Writers Conference Redux

Work and Play...

I got back from Bouchercon 2024 Saturday night, after several days of panels and meetings. A lunch with my agent and some authors she represents was great, and a meeting with my editor at Thomas & Mercer was both productive and wonderfully warm, even though T&M didn’t pick up my latest.

As I’ve written here in the past, the two best days you experience as an author are you’re debut release, and when you make the NYT bestseller list. All the days in between can be a fraught, hand-to-mouth, book-by-book existence; editors who like you come and go, your sales go up and down, your own enthusiasm waxes and wanes. Writing is cheap and easy, but being a professionally published author isn’t, at least for most of us, and that’s okay. That’s the devil’s deal we make.

Publishing is where art meets commerce, and it’s a business after all.

One of the interesting/complicated/strategic parts of this whole business is branding…and that’s part of the discussion I had with my T&M editor. She asked me what I think my true “J. Todd Scott” brand is; another way of saying, what’s my “genre.”

More importantly, she wanted to know what I truly love to write.

Fair question.

My first four books are very noirish, but also very traditional mystery/crime/suspense (MCS) novels, while my last two are what I would call “MCS+ or Suspense+”— suspense + horror, or suspense + sci/fi, or suspense + supernatural. Clearly, that’s a hard genre to easily summarize, although I can point to author “comps,” like Stephen King or Dean Koontz (admittedly, somewhat genres all unto themselves), as well as Chris Golden, Richard Chizmar, Ron Malfi, and Paul Tremblay.

I also look at Michael Kortya, a fantastic author, who writes more traditional novels under his given name, and novels with supernatural elements under his open pen name of Scott Carson. Then there’s also Alma Katsu, who has flipped between historical horror novels and her far more grounded spy novels, and done so successfully without any sort of name or brand shenanigans at all.

The novel I was agented on 11 years ago was easily Suspense+, but the first novel I sold was very much in the traditional MCS mold. In the years since, I’ve kept a foot planted in both genres, so I guess I do love to write both, and hope to continue to do so.

The book I’m working on now is traditional MCS, the next one I’m circling…isn’t.

Does this mean it’s time for an open pen name too, a way to distinguish my “brands?” I honestly don’t know, but that was part of the lively discussion with my T&M editor, and one I’ll think about more in the coming weeks.

While I was at Bouchercon, I also did some micro author interviews, just grabbing folks in the halls. Some I knew, some I’d only just met. I released them out on Substack notes, but here’s a couple—

Next week I’ll talk more about screenwriting, since I’m currently working on a feature film spec. I’ll dive a little of the process…and the frustrations.

As always, feel free to—