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148 Barry Hutchison a.k.a. J.D. Kirk | Indie Crime Thriller Author and Screenwriter
509 Plays2 years ago
Crime, thriller author and screenwriter Barry Hutchison a.k.a. J.D. Kirk is on this week’s episode sharing his many adventures in writing and publishing, from traditionally publishing children’s books to landing a screenwriting job because of a random Tweet and then finding success with indie publishing crime novels.
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Transcript
The Art of Storytelling: Writing and Reader Preferences
00:00:00
Speaker
Ooh, a spicy question.
00:00:02
Speaker
I love it.
00:00:02
Speaker
Because the writing is sort of everything, right?
00:00:04
Speaker
Like you can fix plot holes, but if the writing... So some readers love that and some readers are like, but I wanted more of this.
00:00:11
Speaker
So it's kind of, it's kind of a gamble.
Meet Barry Hutchison: Introduction and Writing Journey
00:00:14
Speaker
Hello, and welcome back to the Right and Wrong podcast.
00:00:17
Speaker
My guest for this episode is a writer of comics, a screenwriter, a director, and author of children's books and crime thrillers for adults.
00:00:27
Speaker
It's Barry Hutchison, also known as J.D.
00:00:30
Speaker
Kirk.
00:00:30
Speaker
Hello, Barry.
00:00:31
Speaker
Welcome to the show.
00:00:32
Speaker
Hello.
00:00:33
Speaker
Thanks for having me.
00:00:34
Speaker
Thanks so much for coming on.
00:00:37
Speaker
You've had quite a prolific career, not just within publishing, but within just very different disciplines of writing.
00:00:43
Speaker
So let's just start with what is an obvious place to start.
DCI Logan Series: Success and Development
00:00:48
Speaker
Your most recent publication, the 17th installment of the DCI Logan series,
00:00:54
Speaker
which you put out under the pen name JD Kirk, in service of death, came out in July this year.
00:01:01
Speaker
How good is your elevator pitch for the series?
00:01:03
Speaker
Oh, it's terrible.
00:01:05
Speaker
The one thing I'm really bad at is ever selling myself in any way whatsoever.
00:01:11
Speaker
And it's really bad when you go into any sort of meetings.
00:01:13
Speaker
I was doing some screenwriting meetings before and it was like, you know, hit me with your pitch.
00:01:18
Speaker
And I was like, I
00:01:20
Speaker
and just sort of choked on my own voice.
00:01:23
Speaker
Okay.
00:01:23
Speaker
Well, tell us a bit about the series.
00:01:25
Speaker
The series is about DCI Jack Logan, who is a detective chief inspector from Glasgow, who in the first book, A Litter of Bones, is sort of seconded to the Highlands, where there's a case that bears a striking similarity to one that he investigated 10 years previously.
00:01:44
Speaker
It was going to be a one-off.
00:01:45
Speaker
I wrote this crime novel, put it out, and it started massively outselling everything else I've ever written, like 100 to 1.
00:01:53
Speaker
And I thought, well, I'm going to write some more of these.
00:01:56
Speaker
And so he has remained in the Highlands ever since.
The World of Barry's Books: Releases and Crossover Characters
00:02:00
Speaker
So yeah, there's now actually the 18th book actually came out in October.
00:02:04
Speaker
So your information is now out of date.
00:02:06
Speaker
Oh.
00:02:06
Speaker
They called A Dead Man Walking, which is sort of a Halloween special almost.
00:02:12
Speaker
It's kind of got Agatha Christie vibes to it, that one.
00:02:15
Speaker
So it's a bit different to the rest of the series.
00:02:17
Speaker
And some people love that and some people are very angry that it's different to the rest of the series.
00:02:22
Speaker
So, yeah.
00:02:23
Speaker
So, yeah, 18 books.
00:02:24
Speaker
So the first one came out in 2019.
00:02:26
Speaker
So I've been, you know, churning.
00:02:27
Speaker
Wow.
00:02:32
Speaker
Quantity over quality, that's my motto.
00:02:35
Speaker
So yeah, 18 of those, four Bob Hoon spinoffs and one D.I.
00:02:41
Speaker
Heather Filson spinoff, the second of which is coming out in January.
00:02:45
Speaker
So I've written 24 of them, 24 books in that universe since May 2019 when the first one came out.
00:02:55
Speaker
Do they cross over the characters?
00:02:58
Speaker
Yeah, lightly.
00:02:59
Speaker
You don't have to read all the Logan books to read the Hoon books or vice versa.
00:03:07
Speaker
The characters pop up, but there's nothing that spoils the plots of either one.
00:03:12
Speaker
So you will enjoy them more if you've read the other series, but you can enjoy them almost as much reading them as standalone.
The Shift to Self-Publishing: Success and Strategies
00:03:21
Speaker
18 books in a series is amazing.
00:03:26
Speaker
I'm trying to think of any others.
00:03:29
Speaker
I guess within crime, and this would be procedural crime as well.
00:03:34
Speaker
I guess that's not so uncommon, but do you see the DCI Logan stuff going on sort of indefinitely?
00:03:43
Speaker
Yeah, well, I mean, I know what the next two are, at least.
00:03:46
Speaker
So I know up to book 20.
00:03:48
Speaker
And we've just done a deal because the DCI Logan stuff is published through my own publishing imprint.
00:03:55
Speaker
You know, I was published by HarperCollins and Penguin Random House and various publishers for about 10, 12 years.
00:04:02
Speaker
And then as a little sort of experiment, I fell into self-publishing a book in 2016, and that started out selling all my traditionally published stuff.
00:04:12
Speaker
And I've been more or less, despite the protests from some of my publishers, I've been more or less just doing my own self-published stuff ever since.
00:04:21
Speaker
um but we've just done a deal for print rights with a uk publisher who are doing a big hardback launch for book 20 and um and all kinds of fancy stuff because it's the 20th book it's also the fifth anniversary of the first book coming out we're making a bit of a sort of 2024 is going to be a big year for dci logan amazing wait so that's four books a year you're putting out
00:04:44
Speaker
Well, more than that, because there's also the six other books I've written in that time as well.
00:04:51
Speaker
How long, what's the sort of average length of these books?
00:04:54
Speaker
About 90,000 words.
00:04:56
Speaker
There are about 80,000, 90,000 words.
00:04:58
Speaker
I've always written quickly.
00:04:59
Speaker
That's been because when I was writing for publishers, you know, when I was writing for children's publishers I was writing for.
00:05:06
Speaker
And I'd be doing my own stuff.
00:05:07
Speaker
And they don't pay very much when you're writing for children's publishers, unless you are JK Rowling or David Walliams or someone who manages to kind of hit it really big.
00:05:15
Speaker
If you're like a working children's publisher or children's author, I should say, you don't get paid that much.
00:05:21
Speaker
So I would always be looking for work because I knew I could pay my bills the following month, but I never knew I could pay my bills two months down the line.
00:05:28
Speaker
And that continued for like 10 years.
00:05:30
Speaker
So I'd always be looking for new work.
00:05:32
Speaker
So publishers would come to me knowing that I would produce decent books to a short deadline.
00:05:39
Speaker
So they might come and say, right, we've got this book, the Ben 10 cartoon series, for example.
00:05:44
Speaker
They said, we want to adapt these into books.
00:05:46
Speaker
And we need like 10 books written for three months from now.
00:05:51
Speaker
And I would go, okay, I'll do that.
00:05:53
Speaker
But at the same time, I'd be writing a nonfiction book for a different publisher and I'd be writing my own work for a different publisher under my own name and all kinds of stuff.
00:06:00
Speaker
So I'd always be juggling stuff.
00:06:02
Speaker
I'd be working on three or four projects at the same time.
00:06:05
Speaker
Sometimes at that point, I was doing like 16 hour days writing.
00:06:08
Speaker
So this is actually kind of a slowed down, sedate pace.
00:06:13
Speaker
compared to what I was used to back then.
00:06:15
Speaker
And I'm doing it all myself, so I don't have sales and marketing teams to try and persuade that this is a good idea or try and dissuade from putting a unicorn in it because they've decided that unicorns are really big that week and they want to have a unicorn.
00:06:31
Speaker
So yeah, it seems quick to people, but it's not really.
00:06:35
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I'm sitting down, I'm writing 3,000, 4,000 words a day, and I'm done by 12 o'clock by lunchtime.
00:06:43
Speaker
And that's quite a nice, sedate, relaxed pace.
00:06:46
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you've got a pretty good schedule going.
00:06:49
Speaker
You say you do it all by yourself, and this is sort of indie published off your own publishing kind of company.
00:06:57
Speaker
Yeah.
00:06:58
Speaker
But I'm going to guess, do you also work with an independent editor and other people?
00:07:05
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:07:06
Speaker
When I started out, the reason I fell into self-publishing was I was asked to go into a school and talk about how kids could publish their own books.
00:07:13
Speaker
And I had no idea how they could publish their own books.
00:07:15
Speaker
As far as I knew, you wrote a book and you emailed it to a publisher in London and then...
00:07:20
Speaker
sometime later a book appeared in the world and that was my entire understanding of the publishing process.
00:07:24
Speaker
But they were offering to pay me money to go in and spend a week teaching these teenagers how to publish their own work.
00:07:30
Speaker
So I thought, well, I'll try and learn it.
00:07:32
Speaker
And I wrote a book, a comedy science fiction novel called Space Team in 2016.
00:07:38
Speaker
And I put that out on Kindle, designed the cover myself because I knew kids don't, you know, they can't pay a cover designer.
00:07:44
Speaker
I edited it myself because kids can't pay an editor.
00:07:48
Speaker
And the point was to do it all for free.
00:07:50
Speaker
And I did that.
00:07:51
Speaker
And then I went away on holiday.
00:07:52
Speaker
And two weeks later, when I came back, it was outselling all my other books combined.
Marketing Mastery: Building a Book Community
00:07:56
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And I thought, right, I'm going to do more of these.
00:07:59
Speaker
And I wrote 12 of those in the following three years.
00:08:02
Speaker
Yes.
00:08:02
Speaker
But now I'm kind of going back to just being an author again.
00:08:06
Speaker
That's my journey is going back that direction of I was doing it all myself for a while.
00:08:11
Speaker
And now I employ cover designers.
00:08:14
Speaker
I employ editors.
00:08:15
Speaker
I have...
00:08:16
Speaker
say a PR team we've got sales and marketing people we've got an agent selling foreign rights and film rights and all that stuff so we're now like a fully fledged publisher who at the moment just publishes my books but starting next year we're publishing some other authors as well
00:08:34
Speaker
Oh, wow.
00:08:35
Speaker
So you are literally becoming an indie publisher?
00:08:37
Speaker
Yes.
00:08:39
Speaker
Wow, that's so exciting.
00:08:40
Speaker
I'm wondering, so obviously it was sort of a kind of experiment when you first started doing the self-publishing stuff.
00:08:46
Speaker
How did you, because the biggest thing that I know about indie publishing, the kind of the most daunting thing is marketing the whole thing yourself.
00:08:54
Speaker
How did you kind of go about that at the beginning?
00:08:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:08:57
Speaker
I mean, everyone always says that, but with 140 books, 180 books with children's publishers, very few of them ever got any marketing.
00:09:06
Speaker
Traditional publishing has a marketing strategy seems to be like publish 100 books, watch very carefully to see which ones start selling well on its own, and then chuck all the marketing money at that book.
00:09:20
Speaker
and let the rest die a death and blame it on the author, which sounds quite bitter, but that's my experience of it, is that they like to put all the money behind what already looks like a winning horse.
00:09:30
Speaker
So, I mean, I was unfortunate enough to be published by HarperCollins to have a book coming out the same day as David Walliams,
00:09:37
Speaker
his children's books.
00:09:38
Speaker
And, you know, they rebranded all their social media.
00:09:41
Speaker
They rebranded their website and they had, you know, posters all over the UK and he was on the one show and he was on everything.
00:09:47
Speaker
And they didn't even tweet about my book coming out on the same day, you know.
00:09:50
Speaker
So I was doing my own marketing anyway, as I would say 95% of authors are.
00:09:57
Speaker
They always assume they're going to get something.
00:09:58
Speaker
There's a market team that's going to come in and there's going to be posters everywhere.
00:10:02
Speaker
And it very, very rarely works out like that.
00:10:04
Speaker
So I was doing my own marketing.
00:10:07
Speaker
But when you're doing your own marketing for a traditionally published book, you have no idea what is effective.
00:10:11
Speaker
So I could go on and do like a blog tour, say.
00:10:14
Speaker
So I'm writing blog posts for 10 different blogs.
00:10:18
Speaker
And every day a new post is going up and there's a review and all that stuff.
00:10:23
Speaker
And I don't know if that's doing anything because I have to wait six months until I get a royalty statement.
00:10:28
Speaker
And that royalty statement only tells me how many books were sold during that six-month period.
00:10:33
Speaker
It doesn't tell me any more granular detail than that.
00:10:36
Speaker
Now, when I'm doing it myself, if I did a blog tour, say, I could literally look at my sales dashboard and say, okay, that blog went up and I sold 30 books in the two hours following it.
00:10:49
Speaker
So I can see a direct correlation between things I'm doing as marketing and results I'm getting.
00:10:55
Speaker
So it's much easier to market when you're indie published because you can actually see the results straight away rather than have to just...
00:11:02
Speaker
either not see them or try and guess how effective something is.
00:11:07
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:08
Speaker
So you have more control over the fact that it's like, you kind of say, okay, I did like three blogs or three podcasts and I can see an uptick on one of them and like a downtick on that.
00:11:19
Speaker
Maybe I'll, maybe I'll slow down on that and do more on that.
00:11:22
Speaker
Absolutely, that's it.
00:11:23
Speaker
Yeah, I could go on.
00:11:24
Speaker
I mean, that's why I know that Twitter doesn't sell books.
00:11:26
Speaker
I've tried many, many things on Twitter and literally can watch nothing happening on my sales dashboard as a result.
00:11:32
Speaker
So I know that Twitter doesn't sell books.
00:11:34
Speaker
Now, if I didn't have that direct information, I might be on Twitter all day, every day thinking this might be why I'm selling some books.
00:11:42
Speaker
If I'm looking at just the traditional published royalty statement after six months, I go, okay, I sold 3,000 books in that six months.
00:11:51
Speaker
Maybe Twitter sold all those books, so I better keep tweeting all the time, whereas that's not the truth.
00:11:56
Speaker
I can see the immediate results.
00:11:58
Speaker
If that's not the case, I'm not going to tweet very much.
00:12:01
Speaker
So it's much easier to market.
00:12:03
Speaker
You're going to be doing it your own marketing, whether you're traditionally published or whether you're self-published.
00:12:08
Speaker
Most authors are, certainly.
00:12:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:10
Speaker
So you might as well have all the information to hand.
00:12:12
Speaker
Now, ask for your question what I did at the start.
00:12:15
Speaker
I did nothing whatsoever at the start.
00:12:17
Speaker
I didn't market anything until the third book was out because I knew that if I was to spend any money, it's very difficult to make money back on one book.
00:12:27
Speaker
You know, you're selling a book at $2.99 on Kindle.
00:12:29
Speaker
You haven't got much sort of leeway in that.
00:12:32
Speaker
You're making 70%, so you're making £2.10.
00:12:36
Speaker
So if your marketing costs more than £2.10 a copy, you're losing money.
00:12:40
Speaker
But if you have three books in a series and someone buys book one, there's a chance they'll buy book two and book three as well.
00:12:46
Speaker
So now you've potentially got for that, you know, if you spend £2.11 marketing that book, you've potentially got £9 worth of sales because you've got those other two books in the series as well.
00:12:58
Speaker
So I didn't advertise at all until the third book was out.
00:13:01
Speaker
And then I started dabbling with Facebook,
00:13:04
Speaker
But I still don't – I mean, I spend very little on advertising.
00:13:06
Speaker
My main thing has been building a community around the books, which is kind of mailing list, newsletter.
00:13:13
Speaker
I give away a lot of weird, random things.
00:13:15
Speaker
I never write – I've never written, like, a new book to give away or a short story necessarily.
00:13:22
Speaker
I've done a couple of short stories for the space team stuff.
00:13:24
Speaker
But for the J.D.
00:13:25
Speaker
Kirk crime fiction, I give away, like, a photo gallery of locations,
00:13:31
Speaker
and um there's a character who gets married in one of the books and one of the subplots is another character trying to write their wedding speech and at the end of that book if you join my mailing list you get the wedding speech kind of handwritten with notes and all that stuff i did and it took me took me a couple hours to do but that has brought me in 10 000 subscribers you know to my to my mailing list and then it's just about kind of making them feel part of it all like i love
00:13:57
Speaker
writing to my to my mailing list easily because it's just a like an opportunity to sort of vent about weird things that have happened in my life or and it's just a chatty informal thing and i know when i put out a newsletter i'll get 500 emails back that day from people who just want to chat um and i will i will reply to as many of them as i can and and
00:14:17
Speaker
direct them to the Facebook group and the Facebook page where it's much easier to sort of have a conversation.
00:14:23
Speaker
And so for me, it's been about growing a community rather than selling.
00:14:27
Speaker
I hate selling myself particularly.
00:14:31
Speaker
I used to do a lot of school events and talk in schools and the publishers were like, right, yeah, so you need to go in there and really push the books, the books are for sale.
00:14:38
Speaker
And I just couldn't do that.
00:14:40
Speaker
So I would just sort of go and do this stand-up comedy routine for kids.
00:14:44
Speaker
And then occasionally like glance over at the books that were for sale and the hope they might take the hint.
00:14:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:49
Speaker
Oh, that's so interesting.
00:14:50
Speaker
And it's, it's, it sounds like kind of coming up with those innovative things.
00:14:54
Speaker
That's actually like the, having the wedding speech with notes and things like that's actually kind of like, that's fun for you.
00:14:59
Speaker
And it's fun for people as well.
00:15:01
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
00:15:01
Speaker
Well, I mean, like authors certainly should be creative people.
Creative Content: Engaging Readers with Unique Experiences
00:15:06
Speaker
And so a lot of the stuff I've done, you know, there's a character who's not very well liked in the series.
00:15:11
Speaker
He's a sort of senior crime officer and he's deliberately a horrible character, but he thinks he's very funny.
00:15:19
Speaker
And I wrote this little scene where he attempts stand-up comedy.
00:15:22
Speaker
There's an open spot at a stand-up comedy night.
00:15:25
Speaker
and dies a death on stage.
00:15:26
Speaker
And it's only, you know, 1500 words, but it was great fun to write.
00:15:31
Speaker
And the, the, the, my newsletter subscribers, my VIP club, as I call them, uh, loved it.
00:15:37
Speaker
You know, it was the, and so things like that, which are, you can't really do necessarily with traditional publishing.
00:15:44
Speaker
You know, you know, I, if I went to my, one of my publishers, Harper Collins or whatever, and said, right, I want to do this random scene that we're going to just give away.
00:15:52
Speaker
It would have to go through so many layers of editor and sales and marketing team, and it would go to different meetings and all that.
00:15:59
Speaker
So it slows everything down, and you just don't bother doing it.
00:16:01
Speaker
So being able to do it yourself, I can just go, right, I'm going to do this.
00:16:05
Speaker
So for example, the next thing I'm giving away to my mailing list, there's a character in my series called Bob Hoon.
00:16:12
Speaker
I know he has his own spinoff series, and he has a sister called Roberta.
00:16:16
Speaker
So in Scotland, there is every two years,
00:16:21
Speaker
There's this alternating kind of DC Thompson produced this comic book and one's called Ur-Willy, which you might have heard of, and one's called The Bruins.
00:16:30
Speaker
And The Bruins is this sort of Scottish family and it's black and white strip.
00:16:35
Speaker
And the stories are broadly similar and there's a misunderstanding of some kind and it has a funny ending.
00:16:41
Speaker
And I thought it would be fun to do The Hoons and do like a comic strip page that is in the style of The Bruins, but featuring...
00:16:51
Speaker
Bob Hoon and his sister, Berta.
00:16:54
Speaker
And so that, I went, I looked for an artist to find that and I actually found an artist who drew the Bruins for 16 years.
00:17:01
Speaker
So he's now drawing that.
00:17:02
Speaker
I've written the script.
00:17:03
Speaker
So it took me 10 minutes to write the script because I used to write for the Beano and various other comics.
00:17:08
Speaker
So,
00:17:09
Speaker
It took me 10 minutes to write the script.
00:17:11
Speaker
I sent it to him.
00:17:11
Speaker
I'm paying him not very much money to do the artwork.
00:17:15
Speaker
And it'll be a fun thing to give away in the run up to Christmas to my readers.
00:17:19
Speaker
And it was a fun thing to write.
00:17:20
Speaker
Just a new way of kind of exploring those characters.
00:17:24
Speaker
That's so, it's not something I thought about before.
00:17:25
Speaker
Because whilst you were saying it, like, oh, you can give away these tidbits, these kind of notes and scraps and things like that.
00:17:30
Speaker
I'm just thinking like, yeah, that's so applicable to so many different
00:17:35
Speaker
stories and like I read a lot of fantasy and with a lot of fantasy authors what they'll do is they'll have their the kind of the main books and then they'll they'll write novellas which will be a sort of backstory of a side character which they're obviously interested in yeah but they have to go through their publisher and like that has to be an official thing and it has to be a certain length to be a novella it can't just be like a like a like a 2000 word kind of like fun anecdote whereas with what you're doing it could just be that
00:18:02
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:18:02
Speaker
Yeah.
00:18:03
Speaker
And I think I think readers enjoy that more almost because it is like a fun little thing that they're part of.
00:18:09
Speaker
You know, it's not available anywhere else.
00:18:10
Speaker
It's only available to those guys.
00:18:12
Speaker
Yeah.
00:18:14
Speaker
And it just makes them feel gives them more of a sense of ownership of the characters and the series because they're seeing these little behind the scenes things.
Independent Publishing: Creative Freedom and Future Plans
00:18:22
Speaker
um so yeah and and i love it it keeps me entertained as well because yeah i was gonna say i'd love to do that yeah it's just fun to do yeah do you think you do you think you'll ever go back because am i right in thinking you've kind of just you're only doing sort of adult fiction now you're not doing any children's stuff
00:18:42
Speaker
Yeah, not doing any children's stuff, although I did, after many years of trying, I did get the rights back to a couple of my children's books from HarperCollins, which we will publish ourselves.
00:18:53
Speaker
But yeah, I never really see myself going back to children's publishing.
00:19:00
Speaker
I don't see myself going back to one of the old school traditional publishers.
00:19:03
Speaker
I have had offers for the, you know, the DCI Logan stuff.
00:19:07
Speaker
And it's been so creatively fulfilling to do it myself and financially rewarding compared to what I was being paid as a...
00:19:17
Speaker
traditionally published author that I can't ever, I could never justify doing it.
00:19:21
Speaker
I am working with, kind of partnering up with Bookature, who are like a digital first publisher on two books, which are not part of the DCI Logan series.
00:19:33
Speaker
It was, or not in that universe.
00:19:36
Speaker
I had this idea for these sort of two connected books and I just wasn't quite sure what to do with them.
00:19:41
Speaker
And Bookature came along and said, well, we could kind of team up and do them.
00:19:46
Speaker
So doing that, but I could never see myself just going back to being author writing for publisher again.
00:19:54
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:54
Speaker
And Bookature is quite a different thing.
00:19:57
Speaker
I've had a number of Bookature authors on, and it's a very different, it's not traditional publishing.
00:20:02
Speaker
Not at all.
00:20:03
Speaker
No, they really have the, it's kind of indie mindset.
00:20:05
Speaker
It's basically what we're doing with, with our publishing company next year is, is it, is that sort of indie author mindset to publish other authors and, um,
00:20:17
Speaker
Yeah, so it should be fun to team up with them.
00:20:20
Speaker
They have a very good team.
00:20:21
Speaker
One of the reasons I did it is that they do massive business in the US and most of my sales are UK.
00:20:27
Speaker
I'd say 70% of my sales are UK.
00:20:29
Speaker
So part of it was just business strategy of going, well, how can I most effectively expand sales into the US?
00:20:37
Speaker
without doing all the work myself.
00:20:40
Speaker
So this came along at just the right time.
00:20:43
Speaker
Okay, perfect.
00:20:44
Speaker
And I think that's what I love about the indie publishing thing is it gives you the freedom to do that.
00:20:48
Speaker
You know, I can go, well, I'm going to team up with them for this or I'm going to, you know, myself and a couple of other authors are putting together like a joint sort of
00:20:56
Speaker
patreon thing where we share behind the scenes things going on and and it just gives you the freedom to to kind of take control of of not just your writing but your your business side of it as well yeah and you can really be creative beyond the the the writing itself doing like you can be creative with your marketing and things like that and just absolutely that's it and i think you know nobody cares about your book as much as you do
00:21:19
Speaker
it would be that thing that you would send it to a publisher and the pub invariably, because I say I wrote 180 odd books for publishers and they would always say, right, the deadline is this date.
00:21:30
Speaker
It needs to be done on this date.
00:21:31
Speaker
And I would, you know, I'd sometimes work through the night to get the book to them that day and I would send it in and I'd always get an out of office saying, I'm back in the office in 10 days.
00:21:40
Speaker
And it's like, well, why have I like almost killed myself trying to get this book done and you're off on holiday?
Screenwriting Adventures and Opportunities
00:21:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:46
Speaker
so when i'm doing it myself i have complete control for better or worse you know you have to take if it does go terribly wrong if i write a book that that completely dies then it's my doing it's no one else's yeah yeah yeah true i'd love to talk about you you also do um amongst all of this you also have done quite a lot of screenwriting
00:22:09
Speaker
Um, I saw that you did a comedy back in 2013, um, starring Phil Jupitus and you've, you've written a few things since then.
00:22:17
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:18
Speaker
How did you, how did you, have you always been script writing or is that something that you got into sort of after you'd been published with Harper with your, those initial books?
00:22:26
Speaker
No, I actually started off as a screenwriter.
00:22:28
Speaker
I sold, well, I had my first screenplay optioned when I was 17.
00:22:31
Speaker
Oh, wow.
00:22:32
Speaker
I wrote this screenplay called Curse of the Bog Women, and it was a comedy horror set in the Highlands.
00:22:37
Speaker
And 17, no idea what to do with it.
00:22:39
Speaker
It was all formatted wrong.
00:22:41
Speaker
But Francis Ford Coppola had a website called Zoetrope, zoetrope.com, which was kind of an extension of his production company.
00:22:49
Speaker
And it was for screenwriters to post their scripts and then other writers could go on and review them.
00:22:56
Speaker
And then they would get, if they reviewed three, then...
00:22:59
Speaker
their script would be eligible to be reviewed by other screenwriters.
00:23:03
Speaker
I put a script on there.
00:23:04
Speaker
One of the people that was assigned it to read was an American independent producer in New York.
00:23:09
Speaker
And he got in touch and said, I'd like to produce this.
00:23:13
Speaker
And I went, all right.
00:23:17
Speaker
And he optioned it.
00:23:19
Speaker
And at that point, a 17-year-old living in the Highlands, still in school,
00:23:24
Speaker
um optioned it for what seemed at the time they could have seen amount of money but you know now it's in as a grown-up it's not it wasn't that much by the time it was like and it was getting paid in dollars which felt like so exotic as well i had to go to my little high street bank in the highlands with a check for like ten thousand dollars and say um what do i do with this and they were like well we don't really know what
00:23:48
Speaker
And then at that point I put it in and it was like, it's going to take seven weeks to clear.
00:23:51
Speaker
It was like, this is madness.
00:23:53
Speaker
But so that, that kind of option went on for a few years.
00:23:57
Speaker
When I was about 19, 20 thereabouts, I, another, another, what do you call it?
00:24:04
Speaker
Production company in, based in Newcastle had read the script somehow and said, we really like your writing.
00:24:12
Speaker
We're,
00:24:12
Speaker
We don't really do horror.
00:24:14
Speaker
Do you have like a thriller available?
00:24:17
Speaker
Have you done a thriller?
00:24:17
Speaker
And I went, oh, yeah, I've done that.
00:24:19
Speaker
I'll get it to you.
00:24:21
Speaker
I'm just going to polish it up in the next couple of days and I'll send it to you at the end of the week.
00:24:24
Speaker
And I had absolutely no, I didn't have a script.
00:24:26
Speaker
I didn't even have an idea for a script.
00:24:28
Speaker
But I sat down and over three days I wrote a black comedy thriller set in Glasgow called Making a Killing...
00:24:37
Speaker
And that company optioned that as well at that point.
00:24:40
Speaker
Both companies subsequently went bankrupt and the films never happened.
00:24:45
Speaker
But the thought was there, you know, so that was nice.
00:24:48
Speaker
So I've always been, you know, I've been interested in writing scripts kind of first and foremost, really.
00:24:53
Speaker
And the reason I got into books is I had all these ideas for things, but it's like I know how convincing someone to spend...
00:25:01
Speaker
30 million pounds and producing a film is not easy.
00:25:05
Speaker
Whereas, you know, convincing a publisher to spend a few thousand pound publishing a book is easier.
00:25:11
Speaker
So, um, so I thought I'll try writing books and, um, that's what kind of took off, but I've always been in the background kind of writing, uh, screenplay stuff.
00:25:21
Speaker
And, uh,
00:25:22
Speaker
The comedy series, you're talking about Bottom Knocker Street.
00:25:25
Speaker
It's a children's comedy series.
00:25:27
Speaker
Absolutely bizarre how it came about.
00:25:31
Speaker
There was a kid's show for preschool kids called The Bops, and it was Keith Bopp and Stan Bopp, and Stan was Stan Cullymore from the House Martins.
00:25:43
Speaker
And they just dressed up a bit weird and sang some songs.
00:25:49
Speaker
And it was like this little short 10-minute things between programs.
00:25:54
Speaker
And my daughter at the time, she was about two or three thereabouts and was obsessed with it, loved it.
00:26:00
Speaker
Every time the country was glued to it.
00:26:02
Speaker
And so I was subjected to it all the time.
00:26:05
Speaker
And I tweeted saying, there's something a bit disturbing about the bops, especially Keith.
00:26:11
Speaker
And Keith Bopp replied to me on Twitter and said, you're absolutely right.
00:26:16
Speaker
And I felt really bad because I thought, oh, no, I've just, like, I've realised that he's a real person.
00:26:20
Speaker
You know, he's not.
00:26:21
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:22
Speaker
So I kind of replied, saying, my daughter loves you, and we got chatting.
00:26:26
Speaker
And he had a 13-year-old son, and I ended up sending him a pile of books for his son.
00:26:31
Speaker
And then Keith and Stan, they made a little video for my daughter and sang a song and put her name in it and all that stuff.
00:26:37
Speaker
And it was all lovely.
00:26:39
Speaker
And then he mentioned that he was producing this show, Bottom Knocker Street with Phil Jupitus.
00:26:44
Speaker
It was kind of a kid's comedy, a bit sort of Beano sensibilities and said, if you want to try out for writing an episode, you know, you can do a sample script.
00:26:56
Speaker
Wow.
00:26:57
Speaker
So I went, all right.
00:26:59
Speaker
And I wrote a sample script and then I ended up writing 32 episodes, I think, of the 52 part series.
00:27:07
Speaker
So, yeah, so that worked out quite nicely.
00:27:09
Speaker
And I went down and was, you know, meet with Phil and I was there when they were filming and all that stuff.
00:27:14
Speaker
But it was an eye opening episode.
00:27:17
Speaker
thing because i yeah i kind of thought yeah i can write a couple of these and then it was like right we need we need 30 of them i think it was 15 15 initially and then i was like all right okay and then they just said just keep going just keep going and ended up doing 32 of them um but yeah it all just came from me kind of going on and slagging them off on twitter i might go and say some uncomfortably things about tom cruise next and see if i can land the next mission impossible
00:27:43
Speaker
That's how it's done.
00:27:44
Speaker
Are you thinking about, or have you written any kind of screenplay adaptations for any of the JD Kirk stuff?
00:27:52
Speaker
No, we're in conversations about it with some production companies and things.
00:27:57
Speaker
I'm not sure if I would do it myself or not.
00:28:00
Speaker
I think there's a...
00:28:03
Speaker
there's sort of a plausible deniability if it's terrible, if I haven't written scripts, you know, if I can go, ah, well, the books are great, but the scripts, ah, the TV show was terrible because, you know, the writer just didn't get it.
00:28:14
Speaker
And then I can, so I can still sort of, you know, I can deflect the criticism that way.
00:28:19
Speaker
But if I, you know, and if it's great, I can say, well, it's the books, you know, it was the underlying material that was why it's so good.
00:28:27
Speaker
But if it's terrible and I've written it, then there's nowhere to hide really from that, you know.
00:28:31
Speaker
Yeah, true.
00:28:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:28:32
Speaker
So, you know, I think I'd be the conversations we're having kind of sees me in more of an executive producer role.
00:28:38
Speaker
So still quite hands on in terms of guiding it, but not actually writing all the scripts.
00:28:44
Speaker
Yeah, I do think also with those adaptations, a lot of the time, even if you are someone that writes screenplays, as the author, you're often too close to it in a different medium to translate it.
00:28:56
Speaker
Yeah, very much so.
00:28:56
Speaker
Yeah, it's difficult.
00:28:58
Speaker
Though we're actually, I've been contracted to write three screenplays for something else, which I can't reveal yet, but...
Comics and TV: Writing for Super Mansion and Beyond
00:29:07
Speaker
It's not something I ever saw myself doing.
00:29:11
Speaker
I will say that.
00:29:14
Speaker
But yeah, most of my career, really, I've just lucked into.
00:29:16
Speaker
You know, I wrote the Beano for a few years.
00:29:21
Speaker
Not all of it, but I wrote, you know, the strips for the Beano comic for a few years, which was like a childhood dream.
00:29:28
Speaker
And the way I got that was I basically emailed the Beano and said, can I write for the Beano?
00:29:32
Speaker
And they said, no.
00:29:33
Speaker
No.
00:29:34
Speaker
And then I said, like, go on.
00:29:38
Speaker
And they went, well, you can try writing a sample script for, you know, one of the characters.
00:29:43
Speaker
So I did that.
00:29:43
Speaker
And then this says, right, we're going to use this and we'll pay you for this.
00:29:47
Speaker
And then do you want to keep doing this character?
00:29:49
Speaker
And I was like, yeah, OK.
00:29:51
Speaker
So did that.
00:29:53
Speaker
And then randomly, this connects to the TV writing bit as well.
00:29:57
Speaker
randomly there was a kid's cartoon series called Adventure Time, which my son loved and I loved.
00:30:02
Speaker
And I wrote the A to Z guide to Adventure Time for, I don't know what publisher it was, but for some publisher I wrote that.
00:30:09
Speaker
And there was an Adventure Time comic and I went into a shop and I was too tight to even buy the comic, but I looked at, I opened the comic and found the editor's details and I emailed the editor and said, I'd like to write for this comic.
00:30:22
Speaker
And,
00:30:23
Speaker
And he said, yeah, okay.
00:30:25
Speaker
And I wrote a bit, but then the comic got cancelled before my stuff was published, which was heartbreaking.
00:30:34
Speaker
But then the same editor says, right, we're doing this six-issue miniseries called Super Mansion, which is based on the American animated TV series of the same name.
00:30:46
Speaker
are you aware of it?
00:30:47
Speaker
And I just went onto YouTube and immediately Googled, you know, searched for Supermatch and found as much as I could and then replied and says, oh yeah, I'm a big fan.
00:30:55
Speaker
I know it well.
00:30:57
Speaker
So they said, right, okay, you can do this comic.
00:31:00
Speaker
So I wrote this six-issue comic miniseries thing.
00:31:05
Speaker
But the producers of the show had final approval.
00:31:07
Speaker
So Bryan Cranston from Breaking Bad was one of the producers and Zeb Wells, the creator, who's like a massive Marvel writer and does all kinds of stuff, Spider-Man and all sorts of things.
00:31:19
Speaker
And he was sort of the creator.
00:31:20
Speaker
So he read the comics and says, do you want to write for the show?
Reflections on Luck and Career Development
00:31:24
Speaker
And I went,
00:31:24
Speaker
Yeah, right.
00:31:26
Speaker
So basically I've just lucked into everything over the years.
00:31:29
Speaker
Wow.
00:31:30
Speaker
Wow, what an incredible journey.
00:31:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:33
Speaker
Although I will say that Adventure Time comic got axed just before my stuff was on and Super Mansion got axed just after my stuff was on.
00:31:45
Speaker
And those two companies went bankrupt after buying my script.
00:31:47
Speaker
So I'm not saying I'm a jinx necessarily, but there may be some evidence that points that way.
00:31:53
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:31:54
Speaker
But I would say, you know, you do need to get lucky with a lot of these things, especially in these kinds of industries, but you also, you know, you create opportunities to be lucky.
00:32:03
Speaker
You know, the more you put yourself out there, the more opportunity there is for you to.
00:32:07
Speaker
That's absolutely.
00:32:08
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:32:08
Speaker
It is.
00:32:10
Speaker
It is about putting yourself out there.
00:32:11
Speaker
And I think that's it.
00:32:11
Speaker
You know, I spent years, so between the ages of about 21 and 30, I wrote a load of stuff.
00:32:18
Speaker
I'd never did anything with it.
00:32:19
Speaker
Like I didn't send it anywhere.
00:32:20
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:22
Speaker
And the first thing I sent anywhere was there was a competition being run by an Edinburgh-based literary agent
00:32:32
Speaker
And the competition was you sent in your manuscript.
00:32:35
Speaker
They would read the first like 10 pages.
00:32:38
Speaker
And if you were one of 10 winners, they would read the whole book and they would give you detailed feedback on how to improve the book so that it had a better chance of being picked up or getting representation or whatever.
00:32:51
Speaker
So I said, I'd written this children's horror book and I thought I'll send it to them for this competition and I'll see what happens.
00:32:59
Speaker
And after about a month, they phoned me up and said, would like to take you out of the competition.
00:33:05
Speaker
And I thought that meant that they hated it that much.
00:33:08
Speaker
They were actually contacting me personally to say, you're out.
00:33:13
Speaker
But they said, would like to represent this.
00:33:16
Speaker
Do you have an agent?
00:33:16
Speaker
And I says, no.
00:33:18
Speaker
And they said, well, do you want us to represent it?
00:33:19
Speaker
And I went, yeah, go on then.
00:33:21
Speaker
And then they took it to HarperCollins and HarperCollins came back and said, can you write six books?
00:33:26
Speaker
And I went, yep.
00:33:27
Speaker
And they said, right, can you give us the outline for the next five by two o'clock this afternoon?
00:33:31
Speaker
Because we have an acquisition meeting about it.
00:33:34
Speaker
And I thought this was all just normal.
00:33:35
Speaker
I was like, okay, yeah, I'll do that.
00:33:37
Speaker
So I sat down and wrote an outline, quite a short outline, like two, three paragraphs for five books, which hadn't existed that morning.
00:33:46
Speaker
And then they came back and said, yeah, we'll take all six.
00:33:49
Speaker
So it was dead easy.
00:33:52
Speaker
But I will say, because that makes it sound like it is, after that, I had far more rejection after that, because I come up with loads of ideas going, I want to do that.
00:33:59
Speaker
And they'll go, no, that's not going to sell.
00:34:00
Speaker
No one's going to buy that.
00:34:01
Speaker
That's terrible.
00:34:02
Speaker
So I had more rejection after the fact of having that book picked up.
00:34:06
Speaker
But I will also say that I spent that 10 year gap, that sort of 21 to 30 writing all the time.
00:34:13
Speaker
You know, I was constantly writing stuff.
00:34:15
Speaker
I was writing novels, I was writing scripts, I was writing short stories.
00:34:19
Speaker
So I was always practicing.
00:34:22
Speaker
And that was the first thing that I felt, seeing that competition coincided with the first thing that I felt critically stood up to being looked at by someone who wasn't an immediate family member.
Desert Island Book Choice and Podcast Closing
00:34:35
Speaker
That's amazing.
00:34:35
Speaker
What an awesome journey and career you've had so far.
00:34:39
Speaker
That brings us to the end of the episode, the final question of the episode, which as always is, Barry, if you were stranded on a desert island with a single book, which book would you want it to be?
00:34:55
Speaker
It's such a difficult question.
00:34:58
Speaker
I think I'm going to go back and I'm going to say it would be Hitchhiker's Gate to the Galaxy.
00:35:05
Speaker
Oh, great choice.
00:35:07
Speaker
Which was one of the first...
00:35:09
Speaker
adult books I read and I use air quotes around that because it's very personal and it just transformed I would say it was the first book that turned me into like a fanatic reader and prior to that I'd read lots of comics and I did read you know well my librarian got me into reading more books than comics but I was a big comic book reader and then read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and
00:35:34
Speaker
I would say that book probably changed the trajectory of my life in that I became just, I was never seen without a book in my hand after that, I don't think.
00:35:44
Speaker
Yeah, or a towel, I hope.
00:35:46
Speaker
Yes, or a towel, yeah, yeah.
00:35:47
Speaker
I always had one of those close to hand.
00:35:50
Speaker
Amazing.
00:35:51
Speaker
One of my favorite books of all time, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
00:35:54
Speaker
Such a great, a great choice, I would say.
00:35:57
Speaker
Well, thank you so much, Barry, for coming on the podcast and sharing all of your amazing adventures and stories and everything that you're up to, everything that's like going to happen with you becoming kind of an indie publisher.
00:36:08
Speaker
That's very, very cool.
00:36:09
Speaker
I'm very excited to see how that turns out.
00:36:11
Speaker
It's been awesome chatting with you.
00:36:12
Speaker
Thank you very much.
00:36:13
Speaker
Nice to speak to you.
00:36:14
Speaker
And for anyone wanting to keep up with what Barry is doing, you can follow him on Twitter and Instagram at JD Kirk books, or you can find his website, www.jdkirk.com.
00:36:26
Speaker
To make sure you don't miss episode of this podcast, follow along on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.
00:36:31
Speaker
You can support the show on Patreon.
00:36:32
Speaker
And for more bookish chat, check out my other podcast, the chosen ones and other tropes.
00:36:37
Speaker
Thanks again to Barry.
00:36:37
Speaker
And thanks to everyone listening.
00:36:38
Speaker
We'll catch you in the next episode.