The first thing you notice about J.D. Barker isn’t the best-selling books or the high-figure deals. It’s that he doesn’t carry himself like someone who’s had any of that. He’s a quiet hurricane of a guy—part rock star, part technician, all storyteller.
When we sat down for our most recent chat—one of many over the years—we started with something familiar: weather. J.D. lives on an island, and a storm was moving in. He was matter-of-fact about the threat of losing power, casually talking over seventy-mile-per-hour gusts like most of us would complain about traffic. That’s J.D. Cool in chaos. Always a little ahead of the next crash.
Before the book deals, before the collaborations with legends, there was just a guy chasing a way in. J.D.’s path to publishing wasn’t a straight climb up a well-marked trail—it was a maze of side doors, blind alleys, and self-made shortcuts. He didn’t wait for permission. He engineered opportunities, often from scraps that most people would have stepped over without noticing.
From Ghostwriter to Breakout Author
J.D.’s story doesn’t start the way you might expect from a guy with books on the shelves of Barnes & Noble and airport terminals worldwide. He didn’t fall into this business. He built a trapdoor into it and crawled through on his own terms.
“I grew up without a TV in the house,” he says. “We’d hit the library a couple times a week, and I’d disappear into books. I was autistic—though I didn’t know it at the time—and books were a safe place.”
He’s talked about stapling together his own stories and charging his sister late fees when she’d check them out of his childhood bedroom library. The instinct was there early, but it took years—and a detour through the music industry, finance, and ghostwriting—to turn that impulse into a career.
“My last real job was as a chief compliance officer for a brokerage firm,” he says. “Sixty- to eighty-hour weeks. I’d come home and write just to stay sane.”
And he did it for twenty-three years.
The transition from anonymous book doctor to best-selling author reads like a movie script: ghostwriting books that hit the New York Times list—six of them—all while watching other names ride the success. Then his wife, in an act of faith most dreamers only fantasize about, suggested they sell everything, move into a duplex, and give him eighteen months to make it work as a full-time writer.
That was a risk. That was a turning point.
His breakout novel, Forsaken—a dark, Stephen King-flavored tale with a supernatural twist—did more than sell. It caught the eye of King himself. J.D. made a reference to King’s Needful Things in the manuscript as a placeholder, certain he’d have to take it out. But his wife convinced him to take a shot and ask for permission to keep it in. King said yes.
“Getting that green light became the hook,” J.D. says. “A failed trip to Stephen King’s house turned into a headline. That piece ran in Publishers Weekly, and it lit the book on fire.”
What followed was a sales storm—over two hundred fifty thousand copies moved—and suddenly J.D. Barker was no longer the man behind the curtain. He was front and center.
A Career Built on Strategy
His next book, The Fourth Monkey, caught the attention of publishing powerhouse Houghton Mifflin Harcourt before the manuscript even landed on shelves. In early 2016, it was sold in a series of preemptions and auctions worldwide, with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt acquiring the US publishing rights and HarperCollins taking the UK rights.
Word of the novel’s dark, high-concept hook had spread quickly through his agent to editors, sparking interest that escalated into a dinner meeting. “By the time dinner was over, we were looking at a seven-figure deal, with a feature film and TV show in play.”
Since then, J.D. has played on an entirely different level. He co-authored Dracul with Dacre Stoker, Bram Stoker’s great-grandnephew, using the original notes and journals from the Dracula archives. That book sparked a bidding war and landed at Putnam with a Paramount film deal attached.
He also teamed up with James Patterson—yes, that James Patterson—on multiple thrillers, including The Coast-to-Coast Murders and The Noise. And though you might expect the two head-butted over writing methods—Patterson is the meticulous outliner, and Barker labels himself a pantser and discovery writer—it turns out they zigged and zagged right into each other’s rhythms.
“We wrote the first one without an outline,” J.D. says, laughing. “I’d trap him in a scene, and he’d send back something wilder. Then he sent me an outline for the next book, saying, ‘Here’s an outline for a book called The Noise. I want you to try it my way.’ So we wrote that one based on his outline. And the process was so much smoother. I’ve been outlining ever since.”
It’s this hybrid thinking—creative wildness paired with analytical discipline—that makes J.D. a rare breed. He’s not just a writer. He’s a strategist and a business-minded artist who studies every angle, then invents a new one.
That’s how he ended up with his own imprint under Simon & Schuster. Not many authors can say that. Fewer still can say they walked away from a seven-figure deal to protect their career from industry shakeups. In this case, J.D. was wary of internal changes at the publisher—editorial teams shifting, marketing priorities in flux—and he didn’t want to risk being locked into a contract that might strand his books without the support they deserved. J.D.’s the kind of guy who’ll turn down the check if it doesn’t come with control.
And control is important to him. “I acted like Random House when I self-published Forsaken,” he says. “Hardcover, paperback, audiobook, all released on schedule because I wanted readers to get a product that felt professional.”
His approach works. Whether publishing independently or traditionally, J.D.’s books are in fifty countries, twenty-five languages, and counting. His hybrid approach gives him a unique combination of flexibility and control—even when leveraging traditional publishing avenues and resources, he thinks, markets, and pivots like an indie.
But the thing that really sets J.D. apart is his marketer’s mind. “I learned a lot from Madonna,” he says. “She said she looked at what everyone else was doing and did the opposite. Zig when they zag.”
Innovation, Collaboration, and What’s Next
Case in point: For his new book Something I Keep Upstairs, a supernatural thriller based on a real-life haunted house in New England, J.D. ran a promotion to send one lucky reader and three friends to spend the night, alone, on a private island in that same house. No gimmicks. Just guts.
“There’s a real paranormal community out there,” J.D. says. “People love ghost hunting. This gives them something to talk about—and the book’s along for the ride.”
In addition to a busy writing schedule, J.D. also co-hosts the Writers, Ink Podcast with me, Christine Daigle, and Jenna Brown. His original reason for jumping on a podcast mic? To overcome his fear of public speaking.
That’s what makes him who he is. He’s constantly leveling up—not by chasing trends but by mastering the obstacles in his own path.
So where’s he headed next?
He’s betting big on co-authoring—collaborating with experts like Daigle, a real-life neuropsychologist, to bring authenticity to his books. And he’s working on a number of projects under his imprint, building out a publishing model that gives him the best of both worlds: indie flexibility and Big Five reach.
“There’s no ceiling,” he says. “Every book, every deal—it’s just a stepping stone to something bigger.”
That includes a little project he and I are working on together. No spoilers yet, but let’s just say it’s got teeth. When J.D. Barker steps into a story, it doesn’t walk—it runs.
You can learn more about J.D. and his work, and maybe even catch wind of our upcoming collaboration, at JDBarker.com. And if you're lucky, maybe you’ll get the chance to be stranded overnight in a haunted house on an island, or find yourself tangled up in whatever is coming next. The only thing predictable about J.D., his books, and his career is that you’ll never see the twist coming.
J. Kevin Tumlinson
J. Kevin Tumlinson is an award-winning and bestselling novelist, with more than 70 titles in multiple languages and hundreds of countries worldwide. He’s known as ‘The Voice of Publishing’ for his prolific podcasting and public speaking, and considers it an honor to have helped thousands of writers start, build, and grow their own writing careers. Find Kevin and his books at kevintumlinson.com.