavily now in today's world.

when I've got a new book coming out, know, we weigh the title, we weigh the tagline, the cover on the front of the book.

there's focus groups involved. There's a lot that happens behind the scenes before it ends up on the shelf at Walmart.

@10:06 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, it's kind of crazy. You mentioned that because one of the things I've been doing here in the basement was basically going through SEO for my website and very similar, right, where you essentially need to be able to describe your webpage and what it's the value of it for the individual visiting the webpage in less than five words, right?

then they have the meta description. you have, you know, like 140 characters, 144 mechs. But even that might be too long because folks, when you actually post this stuff online, then actually cuts out some of your some of your characters.

then you have to kind of be thoughtful about how many characters you use in that as well. And yeah, it gets quite quite convoluted, but it's really fun because it really tests your knowledge.

And folks, I'll be completely transparent. I love the Thesaurus. So if you ever, if you ever read my blog post, you might find some unique words because I will truly go and actually look on the Thesaurus and see I this is what I mean.

How can I get this one? it tends into a word, a single word, right? And that sometimes is very difficult.

Now, JD, let's talk about your transition into the books. of the things you mentioned is you and your wife, you sold everything, moved into a small duplex, and then you had essentially 18 months, and then you self-published.

Take us to the process of self-publishing a book for individuals that may not know that process.

@11:21 - J.D. Barker

Sure. So at the time, that wasn't what I had planned. I wrote the book, and it was a very solid story.

I'd been down there this road before. knew what the people in New York were looking for in basically a mass market bestseller.

Where I made a mistake is I had no clue how to query agents. So I created more or less a form letter and sent it out to a list of agents that I purchased from somebody.

I think there were 200 or so on there. It was literally to whom it made concern letter. And I just shot it out, and I didn't get a whole lot of replies, and I didn't understand why.

The actual process, you really need to go to every agents website. They all have their own little terms on there.

They want to see the. first chapter, they want to see the first three chapters. They wanted it at times new Roman font.

This one wants an aerial font. You need to jump through all those hoops or it basically gets deleted the second and good pops up in their inbox.

But at the time, I didn't know that. So I didn't get a whole lot of response. I figured, you know, I'll go ahead and self publish it, you know, just to see what happens with it.

What that basically means is I had to act as the publishing company. I had to find somebody to print the book.

I had to find distribution for that book. I had to find a way 2014. So it wasn't quite as difficult as it was, let's say five years earlier than that.

Amazon, Kindle and all that already existed. were platforms out there to get it done. But I put the book out and initially the sales were decent, but they didn't, it didn't get knocked out of the park or anything.

It wasn't that wild. But in the story, I borrowed some characters from Stephen King. And there's a backstory to that.

He basically gave me permission in order to use these. But after a failed trip to his house, I basically, when I went to get permission,

permission, I printed out the manuscript, hop in the car, and basically went over to Stephen King's house, hoping to find him outside in the manuscript, which is not how life works.

I ended up reaching out to a friend who knew King really well, and he gave me an email address, and I sent the book off to him that way.

But regardless, he read the book, he liked it, he gave me his permission to use these things. after the book came out, I met with a publicist, and I told her about this failed trip that I had to King's house, and she said, you know what, I think that's the story.

So she pitched, I believe it was Publishers Weekly, and they wrote up an article about my failed attempt to get to Stephen King's house for this particular book.

And when that story came out, librarian saw it, bookstores saw it, and that's what actually lit up that particular title and caused it to sell as well as it did.

once they caught on, it was like wildfire.

@13:48 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

You know what's really interesting, too, is as you're kind of talking about your transition from former role over at BG to become an author, but one of the things is your network can

continues to expand and you mentioned you know you were able to connect a connect with someone that knows Stephen King directly so you're able to how important has networking been to your career?

@14:09 - J.D. Barker

Oh it's it's huge you know when I go to a conference if I if I'm in the elevator with somebody I make sure I know who that person is and you know I try to get contact information whenever possible and you know sometimes you know contact may not be useful to you you know until three five years down the road but having those contacts is is huge I don't think in any business you can succeed with without that yeah I could not believe I could not agree more folks in fact if folks you go visit the shades of entrepreneurship the shades of e.com you're going to see a list of entrepreneurs that we've interviewed but in addition to that if you go if you visit me on LinkedIn slash Mr.

@14:47 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Gabe floor or Mr. Gabriel Flores you're going to see the amount of events that I do kind of on a consistent basis and JD one of the things you mentioned was conferences I think sometimes I think some individuals feel they're above a conference

Like there's nothing else they can learn from a conference, but I truly find a lot of value, not only in some times attending the sessions, but actually in the networking of the conference.

@15:10 - J.D. Barker

Yeah, that's where it really happens. mean, I noticed, you know, like when COVID hit, a lot of the conferences were either cancelled or we were doing things on Zoom.

And for me, a lot of business, you know, kind of dried up, you know, just because that wasn't happening.

You know, I go to a conference at this point and I'm kind of in the same boat you just mentioned.

There's not a panel that's going to, you know, teach me something new at this point. But where it's beneficial to me is at the bar, in the hallways, in the elevators, at the cocktail receptions.

Those interactions, that's where the deals that, you know, that kind of move my needle forward with my career, that's where they happen.

So I make it a point to get into every one of those situations and stay there. You know, I don't just appear at the cocktail reception.

I'm there the whole time. If my wife goes with me, lot of times we'll divide and conquer because, you know, if we stay together, then we don't talk to anybody else.

know, so we'll, I'm trying to work our way through the room because that's what it's there for and you got to take advantage of that Um, you know, like I was at Thriller Fest in in New York Um at one point and and lee child was in the elevator with me like I you know I had 15 seconds to talk to the guy for the very first time I talked to him about blurbied my book, you know, me one of those quotes on the back I could have just as easily, you know stood there and watched the numbers take away I watched him we watched him leave the elevator, but you know, I'm just not that person I I figure if you don't ask the question, you're not going to get an answer You know, you know what you kind of serendipitously highlighted in the one of the things that's so important Is the elevator pitch when and you know why let's talk about your elevator pitch and how you create it in the importance of it Yeah, I mean when it comes to a book, you know, like before I even write a book I create the title and the tagline which is basically the one sentence describing it And I create the the backup of blurb, which is the 200 words you typically see like on the back of a paperback That later becomes my my pitch, know, so if I'm talking to film and television guys

See, I can rattle that off for whatever book it might be. You have to be ready for that, because a lot of authors aren't.

lot of conferences have these things called pitchfests, where it's almost like speed-dated with agents. You get a minute or two in front of an agent, you've got to tell them about your book, and then the bell rings, and have to move on to somebody else.

Authors need to practice that, you're selling a product in the end, and you need to be able to articulate it, and you need be to get that point across, and you need to be remembered when you walk away from that table, and you want to be the person that they remember at the end of the day.

@17:32 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, that's completely true, know, folks, our attention and experience is limited, right? And it continues to kind of get smaller and smaller, to slowly dwindling, right?

Now, with that said, if you do attend a conference, a few recommendations I would highly, you know, folks that are putting conferences together, if you have vendors there, I would highly encourage you guys to create either some type of bingo or monopoly board.

So you encourage your attendees to actually attend. and visit each one of those vendors and have this car like a Monopoly card where they can actually stick, you know, a color coded or a stick or whatever to indicate that yes, this guest has in fact attended and visit our vendor.

So that kind of great value back to the vendor. And then at the end, have everybody go ahead and put those things into a bucket, right, a drawing, right?

And so have their name and their email. So now you have their name and the email inside this bucket, right?

And you pull out and the winner gets like a free attendance of the conference next year. Now for the vendors, similar opportunity, when you have that opportunity and you're right then, have yourself, oh, table have like a little giveaway, right?

If you're able to, I know some, some laws like I'm in healthcare, the stark law. So we have to abide by that.

But if you have an opportunity to have a little bit of a giveaway, encourage individuals, say, Hey, job your business card into this bucket.

So you have a chance to win this thing. Because essentially what you're doing is you're now accumulating all that contact information from these individuals that come through.

then as JD You know, try to make yourself memorable when you're at the table visiting if the vendor is someone or agent or somebody who really want to, you know, build a relationship with make sure you have that elevator pitch down.

As JD mentioned, and it's really important that it is extremely brief like truly 10 to 15 seconds. I think the average time from a video perspective is like two seconds and then where we lost our, you know, lost our concentration or so so when you really have those opportunities make sure you know you really capitalize on them.

Now JD, what was your first you mentioned you're you're down in the duplex with the wife. You're on your first book.

What was that first book and then what what how did that then lead you mentioned you yet that book and then you went to a seven figure deal so talk about that kind of transition.

@19:45 - J.D. Barker

Yeah, so the first one was called Forsaken. It was outright horror novel. I was basically about a witch. And you know fairly scary I mean I'm a huge fan of Stephen King so that that was my goal that's the market I was kind of shooting for at the time.

But I knew I didn't want to write the same book. over and over again, which is kind of a trap that that happens.

If you start selling really well, you know, have a book that that hits the New York Times list, your agent and your publisher, they're going to come back to you.

They're going to say, we want that same book but different. And they're going to want that same book but different for the next 20 years.

Lee Child, again, is a good example of that. You know, Lee Child is not his real name. His real name is James Grant, which is on his Wikipedia page.

He wrote under multiple pen names and different tough, you know, different series of different books. And the Jack Reacher book just happened to take off.

And, you know, before he knew it, it's 20 years later. And he's known by his pen name and he stuck writing that same book over and over again.

I didn't want that to be me. So my first book was horror. My second one was a thriller. My third one was horror.

Next one was a thriller. I went back and forth. If you go to my Wikipedia page, it basically says that my stories are suspense stories, know, with the common thread is suspense with elements of horror, elements of sci-fi.

That allows me to branch out and write slightly different. What really changed for me, though, the first book, you know, indie published, it did really

Well, quarter million copies. If you do the math there, you earn about 70 cents on the dollar. So it was a very decent payday.

So when the second book was done, you know, I wasn't sure that I was going to go the traditional route because I saw the economics of publishing as an indie.

But my wife, again, way smarter than me when it comes to these kind of things. She said, go ahead and query a couple of agents.

So let's see what happens. Things were very different. I queried 53 agents. I had 13 offers within the first two weeks.

I had no trouble, you know, securing a deal with an agent. When my agent took it out to the publishing companies, know, the office started coming in.

My life literally changed in the course of an afternoon. I got a call saying that we had an offer for $150,000 out of the UK for the book.

I ran home and I told my wife and I said, we're going out to dinner. By the time we got to the restaurant, we were at 800,000.

We had broken seven figures by the time we left the restaurant all within, you know, four or five hour timeframe.

So that book came out through HarperCollins, H and H through the traditional model. So I got to see exactly how that worked.

And the traditional publishing companies are able to get your books in a lot of places that you can't get as an indie author.

They can get you in the grocery stores, the, you know, CVS, the department stores, Costco, all these fun places.

Um, it's very difficult as an indie. So I got a taste of that. Um, so I kind of started bouncing back and forth.

About four or five books in, I came up with a hybrid approach. I told my agent, I'm going to keep all the English rights for myself.

I'm going to indie publish in English, you know, so US, UK, Canada, Australia, those kind of places I'll handle myself, but you're still allowed to go ahead and sell the foreign rights.

And at that point, I'm in roughly 150 different countries at this point, two different languages or 23 languages. So it's a pretty wide market.

So I published in a hybrid model. did a little bit of all these different things. And for me, that was, that worked out really great because I got to collect that, that 70 cents on the dollar, but I wasn't able to get into some of those, those places.

So you fast forward to about a year ago, I had a new book coming out called behind a closed door.

My agent took it and sent it out to the publishers. started getting film and TV interest almost immediately. The publishing side, it was going to auction, which basically means multiple publishers wanted it and we were about to have that auction and I got a phone call from a friend of mine that works at Penguin Random House.

And she said, listen, we're about to offer on your book, you want to turn it down when that offer comes in.

And I asked her why, and she said, well, Penguin Random House is about to lay off a bunch of people and your editor is one of them and you don't want to get caught up in that mix.

I got a similar phone call from somebody at HarperCollins. So I started conversations with Simon and Schuster. They had recently been bought by a private equity firm and coming out of the finance world, I knew some of the players involved in that.

So I reached out to them. I showed them my sales numbers on previous books. told them what I wanted to do from a business standpoint, moving forward.

And ultimately, we struck a deal where I created my own imprint, my own publishing company with Simon and Schuster behind me to handle print sales and distribution, which is where I'm at today.

So any book that I put out today, I basically have the full control of an indie author, but it's coming out through Simon and Schuster, so I'm getting the best of both worlds.

to where I am today.

@24:01 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

What would you say would be the most challenging piece for an up-and-coming author who is trying to get to your level of success?

@24:12 - J.D. Barker

What would you say is the most challenging piece? I think this coverability, from my standpoint, I've been very focused on building a brand.

JD Barker is my brand. actually have a trademark on my name. There's written a certain way. All those things were purchased at the get-go.

And it's something that's always been conscious and in my head or something I worked towards. A lot of authors, they don't do that.

a publisher company tried not to do it. Like if you get your first novel gets published or a big publisher, the title is going to be nice and big.

The author name is going to be real small down at the bottom. ideally, you want that flipped. You want people to walk into a store and see your name, your name, your name.

So that's something I've tried to take control of from the get-go. But as an author, if you're new, if your book is coming out this year, a million books are going to be published this year and your book is one of them.

So you have to put some serious thought into, you know, what am I going to do to make my book stand out in that that crazy crowd?

You know, if it's coming out through one of the traditional publishers, you know, they're going to do the same thing to market your book that They're doing for all the other ones on their slate.

know, some books will get more money some books will get less But you know, they more or less do the same things if you're an indie author and you're doing the same thing that everybody else is doing That's not going to work either.

So again, you have to think outside the box. always go back to that One of the things that I did is you know, like when tiktok first came out, you know, I watched it and I scrolled it I tried, you know, I look what I couldn't figure out.

How do I sell a book on tiktok? Nobody wants to see me dancing around in a bathing suit holding up one of my books That's not going to move titles.

So ultimately what I ended up doing is I created a mailing list of people that are booktok influencers people that review books on tiktok We've got roughly I think 4,000 people now on that mailing list I turned that into a company a completely standalone company called Best of Booktok So once a week we send a mailing out to those the booktok influencers and we give them titles that I get through the traditional publishers

So they get an email very similar to Bookbub, you're familiar with that, it's got four or five books on it, influencers can pick the ones that they want to get for free and the publishers send them those titles, and then they can review them if they like them or they don't have to.

But from my standpoint, now I've got a mailing list of 4,000 or so, you know, book talk influencers, I can drop my own titles in there anytime I want and put them in front of that audience, you know, which in turn has millions of viewers on TikTok.

So I approach every situation like that, know, like if I look at Facebook, I look at what everybody else is doing on Facebook, just like Madonna, I zig instead of Zag, and come up with something new.

@26:34 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, brilliant, brilliant idea. In fact, one of the things you mentioned was trying to get notice, right, a crowded kind of room, you mentioned about a million books will be coming out.

Well, I'm looking at your book right now, The Forsaken, and so I'm just folks for the visual perspective, right, the top of the book, New York Times bestseller, and this is, I feel like this is actually really consistent.

So I kind of wanted to ask if this is, this is like a specific science with this or what.

So at the beginning of the front of the book, right. New York has about sell at the top author and then your name like you mentioned JD Barker extremely big right and then below that It says forsaken.

I would say you know I I tend to read quite a bit myself and I have noticed You know you have that New York Times stamp on the very top like this the first thing you see all the time And then usually the author name or sometimes it's the book name in the authors a little bit lower What what is there any kind of science behind that?

@27:26 - J.D. Barker

Well, it's it's a stamp of it validates the the author right see New York Times bestseller I'm technically a number two New York Times bestseller Crawdaddies was number one when my last title hit But putting number two New York Times bestseller doesn't look quite as cool as putting number one, so I don't do that But you know again any type of moniker that you can put out there, you know again You're competing against you know a million other books, you know Everybody's is brand new at that point.

Nobody's gonna you know if you're brand-new Nobody's putting New York Times bestseller. Nobody's putting USA today or Wall Street Journal or any kind of bestseller moniker because they haven't

earned it yet. But having it allows you to stand out in that crowd. And I can tell you like from a bookstore standpoint, that's when the bookstores start to, you know, stock your title.

They see that. mean, I didn't see like Forsaken was indie published, but you can find it today in an airport bookstore, which is probably the hardest place to get into.

I actually saw it at an airport bookstore and Istanbul, you know, so like it is everywhere, but it's an indie published title.

But it's all because I've hit certain milestones that allow me to kind of rise to the top, like the cream of the crop.

And that's all you can do. You just basically keep making enough noise where more and more people get to know who you are.

before you know it, you do become a familiar name, a familiar brand, and more people are picking it up.

I've been told you have to touch somebody eight to 10 times before they remember it from an advertising standpoint.

So I try to get out there as much as possible.

@28:52 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

You know, so this is kind of a two part question, because it's very interesting what you mentioned. You mentioned that the one of the hardest locations.

actually get into was an airport. So so again, two part question one, what is kind of that scale? So if an author just served for general understanding, what is that scaled, feasibility of locations and get into versus the difficulty locations to get into?

And then how did you yourself build up the JD Parker brand enough to get into those difficult locations?

@29:22 - J.D. Barker

Well, I think most authors we started off and I was guilty of this too. You know, my first book was out, I would walk into a bookstore and I would try, hey, can I talk to the manager?

Can I talk to the owner? What do I need to do to get my book in here? And the truth is they're not going to carry your book at that point.

If you look around, they've got very limited shelf space. That shelf space is expensive for them to maintain. So they, you know, they have to make sure they put stuff up there that that's going to move.

You know, so all you can really do to really get into those bookstores organically is to start selling at, you know, decent numbers where you pop up.

In my case, I'm lucky because with the deal through Simon and Schuster, Simon and Schuster reps, when they go into a bookstore, they pitch my titles right next to the signage.

future titles. You know, that's not something that I had at the get go. If you walk into like a Barnes and Noble, most people don't realize this, but every piece of shell space there is bought and paid for.

So that little alcove in the front door is probably the most expensive place you can have your book in that store.

The new release table, you know, right in front when you enter that store, that's $20,000 a week to have your title.

This is not something that I mean, the authors can do it. You know, if you've got the bank roll behind you, but most indie authors don't, you're very lucky if you can get a traditional publisher to put your debut novel out there.

You know, in a lot of ways, you know, it comes down to what, you know, that publisher is willing to spend.

If you get a big advance, you know, I found that, you know, they will put equal dollars into marketing.

You know, so if you get a $500,000 advance or a million dollar advance, they're going to put a decent amount of money marketing that book because they have to earn that money back.

If they give you a small advance, if it's $5,000, $10,000, $10,000,,000,,000, they're not going to spend a whole lot on the marketing side because they've got nothing to recoup and, you know, that low dollar amount basically tells you.

You know, I don't want to say that's what they think of your book, but that's basically where they categorized you, and you know, you need to move the needle and you've got to be one of those big dollars for all to make sense.

@31:10 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah. That definitely makes sense. have to have the return on investment for sure, and you also have to understand like what is your own worth, I'm assuming, because it sounds like a lot of these times you're kind of going into negotiations essentially selling your value as it is not only an author, but as a continuous support of or continuous value of that, that organization, is that correct?

@31:32 - J.D. Barker

Yeah, absolutely. mean, one of the other things that I've been very conscious of is to make sure that I do a lot of high profile projects, you know, right after Forsaken came out, I signed on with Brand Stoker's family to write a prequel to Dracula using Brand Stoker's original notes.

That was high profile. We sold the film rights to that before, you know, we were literally in the car, you know, the publishing companies to try and figure out which deal we wanted to take there, and we sold the film rights.

I always try to have one of those high profile type projects going at any given time, you know, so I had to try.

Accula one, I've written a bunch of books with James Patterson, you know, just having that, you know, my name on the same cover as his gets it in a lot of different places, which creates that recognition.

Right now I'm working on a pre area. I'm rebooting the flat line is franchise. If you remember the movie from 1990s, I'm writing a book to reboot the franchise.

So that's again, another high profile project as soon as as soon as word of that leaked, you know, we got interviewed by probably 20 different publications and it was all over the Internet.

You like I purposely seek those types of things out because they organically create buzz for you. You know, you don't have to pay people to write those stories.

Those are things that people want to hear about and they come to you. So I try to have something like that going on at any given moment while I'm also working on my regular titles.

It's also about raising the boat, you know, like that every little thing raises your boat, your profile just a little bit more in that harbor than before you know it, you know, it's one of those things everybody knows who you are.

@32:52 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

How do you when you're going through the process of starting a new book and again, folks, all this if you're looking for JD book.

I'm gonna have it on the Shades of Entrepreneurship, visit the Shades of E, subscribe to the newsletter, we'll make sure we have a blog with JD's information on there.

So please, again, subscribe. JD, how do you go through your process? you've written a lot of books, you mentioned, know, they're kind of, they go from thriller to horror, thriller to horror, similar, I guess, but also two very different kind of verticals in regards to the book of the theme.

How do you kind of go through the process of creating an idea to write about?

@33:30 - J.D. Barker

Ideas are a weird thing because they, you know, you can't force them into your head, they just sort of pop in there.

So I've got a note app on my phone called SimpleNote, where I put everything. And one of those notes is actually called Ideas.

So if I get any kind of idea for anything that might remotely fit in a book, I drop it in there.

To give you an example of how my last one that came together, it's called Behind a Closed Door. I had a husband and wife couple that I knew I wanted to write about.

Her names were Brendan and Hollander. They were basically a couple. They were married for about 10 years. know, they love you.

Each other marriage has gone sour just not because they fight but because they're leading independent lives. They both have jobs.

They're both running off doing their own thing and they've grown apart over time. I had them as a character set that I knew I wanted to use and they sat in that document for probably about four or five years.

Then one night I was talking to my wife, I had mentioned that we did real estate. She had bought this big house in Georgia and she wanted to renovate and turn it into an Airbnb.

We were having dinner and we were discussing it and she mentioned that it had seven bathrooms and she's like, how am I going to renovate seven bathrooms quickly?

I brought up a company called Bathfitters which we've all seen the commercials. They come in in one day and they retrofit your bathroom.

They do a cosmetic thing and they're in and out. We just talked about it. It's the casual conversation over dinner but that night on our phones we both started seeing ads for bathfitters pop up in our social media feeds.

Commercials started to pop up on our TV on Hulu. I researched that and then realized in the terms of service for our phones, whether you've got an iPhone or an Android, we give them permission to do that.

Right now my phone is sitting right next to me. It's listening to this entire conversation that we're having and it's grabbing these keywords out of the air and it's going to put that in a database and find some way to use that to market to me later.

So when I realized that I took that idea and combined it with Brendan and Abby, my two my characters and that became the genesis of behind a closed door.

They basically download an app to their phone recommended to them by a marriage counselor to help spice up their marriage.

The app is called sugar and spice. basically truth or dare for adults. But it has the ability to really dig into their lives into their phones and that data that's on your app.

And the scariest thing about this book is as frightening as it is, everything that happens in the story could happen in real life.

Because I pulled the data from real things that exist today. So that's kind of how it happened. If I would have had the bath that her story all by itself, it may still be sitting on that map, but multiple pieces came together.

sort of like chalk with a peanut butter.

@35:52 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, I got to tell you, I feel like some of the most frightening things in the world are things that we tend to like go through every day.

Just don't know. how frightening they are like going online and purchasing or you know putting your soul security online for a credit card or a credit card application and then a couple days later they get hacked or you know it's just constantly something across the spectrum that is very unique.

Now what would you say would you would say it was your funnest book to write that you have written so far?

@36:23 - J.D. Barker

Oh wow they're sort of like your kids like people ask me what's my favorite. My favorite tends to be that the latest one.

I think my funnest one to write though is called a callers game because at that point that was like my fifth or sixth novel and everything I had written up until that point I got an option for film or streaming series or something.

So while I was writing that book I was like I'm going to write something that they can't possibly film.

So in this book I blow up like half of New York. There's no way they're going to be able to film this story.

It's it's too crazy it's too out there and while we were shopping the book where at least Scott's company came in and they optioned it.

@36:58 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

So there was a film in the works and you know I Or they can film basically anything, it just gets expensive.

@37:03 - J.D. Barker

So to film this particular book is about, at the time, was about $200 million, but they can get it done.

But like, that was fun to write. Another fun one was post-to-coast murders with Jim Patterson, because I'm what they call a pantser.

I basically come up with an idea for a book, and I come up with my characters, and I just kind of mix it all together, and just sort of run with it.

I don't necessarily know where the story is going. Patterson is the opposite. He outlines everything very, very strictly. He'll come up with a 30 to 40 page outline before he starts writing a book.

So when we first talked, we didn't think we'd be able to work together because it's just two totally different competing styles.

But ultimately, he agreed to pants a novel. He agreed to try it my way. So we ended up writing coast-to-coast, and we went back and forth.

I would write a chapter, and I would paint him into some crazy impossible corner. I would send him the pages, and there's no way you're getting out of this.

15 minutes later, he not only got out of it, but he sent me 20 more pages back and put me in an even more difficult situation.

And we wrote the whole book. Looked out. I just twist after twist, trying to one up each other.

@38:02 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

And that was a good time. Yeah, that's that's such a cool concept. I feel like, you know, I'm I read a lot of dragonlands right now.

That's kind of my sci-fi go to bar by Margaret Weiss and Hickman. And I feel like those two authors, they tend to go back and forth like that quite a bit, where they put these heroes in these very unique situations and then okay, the next chapter, you have to kind of get out of it, right?

And so on and so forth. In fact, I was I was watching a YouTube clip about the South Park creators the other day and they're talking about storytelling and the importance of storytelling.

And they kind of talk about how, you know, today, a lot of authors essentially use lot of ants. This happened and this happened and this happened and and they were really encouraging these writers to say, you know, this happened there before this happened because this happened there for it.

And the way they're kind of explaining it to me was really, or really explaining it on on YouTube was really unique because it kind of got me to think like, yeah, it makes sense because if

put therefore and start to write a little bit afterward, it's almost like you have to get a little bit more detailed into the description of what is occurring versus just saying and is there any what advice do you have for writers or tips like that that maybe aspiring writers are listening that they should if they have like a writer's block or if they are struggling, what tips do you have?

@39:22 - J.D. Barker

One of the simple ones is I tend to do this on the second draft is a lot of us tend to use lot of adverbs you know it's a Bob said angrily you know like that kind of thing.

I'll go ahead and write that for the first draft just to get the first deck draft down on paper but then when I circle back I look for any kind of dialogue tag and try to find some way to basically remove that dialogue tag and just beef up the sentence you know so whatever Bob said you know make that sound angry you know make his actions angry you know Bob's scream blah blah blah and pound of his fist or something but like there's ways to tweak it and like there's not a whole lot to it you know it's just a couple words that you're swapping out but it makes

It's a huge difference when you go back and you reread that book. That's basically what takes it from half baked to fully baked cake.

@40:08 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, it's kind of almost taking my philosophy and spinning it around completely where I'm writing a blog and I'm trying to essentially get a sentence down to one word.

So I'll look at this asaurus and say, Oh, one word captures all this. And you're saying I'm looking at that one word and how can I emphasize and describe that one word in multiple words without actually having to use that word.

@40:31 - J.D. Barker

Yeah, I mean, one of my favorite books, there's only two books that I really like on the topic of writing.

One of them is called unwriting by Stephen King. Another one is called Reacher Said Nothing. And it's a reporter that sat in Lee Child's apartment while he wrote one of the Jack Reacher novels.

He literally just sat on the couch while Lee was typing away on his computer and he would, know, stare over his shoulder and just kind of follow along.

But the way that it's written, it basically shows you the organic structure of a novel, like how it started the middle of the end and how we got there.

But one of the things Because I like about it, in that book, he had one particular sentence and it starts off, I think like eight or nine words long, and he keeps revisiting it and he takes a word out, he just walks these two words for something else and by the time you reach the end of the book, know, it's not like three words to basically describe the same thing.

We do quite a bit of that. mean, when I wrote with Patterson, there was a particular scene in one of the books where some characters had to have a dinner.

You so they sat down for dinner, there was a conversation like to me it had to happen because in that conversation they communicated information we needed in the story, but it ended up being like three or four pages of these people having dinner.

So he got those pages he read, and he's like, is there any reason we can't just say they had dinner, three words, you know, which eliminates all these pages, and then he just grabbed the two or three sentences that needed to be communicated and he just plugged those into different parts of the book.

And basically he streamlined it. All right, know, writing really comes down to editing in the end, like anybody I think can write a book, the successful authors know how to edit a book.

@41:58 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

That's a good point. Because I kind of, I'm struggling with just like, you know, my own creativity writing blog posts and kind of posting them up is I think with the with the online world the virtual world it's it's there's so much of an importance on you know SEO and keywords.

Is there any importance on keywords when writing the book.

@42:19 - J.D. Barker

Not really when writing a book but understand what you're talking about because I write for Rolling Stone on the side just for fun.

Yeah, they often tweak my, you know, my title or something different from an SEO standpoint or the first couple sentences of the story they'll change a couple of words and the reasoning is always SEO.

For me personally like I don't think about that like as I'm writing I just write what I want to write and I send it off to them.

But you know SEO is huge. mean like, you know, one or two words can make a difference between an appearing on the first page of a Google result versus the fifth page.

You have to be cognizant of it.

@42:55 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, and that's I got to tell you folks. You know I've been running the podcast about three years. Here's now where I think we're about 100 and almost almost 200 episodes running up on that and I've been doing the blog post again check it out the shades calm you can subscribe to the newsletter by visiting the shades of calm and I will say it's a working backwards has been difficult because I'm starting to you know I think after the first year and a half I'm like okay you know a lot of content why am I not getting a lot of visitors on the blog and so they started you know diving deep into that you know first year was was really about the podcast editing making sure my audio is correct making sure you know all that's all now it's starting to transfer over to the the web design right and I got to tell you this this morning I was literally in front of my page with the rabbit SEO right helper going through all my different pages and saying oh well this is only this is less than 55 characters and easy to be more I'm like well if I do it anymore and then it becomes it becomes too like it's not explaining it too quickly or you know it's it's like I'm struggling with myself because similar to you JD I like to get things out in one or two sentences.

@43:58 - J.D. Barker

Yeah now I'm in the same boat I I've I've got people that do that sort of thing for me, but I really pick their brain on why.

If they change something, need to understand it. can't just pay somebody to do it and walk away. I need to understand why they're tweaking it.

Some of the reasons, they make very little sense, but it works. Certain keywords just tend to resonate. If I've got a story that shows up page one of my Google results one week and then it drops to page three, I've got somebody I can call that can tell me exactly why.

It's always something silly. They make a quick little change in a keyword or something in the title and it's back on the number one page again.

If you have any type of blog, any type of online presence, you do need to get familiar with that.

It translates across the board. If you're posting on TikTok, it's the same thing. Your title, the text and everything you put in there, those hashtags, the words you use in your video, all of those things, they go into those databases, like I mentioned earlier.

That's what the algorithms feed off of and you need to understand how those work.

@45:00 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

I really like what you said too in regards to, you know, just understanding like the key, not necessarily the key words, kind of understanding like what those algorithms are, you know, because I think that's another difficulty too, because each system, you know, TikTok, Facebook, websites, they all have their kind of own algorithm.

And so understanding that is really important. And then again, you know, testing your thesis, you know, going back, like you mentioned, JD, I really like the idea of going and actually checking where you're ranking on the Google page.

And understanding like the web, this SEO piece, it does take some time. also like what you mentioned, like I like to do it all.

And that's very much me. I like to at least try it so I can get a good baseline knowledge of what I'm doing before I outsource it.

Because if I outsource it before I know what I'm doing, then I don't know if you're doing a good or job or bad job, because I have no baseline knowledge, right?

And at least I'm trying to create a baseline knowledge.

@45:53 - J.D. Barker

Yeah, I mean, I can tell you from an author standpoint, like I've got a lot of bios on different websites, know, Barnes and Noble has one Amazon's got one.

This guy's got one. And that guy's got one. If those files aren't current, they will drop down to those search results.

by current, I basically mean it knows Google's search algorithms understand what my next book is. So if it's not mentioned in my bio, or if the book that's mentioned in that bio is an older title, that algorithm actually understands that and recognizes it.

So you have to update all of those different things and stay on top of it.

@46:23 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yes, and folks, again, I will make sure I try to update JD's bio that will be, again, on the Shades of E website.

So go ahead and subscribe to that. Now JD, what's the next book? What are we working on?

@46:36 - J.D. Barker

Well, right now I'm following James Patterson's lead and I'm working with a lot of co-authors. I've got starting in November.

I've got one coming out a month, is a pretty aggressive publishing schedule. But through that deal that I mentioned, I'm able to do that.

But what I'm finding is it's allowing me to write books that I wouldn't be able to write on my own.

Like my next one is called Heavier of the Stones. I wrote it with a girl named Christine Dagle, who's a neuropsychologist.

So she brought that knowledge base to the table. we wrote that book and it's a fantastic serial killer story and like I know I could have written it on my own but like having that extra piece in there and her knowledge it took it to another level so like I'm really focusing on that bringing in people that you know it may not make sense quite on paper but like when you put them together it works really really well to create you know stories that still kind of follow the same suspense and the fast pacing and stuff that people are used to from me but it allows me to tell you know different stories stories I wouldn't be able to come up with strictly on my own so I'm hoping that that works well but the next one is it's heavier the stones it comes out in November it's the first one heavier than stones for again if you forget all that they will be on the shades of e.com website so go ahead and subscribe to their newsletter and one of the things I liked about that JD is you kind of also elevate authors that when you attach their your name to them one and then two even if you don't put your name to that book you're still providing a lot of knowledge to these individuals yeah I mean that's kind of how it started because I used to mentor authors.

You know, they would come to me and like, you know, I would teach them, you know, how to write a book from start to finish and they would pay me for that and I always felt like he, you know, taking money for it.

But I had to charge something because it worked as a gatekeeper. I got to kind of keep the riff for I thought only the ones who really wanted to do it would pay.

But I didn't feel right about that. So I kind of flipped the whole model on its head. So instead I bring these people aboard.

I pay them to write the book with me, but I teach them exactly how to do it, know, from creating the title and the tagline and the backup book blurb, creating an outline that I walk them through every single chapter.

I walk them through the pacing thing and get them basically up their game. know, by the time they're done, they get a crash course, which is no different from what James Patterson taught me.

Like you mentioned his masterclass, you know, after writing five books with them, you know, like he literally calls and yells at me on the phone when I do something wrong.

It doesn't get any better than that. But like I can hear him up here, you know, every time I put a sentence on paper.

So I try to do that for for new up and coming authors. And luckily, you know, because of my name recognition and presence, I'm able to get, you know, books with my name and now their name into, you know, some.

those places we mentioned earlier, which they probably couldn't do on their own.

@49:02 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

So it elevates everybody. So I think it works really well. Yeah. Yeah. all ships rise all tied. think the phrase goes or something similar to that.

Now, JD, for those individuals that are listening to this show, maybe they are interested in writing a co-author book or getting some mentorship and pulling out their wallets to pay you handsomely for that time.

How can they contact you? What's the best way?

@49:22 - J.D. Barker

are you out on the internet? Where can they find your books? Well, I don't, I don't take payment for that anymore, but you're welcome to reach out.

The easiest place to find me is JDburcker.com. Literally everything is there. The next appearance I have, I think, is going to be the author nation conference in November.

So if you are an author, an aspiring author and you're going to be an author nation, I'll be there all week long.

@49:41 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

So feel free to track me down. And when is that again, November?

@49:45 - J.D. Barker

It's, I believe the first second week of November.

@49:47 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

don't know. Perfect. Again, folks, author conference coming up. again, all this information will be on the shades of E.com website.

So go ahead and subscribe to the newsletter. JD, this is a really, really unique conversation. Really exciting stuff. I'm, I'm really excited.

It's like truly impressed with your background and your experience and how it has evolved from, you know, hating the corporate job that you have to, it seems like you really are enjoying life and what you're doing today.

@50:13 - J.D. Barker

Well, you know, entrepreneurship right like that's kind of what it's all about you get you don't allow yourself to get complacent you, you know, you get you get everything working and then you look at, you know, where's that next brass ring, how can I take it to another level and that's where I'm kind of always at and that's what keeps it entertaining keeps it fun for me.

@50:28 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

That is very true. Yes, it's a constant move. hate being a hate being in one place for too long.

gotta gotta kind of learn something new. I'm okay being the jack of all trade master of nuns to a certain extent.

But eventually if you find your passion by all means go all in and become the master of that passion.

@50:47 - J.D. Barker

J.D. Thank you again so much for being on the show. Is there any last words you have to say for the guests?

No, I'm all good.

@50:53 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Have a wonderful weekend. J.D. Dady Barker again, the author of so many books again, folks, this information will be on the shades of e.com.

Also, please subscribe to us and you can visit us on the website, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Facebook by visiting theshadesofe.com. Thank you and have a great night!