JD Kirk has become a bestselling sensation with his self-published crime novels. Better known as Barry Hutchison, BooksfromScotland caught up with him to talk about his latest novel and about his career as an author.

Eastgate
By JD Kirk
Published by Xertex Media

Eastgate is the fourth in a new crime series centred around a character called Bob Hoon. After such a varied writing career including multiple children’s books, what brought you to crime, and how has the experience of writing Bob Hoon differed from your hugely successful DCI Jack Logan series? 

So the Bob Hoon books are a spinoff from the Logan series. There’s a character in the Logan series, Robert Hoon, who was Detective Superintendent. He was basically created to be like a Scottish psychotic version of the boss in Cagney and Lacey who was always giving them grief. He was supposed to be quite a two-dimensional character who just popped up in a few scenes to cause trouble, but then I started getting lots of emails about him. They were quite mixed, it was half going, ‘I absolutely hate this character and skip over all his scenes’, and the other half going, ‘I love him, he’s the greatest character I’ve ever read’. So I was quite tempted to see if I could redeem him a bit in the eyes of the people who hate him, if I could still stay true to his character but turn him into a three-dimensional character that people identified with.  

It was originally going to be a trilogy. The first one is called Northwind, the second Southpaw, and the third Westward, and it was my son who said I had to do four. I had no idea what East was going to be, but then up in Inverness there’s the Eastgate Shopping Centre, and I thought that could work. At least it fits in with the naming pattern! Eastgate is basically an action movie in book form. It’s a terrorist takeover of the shopping centre which Bob Hoon finds himself at the centre of. It’s like a sweary, psychotic, Scottish Die Hard. It was almost like a Christmas Special this one, because the cast of the Logan series are in it, it rounds off the Hoon series, it’s kind of a big explosive action-packed ending with all the characters the readers have come to love over the course of the series, with a bit of social commentary on male entitlement in there too through the villains. 

This conscious framing of the book as a Die Hard set in the Highlands is complemented by Bob Hoon, who’s written very much in the hard-boiled mode with a number of genre winks and familiar characterisations. Do you enjoy working within the tropes of different genres? 

Yeah, very much so. The Hoon books were always meant to be fun, I mean they go dark at points, but it’s always been me having an absolute blast writing them. I suppose it’s been like a tour of all my writing inspirations as well, so it goes through books I’ve read, films I’ve seen, and there’s little winks and nods to those, down all the way to things like how my daughter’s really into anime and there’s little nods to that in there. So yeah, it’s been a celebration of all the fiction I’ve loved really. With it being the last one in the series as well I’d say it’s probably not as dark as some of the earlier ones, despite it being an Incel terrorist takeover! It’s more a celebration of Bob Hoon. 

So you were born in Fort William and are settled there now with your family. All the Jack Logan books are set in the Highlands and of course Eastgate is set in the Inverness shopping centre of the same name. How important is setting to your work and to the crime form in general? 

Well I’d say it’s very important for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I’m a very lazy person and I know the Highlands quite well, so in terms of having to do very little research, it was really important! But what I’ve found is, it does really well in the Highlands, my series, because people really like reading about where they live, but internationally it also does really well too. Certainly during lockdown, people would feel like they were able to travel to the Highlands, so internationally that’s a big pull of the books, the romance of it all.  

What’s also interesting is I have something called aphantasia, which means I have no mental pictures, I think in words. But the number of people who say, ‘Oh, wow, it was just like being there’, and I always found that fascinating just how that works, because when I read a book, quite often when there are paragraphs and paragraphs describing a scene, I’ll almost gloss over that because it’s doing me no favours. It’s like, I get it, you’re in a room! I want the dialogue and the action and the story. But a lot of people like that lingering in a place and establishing the scene, so it fascinates me how different readers respond to different ways of writing. 

So for those who may not know, you self-publish your crime fiction through Zertex Media, and to massive success. What was it that took you down that path of publishing, and what kind of benefits do you think it grants you as the author? 

Well I worked with publishers for about ten years writing kids’ books, but ultimately it was by accident that I got into self-publishing. Like most kids’ authors, most of my income came from doing school events, and I got asked to go to a school in Elgin and talk about how kids can publish their own books. But I had no idea how kids could publish their own books! As far as I was concerned, you wrote something and sent it to London, and 6 months to a year later a book arrived in the post. But they were offering to pay me to do four different sessions, so I thought okay, I’ll learn. I quickly rattled off this comedy/science fiction book called Space Team and I stuck that on Kindle. Then we went away on holiday, and Space Team started outselling all my kids’ books, but I’d done no marketing for it. I didn’t think anyone was going to buy it. I designed the cover myself, it was all self-edited, it was an experiment to learn.  

By the time we were back from holiday, it was making something like £50 or £60 per day, and I thought I’m going to try and write a second one. When I wrote a second one then the sales of the first book skyrocketed, and by the time I wrote the third one I was earning more in one day on these three books than I was in six months on all my traditionally published books combined. I ended up writing twelve books in that series, we did three spin-off book series and the audiobooks, but it all felt a bit ad-hoc. It was still just me uploading to Kindle. So when I had the idea for the crime series, I wanted to do it properly. We set up a limited company, contacted foreign rights sales agents, TV rights agents, we’ve now got a PR company involved. We wanted to get into bookshops, so we got tied up with Booksource and then CPI to do print runs, and we’ve got Martin Palmer Publishing Services who are kind of acting as sales agents. 

In terms of the advantages, what I was getting a bit sick of with traditional publishing, was that I’d pitch an idea and say, ‘Right I want to do this book’, and they’d say, ‘Great, now can you put a unicorn in it? Unicorns are massive at the moment!’ So you’re always compromising. Which is part of the whole industry, of course, but then when I was doing the Space Team books, I was just writing it for myself. Then when people were asking about merchandise, I had all the rights, so I did T-shirts, mugs, and we were able to exploit audio fully, because a lot of my books the audio rights were with the publishers but they never did anything with them. Hanging on to all the rights was massive, but creatively it was just really freeing. 

On the flip side, suddenly all the responsibility was mine as well. Luckily we were in a position where it wasn’t just me doing everything, we had cover designers, editors, working with us freelance. We’ve actually just started doing some Logan and Hoon series merchandise, exclusive merchandise whose proceeds are going to local charities based here in the Highlands. There’s a different charity every 3 months – the first one was set up by an old school friend whose son died of cancer when he was a year old, so they’ve set up a charity for raising awareness for children with cancer. Again this was led by people just asking for merchandise, so I thought since I’ve been so well supported in the area, we could use this as a way of giving a bit back into the local area. 

So what do you think it was about your books that made them such a huge success? You mention how you didn’t do any marketing for the Space Team titles, and I’m sure there are a lot of writers considering self-publishing but who are unsure of how to go about it. Do you have a magic tip? 

I genuinely wish I knew. I think a big part of it is just being nice to people. When I was learning about self-publishing I joined a couple of Facebook groups, and I got involved in those. And when my first Space Team book came out, a couple of people in that group who I’d not necessarily helped but who had seen me help others out, shared it, said check this new book out, and it just built from there. With Amazon especially, I think if you can get that momentum early, if you get a flurry of readers who review it positively, then Amazon will start to show it around. That’s why I changed my name for the crime fiction series. Well two reasons: firstly I didn’t want the kids who’d read my other books to suddenly read books about death and murder and lots and lots of swearing, but also, if I put out books under my sci-fi name then I know lots of sci-fi readers would’ve picked up those books because Amazon would have registered the name and displayed it as of interest to science fiction readers. So I kept the name a secret until it had established itself as a crime series in its own right, and Amazon knew that JD Kirk writes crime and to show those books to crime readers. But these are all things that I’d learned by trial and error over the course of the Space Team books. 

So involving yourself in the community and learning the system… 

Yeah, and I think the word ‘community’ there is really important. Around both the Space Team books and JD Kirk books, I don’t do much marketing, but I look at building a community. For example, with the JD Kirk group, a lot of the readers are older and are on Facebook and some were alone at Christmas, so we did a kind of Christmas get-together. I put on some quizzes, I’d recorded videos with a wee Santa hat, and loads of them got together on the Facebook group to chat and spend Christmas together. I just love that kind of thing happening regardless of any knock-on effect, but people then become more than readers of the book, they become invested in the community as well, so that when a new book comes out they’re straight on it and chatting about it. So for me it’s always been about communities of readers. 

We had a readers’ newsletter a couple of years ago, which we’ve recently rebranded to the JD Kirk VIP Club, and there are about 20,000 people on that, so I’ll email them every couple of weeks, and I’m guaranteed to get something like 500-600 emails back from people just telling me what they’ve been up to and how their day’s going. I love that. 

Eastgate by JD Kirk is published by Xertex Media, priced £2.99.