Episode 024 - Three Hard Truths with J.J. Hensley
April 28, 2020
"Insightful and funny. I thought his take on the conflicted natures of writing and writers was spot on!" James McCrone
"This is SUCH an awesome interview! Writer friends, check it out. This is my favorite from this podcast series so far!" Lisa Regan
"This is SUCH an awesome interview! Writer friends, check it out. This is my favorite from this podcast series so far!" Lisa Regan
J.J. Hensley discusses the Three Hard Truths he has discovered since his first book, the support he found in the writing community, and the importance of assessing your goals for becoming a writer.
J.J. Hensley is the author of the Trevor Galloway series, among other works. He is a former police officer and former Special Agent with the U.S. Secret Service.
J.J. Hensley is the author of the Trevor Galloway series, among other works. He is a former police officer and former Special Agent with the U.S. Secret Service.
J.J., who is originally from Huntington, WV, graduated from Penn State University with a B.S. in Administration of Justice and has a M.S. in Criminal Justice Administration from Columbia Southern University.
He currently resides near Savannah, GA. J.J.’s novel RESOLVE was named one of the BEST BOOKS OF 2013 by Suspense Magazine and was named a finalist for Best First Novel by the International Thriller Writers organization. He is a member of the International Thriller Writers and Sisters in Crime.
He currently resides near Savannah, GA. J.J.’s novel RESOLVE was named one of the BEST BOOKS OF 2013 by Suspense Magazine and was named a finalist for Best First Novel by the International Thriller Writers organization. He is a member of the International Thriller Writers and Sisters in Crime.
Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is JJ Hensley. JJ, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] JJ: Great. How are you?
[00:00:07] Matty: I am great, thank you. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, JJ Hensley is the author of the Trevor Galloway series, among other works. He's a former police officer and former special agent with the US Secret Service. Hensley, who originally was from Huntington, West Virginia, graduated from Penn State University with a BS in Administration of Justice and has an MS in Criminal Justice Administration from Columbia Southern University. He currently resides near Savannah, Georgia. And his novel Resolve was named one of the best books of 2013 by Suspense Magazine and was named as a finalist for the best first novel at the International Thriller Writers organization.
[00:00:48] He is a member of International Thriller Writers and Sisters in Crime, which I think is great because I always like an opportunity to call out that Sisters in Crime is not just women. It's sisters and misters.
[00:00:59] JJ: Right. There are quite a few men in there.
[00:01:02] Matty: There are. Anyone who is in crime fiction, I always highly recommend Sisters in Crime because it's a great organization.
[00:01:10]The topic we're going to be discussing today with JJ is from a guest post that you did for International Thriller Writers in The Thrill Begins, I think it was in February, on "Three Things I Wish I'd Known Before I Wrote a Book," which I think is a series they were doing. And you boil that down to "Three Hard Truths."
[00:01:30] Today we're going to be talking about three hard truths from a writer's point of view. But in the article, you described the experience with your first book, which didn't sound that hard. Tell the listeners a little bit about your experience with your first book.
[00:01:43] JJ: My first book, Resolve, I had no writing experience. I should have prefaced it with that. I was with the Secret Service when I got the idea to start writing. My wife had suggested I give a shot at writing a book, and then I left the Secret Service for another job in the federal government and moved to the Pittsburgh area.
[00:02:03] And I had no idea what I was doing whatsoever. I cannot express that enough, that I really had no guidance, no tie to the writing community.
[00:00:06] JJ: Great. How are you?
[00:00:07] Matty: I am great, thank you. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, JJ Hensley is the author of the Trevor Galloway series, among other works. He's a former police officer and former special agent with the US Secret Service. Hensley, who originally was from Huntington, West Virginia, graduated from Penn State University with a BS in Administration of Justice and has an MS in Criminal Justice Administration from Columbia Southern University. He currently resides near Savannah, Georgia. And his novel Resolve was named one of the best books of 2013 by Suspense Magazine and was named as a finalist for the best first novel at the International Thriller Writers organization.
[00:00:48] He is a member of International Thriller Writers and Sisters in Crime, which I think is great because I always like an opportunity to call out that Sisters in Crime is not just women. It's sisters and misters.
[00:00:59] JJ: Right. There are quite a few men in there.
[00:01:02] Matty: There are. Anyone who is in crime fiction, I always highly recommend Sisters in Crime because it's a great organization.
[00:01:10]The topic we're going to be discussing today with JJ is from a guest post that you did for International Thriller Writers in The Thrill Begins, I think it was in February, on "Three Things I Wish I'd Known Before I Wrote a Book," which I think is a series they were doing. And you boil that down to "Three Hard Truths."
[00:01:30] Today we're going to be talking about three hard truths from a writer's point of view. But in the article, you described the experience with your first book, which didn't sound that hard. Tell the listeners a little bit about your experience with your first book.
[00:01:43] JJ: My first book, Resolve, I had no writing experience. I should have prefaced it with that. I was with the Secret Service when I got the idea to start writing. My wife had suggested I give a shot at writing a book, and then I left the Secret Service for another job in the federal government and moved to the Pittsburgh area.
[00:02:03] And I had no idea what I was doing whatsoever. I cannot express that enough, that I really had no guidance, no tie to the writing community.
read more ...
[00:02:11] I was really just Googling things as far as how does this process even work. And sat down and just real quick, just threw out a few chapters in and had my wife read it and she thought pretty good. My wife is a pretty solid critic, so when she said it was pretty good, it wasn't like if your spouse is going to just be patting you on the back and say, "Yeah, that's really nice."
[00:02:34] She didn't set it on fire, so I took that as a really good confirmation. She said "I can't wait to see where this is going." I thought, well I can't either, because I didn't even know where it was going at the time. And I finished that manuscript rather quickly, within a few months.
[00:02:50] And then I really just did the internet research as far as, "Okay, what do I do now? I'm going to try to get this thing published." And, I sent query letters out and like most authors got a ton of rejections. But I did end up getting an agent who then got the book sold to an independent publisher up in New York.
[00:03:08] And then I think I was at work one day and another author who was with that same publisher, Gwen Florio, who's a fantastic author, she emailed me and she said, "Can you believe it?" I was like, "No, what? What are you talking about?" And it turned out both our books, had been nominated for best first novel for the Thriller awards.
[00:03:29] And I didn't believe her. I Googled that too. I Google a lot of things.
[00:03:33] Matty: It's good to check the facts.
[00:03:36] JJ: Right, right. I've given out a lot of pranks. I've been the victim of a few pranks, so I verify everything. And it turned out that it did get nominated for best first novel.
[00:03:47] And it was kind of a huge deal was I was like, well, I guess I need to go to this ThrillerFest thing. I went to the awards ceremony and it was just a fantastic experience. And that's how that book got me involved. I thought, well, I need to keep writing books because this had some level success.
[00:04:04] And I thought, maybe this is my way to be a household name, and you start to think, maybe this is where you're going to see your books on all sorts of shelves and not saying there's going to be movie deals and all that stuff, but you start to think maybe it's a lottery ticket with better odds.
[00:04:22] But as you alluded to with the column "Three Hard Truths," it's not always that way.
[00:04:29] Matty: I'm going to just read off the three hard truths that you identify and ask you to elaborate on each of them. The first one was award recognition does not necessarily translate to sales and future book deals. Tell us about that.
[00:04:44] JJ: I think I've mentioned in that article, if you asked the average reader who won an Edgar Award in 2003, or who won a Thriller award in 2002, they don't know. And most of them don't care. Writers care, publishers care, agents care. But most readers, to be honest, they don't care.
[00:05:03] It looks great on a book. But the hard truth about that one is that publishers and agents, what they care about, and I understand why, it's a business, is sales. They care about sales and the hard truth is it's about the numbers
[00:05:18] And that's not to sound bitter about it. I mean, the award recognition is fantastic. It's an honor. but it doesn't mean if you get a nomination or even an award for something that you're going to be a household name overnight or in five years or 10 years or anything like that.
[00:05:35] Matty: That could be a comforting truth to the 99.9% of us who have not been nominated for a big award.
[00:05:43] JJ: Oh, absolutely.
[00:05:45] Matty: The second hard truth you learned was there are bad books that will become best sellers. Talk about that.
[00:05:52] JJ: I think we've all experienced that. I think all authors are avid readers. And there's so many of us who have come across books that are international bestseller, New York times bestseller, and they read the book and we don't want to go out and bash a book online or anything like that. That's petty. But we all have come across those books that are huge bestsellers and they're not good. They're just not. Sometimes it's because the publisher has decided for whatever reason to throw in a lot of marketing money behind the book, and they say, "We're going to make book successful one way or another, it's going to be successful."
[00:06:31] Sometimes it's because the author is already established and they've had successful books and maybe their first book, second book was wildly successful, but their next book is just not good. But they have a big enough following that they're going to buy it no matter what.
[00:06:46] There are others who have had really, really good books and then they've written some duds, but they've been crazy successful just because of name recognition. And that's just the way it is. Maybe they've earned that right to have it, that book that sells great numbers. I would love to have that. I would love to go out there and write a book in crayon and it's up on a bestseller list.
[00:07:05] Matty: It seems as if the other reason for those kinds of books is sometimes that an author is so good at one aspect of the book that readers let them be horrible at the other aspects. Like the story is so good that they don't care that the characters are completely two-dimensional cardboard cutouts, or the characters are so compelling that they overlook the fact that there's a huge hole in the plot.
[00:07:29] JJ: Oh, yeah. I've come across a lot of books where there's things in the book that just don't make any logical sense. Huge continuity errors or things beyond "That gun would've run out of bullets long ago," or "That's not the type of helicopter they use." Not the detailed things. I mean, just huge plot holes that don't make sense.
[00:07:51] Matty: Yeah. The third hard truth is most writers make very little money.
[00:07:58] JJ: yeah. I think you can attest to this. Most writers either have another job or are retired. There are very few who write full time.
[00:08:06] I'm generalizing here, but I'm willing to bet that royalty wise, traditionally published authors probably pull down about $2 a book, that are sold. The agent gets their cut if they have a agent. The publisher gets a cut, Amazon takes their cut if it goes through Amazon or whoever the distributor may be. Let's say it gets $2 a cut.
[00:08:28] A lot of the public doesn't realize what a lot of sales are, but selling 10,000 books is a lot of books. Let's say that's a pretty successful author to sell 10,000 books. So you sell 10,000 books. Let's say you make $20,000 off a book. That's before taxes, before website costs, before going to conventions and everything.
[00:08:47] You aren't buying an island with that title, right? You aren't quitting your job. It's not like you're making a lot of money off of books, and that's if you sold 10,000 copies. We know that most authors are selling a few hundred copies, maybe a couple thousand copies. Maybe they've got some audio rights and they might make a that little extra money off that.
[00:09:07] But most authors are making a few thousand dollars at most off of books. I can't remember which author I've heard say it's easier than ever to get published, but it's harder than ever to make a living as a writer. It's just incredibly hard now to make a living as a writer, especially when the market is, I'll say, extremely diluted because anybody can self-publish obviously, and that's not a negative thing necessarily, but there's so much that is out there available for people cheap on Kindle for eBooks, anybody publishes and there's no vetting process. People can go out there and put things on there for free or 99 cents or whatever.
[00:09:46] And, then I'm not saying that's a negative thing, and I understand why that exists because we know how hard that process is to get an agent and to get published. I've been through three publishers and two agents. They come and go and they go out of business.
[00:10:04] It's a brutal business, you're not going to make a lot of money at it unless you are very, very fortunate.
[00:10:10] Matty: One thing that I believe is getting better in terms of indy books, at least for some indy publishers and indy authors, is that readers and the different consumers of content are becoming more savvy about finding quality. I think early on someone would go onto Amazon or go on to some other place where they were getting content, they would see something for 99 cents and they would think, "Oh, great, I'm going to have a nice read for 99 cents."
[00:10:34] And sometimes they did, but sometimes they didn't. I just had Mark Lefebvre on the podcast a couple of episodes ago, and he was talking about getting into libraries and he said that when books first started to be independently published, they were all going to the same central database of books that librarians went to to find content for their libraries, and they started seeing the 99 cent books and thinking, "This is great. we're going to be able to get many more books for our budget dollars than we used to," and then ended up with a lot of bad books.
[00:11:05] And the backend provider of the data ended up segmenting out the independent publishing books into a whole separate database. And so as Mark described it, it was as if every time you did a search, you had to go to Google, but then you had to go to Bing to do the separate search for the separate subcategory of books, and they just recently recombined them. And I think it's because readers are getting more savvy about seeing the markers for a badly published indy book and the writers who didn't want to step up to a more professional presentation are dropping off.
[00:11:37] That said. You're still operating in a pool of millions and millions and millions of books.
[00:11:43] JJ: Right, right. It scared so many libraries off too, because they won't touch, not just completely independent authors sometimes, but they won't touch a lot of independent presses. They will only touch a lot of the big five publishers.
[00:11:57] There's only a certain set of publishers that they will even get books from. In bookstores as well, they are so particular about who they'll actually take books from, it just makes it hard to reach the readers, unless it's through online sales.
[00:12:11] Matty: Bookstores is tough, but I think that indies have an opportunity in libraries because a lot of their traditional publishers have been treating libraries so badly that if an indy publisher can come in and say, "Hey, I'm going to do whatever I need to do to make my books available to you as soon as they're out in every format I have," that it can be a benefit that the indies have over the big houses that now have the bad reputation.
[00:12:33] JJ: I do remember reading that one of the big five houses really did a number on the libraries not too long ago and libraries were not very happy about it, especially with the e-books.
[00:12:44] Matty: Right. That they weren't allowing them to have the ebook, I think for six months, just one copy or something.
[00:12:51] JJ: Just one copy. Yeah.
[00:12:52] Matty: Very strange. The other thing that I wanted to say about making money is I totally agree that if your dream is to write fiction, then you better keep a day job. I left my day job last year and I left with the knowledge that my business plan needed to be fiction writing and nonfiction writing and other offerings through my nonfiction platform, which is The Indy Author, like online courses or monetizing my podcast and things like that. Yeah, just thinking you can be the artist in the garret writing your novel is not going to result in you being able to pay the rent on that garret.
[00:13:32] JJ: Right, right. It's a little discouraging every time when we come around to tax season and my wife says, "Oh, thank God you didn't make too much money on books this year."
[00:13:40] Matty: It's not what you really want to hear. “I feel like good about myself now.”
[00:13:44] JJ: It's real confidence. Awesome.
[00:13:50] Matty: I wanted to read an excerpt from the article that you wrote because there were a couple of things that I want to tease out of this, and the quote is, "Throughout the journey where I was worried about lists, awards, and sales, I made one amazing discovery. The writing community in general is an incredible, indecipherable, wonderful, insecure, supportive, jealous, welcoming, collaborative, delightful family."
[00:14:16] You had spoken earlier about the fact that when you started out with your first book, your only connection with what was going on was Google. Just talk a little bit about how the community you found among writers has helped you through your writing and publishing journey.
[00:14:31] JJ: Oh, I ended up leaping into the best dysfunctional family ever with the writing community, through the International Thriller Writers, and then in Pittsburgh, I got involved in the local Sisters in Crime chapter, and they were fantastic. I met Annette Dashofy and that group there, and they were just fantastic. And. Rebecca Drake. They really just kind of guided me through a lot of the process and opened up a lot of the resources there.
[00:15:00] And then I got involved with, a lot of the people through the International Thriller Writers and the crew at The Thrill Begins. Ed Aymar and Shannon Kirk and Wendy Tyson and Tom Sweterlitsch in the whole cast of people there. But the thing with doing those collaborative projects as far as The Thrill Begins and going to these conferences such as Bouchercon and the International Thriller Writers ThrillerFest and even listening to the panel discussions is you discover that writers in general, we're all so insecure, we are all jealous of each other, but we'll help each other, which is fantastic.
[00:15:39] 99% of us are jealous of somebody else, but we're also willing to help one another to even get better, to even improve the other person to the point that they're going to be at a higher level than anybody else we know. So if somebody who needs a blurb for a book, they need a contact, if they need any kind of help whatsoever, it's been fantastic. I've had big name writers who really didn't know me give me blurbs for books, or talk me through what's the best way to market this and market that. And they've had no reason to do that whatsoever.
[00:16:17] Of course, I've given blurbs for books for people that I really didn't know. And because of my background in law enforcement, I've given a lot of manuscripts reads and I've always been willing to help people out with stuff like that.
[00:16:29] It's just such a supportive community as far as that goes. I think we all want each other to be successful. And for the number of people out there that are doing this, it's a surprisingly little number of jerks in the community. You do have a few people who are going to have those egos and they get a little bit condescending sometimes, but really not that many.
[00:16:52] Most people are really cool. And especially for a bunch of introverts. A lot of us are introverted personalities to some extent and can be kind of socially awkward sometimes. But, it's just such a unique community as far as being able to help each other out and give each other tips and help each other with research.
[00:17:12] Now the funny thing is watching people who are so nice to each other and interactive online and then they go and meet each other in person at a convention and then they're so socially awkward around each other and they don't know how to interact in person.
[00:17:27] They're so afraid of disappointing each other in person.
[00:17:31] Matty: That's an interesting perspective.
[00:17:33] JJ: It's so funny. There'll be little cliques online and they're sniping back and forth jokingly, but then you get together at a bar at Bouchercon or one of the writer conventions, and then you can see them feeling each other out and they're like, I'm so going to disappoint you. I'm so much wittier on Twitter than I am in person. I need to drink heavily now because it's going to go downhill.
[00:17:56] Matty: I want to go back to most writers make very little money in conjunction with the importance of forcing yourself to get out there in person and meet people at events like these, which can be very expensive.
[00:18:08] I went to International Thriller Writers for four consecutive years, and then the fifth year came, and I was like, yeah, you know what. I'm going to have to take a couple of years off cause it's a pricey endeavor. How do you weigh the cost benefit of going to those kinds of events?
[00:18:25] JJ: I ask my wife if I'm allowed. I don't do stuff every year now. I've done ThrillerFest a few years. I, like you, have taken a couple of years off because it's always in New York. It can be very expensive. Bouchercon is less expensive, so I've done it the last couple of years.
[00:18:42] I still work for the federal government, so sometimes I have work obligations that I just can't travel to a lot of book events, but I'll do one, maybe two events, the bigger events, per year, and that's it. But I am really, really not suited for the author life because I am so return on investment oriented.
[00:19:01] I should be going out and traveling and doing all these events and hauling books around but unless I know the return on investment, I won't do it. I can't get it through my head when people say, you got to get your name out there and do it up front. I did it at first with my first few books, but now I'm to the point that unless I know the return on investment, I don't do it as much.
[00:19:25] Matty: It is a very tough balance to hit. When I left my corporate job last year, I thought, "Oh, I'm going to be able to do so many more events now that my time is my own," but it turned out I do fewer because now I'm bringing a more strictly business focused approach to, if I invest a day to go to this book fair and sit at a table for eight hours, is it going to be worth it? And I find that I'm saying no more often, that it's better if I spend eight hours writing another book. But that said, that idea that you never know when you're going to make that contact or make that good friend or form a connection.
[00:20:04] JJ: Right. But I'm not going to pay a $50 table fee if I'm not going to sell that many books. I'm just not. And then there's other factors too. I've got an eight-year-old daughter. I'm not going to spend that much time away from her to sell five books.
[00:20:17] Matty: Yeah. There are lots of both quantitative and qualitative things you have to weigh when you're making the decisions about that.
[00:20:25] Matty: The other quote that I want to call out and here we are in April 2020 and we're in the middle of the COVID-19 quarantine. And generally, I haven't talked about it on the podcast because I'm looking to make this content more evergreen, but there was another sentence in your article which you wrote back in February, so you weren't thinking about COVID at the time, I'm assuming, unless you knew something through your government job that the rest of us didn't, but it is: "When a writer stares at a blank page, there is an inherent sense of isolation in the work, the crafting of the stories. But when you've been in the business for a while, you learned that shared isolation is a real thing."
[00:21:03] Are you bringing a different perspective to that idea of shared isolation now than you did in February?
[00:21:10] JJ: Yeah, I just had a Zoom lunch with my colleagues on The Thrill Begins and it was kind of reinvigorating because we all had that shared sense of being quarantined and struggling with our writing at the time. Because it is a challenge to not just deal with a lot of us are working from home who aren't furloughed and dealing with family situations, kids who are doing school at home now.
[00:21:37] And then just the overall distraction of trying to write with all this going on, all the stress, and trying to figure out how you're going to write this into a book. Can you write a book that is going to be set a year from now, two years from now, and how are you going to deal with coronavirus? Are people shaking hands? Are they in crowds? Are they going to a ballgame? People don't even know how to deal with that point. There's a lot of questions for that. But even that shared experience among authors is really interesting right now. Even though that the writing itself is a kind of solitary experience, there is that shared feeling that you're not alone in doing that now.
[00:22:17] And maybe now more than ever. So, through the writing community, it is nice to know that you aren't alone in those struggles.
[00:22:26] Matty: Yeah. The thing that you ended your article with for The Thrill Begins was: "You need to decide on your idea of success before walking through the gauntlet of the writing world. It may turn out reaching your goal will be easier than you think."
[00:22:40] We started out with this kind of ominous, the three hard truths, but what you shared ended on a positive note. Can you expand on that a little bit?
[00:22:50] JJ: Yeah. If you're dead set on being world famous and getting a movie deal and being on the top of the New York times bestseller list, you're probably going to be disappointed.
[00:23:01] But if your goals are to write a great story, to write something that you're happy about, if it's just to get published, then you're going to achieve your goal if you keep working at it. If just sitting down and you're just enjoying the process of writing, you're going to achieve that.
[00:23:19] Maybe it's just a matter of keeping that perspective. The first full ThrillerFest I went to, I actually got kind of depressed because I got there and it was a little bit overwhelming because there were so many people with huge book deals and people talking about movie deals, and they were with big publishers. And I was just like, wow, I felt like such a small fish. And it was a little overwhelming.
[00:23:44] And part of me wanted that, and it got a little depressing, and then I had to pull back and be like, that's not why I started writing. That's not what my goal was. Maybe it's just a matter of keeping that in your mind, what your definition of success was when you started writing. If you do that, I think you'll be pretty happy with it.
[00:24:05] Matty: Great. Well, thank you so much, JJ. This was so helpful. And please let our listeners know where they can find out more about you and your work online.
[00:24:13] JJ: I have a website at www.hensley-books.com. I also have a blog out there called, "Yinz to Y'all" because people in Pittsburgh, they'll say yinz instead of y'all. I moved from Pittsburgh to Savannah. But if you just put JJ Hensley blog in Google, it'll come up. I'm on Twitter at JJHensleyAuthor is my handle, and I'm on Facebook, JJ Hensley, Author page, and I've got a good reads page, Amazon author page. If you Google me, you'll find me.
[00:24:48] Matty: Great. Well, thank you so much, JJ. I appreciate you spending the time with us.
[00:24:52] JJ: Thank you for having me.
[00:02:34] She didn't set it on fire, so I took that as a really good confirmation. She said "I can't wait to see where this is going." I thought, well I can't either, because I didn't even know where it was going at the time. And I finished that manuscript rather quickly, within a few months.
[00:02:50] And then I really just did the internet research as far as, "Okay, what do I do now? I'm going to try to get this thing published." And, I sent query letters out and like most authors got a ton of rejections. But I did end up getting an agent who then got the book sold to an independent publisher up in New York.
[00:03:08] And then I think I was at work one day and another author who was with that same publisher, Gwen Florio, who's a fantastic author, she emailed me and she said, "Can you believe it?" I was like, "No, what? What are you talking about?" And it turned out both our books, had been nominated for best first novel for the Thriller awards.
[00:03:29] And I didn't believe her. I Googled that too. I Google a lot of things.
[00:03:33] Matty: It's good to check the facts.
[00:03:36] JJ: Right, right. I've given out a lot of pranks. I've been the victim of a few pranks, so I verify everything. And it turned out that it did get nominated for best first novel.
[00:03:47] And it was kind of a huge deal was I was like, well, I guess I need to go to this ThrillerFest thing. I went to the awards ceremony and it was just a fantastic experience. And that's how that book got me involved. I thought, well, I need to keep writing books because this had some level success.
[00:04:04] And I thought, maybe this is my way to be a household name, and you start to think, maybe this is where you're going to see your books on all sorts of shelves and not saying there's going to be movie deals and all that stuff, but you start to think maybe it's a lottery ticket with better odds.
[00:04:22] But as you alluded to with the column "Three Hard Truths," it's not always that way.
[00:04:29] Matty: I'm going to just read off the three hard truths that you identify and ask you to elaborate on each of them. The first one was award recognition does not necessarily translate to sales and future book deals. Tell us about that.
[00:04:44] JJ: I think I've mentioned in that article, if you asked the average reader who won an Edgar Award in 2003, or who won a Thriller award in 2002, they don't know. And most of them don't care. Writers care, publishers care, agents care. But most readers, to be honest, they don't care.
[00:05:03] It looks great on a book. But the hard truth about that one is that publishers and agents, what they care about, and I understand why, it's a business, is sales. They care about sales and the hard truth is it's about the numbers
[00:05:18] And that's not to sound bitter about it. I mean, the award recognition is fantastic. It's an honor. but it doesn't mean if you get a nomination or even an award for something that you're going to be a household name overnight or in five years or 10 years or anything like that.
[00:05:35] Matty: That could be a comforting truth to the 99.9% of us who have not been nominated for a big award.
[00:05:43] JJ: Oh, absolutely.
[00:05:45] Matty: The second hard truth you learned was there are bad books that will become best sellers. Talk about that.
[00:05:52] JJ: I think we've all experienced that. I think all authors are avid readers. And there's so many of us who have come across books that are international bestseller, New York times bestseller, and they read the book and we don't want to go out and bash a book online or anything like that. That's petty. But we all have come across those books that are huge bestsellers and they're not good. They're just not. Sometimes it's because the publisher has decided for whatever reason to throw in a lot of marketing money behind the book, and they say, "We're going to make book successful one way or another, it's going to be successful."
[00:06:31] Sometimes it's because the author is already established and they've had successful books and maybe their first book, second book was wildly successful, but their next book is just not good. But they have a big enough following that they're going to buy it no matter what.
[00:06:46] There are others who have had really, really good books and then they've written some duds, but they've been crazy successful just because of name recognition. And that's just the way it is. Maybe they've earned that right to have it, that book that sells great numbers. I would love to have that. I would love to go out there and write a book in crayon and it's up on a bestseller list.
[00:07:05] Matty: It seems as if the other reason for those kinds of books is sometimes that an author is so good at one aspect of the book that readers let them be horrible at the other aspects. Like the story is so good that they don't care that the characters are completely two-dimensional cardboard cutouts, or the characters are so compelling that they overlook the fact that there's a huge hole in the plot.
[00:07:29] JJ: Oh, yeah. I've come across a lot of books where there's things in the book that just don't make any logical sense. Huge continuity errors or things beyond "That gun would've run out of bullets long ago," or "That's not the type of helicopter they use." Not the detailed things. I mean, just huge plot holes that don't make sense.
[00:07:51] Matty: Yeah. The third hard truth is most writers make very little money.
[00:07:58] JJ: yeah. I think you can attest to this. Most writers either have another job or are retired. There are very few who write full time.
[00:08:06] I'm generalizing here, but I'm willing to bet that royalty wise, traditionally published authors probably pull down about $2 a book, that are sold. The agent gets their cut if they have a agent. The publisher gets a cut, Amazon takes their cut if it goes through Amazon or whoever the distributor may be. Let's say it gets $2 a cut.
[00:08:28] A lot of the public doesn't realize what a lot of sales are, but selling 10,000 books is a lot of books. Let's say that's a pretty successful author to sell 10,000 books. So you sell 10,000 books. Let's say you make $20,000 off a book. That's before taxes, before website costs, before going to conventions and everything.
[00:08:47] You aren't buying an island with that title, right? You aren't quitting your job. It's not like you're making a lot of money off of books, and that's if you sold 10,000 copies. We know that most authors are selling a few hundred copies, maybe a couple thousand copies. Maybe they've got some audio rights and they might make a that little extra money off that.
[00:09:07] But most authors are making a few thousand dollars at most off of books. I can't remember which author I've heard say it's easier than ever to get published, but it's harder than ever to make a living as a writer. It's just incredibly hard now to make a living as a writer, especially when the market is, I'll say, extremely diluted because anybody can self-publish obviously, and that's not a negative thing necessarily, but there's so much that is out there available for people cheap on Kindle for eBooks, anybody publishes and there's no vetting process. People can go out there and put things on there for free or 99 cents or whatever.
[00:09:46] And, then I'm not saying that's a negative thing, and I understand why that exists because we know how hard that process is to get an agent and to get published. I've been through three publishers and two agents. They come and go and they go out of business.
[00:10:04] It's a brutal business, you're not going to make a lot of money at it unless you are very, very fortunate.
[00:10:10] Matty: One thing that I believe is getting better in terms of indy books, at least for some indy publishers and indy authors, is that readers and the different consumers of content are becoming more savvy about finding quality. I think early on someone would go onto Amazon or go on to some other place where they were getting content, they would see something for 99 cents and they would think, "Oh, great, I'm going to have a nice read for 99 cents."
[00:10:34] And sometimes they did, but sometimes they didn't. I just had Mark Lefebvre on the podcast a couple of episodes ago, and he was talking about getting into libraries and he said that when books first started to be independently published, they were all going to the same central database of books that librarians went to to find content for their libraries, and they started seeing the 99 cent books and thinking, "This is great. we're going to be able to get many more books for our budget dollars than we used to," and then ended up with a lot of bad books.
[00:11:05] And the backend provider of the data ended up segmenting out the independent publishing books into a whole separate database. And so as Mark described it, it was as if every time you did a search, you had to go to Google, but then you had to go to Bing to do the separate search for the separate subcategory of books, and they just recently recombined them. And I think it's because readers are getting more savvy about seeing the markers for a badly published indy book and the writers who didn't want to step up to a more professional presentation are dropping off.
[00:11:37] That said. You're still operating in a pool of millions and millions and millions of books.
[00:11:43] JJ: Right, right. It scared so many libraries off too, because they won't touch, not just completely independent authors sometimes, but they won't touch a lot of independent presses. They will only touch a lot of the big five publishers.
[00:11:57] There's only a certain set of publishers that they will even get books from. In bookstores as well, they are so particular about who they'll actually take books from, it just makes it hard to reach the readers, unless it's through online sales.
[00:12:11] Matty: Bookstores is tough, but I think that indies have an opportunity in libraries because a lot of their traditional publishers have been treating libraries so badly that if an indy publisher can come in and say, "Hey, I'm going to do whatever I need to do to make my books available to you as soon as they're out in every format I have," that it can be a benefit that the indies have over the big houses that now have the bad reputation.
[00:12:33] JJ: I do remember reading that one of the big five houses really did a number on the libraries not too long ago and libraries were not very happy about it, especially with the e-books.
[00:12:44] Matty: Right. That they weren't allowing them to have the ebook, I think for six months, just one copy or something.
[00:12:51] JJ: Just one copy. Yeah.
[00:12:52] Matty: Very strange. The other thing that I wanted to say about making money is I totally agree that if your dream is to write fiction, then you better keep a day job. I left my day job last year and I left with the knowledge that my business plan needed to be fiction writing and nonfiction writing and other offerings through my nonfiction platform, which is The Indy Author, like online courses or monetizing my podcast and things like that. Yeah, just thinking you can be the artist in the garret writing your novel is not going to result in you being able to pay the rent on that garret.
[00:13:32] JJ: Right, right. It's a little discouraging every time when we come around to tax season and my wife says, "Oh, thank God you didn't make too much money on books this year."
[00:13:40] Matty: It's not what you really want to hear. “I feel like good about myself now.”
[00:13:44] JJ: It's real confidence. Awesome.
[00:13:50] Matty: I wanted to read an excerpt from the article that you wrote because there were a couple of things that I want to tease out of this, and the quote is, "Throughout the journey where I was worried about lists, awards, and sales, I made one amazing discovery. The writing community in general is an incredible, indecipherable, wonderful, insecure, supportive, jealous, welcoming, collaborative, delightful family."
[00:14:16] You had spoken earlier about the fact that when you started out with your first book, your only connection with what was going on was Google. Just talk a little bit about how the community you found among writers has helped you through your writing and publishing journey.
[00:14:31] JJ: Oh, I ended up leaping into the best dysfunctional family ever with the writing community, through the International Thriller Writers, and then in Pittsburgh, I got involved in the local Sisters in Crime chapter, and they were fantastic. I met Annette Dashofy and that group there, and they were just fantastic. And. Rebecca Drake. They really just kind of guided me through a lot of the process and opened up a lot of the resources there.
[00:15:00] And then I got involved with, a lot of the people through the International Thriller Writers and the crew at The Thrill Begins. Ed Aymar and Shannon Kirk and Wendy Tyson and Tom Sweterlitsch in the whole cast of people there. But the thing with doing those collaborative projects as far as The Thrill Begins and going to these conferences such as Bouchercon and the International Thriller Writers ThrillerFest and even listening to the panel discussions is you discover that writers in general, we're all so insecure, we are all jealous of each other, but we'll help each other, which is fantastic.
[00:15:39] 99% of us are jealous of somebody else, but we're also willing to help one another to even get better, to even improve the other person to the point that they're going to be at a higher level than anybody else we know. So if somebody who needs a blurb for a book, they need a contact, if they need any kind of help whatsoever, it's been fantastic. I've had big name writers who really didn't know me give me blurbs for books, or talk me through what's the best way to market this and market that. And they've had no reason to do that whatsoever.
[00:16:17] Of course, I've given blurbs for books for people that I really didn't know. And because of my background in law enforcement, I've given a lot of manuscripts reads and I've always been willing to help people out with stuff like that.
[00:16:29] It's just such a supportive community as far as that goes. I think we all want each other to be successful. And for the number of people out there that are doing this, it's a surprisingly little number of jerks in the community. You do have a few people who are going to have those egos and they get a little bit condescending sometimes, but really not that many.
[00:16:52] Most people are really cool. And especially for a bunch of introverts. A lot of us are introverted personalities to some extent and can be kind of socially awkward sometimes. But, it's just such a unique community as far as being able to help each other out and give each other tips and help each other with research.
[00:17:12] Now the funny thing is watching people who are so nice to each other and interactive online and then they go and meet each other in person at a convention and then they're so socially awkward around each other and they don't know how to interact in person.
[00:17:27] They're so afraid of disappointing each other in person.
[00:17:31] Matty: That's an interesting perspective.
[00:17:33] JJ: It's so funny. There'll be little cliques online and they're sniping back and forth jokingly, but then you get together at a bar at Bouchercon or one of the writer conventions, and then you can see them feeling each other out and they're like, I'm so going to disappoint you. I'm so much wittier on Twitter than I am in person. I need to drink heavily now because it's going to go downhill.
[00:17:56] Matty: I want to go back to most writers make very little money in conjunction with the importance of forcing yourself to get out there in person and meet people at events like these, which can be very expensive.
[00:18:08] I went to International Thriller Writers for four consecutive years, and then the fifth year came, and I was like, yeah, you know what. I'm going to have to take a couple of years off cause it's a pricey endeavor. How do you weigh the cost benefit of going to those kinds of events?
[00:18:25] JJ: I ask my wife if I'm allowed. I don't do stuff every year now. I've done ThrillerFest a few years. I, like you, have taken a couple of years off because it's always in New York. It can be very expensive. Bouchercon is less expensive, so I've done it the last couple of years.
[00:18:42] I still work for the federal government, so sometimes I have work obligations that I just can't travel to a lot of book events, but I'll do one, maybe two events, the bigger events, per year, and that's it. But I am really, really not suited for the author life because I am so return on investment oriented.
[00:19:01] I should be going out and traveling and doing all these events and hauling books around but unless I know the return on investment, I won't do it. I can't get it through my head when people say, you got to get your name out there and do it up front. I did it at first with my first few books, but now I'm to the point that unless I know the return on investment, I don't do it as much.
[00:19:25] Matty: It is a very tough balance to hit. When I left my corporate job last year, I thought, "Oh, I'm going to be able to do so many more events now that my time is my own," but it turned out I do fewer because now I'm bringing a more strictly business focused approach to, if I invest a day to go to this book fair and sit at a table for eight hours, is it going to be worth it? And I find that I'm saying no more often, that it's better if I spend eight hours writing another book. But that said, that idea that you never know when you're going to make that contact or make that good friend or form a connection.
[00:20:04] JJ: Right. But I'm not going to pay a $50 table fee if I'm not going to sell that many books. I'm just not. And then there's other factors too. I've got an eight-year-old daughter. I'm not going to spend that much time away from her to sell five books.
[00:20:17] Matty: Yeah. There are lots of both quantitative and qualitative things you have to weigh when you're making the decisions about that.
[00:20:25] Matty: The other quote that I want to call out and here we are in April 2020 and we're in the middle of the COVID-19 quarantine. And generally, I haven't talked about it on the podcast because I'm looking to make this content more evergreen, but there was another sentence in your article which you wrote back in February, so you weren't thinking about COVID at the time, I'm assuming, unless you knew something through your government job that the rest of us didn't, but it is: "When a writer stares at a blank page, there is an inherent sense of isolation in the work, the crafting of the stories. But when you've been in the business for a while, you learned that shared isolation is a real thing."
[00:21:03] Are you bringing a different perspective to that idea of shared isolation now than you did in February?
[00:21:10] JJ: Yeah, I just had a Zoom lunch with my colleagues on The Thrill Begins and it was kind of reinvigorating because we all had that shared sense of being quarantined and struggling with our writing at the time. Because it is a challenge to not just deal with a lot of us are working from home who aren't furloughed and dealing with family situations, kids who are doing school at home now.
[00:21:37] And then just the overall distraction of trying to write with all this going on, all the stress, and trying to figure out how you're going to write this into a book. Can you write a book that is going to be set a year from now, two years from now, and how are you going to deal with coronavirus? Are people shaking hands? Are they in crowds? Are they going to a ballgame? People don't even know how to deal with that point. There's a lot of questions for that. But even that shared experience among authors is really interesting right now. Even though that the writing itself is a kind of solitary experience, there is that shared feeling that you're not alone in doing that now.
[00:22:17] And maybe now more than ever. So, through the writing community, it is nice to know that you aren't alone in those struggles.
[00:22:26] Matty: Yeah. The thing that you ended your article with for The Thrill Begins was: "You need to decide on your idea of success before walking through the gauntlet of the writing world. It may turn out reaching your goal will be easier than you think."
[00:22:40] We started out with this kind of ominous, the three hard truths, but what you shared ended on a positive note. Can you expand on that a little bit?
[00:22:50] JJ: Yeah. If you're dead set on being world famous and getting a movie deal and being on the top of the New York times bestseller list, you're probably going to be disappointed.
[00:23:01] But if your goals are to write a great story, to write something that you're happy about, if it's just to get published, then you're going to achieve your goal if you keep working at it. If just sitting down and you're just enjoying the process of writing, you're going to achieve that.
[00:23:19] Maybe it's just a matter of keeping that perspective. The first full ThrillerFest I went to, I actually got kind of depressed because I got there and it was a little bit overwhelming because there were so many people with huge book deals and people talking about movie deals, and they were with big publishers. And I was just like, wow, I felt like such a small fish. And it was a little overwhelming.
[00:23:44] And part of me wanted that, and it got a little depressing, and then I had to pull back and be like, that's not why I started writing. That's not what my goal was. Maybe it's just a matter of keeping that in your mind, what your definition of success was when you started writing. If you do that, I think you'll be pretty happy with it.
[00:24:05] Matty: Great. Well, thank you so much, JJ. This was so helpful. And please let our listeners know where they can find out more about you and your work online.
[00:24:13] JJ: I have a website at www.hensley-books.com. I also have a blog out there called, "Yinz to Y'all" because people in Pittsburgh, they'll say yinz instead of y'all. I moved from Pittsburgh to Savannah. But if you just put JJ Hensley blog in Google, it'll come up. I'm on Twitter at JJHensleyAuthor is my handle, and I'm on Facebook, JJ Hensley, Author page, and I've got a good reads page, Amazon author page. If you Google me, you'll find me.
[00:24:48] Matty: Great. Well, thank you so much, JJ. I appreciate you spending the time with us.
[00:24:52] JJ: Thank you for having me.
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