Alexa's Publishing Chat
From Ghostwriting to Global Bestsellers: JD Barker’s Savvy Moves that Grew His Author Business {ep. 164}
May 7, 2025
JD Barker shares how his talent and strategic business decisions—like trademarking his name and building multiple revenue streams—paved the way for a powerhouse fiction career, including co-authoring with James Patterson. Learn how smart authorpreneurship helped him grow beyond books and into a scalable creative empire.
In this episode of Alexa’s Publishing Chat, bestselling author JD Barker joins Alexa to share the bold, strategic decisions that helped him build a powerhouse fiction career. From ghostwriting and indie publishing to launching his own imprint with Simon & Schuster, JD has built a career grounded in talent, creative risk-taking, and entrepreneurial smarts.

Today, he’s known for his high-octane thrillers—and yes, for co-authoring multiple novels with James Patterson. But that partnership didn’t happen by luck. JD walks us through how focusing on quality, branding, and business helped him scale his fiction career far beyond the page.

Highlights from this episode:

Mentioned in the episode:


Best Advice from JD:

“Your book needs to be a 5-star story—before you worry about marketing or publishing. Word of mouth only happens when the book is that good.”

J.D. Barker (Jonathan Dylan Barker) is an international bestselling American author whose work has been broadly described as suspense thrillers, often incorporating elements of horror, crime, mystery, science fiction, and the supernatural.

https://jdbarker.com/