Highland Inspiration, Publishing Freedom

Bestselling crime writer JD Kirk reveals how he stumbled on a whole new way to get his work out there... and selling fast

- DAWN GEDDES

JD KIRK has been very busy. The multi-award-winning bestselling author, based in the Highlands, has written over 200 books, including more than 20 selfpublished crime thrillers. As his latest, The One That Got Away, hits the shelves, I caught up with the author to find out about his incredible career and the secret to his self-publishing success.

"I started self-publishing by accident really," JD tells me. "I was originally a children's author writing under my real name of Barry Hutchison. I'd been writing full-time for 10 years, but most children's authors don't make a huge amount of money from their books. One day I was asked to go into a high school and talk about ways in which kids could publish their own work. At the time, I had no idea how - so I decided to find out.

"I'd had this idea for a while for a comedy science fiction novel for adults called Space Team. I'd never done anything with it, because I'd been so busy with the kids' books, so I decided to write it and self-publish it as an experiment." JD wrote the book within three weeks and put it up on Kindle.

"I went away on holiday and by the time I came back two weeks later, the book was outselling all of my children's books. I went, 'OK, this is interesting!' By the time I'd written the third book in the series, I was making more in one day from those three books than I was making from 170 kids' books from multiple different publishers in six months."

Self-publishing also gave him the freedom to write anything he wanted.

"When you're traditionally published, you've got editors and sales and marketing departments who want a say in what you're writing about. Maybe they want you to include a unicorn because they're big at the moment or they'd like you to shove a talking cat into your story! They want you to create something that they think they can sell, which makes sense; they are a business.