Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode. at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see a a guest.

Mindy: We're here with Jack Ellem who writes under the name JK Ellem and has had tremendous success in the indie world with publishing and especially on Amazon. So Jack's here to talk to us about writing specifically thriller fiction, crime fiction and achieving self publishing success. So, I mean, first of all, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you write and why you decided to go with indie publishing over traditional?

Jack: Super happy for the invite to be here today. I came to this with no experience at all, nothing. The indie path gave me a way to learn the craft, to learn how to write and to how to put stories together. So I wasn't the type of person that was going to work on a manuscript for a year or two years and then submit it to 100 agents and then just get rejected. I thought two years of my time - that's quite a waste. So I thought, look, write a book, write the first book, test it. I'm always keen on testing the market. I've got a business background. What I've learned is that get your product out there, 80% done or 90% happy with and let the market decide and get some valuable feedback and then go on to book two and implement those improvements and get more feedback and go into book three. 

And indie publishing allows you to do that. It allows you to find your way, to get experience. But more importantly allows you to test the market and get your stories into the hands of readers quickly and get feedback quickly. Traditional publishing doesn't allow that. By the time you finish a manuscript, it could be another 18 months until it hits the bookstores. Indie publishing appeals to me, Mindy, from the get go purely because it's almost like social media, it's instant response. You can put something up and you can get some feedback, good, bad or indifferent and that's what I wanted. I didn't want to spend two or three years of my life crafting a Pulitzer Prize winning novel, which I wouldn't have done anyway, and realize after two or three years of blood, sweat and tears that hey, it was the wrong genre or I've picked the wrong audience or I've tried to follow the market and it hasn't worked. Indie publishing allows you to be extremely flexible, nimble, you can pivot, you can change direction and you can write across multiple genres from there. So it's purely the flexibility and the ability to interact directly with your readers on a shorter timescale was what made indie publishing so attractive. 

Mindy: Very attractive. I agree. So I have one foot in each. I do write under my real name, in the traditional publishing world, but I also write under a pen name in the indie. And it has been so much fun. I was very grateful. Some friends of mine encouraged me to enter into that world and to write with them to co author some books, kind of experiment and see what we could do and accomplish. And I agree wholeheartedly about the turnaround because in the traditional publishing world, you know, my books are coming out about 18 months after I finish writing and editing. So when they hit the shelves, my attention has already turned elsewhere. I've written another book since then, I'm in the midst of editing something else. Also, just to watch your list of available titles grow so quickly. When you're in the trad world it's one a year and when you're in the indie world it's as many as you can produce.

Jack: That’s it. And that's one of the appeals. I've got a lot of friends in the traditional publishing sphere and I wonder what they do for the rest of the year. It would drive me crazy. You've got the lever on the production cycle. You can increase it, you can slow it down, you can go flat out and do four or five books a year. Or you can do just one. You don't have that control when it's trad publishing. 

Mindy: I also of course love what you said about pivoting. So if you see a trend, if something is happening now, that's hot in trad publishing. If it's trending now, it's too late for you to get on that bandwagon by the time you have your book finished written, polished edited with a cover, the trend is going to be cooling if not already over. By the time your book hits the shop. Not so with indie pub, as fast as you can write it, you can get it out there and you can cash in on what's hot right now. 

Jack: And the other thing I thought was odd. I've heard a lot of trad authors, their publisher or the agent will come to them and say, hey look, we want you to write this, want you to write the next Girl On the Train. I think for the bulk of traditionally published authors, they are led a lot by their agent and by the publisher because they're all thinking, well I need the next two book deal. I need the next two book deal. I don't want to be dropped by my publisher. So sometimes they get pigeonholed into having to write what their agent or what their publisher thinks is going to be the next trend. If I see another Girl On the Train or a Woman In the Window or A Man In the Door sort of book, I'm going to go insane.

Mindy: That was the thing for a while - a person in the house. It can happen, especially in the trial world, you can get pigeonholed. That has not been my experience, so I can't speak to it. But that's partially because I write across genres and my publisher is fairly open with me and lets me hop around and kind of do what I want, to be honest with you. But also I do write YA. I write for teens and that is a little more forgiving of an age category when it comes to changing genres. I don't know that the adult world is the same. I could be wrong about that. 

Dystopian had a really, really long tail. And then vampires. The one thing that is true about traditional publishing is that if there's something that is hot, it does tend to last a little longer because it does take time for that book, whatever it is that hit -  Twilight of course, sparking off vampires, Hunger Games, really ushering in dystopia. And then Girl On the Train bringing in the unreliable narrator, thriller - Gone Girl as well, I think we can attribute to that. But those lasted for years. Gosh, vampires for like 12, 15 years. 

In those mega cases, yes, you can write to a trend and still expect some success. You have to decide whether it's not that that's what you actually want, which is I think something that you're pointing at. One of my only frustrations and it is a frustration, still trying to figure out many things in the indie world. The trends do tend to change much more quickly. You have to be nimble and you have to be ready to tap into what's hot and be prepared to write it, I think, but also be prepared to have it be over quickly as well. In some ways I feel a crunch with Indie, it's true of trad too, I wouldn't say that it's disparate, but if something's hot, you need to be writing it right now or you're going to miss that train. 

I wanna hop onto something that you said initially as soon as you got here, you said you have a background in business. So obviously that would be a huge benefit to you going into the indie world because you have to be a business person to do this. 

Jack: Well, It is an advantage, but it can also be a hindrance because if you've got to enter into this world with a bit of an open mind. There are some fundamentals you can still apply, like planning and having a strategic plan and mapping out your business plan for the next 12 months and books you're going to write and marketing you're going to do. But it's a different type of industry. With a normal business within the law, you're free to do what you want to. With the publishing industry, it's still, I find it's still a very closed shop. Even though you're publishing independently, there's still the effects of traditional publishers there, you know, the massive publishers and they do influence trends. So it's a case of trying to work out how as an indie author you can still grow a client base of readership and still influence that readership while all the time you've got some big players in the room. But there's enough of the pie for everyone. So having some business skills, having run a business and having to get your product or your book on the virtual bookshelf still applies.

Mindy: What industry were you in before you came into publishing?

Jack: I originally had an accounting firm and I was very much into the planning, the business planning. I did a course, I went to Harvard and Boston and did a course on launching new ventures and I felt that that really helped. Getting your book, getting your story into the market and testing, testing, testing was what they really pushed during that programs and it's like a startup. You are a startup of one when you're an indie publisher, whether you've written 10 books or you're bringing out your first book, you are a startup of one and you need to approach it like you don't have an infinite budget. You could easily spend, waste tens of thousands of dollars on marketing and your product could crash and burn. So you've got to have that approach of being a lean mean startup.

Mindy: What did you bring with you that translated and what did you have to learn from scratch to go from accounting into publishing?

Jack: I think what I had to learn from scratch was the entire industry. Was how to get your books out there from the production side. You know, should I go wide? Should I go with Kobo, Apple, everyone, Barnes and Noble? Or should I go narrow and just focus on Amazon? And you never stop learning from that side of it. So it was learning how the industry works and learning about paid ads and Facebook and Amazon ads and how to do a really good cover, how to do a really good tagline. And I guess elements of marketing. 

I've always been a person that I go against the grain. I'm contrary and I look at what every other competitor or what every other book or author is doing out there and I try to do the exact opposite. I always had that mindset of - don't follow the herd. Whether you're writing a book or whether you are running a company with 100 staff, just don't follow what everyone else is doing because you'll never stand out from the crowd. Iff you can imagine 10 million books on Amazon all vying for your attention. If you throw yourself into that sea of sameness, and say I'm going to write a book, you'll drown in with everyone else. What I brought to the table from my business days was you've got to be brash and you've got to stand out from the crowd and that's what really changed some of the marketing that we did. And that's what sort of created some of these books that just took off into the stratosphere purely because of the marketing being different. Don't be the next Girl On the Train. And so basically learning everything I could about the industry and then bringing those elements of being different, standing out from the crowd. That's the fundamentals that I brought to the table.

Mindy: And everything you just mentioned is all aside from actually writing the book.

Jack: That’s it. That's probably one of the takeaways. I'd say to your listeners, if you're starting off and you think marketing looks like a daunting task, focus on writing the books. You’re spot on. Was it, Bella Andre, the romance author said - oh and this is a woman that's written nearly 50 books and she's hybrid too. She's done multi million dollar deals as well as independently published and you think, oh well she'll sit back on our laurels now and and push out one book a year. But no, she's still writing four or five books. Her number one marketing rule is - the best thing you can do for marketing is get your next book out, that's it.

Mindy: In the trad publishing industry, something that I learned there that definitely translated over to Indie and not all things do, but - front list sells backlist. If you put out a new book, it draws attention to your old, particularly with Amazon, which I want to focus on for a little bit here because I know that you had great success with Amazon. The Amazon algorithm is a magical formula that no one has really any access to because it is in fact the golden fleece of the publishing industry. But one of the things that we can say about Amazon is that it does tend to reward newness. It likes the shiny new thing and I think that the importance of putting out that next book, like you're saying, is very, very true. Like you got to stay relevant and you've got to be putting something out. With those things in mind, I want to go back to what you were saying about standing apart. That is the trick - making something that is similar yet distinct. That is the absolute challenge. Talk about how you developed something that wasn't the next Girl On the Train, but it's going to appeal to the same audience. 

Jack: Great question. I did two things. I'm going to be very specific here because I think your listeners will benefit from this. I was running Facebook ads a couple of years back. I got to a point where I was spending 100,000 a year. What revenue it created, royalties it created went back into Facebook ads. It was just breaking even. I'm thinking, well I'm making Facebook rich, but I'm not really getting ahead. Everything I earned went back in to pay for more ads that went back into ads. I would do the typical thing of looking at my genre and looking at what everyone else was advertising. After 12 months I realized that hey, my ads looked like everyone else's ads. If I was looking at a thriller book, you'd see an ad pop up in your feed. It would be a picture of a thriller book. It would be, you know, Mindy hunts serial killers in Ohio. And I'm thinking, well there's already 10 books, you know of Mindy or a similar person hunting serial killers in Ohio. And I'm thinking they all look the same. 

And this was going back, I think to 2018. I look like everyone else. It feels like everyone else. And I hit upon this idea, my wife was addicted to her cell phone. Just loves reading the news. She just loves reading the news on her cellphone. The key here is to design an ad for a book that doesn't look like an ad for a book. And that was the challenge I set myself. So what I did was that I came up with a breaking news ad. I didn't have a picture of the book. Nothing. I just had at the top of the ad, Breaking News. And I had it in red and automatically, I thought, well people's eyes go to that. They want to see what's breaking news. Let's have an ad that's not an ad, but it's a news story for a crime that's just happened. 

Start off with one of my books, A Winter’s Kill, which is about a serial killer in the midwest. Breaking News: Ex special agent returns to her hometown not realizing that the number one serial killer in the country has moved there, too. As soon as I put that up, it just took off. It differentiated itself from all the other ads people were getting because it didn't look like an ad for a thriller novel. It looked like a piece of breaking news. A Winter’s Kill  just took off. 

I did that again with another book. You tested it, it worked. Do it again. So I had a book called All Other Sins. Breaking News: housewife from Nebraska finds $1 million dollars on the side of the road. And I did that ad and it just took off as well. That's where everything pivoted. I went from the normal, here's my cover. It's about a woman. It's about a serial killer, blah, blah, blah. Everyone goes, yes, we’ve seen that. If you talk about the Facebook algorithm when an ad does well, it's just self perpetuates and they keep pushing it in front of as many people as possible. That was the turning point where I said, I've got to do ads that don't look like ads for what I'm trying to sell. And we're all trying to sell something. It then moves on to the next trend. You tend to saturate what you're doing. So you've got to always come up with the next one.

Mindy: I have not found the best way to do an ad for my audiences. Now. Of course, I'm speaking about my pen name here. I agree completely that you have to be prepared to put money into it if you want to use ads. But I also like what you're saying, you have to find that sweet spot in between. Because if you're just making enough money selling books on your ads in order to run more ads, that's not a good business. You mentioned Facebook ads and you mentioned AMS, which is Amazon ads. I'm curious how you approached Amazon then, because I think those ads would be a little trickier in terms of not making it look like an ad for a book. So how did you find success there?

Jack: On the Amazon ads? We didn't. We tried to copy the same formula across and you’re correct. Spot on. It's a different type of platform that didn't allow that sort of flexibility. The bulk of the success came from running the actual Facebook ads. And like I said, it's one of these things - you don't want to be so distracted that your next book is pushed back in publication. Having to learn AMS. And then you're having to learn Tiktok ads or you're having to learn doing ads on Twitter and so on. That could suck up a lot of time. And I know authors that haven't put stuff out for months and months because eight hours a day, they're trying to work out how to crack an algorithm on an ad platform and you've lost direction. So you've got to be very quick, you put a small amount into this platform and then test it from then. My advice is is stick with one. Master one. And like we still haven't mastered Facebook ads. We stopped our Facebook ads at the moment. To tell you the truth, we're doing a refresh on that. Don't try and straddle across. While I'm doing Facebook ads today and then I've got to learn how to do AMS ads and maybe I can do Twitter ads - someone said they were great. You're only going to scratch the surface on a couple of them. Pick one that you like, that you can understand, that it's easier to do. Become a master of that particular ad platform.

Mindy: And those ads will suck money pretty quickly. You have to keep an eye on them. Don't just set it and forget it because they will spend. 

Jack: Absolutely. They've got your credit card, they'll just take it out every month. It can be daunting at the end of the day.

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Mindy: Common mistakes. What are some really common mistakes - beyond letting yourself be sucked away from the actual job of writing the book - what are some common mistakes? Things that you see writers right out of the gate doing as not a good choice? 

Jack: Writing a series and that's going to maybe sound contradictory to what some people think. But right from the get go out of the gate, I'm going to write three books. I'm going to write five books. This is going to be a 10 book series. I'm going to tell everyone on my Facebook page, hey, this is book one of 10 or book one of three, and then they lose interest after the first book. But I think if you're starting out, you're still finding your way. My advice would be to do a couple of stand alones, but do them quickly. Find out what you like. Find out what the readers like. It doesn't matter if they're different genres, test the market with a few stand alone.  Every new book that I write is not part of a series. It's got the potential to be a series. Let the reader decide based on the uptake and the sales and the reviews. 

And Mill Point Road, which was probably the most successful book I've had, I never intended it to be a series. It was a standalone. It was done and dusted, page 350, The end it was done. People started coming back - when are you going to write the next one? What happens to Becca? As an author, starting out, just write a couple of standalones, let your readers tell you what they enjoy and then follow that muse from there. 

And I think the other one - write the books, don't be distracted. I've got to do a course on this. I've got to do AMS ads, no. Put your Facebook page up, put your business page up and post regularly into that. Don't worry about having to run ads at this stage. Your ads will happen once you've got enough contacts on your Facebook. Write the books, get two or three up and just focus on you, finding yourself what you like to write.

Mindy: And what the readers want to read. I agree with that entirely. My partners and I, when we did our first series, we initially said this was going to be a seven book series. And we finished out the seven book series, but the first one did well and then, you know, the readers fell off and by the time we cranked out the sixth or seventh one, we knew there wasn't gonna be a great read through. The trend itself had already passed. And we were feverishly working on the next thing because we wanted to get that out and get that out there because we were working on an old thing that was already halfway dead. So yeah, that's very true. 

Jack: Yeah, don't commit.

Mindy: I agree too, on having a little bit more to sell than just one book before you really start investing money in ads and things like that. I think that's important. I know that it's really easy to lose your shirt when you first jump in. You get excited and you hear stories of people throwing up a book and waking up in the morning and they've made $100,000. That might happen once to one person, but it's probably not going to be you.

Jack: Now that you mentioned it,  one of the mistakes that I did make is having to long of a stretch between books. I think now I make sure that once I've got a book ready to be published in the back of it there's a pre order for the next one, or for the next standalone or for the next in the series. Maybe write two or 3 books before you even publish the first one and then put them all up. If you don't have anything they'll go to someone else, they'll go to another author. So it's not unheard of to break down that 120,000 word book into three smaller books. 

Mindy: Especially with the e book readers and the readers and the genre readers, mystery and romance in particular. They will binge a series and if you have it ready for them they will buy it. I want to talk about Mill Point Road. That is your book that really broke you through. I'm looking at its listing on Amazon, it has over 2000 ratings. That's wonderful.

Jack: I call it the wrong turn book. I find the marketing success and the writing success is never deliberate. It just happens, you stumbled across it. So, Mill Point Road, I call the wrong turn book. I was in Maryland, in 2019. And we're driving around, my wife and I, we got lost in the countryside and I took a wrong turn, crested this hill and on the top of the hill there was this ridge with all five of these mansions, really beautiful houses in this gated community and the road was called Mill Point Road. And I said to my wife, I turned to and said, I wonder what happens up there behind closed doors? And that's the genesis of the book. I spent the next couple of days in Hagerstown and outlined a book. If I hadn't taken that wrong turn Mill Point Road wouldn't have come into existence. So that's really the genesis of the book. The best ideas just tend to happen. 

Mindy: They do and when that inspiration hits you must grab it. 

Jack: That's it, literally. I was scouting for locations. People probably drove by me while I was walking down the side of the road trying to find a good place to put a body.

Mindy: Yeah, I’ve been there

Jack: I just had to stay there longer and outline this book. Came back and wrote it and it wasn’t an overnight success. But once again I did something different to the marketing with that book and it took off.

Mindy: Looking at your Amazon listing, you're doing all the things that you're supposed to do. You've got a great cover, you've got a great tagline -  Five Women, Five Dark Secrets, One Killer Who Knows Them All. You've got your keywords that are worked into your subtitle  - a serial killer, mystery and suspense crime thriller. Those little tiny things that you can do that are going to return for you on SEO returns on search returns. 

Jack: And that's something that I never knew about, but I had to learn about. How to, you know, put your keywords in there, try and cover as many genres in that subtitle so the algorithm will throw it up to people that are interested in crime. They're interested in domestic thrillers, they're interested in mystery and suspense. 

Mindy: Listeners may not know, but especially the platform Google Play, it's entirely run by an algorithm. It’s entirely run by bots. And so if someone searches on Google Play, they're looking for a serial killer thriller, mystery suspense. Because Jack has all of these keywords in there, it might pop up Mill Point Road. If people click on it and then they buy it, the algorithm has learned - serial killer, mystery, suspense thriller - give them Mill Point Road, they'll buy it and it'll keep doing it, it'll keep throwing you in front of them. I see you also have an audio book. Why don't you talk to me a little bit about audiobook production in the indie world?

Jack: It took a lot of time and a lot of learning. So we made the strategic decision that if we're going to do audio books, we were going to sell the rights to that. I just didn't have the time to look at production and how we produce an audiobook, selecting your narrators. And I was approached by a company out of the UK that said, we'd like to buy the rights to Mill Point Road and every other book in that series. So I said no problem. And away we go. 

You cannot, as an indie author, you can't do everything. And you know that Mindy, you'll get burnout, you'll go insane. Be willing to break off parts of your product. If you can make a book and then there's a paperback and there's an e book and there's an audio book to it. You need to view them as individual products that you can easily snap off and sell to someone that's good at doing distribution on a paperback. Everything I've got is for sale. I've got a company out of the UK at the moment that is looking at the foreign rights translations. So just think about that. You've got one product. But within that one product of your book there are multiple products and you don't have to get them all to the market. What you need to get to the market is that initial book. I just want more readers or more listeners, whatever platforms, whatever countries. I just want more of those people. And if someone can come onboard and partner and I’m all about that then. Just because you're an indie author doesn't mean the door is closed on those options, you've got to approach it as I've got a product, I can break it off and I can sell that version of it to an expert.

Mindy: You own the rights and that's one of the key things is that, I know under my pen name we've sold rights to serial fiction apps that they buy the novel and they break it up into episodes. I'm not going to produce that, I don't have time, They do it and they pay me for the product. So yes, I agree. You let those professionals deal with their corner of the world and you provide the material. 

Jack: I had a friend of mine, he's a thriller author and he spent literally 18 months and did nothing but translate one of his books into German. Everything else stopped. All his writing. The fact is halfway through it, he hated it, but he couldn't stop. He had started. The train had started rolling and he couldn't get off. I think you have to have therapy. Another thing, I guess the tip to your listeners is - know your limitations. At the time we may think we can conquer the world, but stick to what you're good at and if you're good at writing and getting the books out then stick to that. You're much better in the engine room rather than anywhere else on the ship. 

Mindy: Completely agreed with that. Last thing, why don't you let listeners know where they can find you online and where they can find your books?

Jack: Everyone can just go to my website, JK Ellem. J K double L E M dot com and you can find all my links to my books, the  audiobooks and all other information about me. 

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Mindy: Writer Writer Pants on Fire is produced by Mindy McGinnis. Music by Jack Korbel. Don't forget to check out the blog for additional interviews, writing advice and publication tips at Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com. If the blog or podcast have been helpful to you or if you just enjoy listening, please consider donating. Visit Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com and click “support the blog and podcast” in the sidebar.