Episode 080 - The Force of a Brand with Daniel Palmer
May 25, 2021
Author Daniel Palmer talks about making the transition from the corporate world to the writer’s world, what lessons regarding branding he brought with him, and how he carried that forward into another business venture. He talks about the evolution of his own brand: from Daniel Palmer to authoring books under the brand of his father Michael Palmer, to D. J. Palmer, and what drove each of those steps. And he talks about how Luke Skywalker and The Force work as metaphors in branding—hence the name of this week’s episode, THE FORCE OF A BRAND.
Daniel Palmer is the USA Today bestselling author of ten critically acclaimed suspense novels, including his latest, as D. J. Palmer, THE PERFECT DAUGHTER. He published his first novel, DELIRIOUS, after a decade-long career in e-commerce, where he helped launch websites for major online retailers including Barnes & Noble. Following the success of Daniel's publishing career, he founded DAY IN THE LIFE MEDIA, a video production and communication company committed to helping brands identify their brand heroes so they can tell stories in a way that directly impacts the bottom line. A recording artist, accomplished blues harmonica player, and lifelong Red Sox fan, Daniel lives in New Hampshire with his wife and two children.
"That awareness that you're projecting a certain persona to an outside audience has stuck with me in my writing career." —Daniel Palmer
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Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast, today my guest is Daniel Palmer. Hey, Daniel, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Daniel: Hey, I'm doing great. Thank you for having me here.
[00:00:08] Matty: It is my pleasure. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you ... Daniel Palmer is the USA Today bestselling author of 10 critically acclaimed suspense novels, including his latest as D. J. Palmer, THE PERFECT DAUGHTER. He published his first novel, DELIRIOUS, after a decade long career in e-commerce where he helped launch websites for major online retailers, including Barnes and Noble. Following the success of Daniel's publishing career, he founded DAY IN THE LIFE MEDIA, a video production and communication company committed to helping brands identify their brand heroes so that they can tell stories in a way that directly impacts the bottom line. And we're going to return to that in our conversation. He is also a recording artist, an accomplished blues harmonica player, and a lifelong Red Sox fan. And Daniel lives in New Hampshire with his wife and his two children.
[00:00:57] I asked Daniel to come on the podcast to talk about mid-career author branding, but before we dive right into that, and I think there's going to be a nice segue here, I was very interested when I read about the fact that you had done brand centric work in your corporate life and outside your writing life. And so I'm wondering if you could talk about how you made the transition from that work to being a thriller author, both from a creative and a business point of view.
[00:01:25] Daniel: Yeah, sure. First of all, thank you for having me, great to be on the podcast. So we're talking about DAY IN THE LIFE MEDIA, right?
[00:01:31] Matty: Well, DAY IN THE LIFE MEDIA, and any lessons that you carried forward from your work, for example, at the online retailer.
[00:01:38] Daniel: Right. So the online retail jobs, I guess I did a lot of the brand work. So when I showed up at Barnes and Noble, I was the third employee who was basically hired to help launch and build a website. I had gotten out of graduate school and a friend of mine who I went to grad school with said that there was this opportunity to move to New York City, I lived in Boston at the time, to move to New York City and compete against this upstart company called Amazon. And that there was this chance that Barnes and Noble could get into that space or really wanted to be in the same space, and it's like, well, what are they going to do? ...
[00:00:06] Daniel: Hey, I'm doing great. Thank you for having me here.
[00:00:08] Matty: It is my pleasure. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you ... Daniel Palmer is the USA Today bestselling author of 10 critically acclaimed suspense novels, including his latest as D. J. Palmer, THE PERFECT DAUGHTER. He published his first novel, DELIRIOUS, after a decade long career in e-commerce where he helped launch websites for major online retailers, including Barnes and Noble. Following the success of Daniel's publishing career, he founded DAY IN THE LIFE MEDIA, a video production and communication company committed to helping brands identify their brand heroes so that they can tell stories in a way that directly impacts the bottom line. And we're going to return to that in our conversation. He is also a recording artist, an accomplished blues harmonica player, and a lifelong Red Sox fan. And Daniel lives in New Hampshire with his wife and his two children.
[00:00:57] I asked Daniel to come on the podcast to talk about mid-career author branding, but before we dive right into that, and I think there's going to be a nice segue here, I was very interested when I read about the fact that you had done brand centric work in your corporate life and outside your writing life. And so I'm wondering if you could talk about how you made the transition from that work to being a thriller author, both from a creative and a business point of view.
[00:01:25] Daniel: Yeah, sure. First of all, thank you for having me, great to be on the podcast. So we're talking about DAY IN THE LIFE MEDIA, right?
[00:01:31] Matty: Well, DAY IN THE LIFE MEDIA, and any lessons that you carried forward from your work, for example, at the online retailer.
[00:01:38] Daniel: Right. So the online retail jobs, I guess I did a lot of the brand work. So when I showed up at Barnes and Noble, I was the third employee who was basically hired to help launch and build a website. I had gotten out of graduate school and a friend of mine who I went to grad school with said that there was this opportunity to move to New York City, I lived in Boston at the time, to move to New York City and compete against this upstart company called Amazon. And that there was this chance that Barnes and Noble could get into that space or really wanted to be in the same space, and it's like, well, what are they going to do? ...
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[00:02:19] I didn't even know what Amazon was. I mean, the internet was brand new. They said, Well, they want to sell books over the internet and I laughed, true story, I laughed and I said, You think people are going to actually buy stuff over the internet? Have you used the internet? So obviously I was a visionary.
[00:02:38] I went to New York. I interviewed with the CTO. And I was just a kid, mid-twenties maybe. And it just so happened that I had the absolute perfect skillset for the time. Not that I actually had a great time skill set. I just knew how to do the thing that Barnes and Noble needed to get done.
[00:03:01] And so they hired me basically on the spot and said, Okay, move to New York and get this website live. And I pulled together a team. We grew incredibly fast. We worked incredibly hard, had the most fun ever. And we built a website that went live on AOL and we beat Borders to the punch. And from that time it was Barnes and Noble versus Amazon. And obviously we know who won.
[00:03:28] But it was a great experience in terms of understanding how to bring an identity of a corporation online and how to translate that feeling of who the company is to the consumer. And that awareness that you're projecting a certain persona to an outside audience has stuck with me in my writing career.
[00:03:58] I started off saying, Daniel Palmer is going to be what? So it's not enough just to say, I'm going to go write a book or I'm going to write a thriller or I'm going to go write a mystery. What kind of thriller? What kind of mystery? I actually got started writing romantic comedies from the guy's point of view. I had read HIGH FIDELITY and BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY was just becoming a huge thing, was actually a huge at that time. And I thought I'll do Nick Hornby HIGH FIDELITY meets BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY and make a bazillion dollars. That was my business plan.
[00:04:37] Didn't work out that way. What I found out is that women, who I was targeting, who are the primary readers of romance, evidently don't care a ton about the guy's point of view.
[00:04:51] So I found out that I liked writing, but I didn't have a path for getting my books published because I didn't have a genre. So I switched genres to the books that I liked to read, which were thrillers. So I'd read Stephen King, I'd read Dean Koontz, read Tom Clancy, Thomas Harris, just kind of the big thrillers of the day. Robert Ludlum. And I talked to my father, whose name is Michael Palmer. He passed away in 2013, but he was a very successful medical suspense novelist, he and Robin Cook and Tess Gerritsen really single-handedly, I think, created the medical suspense genre. Cook obviously was first mover there with COMA. That was just a huge success.
[00:05:34] So I asked my dad, How do you do it? How do you write a thriller? I want to do this. I'm interested. And my father said, Okay. Open up a web browser and type in www.michaelpalmerbooks.com/writingtips. And I was like, Dad, I built your website, I put those writing tips out there on your website. He said, Have you read them? And I was like, okay, good point.
[00:06:01] So I read through the writing tips that I actually put on my father's website and I just began the process of learning how to write a thriller novel and defining my brand different from my father's, who was the medical suspense brand for doctors who were put in perilous situations because of who they are or what they did. They didn't seek out a mystery or a suspense story, like Quincy might, as he was trying to do some medical examining or BONES or Kathy Reichs' great characters. My father's characters, the story found them because of who they are and what they did. And I created a brand around that. It was really around ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.
[00:06:49] And most of my characters, I think from the beginning of my books, were men. My first book was a book called DELIRIOUS and it was about a technology entrepreneur who believes he might be developing schizophrenia. And so it's a story about him becoming like his brother who is a diagnosed schizophrenic. It was an interesting story and it got my career started and it's evolved from that point forward.
[00:07:14] Matty: Did you write the romantic comedy stories under Daniel Palmer? Were any of those published? Can we find them?
[00:07:21] Daniel: You cannot find those books unless you break into the house, you're at my computer, and open up the file drawer under. It will never see the light of day.
[00:07:32] I re-read those books, though. I re-read some portions of them and some of it is really funny. So I would like somehow, someday to get those books out there. I'm just not sure how, and it really doesn't fit with what I'm doing right now as a writer. So it may just be that those are archival moments and they don't have a home, but there are moments in those books that are laugh out loud funny, sadly, because it's true stuff that happened to me.
[00:08:06] Matty: Well, remind me when we get to the end of our conversation, because I don't want to skip forward chronologically, but I want to ask you when we finish, whether, if you did ever publish those, what name you would use to publish them. So remind me to ask that before we end our conversation.
[00:08:22] So then I wanted to also just get a little bit of background about DAY IN THE LIFE MEDIA, because that is even more explicitly focused on brand, correct?
[00:08:33] Daniel: Right. Yeah, DAY IN THE LIFE MEDIA came about from one of those moments of inspiration, which are not always great, but I have a hard time not following my moments of inspiration when they come to me. I'm like, that's a great, I'm like super enthusiastic about everything that comes. I'm like a dog in that way. Oh my God. Yeah. I'm like, that's a great idea. I got to go do it. I'm doing it. And so I'm also very big on I'm doing it. I'm not just going to think about it. I'm going to make it happen.
[00:09:03] And so I tend to manifest a lot of what I create just out of sheer willpower. Like me being a novelist is pretty ridiculous. If you knew how I was as an English student, if you talked to any of my English professors, they'd say, No, the kid's got a good imagination, but this is not the guy who's going to go off and write books for a living. I would be the least likely candidate for that, even though my father had made a great career out of his imagination.
[00:09:34] Matty: Is that because you have this tendency to go after the immediate inspiration.
[00:09:39] Daniel: Just I wasn't that kid. you hear authors all the time like, I came out of the womb with a pen in my hand. I grew up just consuming Nancy Drew Mysteries, or Hardy Boy Mysteries and I knew I was going to ... that just wasn't me. I thought I was going to be a rock and roll musician. I thought I was going to do something else. It just never occurred to me that this was a path that was viable to me because I wasn't a reader. I just wasn't a voracious reader. And to be successful at this job, you really have to do those two things you have to read and you have to write. I don't know any other shortcuts. Those are kind of the requirements, the baseline requirements, for being good at this craft. You have to practice the craft by reading and practice the craft by writing a lot. And those were skills I didn't have.
[00:10:29] My brother Matthew Palmer, who is also a published novelist, so if you look at the Palmers, we're kind of like the Manning family of suspense fiction. We have Archie Manning, my father, Michael, and then we have Matthew Palmer who is a 25 year career diplomat who writes political thrillers as Matthew Palmer. And we have me, Daniel Palmer, and I would say, am I Peyton Manning or Eli? I'll go with Peyton. I think I'm Peyton. We'll give Matthew Eli, even though he's the older one
[00:11:03] Matty: We'll ask listeners to comment on which Manning they think you are.
[00:11:07] Daniel: Which Manning am I? And so my brother was the voracious reader. My brother always had a book in his hand and he was constantly reading, read everything. And so I always thought, Oh, Matthew is going to be the first one to be published or he would potentially have that as a career. And it turned out that I did it first.
[00:11:26] So anyways, in a moment of inspiration, I realized after I was doing all this writing and character development that I saw from my corporate world a problem with how corporations saw themselves. And the issue is that companies, this was my thesis, if you will, my guiding principle that made me want to start this business, companies see themselves in, if I was to put it in the story context, as Luke Skywalker. So they are the hero that this great company, let's just say they manufacture rope that mountain climbers would use to scale a mountain, and they're like, we are the best rope for mountain climbing and if you want to be a mountain climber, you need our rope because we're the hero.
[00:12:18] And I have to say to this rope manufacturer, I have bad news for you. You're not Luke Skywalker. In the story, you're actually the Force. You're this nebulous thing that really exists to make the hero successful. The hero is the person, the woman, who's climbing the mountain using your rope. Let's not conflate those two things and let's actually help you understand how to rebrand yourself or market yourself under the context of who's the hero and how do we, the company, help the hero on their journey.
[00:12:56] And so I basically took the concept of the hero's journey, which is obviously something I didn't create, but I reapplied it to corporate branding and said, let's create videos, stories about your brand that cast you in the right role as the Force and show the Force helping the hero, the protagonist, using your ability, your product or your service, to scale that mountain and accomplish their dream and accomplish their goal.
[00:13:26] And it created a narrative. I followed that hero's journey story structure to say, this is how your ad, if you will, will be very sticky and will truly reflect your brand's character to the consumer in a way that will be emotionally relatable to them.
[00:13:44] And so it was a kind of a different approach to branding. And that's why I built this company around that concept.
[00:13:52] Matty: I love that analogy. And I want to talk more about how that applies to an author brand and to do that through a discussion of the fact that you've had several different personas in your author career. So you started out, not counting the unpublished rom-coms, as Daniel Palmer. Did you ever consider using a name other than Daniel Palmer as a branding mechanism when you first started out with those books?
[00:14:18] Daniel: No, it didn't even occur to me, honestly. I didn't even understand what my brand was until I was maybe two or three books into the work. And then I realized, okay, I'm ordinary people, extraordinary circumstances. Who am I most like? Most like Harlan Coben or most like, at the time, Greg Hurwitz? Both phenomenal writers, both friends and Andy Gross is another one. So we were kind of this group that wrote in this milieu or this sub-genre of thriller fiction.
[00:14:53] And so our characters weren't super skilled. They weren't specially trained. They weren't investigators. They were just ordinary people living their lives. And because of who they are, so similar to what my dad did, because of who they are, the story found them. And the only way for the character to survive and get what they wanted, which was to live a happy life, they had to go through the story. And those were the kinds of books I was writing. And it was hard to find the audience for those stories.
[00:15:25] And I think that's part of what the job is of the author is to say, Okay, I'm a commercial fiction writer. So I don't do this necessarily for my own gratification. I do, it is gratifying to do the work, but if I don't have an audience, if I'm not reaching enough readers, then I want to ask myself, What else, like any brand, like any company, what else can I do to increase my product sales? Well, sometimes what you have to do is just change who you're marketing to or who your consumer is.
[00:15:55] And so I had to think how do I evolve this Daniel Palmer brand into something that's going to be more marketable? Well, while it was having those conversations with myself, mostly, tragedy struck and my father passed away quite suddenly on a return trip from Africa. And it wasn't long after he died that his publisher got in touch with me and said, Would I, could I write Michael Palmer books? Which was a very tall order because obviously my dad had a huge readership and a great legacy, and the last thing a son wants to do is come in and just tarnish the family name in what looks like some kind of money grab or something like that.
[00:16:34] But honestly, my father, the one thing he would have wanted more than anything was to feed his grandchildren, from this world or another. So it would be something my dad would have wanted me to do. The question was whether or not I had the skillset to do it because I'm not a doctor. But I did have a few years where my father and I were both writing books at the same time, so he was able to mentor me on his process and I had grown up with his process. So I had a peek behind the Michael Palmer curtain for longer than anybody else.
[00:17:05] Matty: And you had his writing tips.
[00:17:07] Daniel: I had his writing tips, right. So exactly how to structure that book. And so I put the everyday, extraordinary people aside and I switched to medical suspense. And so it was a change of branding from Daniel Palmer that writer to Daniel Palmer, kind of writing more in the Robin Cook genre.
[00:17:31] Matty: What I thought was very interesting about those book covers is that, at least the covers I was seeing it will say MICHAEL PALMER and then A Novel by Daniel Palmer or Michael Palmer and Daniel Palmer. Like if I were just glancing at it, I would assume that it was by Michael Palmer. From a branding point of view? What was your feeling about that?
[00:17:52] Daniel: It was my hope that that's the way it would be billed because these are Michael Palmer books. So it's like Vince Flynn who passed away tragically as well. His estate continues to publish Vince Flynn books. The estate of Robert Parker continues to publish Robert Parker books with authors, Ace Atkins is one, Reed Farrel Coleman another who have written for the Robert Parker estate, but it's not going to be Ace Atkins Presents a Robert B. Parker Spenser Novel, or Robert B. Parker Mystery. It's going to be, this is a Robert B. Parker book penned by this person.
[00:18:33] Matty: It's really the most clear example you can come up with about an author being a brand.
[00:18:39] Daniel: Right. There's no better example than the brand continuing after the author is no longer with us. And Michael Palmer wasn't the first to do it.
[00:18:47] Steve Larson's another one. V. C. Andrews' another one. So there's all these authors whose careers have continued because of the work of authors like me, authors like Ace, authors like Reed who can emulate a voice. We could do like 90% of it. It's an impossible task to be 100% the voice of another author. It just doesn't work. But you can get close almost to mimicking and that's part of the work. So it was an honor to do, but it was the hardest thing I had done because I'm not a doctor and that's a huge part of writing a medical suspense novel. So I needed the help of doctors, a doctor in particular, my uncle, to be the medical part of the work.
[00:19:35] Matty: Do you have any sense of whether over time, the people who are more recently reading the Michael Palmer penned by Daniel Palmer were carry overs from your father's fan base, and how much transfer you've gotten from the people who were fans from your earlier work?
[00:19:51] Daniel: You know, I can't quantify it. I don't know the exact number, but I know for sure that I've gotten many, many messages from people who said, Read your father's work, loved all of his books, and now I'm reading you and love your work as well.
[00:20:06] And so there's definitely been some momentum there in terms of that crossover, my dad's fans who now read my work, even though it's not medically based, as much at least as his work was. But I don't know the exact number. It's not something I could easily quantify regardless.
[00:20:25] But the things that we do similarly, are we try to have an authentic relationship with our readers. I can't really do it in Twitter. It just doesn't work for me. I don't love Twitter as a platform. Twitter is extremely clever. The writing on Twitter from my writer friends who I follow is very clever, it's very well-crafted. My brother would be excellent at it. Just not how I work. I'm a little more verbose. I just want to be real. I don't want to think about it or process it or anything of that nature. I just want to tell you how I see it.
[00:21:02] So Facebook actually works better for me as a medium. And it's tough for me as well because I'm not really an image person. I had a friend help me stage a picture of my book THE PERFECT DAUGHTER for Instagram. And it looked great as best picture ever. But then of course I have to go on Facebook and say, Here's a picture I took on Instagram, but I wasn't actually reading the book and then used my book as a placeholder to hover over the book so that the inside and the cover, and I didn't drink any of this coffee ...
[00:21:40] Yeah. I can't keep anything secret. So Facebook is where I go to connect with my fans, my readers. And I actually have an author group, independent of my Facebook page, and that's a group that I give a lot of free stuff away to and special excerpts or sneak peaks or what have you. And I asked that group to then become my street team, if you will, and say, you guys are it, get out there and get the word out, start spreading the word. So they helped to build that early momentum. So I don't want it to be a massive group. But it's grown substantially since I started it.
[00:22:19] Matty: I think that's a great idea. I actually recently started a private Facebook group after a conversation, I'll put a link in it, with Jason Kasper, the episode was about Jason's move from being independently published a traditionally published, but we got talking about his Facebook private group and how productive it is for him, and it incented me to spin up my own. So I'll include a link to that episode in the in the show notes.
[00:22:46] And I'm curious if in your analogy about Luke Skywalker, if the books or the author brand are the Force, are the readers the Luke Skywalkers?
[00:22:56] Daniel: Okay. It's a terrific question. And it depends, I believe, on the publisher and the author. So some authors become the Luke Skywalker, and those are your branded authors. They are the hero, but yes, at the end of the day, the author is the Force still.
[00:23:16]
[00:23:16] Matty:
[00:23:16] Daniel: So a reader of a Harlan Coben novel, for instance, is expecting a certain thing they're expecting Harlan's voice. They're expecting to be put on this journey, but at the end of the day, the reader wants to have a certain experience that is going to be. Meaningful and impactful to them. And if they don't have the experience, then the reader is going to feel like they didn't get anything out of the story.
[00:23:39] And the readers love to envision themselves in the book. They want to be the one who's solving the problem, solving the crime. It's always a reflection back on them. So the author's job is to create sort of the space for the reader to feel like this could be me, this could be happening to me. Then their brain engages in a different way and they have a different level of empathy and connection to the characters and to the stories. So that's when it becomes hugely successful. So I think for the most part, the reader's always the hero and we want to give the reader that space to do the job. But there are certain authors for whom just the name of the author will sell the book.
[00:24:18] And if you go to the Amazon world, however, in a lot of cases, the name of the author isn't as important as the marketing of the book. So did the book hit my inbox? Is the book a Kindle Daily Deal? Is the book priced at a price point that I would buy it? Is the book an Amazon First Read. And in those cases, it's not, Oh, I'm looking for this author's name. It's what was in front of me. What did Amazon suggest I wanted? And those books sell crazy numbers of units because it's just a different approach to the marketing.
[00:24:55] And then there's, where I'm at more or less is you're still trying to get that book to kind of propel you to that next rung on the ladder. And in order to do that in this day and age, it's really a book that captures the zeitgeist and catches lightning in a bottle. So if you don't do lightning in a bottle, which is super hard to do, it's not even hard to do. At some point it becomes luck. So you have to realize that the formula for this business, and I will stand by this formula, the formula for success as a writer is time, talent, persistence, and luck. And then, and that's what it really boils down to. So you have to just keep moving forward in this game, an inch better than your last book is a mile.
[00:25:46] And publishers will tend to stay with you because they're thinking, okay, well, then he could hit a grand slam. If you hit the grand slam, then, you know, your backlist starts to sell and everything starts to move in a really positive direction and you can ride the wave for as long as the wave is there to ride.
[00:26:04] And so back to the branding of the medical books, I ended up writing the Michael Palmer books and I turned in a book that was supposed to be another Michael Palmer medical suspense novel under contract with my publisher. And I did it a little cagey or with a little trepidation, I guess I should say, because I knew this wasn't a book my father could write. It just wasn't in the Michael Palmer milieu or kind of the style of a Michael Palmer novel. This was something different.
[00:26:35] And it wasn't like a Daniel Palmer novel, like I had published before -- those ordinary people, extraordinary circumstances. This was a family drama, family dynamics, and kind of a tangled web of personality conflicts that was wrapped around a story about Munchausen syndrome by proxy. And I turned it in to my editor and said, I think it's good, but I just don't know that my dad could have written this book. What do you think?
[00:27:06] And it turned out she loved the book and said, I think we're going to change your name. And so she said, You are no longer writing the Michael Palmer books. You are now D. J. Palmer. James is my middle name, so it's a true rebranding, Daniel Palmer to D. J. Palmer, and she just said, I want you now to focus on writing domestic suspense stories.
[00:27:29] So where I used to be ordinary people, extraordinary circumstances, now I'm looking at more family dynamic or interpersonal relationships as the foundational first plank of all of my stories. And that's been the switch to D. J. and it's been it's been really good for me.
[00:27:49] Matty: You had said earlier that you weren't at least initially a big reader. Did you become a big reader over time? I mean, you're mentioning lots of comp type authors. Are those comp authors you found yourself or that your publisher said, Oh, you should read Harlan Coben because you're like him?
[00:28:04] Daniel: Yeah, it's a great question because I had a super successful father who was a writer. I had an in with a top flight New York literary agency. And so I had all of these ingredients, if you will, to just go, Oh, I'm going to be a writer, and three days later, my career is taking off. Doesn't work that way. The first thing I had to do was learn how to be a writer.
[00:28:34] And so from the moment I said I'm going to do this, and I had closed a retail e-commerce business that I had helped to launch, we built websites for Dick's Sporting Goods, Alta Cosmetics, a toy company that went out of business based in Philadelphia or based out of Philadelphia, a company called Zany Brainy, which I suspect you might've known because you're from that area, so Zany Brainy's e-commerce business.
[00:28:57] And when we closed the doors and I turned the key and said that was a good run, but our run is done, I said, I'm going to be a fiction writer and set off with my rom-coms and all of that journey from the day I said I'm going to do it to the day my book came out was about 12 years. And in those 12 years I studied, I read voraciously and I really studied the craft and I didn't just read passively. I read, how are they doing it? Why are they making these choices? What is happening? How do you generate suspense throughout this story? Where is the right kind of flow, narrative flow, and I just became a very critical, active reader versus just a passive reading for pleasure.
[00:29:46] In the course of doing that, I rediscovered a love for reading. I did as a kid read a little bit here and there, like JAWS, all of the Stephen King books, these Dean Koontz books, and so I was able to kind of tap into that. I just wasn't a reader like my brother, who would read anything and everything multiple times. You know, he had one book here and then a book there and then a cereal box he would read. He just read, anything that had a word he would read. And so I became a reader, but not only that, I became a student at the same time. And I did what Malcolm Gladwell said, which is 10,000 hours. I don't know how many hours I put in, but it was a crazy amount of hours and certainly close to a million words written before I ever published anything.
[00:30:31] Matty: I think it's funny that whenever Stephen King comes up in one of my conversations with an author, business person, any of the guests on the podcast, he's always the exception to the rule. Like you can't write a story where you wander off into things that won't really have anything to do with the main story, unless you're Stephen King. Or you really can't write books that are 1200 pages long, unless you're Stephen King. And I feel bad for anyone who's reading Stephen King saying, yeah, I'm going to follow in his footsteps because obviously he's doing it right. And they're overlooking the, Yeah, but he's Stephen King.
[00:31:03] Daniel: I mean, that's a huge factor and you're absolutely right. Stephen King, you know, and I've had that thought while I'm writing and people they'll say, Oh, I wish that you did less of this, and it's like two paragraphs on a certain side character or whatever, and they would wish that didn't exist in the book. And readers do that. Again, back to the reader's the hero , well, the reader thinks this is how the book should've gone and I'm unhappy with the book because you didn't write it the way I would have written it.
[00:31:27] And there's no way you can argue that. You just have to say , Well, I'm sorry, but that's not what happened. And this is what happened. But Stephen King could write chapters about this side plot, as you mentioned, and we'll gobble it up because he's Stephen King. We can't all do that. So you have to find your strength, find your kind of voice as the Force. You the author are the Force, so you have to find what you do well as the forest and bring that to the reader.
[00:31:54] Matty: In the transition from being Daniel Palmer to Michael Palmer, a Novel by Daniel Palmer, and D. J. Palmer, did your publisher recognize that you had this branding background yourself and work through that with you, or it sounds like they just said, guess what your new name is D. J. Palmer.
[00:32:12] Daniel: Yeah. Back to STAR WARS. I don't know if folks remember the scene where there's a chess game, moving chess pieces, and it's Chewbacca versus C3PO and C3PO makes the winning move and Chewbacca gets mad and Han Solo basically suggests, Hey, you better let the Wookie win cause droids don't rip your arms out of your sockets when you lose. And I just always loved that line. And I use that line in my career, which is let the Wookie win. Whatever, you know, I'm not that guy and not that writer. And I would advise other writers to do as I do, because it works for me. I guess you have to follow your own path.
[00:32:56] But if my editor says, Hey, this is good but it should be blue. Well, how blue? You know, Lee Child is a friend and a mentor and somebody I just looked up to and his editor would say, Hey, Lee, you know, this is great book. You've done amazing work, but wouldn't it be better if this happened? And Lee looked at it and would look at that passage and go, Ah, yeah, it would be better if that happened. But that's not what happened,
[00:33:29] Matty: Lee Child is the other, Well, it's Lee Child. Those are the two. It's Stephen King and Lee Child.
[00:33:33] Daniel: Yeah. You just have to go with it. So I follow my publisher's lead, what they say worked best and I go in that direction. I do it with the book. And when my editor says, This isn't for me, I say, Okay. let's figure out how to fix it. And I think this is sage advice. Neil Gaiman offers this advice as well, and I think it's very sage advice, which is if somebody tells you something isn't working with your book and they tell you exactly what's wrong and exactly how to fix it, be skeptical. If somebody tells you something isn't working in the book and they're not sure why, but it just doesn't work for them, pay very close attention. Because that's the stuff that you want to figure out how to fix. The people who know exactly how to fix it, they don't know the craft, they don't know the job, and they're there too deep in their own thought to be a source of trusted information.
[00:34:26] But it's those people who say that this just doesn't work for me, and this area is weak, and it's your job as the writer to figure out why isn't it working and then how to fix it. And so I follow their advice on all the fixes. And my editor seldom says, On page 225, change this to this. They just say on page 225, no. Okay. And I'm going to figure out how to fix that. And so I follow their lead with the books and I follow their lead with the branding. And those are the only things within my control. A lot of this business just is not in my control.
[00:35:00] Matty: When you made the switch to D. J. Palmer, obviously one of the reasons people sometimes use initials is if you wanted to disguise your gender. Was that part of why that change happened? A slightly different genre being a better match for an author who could be a woman or a man?
[00:35:15] Daniel: Yeah. So I would say 90% of my readers are women, maybe 95.
[00:35:20] Matty: Was that across your whole career? Earlier, it was more men, right?
[00:35:23] Daniel: Yeah. It's definitely shifted. I mean, it's always, women are 75% to 80% of the readership of fiction. It's just always has been. Even when my dad started off in in the eighties. When my father was in the very early stages of his career, he pitched an idea to his new agent then, Jane Berkey, who was the owner of the Jane Rotrosen Agency, JRA, where I'm still a client, my brother's a client, my father was a client there. They're my agent. They'll be my agent for life. That's just where my family is. He pitched to young Jane who was just getting started in this business. And now they have Kristin Hannah. They have Lisa Gardner, Tess Gerritsen, and tons of huge authors. Luanne Rice.
[00:36:12] He pitched the book about a secret society of doctors dedicated to euthanasia. And Jane looked at that and said, Michael, do you know that 75% of readers are women, so what if it was nurses? And right then my father was like, Yeah, that's a million times better book. Secret society of nurses dedicated to euthanasia became THE SISTERHOOD, became my father's first published novel, and was a massive, huge multi-million selling copies success. And that was how he got started and his readership was mixed. There was a lot of men who read his stuff and a lot of women.
[00:36:47] So mine, definitely more women than men. But as I switched to the family-focused dramas, these domestic suspense stories really, and started writing women characters, almost predominantly women protagonists, my readership switched to almost exclusively women. But my publisher said, D. J., you know, let's just think of it as a very poorly guarded secret. She was like, we don't have to put your picture on it and we don't have to broadcast that you're a man. We don't have to tell the world that you're Daniel. But for those readers who might be gun shy about reading a domestic story from a man, she made that switch.
[00:37:30] Matty: It would be interesting to look and see over time how secretive those kinds of switches have been, because you can imagine that before the world of social media, people could make that switch, you could put a fake picture on your cover if you wanted to, and only a small pool of people would know who you are, but now that authors are getting more and more out on social media, it would be harder and harder to do. And one of my favorite stories, and I always wonder if this is apocryphal or a marketing ploy, is JK Rowling thinking she could write the Robert Galbraith books and no one would ever know.
[00:38:03] Daniel: Right. Well, she was happy. She was happy to sell no copies.
[00:38:08] Matty: Yeah. And I understand had gotten a friend of hers who, when there had to be in person meetings with the publisher, would pretend that he was Robert Galbraith.
[00:38:17] Daniel: Right, right. Yeah. She, I don't think she, I don't know. Cause I, you know ...
[00:38:20] Matty: I'm sure she wanted to, but I just think I think she vastly underestimated her own fame when she thought that she was going to be able to get away with it.
[00:38:30] Daniel: Right. I mean, somebody took her secret and broadcast it and I suspect she wasn't happy. Because being JK Rowling comes with a whole degree of weight, but I do believe that over the course of whatever number of books, that they don't think of these books is JK Rowling books, they think of them as Robert Galbraith books and they're written in a very certain style. And so I think she's done a remarkable job of rebranding herself and stepping outside of the box that she always would have been in, where people, if there was a JK Rowling book, they would've been like this is a really interesting mystery, but where are the wizards? And so she kind of freed yourself from that bit of bondage there and could explore her vast talent as a writer. I mean, she is ridiculously talented across multiple genres.
[00:39:23] Matty: Well, I wonder if a book like THE CASUAL VACANCY would have done better if it had been, I think that was published under J K Rowling and you couldn't really get a book that was more different in tone from Harry Potter than THE CASUAL VACANCY. And I wonder if it would have been , well, maybe it was more embraced. I didn't like it personally. I love all her other stuff, but I couldn't read THE CASUAL VACANCY. It was too snarky for me.
[00:39:45] Daniel: Yeah. Yeah. I actually didn't read that. I have read the Robert Galbraith books and then read Harry Potter because who hasn't read Harry Potter.
[00:39:54] Matty: Yeah.
[00:39:55] One of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation is that I have two series and they both have paranormal, supernatural aspects to them. In fact, my tagline is what happens when an extraordinary ability transforms an ordinary life. We had been talking about another version of that earlier, and I have a standalone that doesn't have any supernatural or paranormal elements, and I've been thinking that I might want to put that out there under a different name, not to be secretive about it, but to give a very clear message that this is going to be different. So, you know, if you want to follow me for my series to the standalone, that's fine, but don't expect people to be talking with dead people.
[00:40:36] But one of the considerations I've heard is that if you pick initials, a problem is that you have to be very consistent about how you present it, and this may be more an issue for your publisher than it is for you, but you could have DJ Palmer, or you could have D. J. Palmer. You could have D.J. Palmer. Did you get any insight from your publisher about why they decided to go with initials even though there is that logistical consideration versus, you know, Chris Palmer.
[00:41:07] Daniel: Right. Like a sort of ambiguous name, gender neutral. I think because my publisher publishes B. A. Paris and this, I guess -- I'm guessing on this one, I have no insight specifically -- but I think they saw it a lot of success with B. A. And they thought, Okay we got, A. J. Flynn. B. A. Paris. And so they saw it as this is sort of a trend that readers have embraced. So readers are okay with the initials, readers seem to like the initials. And so I think they thought it would be fine. Versus really saying I'm somebody who I'm not. And that was another consideration. They really didn't want to make it a true pen name.
[00:41:52] So you know, Alex Finlay just published a very successful book. And Alex is a pen name but Alex is also a gender neutral kind of name. So I don't know is Alex a man, is Alex a woman, who was Alex? And that was a complete rebranding, we're stepping away from this author's past work, and we're creating something brand new for readers to follow along with. D. J. is sort of smaller step away from the Michael Palmer work, away from Daniel Palmer. It's not as a giant leap. So I think that was why they were okay with saying, let's go with the initials and I haven't even looked, but yeah, apparently it's dots. I'm dots, dots. I never even thought about it.
[00:42:36] Matty: So now I get to return to the question I had been speculating about earlier, which is if you ever did decide to pull the rom-coms out of the drawer and send them out, how would you want those billed?
[00:42:49] Daniel: Yeah, those would be a Daniel Palmer book. I would do those. I wouldn't try to disguise myself as a woman writing from the guy's point of view. I'd say this is a book from a guy's point of view about relationships and about young love and two people trying to build a life together and seeing how that all plays out.
[00:43:08] But again, the probability of those books ever seeing the light of day is really low. It's just low. Right now I'm busy writing, finishing up the next D. J. book, and then there's going to be a D. J. book after that. And so is every minute of my day taken up writing? No, but I need space in my day to think and to be able to process. That's a big part of the work, which is just having that kind of downtime to really give the story a chance to breathe and see , well, what did I do? What did I do right? What did I do wrong? How can I fix it? How can I make it better?
[00:43:47] Matty: Great. Well, Daniel, thank you so much. This has been so interesting and so illuminating. Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and your work online.
[00:43:56] Daniel: Sure. You can check out djpalmerauthor, the website, DJPalmerAuthor on Facebook and djpalmerauthor on Twitter. That'd be great to hear from anybody. try and be as responsive as I can. But obviously as you know, I have a very active dog who takes up a lot of my time. If I'm not getting back to you, chances are I'm throwing a ball to my dog or doing something to take care of my dog.
[00:44:22] Matty: Excellent. Well, I think you have your priorities right.
[00:44:25] Daniel: Thank you so much. I appreciate it. And nice to talk with you.
[00:44:28] Matty: Nice talking with you too.
[00:02:38] I went to New York. I interviewed with the CTO. And I was just a kid, mid-twenties maybe. And it just so happened that I had the absolute perfect skillset for the time. Not that I actually had a great time skill set. I just knew how to do the thing that Barnes and Noble needed to get done.
[00:03:01] And so they hired me basically on the spot and said, Okay, move to New York and get this website live. And I pulled together a team. We grew incredibly fast. We worked incredibly hard, had the most fun ever. And we built a website that went live on AOL and we beat Borders to the punch. And from that time it was Barnes and Noble versus Amazon. And obviously we know who won.
[00:03:28] But it was a great experience in terms of understanding how to bring an identity of a corporation online and how to translate that feeling of who the company is to the consumer. And that awareness that you're projecting a certain persona to an outside audience has stuck with me in my writing career.
[00:03:58] I started off saying, Daniel Palmer is going to be what? So it's not enough just to say, I'm going to go write a book or I'm going to write a thriller or I'm going to go write a mystery. What kind of thriller? What kind of mystery? I actually got started writing romantic comedies from the guy's point of view. I had read HIGH FIDELITY and BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY was just becoming a huge thing, was actually a huge at that time. And I thought I'll do Nick Hornby HIGH FIDELITY meets BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY and make a bazillion dollars. That was my business plan.
[00:04:37] Didn't work out that way. What I found out is that women, who I was targeting, who are the primary readers of romance, evidently don't care a ton about the guy's point of view.
[00:04:51] So I found out that I liked writing, but I didn't have a path for getting my books published because I didn't have a genre. So I switched genres to the books that I liked to read, which were thrillers. So I'd read Stephen King, I'd read Dean Koontz, read Tom Clancy, Thomas Harris, just kind of the big thrillers of the day. Robert Ludlum. And I talked to my father, whose name is Michael Palmer. He passed away in 2013, but he was a very successful medical suspense novelist, he and Robin Cook and Tess Gerritsen really single-handedly, I think, created the medical suspense genre. Cook obviously was first mover there with COMA. That was just a huge success.
[00:05:34] So I asked my dad, How do you do it? How do you write a thriller? I want to do this. I'm interested. And my father said, Okay. Open up a web browser and type in www.michaelpalmerbooks.com/writingtips. And I was like, Dad, I built your website, I put those writing tips out there on your website. He said, Have you read them? And I was like, okay, good point.
[00:06:01] So I read through the writing tips that I actually put on my father's website and I just began the process of learning how to write a thriller novel and defining my brand different from my father's, who was the medical suspense brand for doctors who were put in perilous situations because of who they are or what they did. They didn't seek out a mystery or a suspense story, like Quincy might, as he was trying to do some medical examining or BONES or Kathy Reichs' great characters. My father's characters, the story found them because of who they are and what they did. And I created a brand around that. It was really around ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.
[00:06:49] And most of my characters, I think from the beginning of my books, were men. My first book was a book called DELIRIOUS and it was about a technology entrepreneur who believes he might be developing schizophrenia. And so it's a story about him becoming like his brother who is a diagnosed schizophrenic. It was an interesting story and it got my career started and it's evolved from that point forward.
[00:07:14] Matty: Did you write the romantic comedy stories under Daniel Palmer? Were any of those published? Can we find them?
[00:07:21] Daniel: You cannot find those books unless you break into the house, you're at my computer, and open up the file drawer under. It will never see the light of day.
[00:07:32] I re-read those books, though. I re-read some portions of them and some of it is really funny. So I would like somehow, someday to get those books out there. I'm just not sure how, and it really doesn't fit with what I'm doing right now as a writer. So it may just be that those are archival moments and they don't have a home, but there are moments in those books that are laugh out loud funny, sadly, because it's true stuff that happened to me.
[00:08:06] Matty: Well, remind me when we get to the end of our conversation, because I don't want to skip forward chronologically, but I want to ask you when we finish, whether, if you did ever publish those, what name you would use to publish them. So remind me to ask that before we end our conversation.
[00:08:22] So then I wanted to also just get a little bit of background about DAY IN THE LIFE MEDIA, because that is even more explicitly focused on brand, correct?
[00:08:33] Daniel: Right. Yeah, DAY IN THE LIFE MEDIA came about from one of those moments of inspiration, which are not always great, but I have a hard time not following my moments of inspiration when they come to me. I'm like, that's a great, I'm like super enthusiastic about everything that comes. I'm like a dog in that way. Oh my God. Yeah. I'm like, that's a great idea. I got to go do it. I'm doing it. And so I'm also very big on I'm doing it. I'm not just going to think about it. I'm going to make it happen.
[00:09:03] And so I tend to manifest a lot of what I create just out of sheer willpower. Like me being a novelist is pretty ridiculous. If you knew how I was as an English student, if you talked to any of my English professors, they'd say, No, the kid's got a good imagination, but this is not the guy who's going to go off and write books for a living. I would be the least likely candidate for that, even though my father had made a great career out of his imagination.
[00:09:34] Matty: Is that because you have this tendency to go after the immediate inspiration.
[00:09:39] Daniel: Just I wasn't that kid. you hear authors all the time like, I came out of the womb with a pen in my hand. I grew up just consuming Nancy Drew Mysteries, or Hardy Boy Mysteries and I knew I was going to ... that just wasn't me. I thought I was going to be a rock and roll musician. I thought I was going to do something else. It just never occurred to me that this was a path that was viable to me because I wasn't a reader. I just wasn't a voracious reader. And to be successful at this job, you really have to do those two things you have to read and you have to write. I don't know any other shortcuts. Those are kind of the requirements, the baseline requirements, for being good at this craft. You have to practice the craft by reading and practice the craft by writing a lot. And those were skills I didn't have.
[00:10:29] My brother Matthew Palmer, who is also a published novelist, so if you look at the Palmers, we're kind of like the Manning family of suspense fiction. We have Archie Manning, my father, Michael, and then we have Matthew Palmer who is a 25 year career diplomat who writes political thrillers as Matthew Palmer. And we have me, Daniel Palmer, and I would say, am I Peyton Manning or Eli? I'll go with Peyton. I think I'm Peyton. We'll give Matthew Eli, even though he's the older one
[00:11:03] Matty: We'll ask listeners to comment on which Manning they think you are.
[00:11:07] Daniel: Which Manning am I? And so my brother was the voracious reader. My brother always had a book in his hand and he was constantly reading, read everything. And so I always thought, Oh, Matthew is going to be the first one to be published or he would potentially have that as a career. And it turned out that I did it first.
[00:11:26] So anyways, in a moment of inspiration, I realized after I was doing all this writing and character development that I saw from my corporate world a problem with how corporations saw themselves. And the issue is that companies, this was my thesis, if you will, my guiding principle that made me want to start this business, companies see themselves in, if I was to put it in the story context, as Luke Skywalker. So they are the hero that this great company, let's just say they manufacture rope that mountain climbers would use to scale a mountain, and they're like, we are the best rope for mountain climbing and if you want to be a mountain climber, you need our rope because we're the hero.
[00:12:18] And I have to say to this rope manufacturer, I have bad news for you. You're not Luke Skywalker. In the story, you're actually the Force. You're this nebulous thing that really exists to make the hero successful. The hero is the person, the woman, who's climbing the mountain using your rope. Let's not conflate those two things and let's actually help you understand how to rebrand yourself or market yourself under the context of who's the hero and how do we, the company, help the hero on their journey.
[00:12:56] And so I basically took the concept of the hero's journey, which is obviously something I didn't create, but I reapplied it to corporate branding and said, let's create videos, stories about your brand that cast you in the right role as the Force and show the Force helping the hero, the protagonist, using your ability, your product or your service, to scale that mountain and accomplish their dream and accomplish their goal.
[00:13:26] And it created a narrative. I followed that hero's journey story structure to say, this is how your ad, if you will, will be very sticky and will truly reflect your brand's character to the consumer in a way that will be emotionally relatable to them.
[00:13:44] And so it was a kind of a different approach to branding. And that's why I built this company around that concept.
[00:13:52] Matty: I love that analogy. And I want to talk more about how that applies to an author brand and to do that through a discussion of the fact that you've had several different personas in your author career. So you started out, not counting the unpublished rom-coms, as Daniel Palmer. Did you ever consider using a name other than Daniel Palmer as a branding mechanism when you first started out with those books?
[00:14:18] Daniel: No, it didn't even occur to me, honestly. I didn't even understand what my brand was until I was maybe two or three books into the work. And then I realized, okay, I'm ordinary people, extraordinary circumstances. Who am I most like? Most like Harlan Coben or most like, at the time, Greg Hurwitz? Both phenomenal writers, both friends and Andy Gross is another one. So we were kind of this group that wrote in this milieu or this sub-genre of thriller fiction.
[00:14:53] And so our characters weren't super skilled. They weren't specially trained. They weren't investigators. They were just ordinary people living their lives. And because of who they are, so similar to what my dad did, because of who they are, the story found them. And the only way for the character to survive and get what they wanted, which was to live a happy life, they had to go through the story. And those were the kinds of books I was writing. And it was hard to find the audience for those stories.
[00:15:25] And I think that's part of what the job is of the author is to say, Okay, I'm a commercial fiction writer. So I don't do this necessarily for my own gratification. I do, it is gratifying to do the work, but if I don't have an audience, if I'm not reaching enough readers, then I want to ask myself, What else, like any brand, like any company, what else can I do to increase my product sales? Well, sometimes what you have to do is just change who you're marketing to or who your consumer is.
[00:15:55] And so I had to think how do I evolve this Daniel Palmer brand into something that's going to be more marketable? Well, while it was having those conversations with myself, mostly, tragedy struck and my father passed away quite suddenly on a return trip from Africa. And it wasn't long after he died that his publisher got in touch with me and said, Would I, could I write Michael Palmer books? Which was a very tall order because obviously my dad had a huge readership and a great legacy, and the last thing a son wants to do is come in and just tarnish the family name in what looks like some kind of money grab or something like that.
[00:16:34] But honestly, my father, the one thing he would have wanted more than anything was to feed his grandchildren, from this world or another. So it would be something my dad would have wanted me to do. The question was whether or not I had the skillset to do it because I'm not a doctor. But I did have a few years where my father and I were both writing books at the same time, so he was able to mentor me on his process and I had grown up with his process. So I had a peek behind the Michael Palmer curtain for longer than anybody else.
[00:17:05] Matty: And you had his writing tips.
[00:17:07] Daniel: I had his writing tips, right. So exactly how to structure that book. And so I put the everyday, extraordinary people aside and I switched to medical suspense. And so it was a change of branding from Daniel Palmer that writer to Daniel Palmer, kind of writing more in the Robin Cook genre.
[00:17:31] Matty: What I thought was very interesting about those book covers is that, at least the covers I was seeing it will say MICHAEL PALMER and then A Novel by Daniel Palmer or Michael Palmer and Daniel Palmer. Like if I were just glancing at it, I would assume that it was by Michael Palmer. From a branding point of view? What was your feeling about that?
[00:17:52] Daniel: It was my hope that that's the way it would be billed because these are Michael Palmer books. So it's like Vince Flynn who passed away tragically as well. His estate continues to publish Vince Flynn books. The estate of Robert Parker continues to publish Robert Parker books with authors, Ace Atkins is one, Reed Farrel Coleman another who have written for the Robert Parker estate, but it's not going to be Ace Atkins Presents a Robert B. Parker Spenser Novel, or Robert B. Parker Mystery. It's going to be, this is a Robert B. Parker book penned by this person.
[00:18:33] Matty: It's really the most clear example you can come up with about an author being a brand.
[00:18:39] Daniel: Right. There's no better example than the brand continuing after the author is no longer with us. And Michael Palmer wasn't the first to do it.
[00:18:47] Steve Larson's another one. V. C. Andrews' another one. So there's all these authors whose careers have continued because of the work of authors like me, authors like Ace, authors like Reed who can emulate a voice. We could do like 90% of it. It's an impossible task to be 100% the voice of another author. It just doesn't work. But you can get close almost to mimicking and that's part of the work. So it was an honor to do, but it was the hardest thing I had done because I'm not a doctor and that's a huge part of writing a medical suspense novel. So I needed the help of doctors, a doctor in particular, my uncle, to be the medical part of the work.
[00:19:35] Matty: Do you have any sense of whether over time, the people who are more recently reading the Michael Palmer penned by Daniel Palmer were carry overs from your father's fan base, and how much transfer you've gotten from the people who were fans from your earlier work?
[00:19:51] Daniel: You know, I can't quantify it. I don't know the exact number, but I know for sure that I've gotten many, many messages from people who said, Read your father's work, loved all of his books, and now I'm reading you and love your work as well.
[00:20:06] And so there's definitely been some momentum there in terms of that crossover, my dad's fans who now read my work, even though it's not medically based, as much at least as his work was. But I don't know the exact number. It's not something I could easily quantify regardless.
[00:20:25] But the things that we do similarly, are we try to have an authentic relationship with our readers. I can't really do it in Twitter. It just doesn't work for me. I don't love Twitter as a platform. Twitter is extremely clever. The writing on Twitter from my writer friends who I follow is very clever, it's very well-crafted. My brother would be excellent at it. Just not how I work. I'm a little more verbose. I just want to be real. I don't want to think about it or process it or anything of that nature. I just want to tell you how I see it.
[00:21:02] So Facebook actually works better for me as a medium. And it's tough for me as well because I'm not really an image person. I had a friend help me stage a picture of my book THE PERFECT DAUGHTER for Instagram. And it looked great as best picture ever. But then of course I have to go on Facebook and say, Here's a picture I took on Instagram, but I wasn't actually reading the book and then used my book as a placeholder to hover over the book so that the inside and the cover, and I didn't drink any of this coffee ...
[00:21:40] Yeah. I can't keep anything secret. So Facebook is where I go to connect with my fans, my readers. And I actually have an author group, independent of my Facebook page, and that's a group that I give a lot of free stuff away to and special excerpts or sneak peaks or what have you. And I asked that group to then become my street team, if you will, and say, you guys are it, get out there and get the word out, start spreading the word. So they helped to build that early momentum. So I don't want it to be a massive group. But it's grown substantially since I started it.
[00:22:19] Matty: I think that's a great idea. I actually recently started a private Facebook group after a conversation, I'll put a link in it, with Jason Kasper, the episode was about Jason's move from being independently published a traditionally published, but we got talking about his Facebook private group and how productive it is for him, and it incented me to spin up my own. So I'll include a link to that episode in the in the show notes.
[00:22:46] And I'm curious if in your analogy about Luke Skywalker, if the books or the author brand are the Force, are the readers the Luke Skywalkers?
[00:22:56] Daniel: Okay. It's a terrific question. And it depends, I believe, on the publisher and the author. So some authors become the Luke Skywalker, and those are your branded authors. They are the hero, but yes, at the end of the day, the author is the Force still.
[00:23:16]
[00:23:16] Matty:
[00:23:16] Daniel: So a reader of a Harlan Coben novel, for instance, is expecting a certain thing they're expecting Harlan's voice. They're expecting to be put on this journey, but at the end of the day, the reader wants to have a certain experience that is going to be. Meaningful and impactful to them. And if they don't have the experience, then the reader is going to feel like they didn't get anything out of the story.
[00:23:39] And the readers love to envision themselves in the book. They want to be the one who's solving the problem, solving the crime. It's always a reflection back on them. So the author's job is to create sort of the space for the reader to feel like this could be me, this could be happening to me. Then their brain engages in a different way and they have a different level of empathy and connection to the characters and to the stories. So that's when it becomes hugely successful. So I think for the most part, the reader's always the hero and we want to give the reader that space to do the job. But there are certain authors for whom just the name of the author will sell the book.
[00:24:18] And if you go to the Amazon world, however, in a lot of cases, the name of the author isn't as important as the marketing of the book. So did the book hit my inbox? Is the book a Kindle Daily Deal? Is the book priced at a price point that I would buy it? Is the book an Amazon First Read. And in those cases, it's not, Oh, I'm looking for this author's name. It's what was in front of me. What did Amazon suggest I wanted? And those books sell crazy numbers of units because it's just a different approach to the marketing.
[00:24:55] And then there's, where I'm at more or less is you're still trying to get that book to kind of propel you to that next rung on the ladder. And in order to do that in this day and age, it's really a book that captures the zeitgeist and catches lightning in a bottle. So if you don't do lightning in a bottle, which is super hard to do, it's not even hard to do. At some point it becomes luck. So you have to realize that the formula for this business, and I will stand by this formula, the formula for success as a writer is time, talent, persistence, and luck. And then, and that's what it really boils down to. So you have to just keep moving forward in this game, an inch better than your last book is a mile.
[00:25:46] And publishers will tend to stay with you because they're thinking, okay, well, then he could hit a grand slam. If you hit the grand slam, then, you know, your backlist starts to sell and everything starts to move in a really positive direction and you can ride the wave for as long as the wave is there to ride.
[00:26:04] And so back to the branding of the medical books, I ended up writing the Michael Palmer books and I turned in a book that was supposed to be another Michael Palmer medical suspense novel under contract with my publisher. And I did it a little cagey or with a little trepidation, I guess I should say, because I knew this wasn't a book my father could write. It just wasn't in the Michael Palmer milieu or kind of the style of a Michael Palmer novel. This was something different.
[00:26:35] And it wasn't like a Daniel Palmer novel, like I had published before -- those ordinary people, extraordinary circumstances. This was a family drama, family dynamics, and kind of a tangled web of personality conflicts that was wrapped around a story about Munchausen syndrome by proxy. And I turned it in to my editor and said, I think it's good, but I just don't know that my dad could have written this book. What do you think?
[00:27:06] And it turned out she loved the book and said, I think we're going to change your name. And so she said, You are no longer writing the Michael Palmer books. You are now D. J. Palmer. James is my middle name, so it's a true rebranding, Daniel Palmer to D. J. Palmer, and she just said, I want you now to focus on writing domestic suspense stories.
[00:27:29] So where I used to be ordinary people, extraordinary circumstances, now I'm looking at more family dynamic or interpersonal relationships as the foundational first plank of all of my stories. And that's been the switch to D. J. and it's been it's been really good for me.
[00:27:49] Matty: You had said earlier that you weren't at least initially a big reader. Did you become a big reader over time? I mean, you're mentioning lots of comp type authors. Are those comp authors you found yourself or that your publisher said, Oh, you should read Harlan Coben because you're like him?
[00:28:04] Daniel: Yeah, it's a great question because I had a super successful father who was a writer. I had an in with a top flight New York literary agency. And so I had all of these ingredients, if you will, to just go, Oh, I'm going to be a writer, and three days later, my career is taking off. Doesn't work that way. The first thing I had to do was learn how to be a writer.
[00:28:34] And so from the moment I said I'm going to do this, and I had closed a retail e-commerce business that I had helped to launch, we built websites for Dick's Sporting Goods, Alta Cosmetics, a toy company that went out of business based in Philadelphia or based out of Philadelphia, a company called Zany Brainy, which I suspect you might've known because you're from that area, so Zany Brainy's e-commerce business.
[00:28:57] And when we closed the doors and I turned the key and said that was a good run, but our run is done, I said, I'm going to be a fiction writer and set off with my rom-coms and all of that journey from the day I said I'm going to do it to the day my book came out was about 12 years. And in those 12 years I studied, I read voraciously and I really studied the craft and I didn't just read passively. I read, how are they doing it? Why are they making these choices? What is happening? How do you generate suspense throughout this story? Where is the right kind of flow, narrative flow, and I just became a very critical, active reader versus just a passive reading for pleasure.
[00:29:46] In the course of doing that, I rediscovered a love for reading. I did as a kid read a little bit here and there, like JAWS, all of the Stephen King books, these Dean Koontz books, and so I was able to kind of tap into that. I just wasn't a reader like my brother, who would read anything and everything multiple times. You know, he had one book here and then a book there and then a cereal box he would read. He just read, anything that had a word he would read. And so I became a reader, but not only that, I became a student at the same time. And I did what Malcolm Gladwell said, which is 10,000 hours. I don't know how many hours I put in, but it was a crazy amount of hours and certainly close to a million words written before I ever published anything.
[00:30:31] Matty: I think it's funny that whenever Stephen King comes up in one of my conversations with an author, business person, any of the guests on the podcast, he's always the exception to the rule. Like you can't write a story where you wander off into things that won't really have anything to do with the main story, unless you're Stephen King. Or you really can't write books that are 1200 pages long, unless you're Stephen King. And I feel bad for anyone who's reading Stephen King saying, yeah, I'm going to follow in his footsteps because obviously he's doing it right. And they're overlooking the, Yeah, but he's Stephen King.
[00:31:03] Daniel: I mean, that's a huge factor and you're absolutely right. Stephen King, you know, and I've had that thought while I'm writing and people they'll say, Oh, I wish that you did less of this, and it's like two paragraphs on a certain side character or whatever, and they would wish that didn't exist in the book. And readers do that. Again, back to the reader's the hero , well, the reader thinks this is how the book should've gone and I'm unhappy with the book because you didn't write it the way I would have written it.
[00:31:27] And there's no way you can argue that. You just have to say , Well, I'm sorry, but that's not what happened. And this is what happened. But Stephen King could write chapters about this side plot, as you mentioned, and we'll gobble it up because he's Stephen King. We can't all do that. So you have to find your strength, find your kind of voice as the Force. You the author are the Force, so you have to find what you do well as the forest and bring that to the reader.
[00:31:54] Matty: In the transition from being Daniel Palmer to Michael Palmer, a Novel by Daniel Palmer, and D. J. Palmer, did your publisher recognize that you had this branding background yourself and work through that with you, or it sounds like they just said, guess what your new name is D. J. Palmer.
[00:32:12] Daniel: Yeah. Back to STAR WARS. I don't know if folks remember the scene where there's a chess game, moving chess pieces, and it's Chewbacca versus C3PO and C3PO makes the winning move and Chewbacca gets mad and Han Solo basically suggests, Hey, you better let the Wookie win cause droids don't rip your arms out of your sockets when you lose. And I just always loved that line. And I use that line in my career, which is let the Wookie win. Whatever, you know, I'm not that guy and not that writer. And I would advise other writers to do as I do, because it works for me. I guess you have to follow your own path.
[00:32:56] But if my editor says, Hey, this is good but it should be blue. Well, how blue? You know, Lee Child is a friend and a mentor and somebody I just looked up to and his editor would say, Hey, Lee, you know, this is great book. You've done amazing work, but wouldn't it be better if this happened? And Lee looked at it and would look at that passage and go, Ah, yeah, it would be better if that happened. But that's not what happened,
[00:33:29] Matty: Lee Child is the other, Well, it's Lee Child. Those are the two. It's Stephen King and Lee Child.
[00:33:33] Daniel: Yeah. You just have to go with it. So I follow my publisher's lead, what they say worked best and I go in that direction. I do it with the book. And when my editor says, This isn't for me, I say, Okay. let's figure out how to fix it. And I think this is sage advice. Neil Gaiman offers this advice as well, and I think it's very sage advice, which is if somebody tells you something isn't working with your book and they tell you exactly what's wrong and exactly how to fix it, be skeptical. If somebody tells you something isn't working in the book and they're not sure why, but it just doesn't work for them, pay very close attention. Because that's the stuff that you want to figure out how to fix. The people who know exactly how to fix it, they don't know the craft, they don't know the job, and they're there too deep in their own thought to be a source of trusted information.
[00:34:26] But it's those people who say that this just doesn't work for me, and this area is weak, and it's your job as the writer to figure out why isn't it working and then how to fix it. And so I follow their advice on all the fixes. And my editor seldom says, On page 225, change this to this. They just say on page 225, no. Okay. And I'm going to figure out how to fix that. And so I follow their lead with the books and I follow their lead with the branding. And those are the only things within my control. A lot of this business just is not in my control.
[00:35:00] Matty: When you made the switch to D. J. Palmer, obviously one of the reasons people sometimes use initials is if you wanted to disguise your gender. Was that part of why that change happened? A slightly different genre being a better match for an author who could be a woman or a man?
[00:35:15] Daniel: Yeah. So I would say 90% of my readers are women, maybe 95.
[00:35:20] Matty: Was that across your whole career? Earlier, it was more men, right?
[00:35:23] Daniel: Yeah. It's definitely shifted. I mean, it's always, women are 75% to 80% of the readership of fiction. It's just always has been. Even when my dad started off in in the eighties. When my father was in the very early stages of his career, he pitched an idea to his new agent then, Jane Berkey, who was the owner of the Jane Rotrosen Agency, JRA, where I'm still a client, my brother's a client, my father was a client there. They're my agent. They'll be my agent for life. That's just where my family is. He pitched to young Jane who was just getting started in this business. And now they have Kristin Hannah. They have Lisa Gardner, Tess Gerritsen, and tons of huge authors. Luanne Rice.
[00:36:12] He pitched the book about a secret society of doctors dedicated to euthanasia. And Jane looked at that and said, Michael, do you know that 75% of readers are women, so what if it was nurses? And right then my father was like, Yeah, that's a million times better book. Secret society of nurses dedicated to euthanasia became THE SISTERHOOD, became my father's first published novel, and was a massive, huge multi-million selling copies success. And that was how he got started and his readership was mixed. There was a lot of men who read his stuff and a lot of women.
[00:36:47] So mine, definitely more women than men. But as I switched to the family-focused dramas, these domestic suspense stories really, and started writing women characters, almost predominantly women protagonists, my readership switched to almost exclusively women. But my publisher said, D. J., you know, let's just think of it as a very poorly guarded secret. She was like, we don't have to put your picture on it and we don't have to broadcast that you're a man. We don't have to tell the world that you're Daniel. But for those readers who might be gun shy about reading a domestic story from a man, she made that switch.
[00:37:30] Matty: It would be interesting to look and see over time how secretive those kinds of switches have been, because you can imagine that before the world of social media, people could make that switch, you could put a fake picture on your cover if you wanted to, and only a small pool of people would know who you are, but now that authors are getting more and more out on social media, it would be harder and harder to do. And one of my favorite stories, and I always wonder if this is apocryphal or a marketing ploy, is JK Rowling thinking she could write the Robert Galbraith books and no one would ever know.
[00:38:03] Daniel: Right. Well, she was happy. She was happy to sell no copies.
[00:38:08] Matty: Yeah. And I understand had gotten a friend of hers who, when there had to be in person meetings with the publisher, would pretend that he was Robert Galbraith.
[00:38:17] Daniel: Right, right. Yeah. She, I don't think she, I don't know. Cause I, you know ...
[00:38:20] Matty: I'm sure she wanted to, but I just think I think she vastly underestimated her own fame when she thought that she was going to be able to get away with it.
[00:38:30] Daniel: Right. I mean, somebody took her secret and broadcast it and I suspect she wasn't happy. Because being JK Rowling comes with a whole degree of weight, but I do believe that over the course of whatever number of books, that they don't think of these books is JK Rowling books, they think of them as Robert Galbraith books and they're written in a very certain style. And so I think she's done a remarkable job of rebranding herself and stepping outside of the box that she always would have been in, where people, if there was a JK Rowling book, they would've been like this is a really interesting mystery, but where are the wizards? And so she kind of freed yourself from that bit of bondage there and could explore her vast talent as a writer. I mean, she is ridiculously talented across multiple genres.
[00:39:23] Matty: Well, I wonder if a book like THE CASUAL VACANCY would have done better if it had been, I think that was published under J K Rowling and you couldn't really get a book that was more different in tone from Harry Potter than THE CASUAL VACANCY. And I wonder if it would have been , well, maybe it was more embraced. I didn't like it personally. I love all her other stuff, but I couldn't read THE CASUAL VACANCY. It was too snarky for me.
[00:39:45] Daniel: Yeah. Yeah. I actually didn't read that. I have read the Robert Galbraith books and then read Harry Potter because who hasn't read Harry Potter.
[00:39:54] Matty: Yeah.
[00:39:55] One of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation is that I have two series and they both have paranormal, supernatural aspects to them. In fact, my tagline is what happens when an extraordinary ability transforms an ordinary life. We had been talking about another version of that earlier, and I have a standalone that doesn't have any supernatural or paranormal elements, and I've been thinking that I might want to put that out there under a different name, not to be secretive about it, but to give a very clear message that this is going to be different. So, you know, if you want to follow me for my series to the standalone, that's fine, but don't expect people to be talking with dead people.
[00:40:36] But one of the considerations I've heard is that if you pick initials, a problem is that you have to be very consistent about how you present it, and this may be more an issue for your publisher than it is for you, but you could have DJ Palmer, or you could have D. J. Palmer. You could have D.J. Palmer. Did you get any insight from your publisher about why they decided to go with initials even though there is that logistical consideration versus, you know, Chris Palmer.
[00:41:07] Daniel: Right. Like a sort of ambiguous name, gender neutral. I think because my publisher publishes B. A. Paris and this, I guess -- I'm guessing on this one, I have no insight specifically -- but I think they saw it a lot of success with B. A. And they thought, Okay we got, A. J. Flynn. B. A. Paris. And so they saw it as this is sort of a trend that readers have embraced. So readers are okay with the initials, readers seem to like the initials. And so I think they thought it would be fine. Versus really saying I'm somebody who I'm not. And that was another consideration. They really didn't want to make it a true pen name.
[00:41:52] So you know, Alex Finlay just published a very successful book. And Alex is a pen name but Alex is also a gender neutral kind of name. So I don't know is Alex a man, is Alex a woman, who was Alex? And that was a complete rebranding, we're stepping away from this author's past work, and we're creating something brand new for readers to follow along with. D. J. is sort of smaller step away from the Michael Palmer work, away from Daniel Palmer. It's not as a giant leap. So I think that was why they were okay with saying, let's go with the initials and I haven't even looked, but yeah, apparently it's dots. I'm dots, dots. I never even thought about it.
[00:42:36] Matty: So now I get to return to the question I had been speculating about earlier, which is if you ever did decide to pull the rom-coms out of the drawer and send them out, how would you want those billed?
[00:42:49] Daniel: Yeah, those would be a Daniel Palmer book. I would do those. I wouldn't try to disguise myself as a woman writing from the guy's point of view. I'd say this is a book from a guy's point of view about relationships and about young love and two people trying to build a life together and seeing how that all plays out.
[00:43:08] But again, the probability of those books ever seeing the light of day is really low. It's just low. Right now I'm busy writing, finishing up the next D. J. book, and then there's going to be a D. J. book after that. And so is every minute of my day taken up writing? No, but I need space in my day to think and to be able to process. That's a big part of the work, which is just having that kind of downtime to really give the story a chance to breathe and see , well, what did I do? What did I do right? What did I do wrong? How can I fix it? How can I make it better?
[00:43:47] Matty: Great. Well, Daniel, thank you so much. This has been so interesting and so illuminating. Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and your work online.
[00:43:56] Daniel: Sure. You can check out djpalmerauthor, the website, DJPalmerAuthor on Facebook and djpalmerauthor on Twitter. That'd be great to hear from anybody. try and be as responsive as I can. But obviously as you know, I have a very active dog who takes up a lot of my time. If I'm not getting back to you, chances are I'm throwing a ball to my dog or doing something to take care of my dog.
[00:44:22] Matty: Excellent. Well, I think you have your priorities right.
[00:44:25] Daniel: Thank you so much. I appreciate it. And nice to talk with you.
[00:44:28] Matty: Nice talking with you too.
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