On a recent edition of First Draft Friday, I sat down with Wall Street Journal bestselling author Jeff Wheeler to discuss writing in a new genre. Jeff, known for his prolific work in epic fantasy, shares his experiences and strategies behind transitioning to writing thrillers. Jeff hasn’t abandoned fantasy — he’s expanding his repertoire to reach new readers with his thriller writing.
Here are some key takeaways from my conversation with Jeff:
Key takeaways from the interview:
- The importance of strategic planning: Jeff’s transition from a secure job at Intel to a full-time writing career was meticulously planned. By building on existing success, he was able to negotiate a deal that would allow him to triple his book production rate by writing full time.
- Maintaining productivity: Jeff gave himself strict rules about writing first thing in the morning, not checking email and putting his phone in a drawer. He is also motivated by publishing deadlines.
- Transferring existing skills in new genres: When transitioning to writing thrillers, Jeff capitalized on the skills and narrative techniques he honed in fantasy writing. His editor pointed out that his fantasy novels already contained thriller elements, making the shift more manageable.
- Research and immersion: To authentically write his thriller series, Jeff immersed himself in the genre, reading works by top thriller authors like Blake Crouch and Dan Brown. He also conducted in-depth research and site visits to ensure a high level of realism in his stories.
- Balancing creativity and constraints: Jeff found that writing thrillers, while different from fantasy, offered a new kind of creative freedom. The real-world settings and constraints required more precise details and knowledge, pushing him to expand his skill set.
- Understanding and meeting reader expectations: While venturing into a new genre, Jeff maintained elements that resonated with his existing audience, such as strong family themes and high stakes. This balance helped retain his fantasy readers while attracting a new audience. Authors should meet the expectations of both their current and potential readers when pivoting genres.
- Creative growth and experimentation: Jeff’s foray into thrillers not only expanded his skill set but energized his writing.
It was a great discussion, one you won’t want to miss! Click below to watch our 30-minute recording and hear the questions we answered from the live audience. Keep scrolling if you’d prefer to read the transcript.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Alessandra Torre: Hello and welcome everyone to First Draft Friday. I am your host, Alessandra Torre, with Authors AI, and today I am joined by Wall Street Journal bestselling author Jeff Wheeler. We’ll be talking all about making changes and pivoting in your author career and how that can be important and powerful, both creatively and professionally. So welcome, Jeff. It’s really great to have you back on First Draft Friday. Do you want to give the audience just a quick introduction to you and your work?
Jeff Wheeler: Sure. It’s awesome to be back and good to see you again, Alessandra. We finally got to meet in person at Inkers Con. I’ll do a plug for you here because that was such a great writing conference. Enjoyed being there. So, I’ve got over 30 epic fantasy novels and sold over 5 million books. I was able to leave my day job at Intel ten years ago this year. So 2014, you know, it just kind of blows my mind, how fast it’s gone. But all these books later and all the fun later, it’s just great to be here with you again.
Alessandra Torre: It’s so great to have you. And can we talk for a minute about when you left your job? Because how many books did you have published at that point?
Jeff Wheeler: I had self-published a couple of them. And then I had signed a six-book deal with Amazon Publishing before I had finished delivering the final book with them is when I decided to to jump into it full time. I was doing about one book a year, and I told Amazon I could write three books a year if I did this full-time. So how can we make this work? So, in 2014, I signed a three-book deal for my Covenant of Muirwood trilogy, and with the commitment that I’d write all three books in one year. A little bit stressful and scary to say, hey, I’m leaving the security of, say, a health care plan, retirement plan, but I had done several books with them. I’d seen the success come and I said, you know what, I want to do this full-time. That has been my goal for years. Like most of my life, I wanted to be a full-time author. So then 10 years of doing it.
Alessandra Torre: So it’s interesting because a lot of authors are like, oh, if I could write full time, then whatever current production I could triple or whatever. Did you find that that was actually the case, that more hours, more free hours translated into more books written, or did you kind of struggle? Because I know that I was almost more productive, when I had a second job, you know, because then I focused on my time. But when suddenly I had the whole day, I was…I don’t know, I just found all this other stuff to do. So I’m curious if that was an easy transition for you to make.
Jeff Wheeler: You know, having been at Intel for my career, I had learned to be very productive and efficient with my time. And I had done enough. I knew myself well enough that it’s like, hey, I’m going to write first thing in the day. I’m going to make sure I have my email and social media off, and my cell phone stuffed in a drawer. This is my real working hour. And I’m going to write until I finish that chapter for that day because I guess having the time pressure of a commitment like the publishing contract. I have these deadlines. I got to deliver the first book in three months. I got to deliver the second book after that. That helped motivate me. So as long as I could finish that chapter for the day, then I could be more distracted by other things. But just having that hanging over my head. I am not a procrastinator by nature, and so it drives some of my kids nuts because I have many members of my family who are procrastinators and we drive each other nuts. But I, you know, I have to have that commitment. I have to have that done. And this made it a lot easier to be able to do it. But at Intel is still part of my soul, unfortunately.
Alessandra Torre: But it’s not a bad thing. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think that really helps. And like you said, it does make a difference when you do have something like when you’re contractually obligated. Because I was attending a class on the mental processes of writers. And I realized that I am that writer who has to have a deadline. If I don’t have a deadline, it’ll be a year. It’ll be 18 months before I write a book. But if I don’t have a deadline either set by a preorder I set up on Amazon, or typically it’s an editor or publisher that’s waiting on me. And I know if I’m late, then they have to ship. It is extremely inconvenient and costly for them, so I really have to meet those deadlines. That’s the only way. Now I know I work best in crunch time and I work best with that threat over me. And, that was impressive that you did three books published or committed books. Yeah. In a year. How long is a typical book for you?
Jeff Wheeler: About 90,000 words ish. Sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less. But when I start a book, I know I can finish it in about three months. The first draft. Yeah. And so I kind of have to bank on that. So with that, I can publish 3 to 4 books a year and Amazon can only handle three. So I usually do an indie or something separate. So I do 3 to 4 books a year and have been almost the whole time.
Alessandra Torre: And do you edit as you…because you’ll submit a book to Amazon and then it’s two or three weeks and then you get your editorial feedback. So are you writing another book or are you taking time off?
Jeff Wheeler: No, I write it from start to finish. And then I reread it myself. And then while that’s being turned in, I start the next book in a series. The only time I take off, so to speak, is when I’m in between series because I need time to kind of organize my thoughts. And I kind of have a world-building process that I go through before I start a new series, because once I’m in the middle of it, then it’s kind of like I’m in creation mode, but I also spend sometimes a month in between series. Plot out or figure out the worldbuilding and what I want to get done with it.
Alessandra Torre: And returning to our topic today, which is about pivoting. So fantasy has a lot of world-building, obviously. I mean, you’re creating oftentimes entirely new civilizations and cultures and histories. You wrote in fantasy. It is strictly fantasy. It’s not science fiction and fantasy for eight years, however long since you’ve quit your job. And then you did move to…And actually, I’m going to cliffhanger that question just a second, because we do have a timely question from the audience and that’s from YouTube. So hi, Daryl, it’s great to have you here. Daryl has a question for you, Jeff. “Do you regret signing a multiple-book deal? Sometimes authors wish they hadn’t locked in that long.” And this is a really good question for your first book deal, which was a six-book deal. Did that scare you at first? And was there any point in time where you were like, oh, maybe this is too big of a commitment?
Jeff Wheeler: I certainly do not regret signing the deal. And what made mine a little bit different is I sold Amazon three books I had already written, and then they repackaged it. They made audiobooks, redid the covers, and made it a lot better than what I did. And then in the other three books I hadn’t written yet, I was already writing the first one that I hadn’t finished yet, so they wanted to. They wanted what had been successful as well as what I was working on. And so that was my strategy with that. So I don’t regret it. And then I continue to work with them and sign new publishing deals with them, as well as with other editors, too. I kind of keep my field open, but I’ve been treated very great by Amazon Publishing. I stayed with them for 12 years now.
Alessandra Torre: And I have to just give a disclaimer. Jeff and I are both with Amazon Publishing, so we were both self-published. But, Jeff is with…
Jeff Wheeler: 47 North
Alessandra Torre: 47 North, which is their fantasy imprint, though they do venture out a little bit, which we’ll talk about in a minute. And I’m with Thomas and Mercer, which is their mystery, thriller, suspense imprint. And I’ve signed multiple book deals with other publishers, and I have regretted some of those. But Amazon is, in all sincerity…This is not us thinking that someone’s going to watch this. They’re such a fantastic publisher to work with. And they are very different from a lot of other publishers in terms of their flexibility and interaction with us as authors. So it’s, I think it helped, Jeff, that you did have that three-book history with them, even though it was already published. To kind of get a sense of what that working relationship would be.
Jeff Wheeler: Exactly, exactly.
Alessandra Torre: So you were a highly successful fantasy author, and then recently you made a fairly major change in your writing and audience. So can you talk to us about that and how that came to be? And the process.
Jeff Wheeler: Absolutely. So, you know, in the last year, in 2023, I published with Amazon, the beginning of a thriller series, called The Dresden Codex. And I’m also very grateful, Alessandra, that you gave me a book blurb for it, which was so appreciated especially when you’re trying something new, right? You’ve got all the people that you know are used to your style of writing. It’s like, why would I want to blurb a thriller novel? So I appreciate that. And, with most authors, we write what we’re passionate about. And I had this really weird, twisted nightmare. Many of my story ideas sometimes come from my dreams. And I’m like, yeah, but I can’t write this as a book because it’s not a fantasy. And it didn’t make sense to adopt it into a fantasy setting because part of the peril was being in our world in modern days. And so I put it aside. But then I kept thinking about it. I kept thinking about it, and I made the choice. Well, let me talk to Amazon. How did it feel about pivoting? So when you pivot to something else, it’s smart to pivot to something adjacent to what you’re doing. So within fantasy, a pivot might be science fiction. But as I thought about it, my editor told me. She’s said, “Jeff, your fantasy books have a lot of thriller elements to them. So you’re pivoting to a different genre, but it’s also in your wheelhouse of writing very intense, tension-driven fantasy.” So they thought it made a lot of sense to do that.
In tackling that challenge, they liked the story idea. They liked the pitch. They said, let’s do it. But what was weird for me is in my fantasy novels, I always knew two to three books out. I knew the whole series. I knew where the story was going to go. But with this, I only had the first book and I signed a three-book deal with them. We had the mutual agreement that if all it went was Book One, we’d just stop there. But they said, no, we think you can take this on like you have done before, but it was terrifying for me to not know where Book Two was going to be as I was writing Book One, and not to know until the end of Book One, like the actual writing of it. I started to finally see, oh, Book Two is going to go there. And so I said, okay, well, I’ll do Book Two next, but I wonder if maybe I’d have to throw in a couple of fantasy books to fill in as I waited for the inspiration to come. But that inspiration came always by the maybe three-quarter mark of the book. Here’s what the next people do. I’ve always been kind of a plotter more than a pantser. So writing as a pantser was definitely a challenge for me. But that’s how it came together. I was able to write all three books continuously as I do for my fantasy series, which means there isn’t a huge gap between the publishing dates. You don’t have to wait a year. You only have to wait a couple of months before the next one comes out. And so Book Two came out in December, of that series. Book Three came out in May. So my fans again never have to wait very long for the book to come out. But it stretched me in ways that surprised me.
Alessandra Torre: Were you under the same timeframe? Three months? Even though you were kind of going into uncharted territory, you still did have kind of a back-to-back commitment.
Jeff Wheeler: That was the goal. I built into the deadline longer than three months. I think I built in five months. But once I started writing it, I found writing thrillers to be just as fast, if not faster than fantasy. Because, it’s like, okay, what else can I do to mess with their lives, you know? But I pictured it like a movie, like the next scene. And what terrible thing can happen to this family on vacation? Getting caught in a global conspiracy to destroy the world.
Alessandra Torre: I see our team just posted the link to Doomsday Match. Do you have a copy of the book? Can you show them the cover?
Jeff Wheeler: I can grab it real quick.
Alessandra Torre: There we go. Yeah. So they can see here it does have a little bit. It almost looks like a little bit of fantasy elements but can you
give the elevator pitch of the story so that they understand?
Jeff Wheeler: Sure. It was inspired by a vacation I took to Florida. In the hot, hot, muggy Florida Everglades. The thing is, imagine a family, the family of a bestselling author. Right? I had to.
Alessandra Torre: Where did that inspiration come from?!.
Jeff Wheeler: But they go on this kind of exclusive vacation down to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. It’s famous for the Mayan Riviera, all these temples and pyramids, and Mayan lore. And they find out that it’s not a relaxing Christmas getaway. That their family has to compete with another family in a fight to the death, basically, in the old Mayan ballgame. They’re kind of being lured down under false pretenses. And then they have to try to find a way to escape. So that was the essence of the dream. But the dream I had was that my family was on vacation. We were being hunted by other families, you know, and it’s just terrifying. And I woke up, oh my gosh, I really have nice neighbors. But this is just the author’s brain. We’re always kind of thinking of the worst-case scenario. And my family moved recently. And so you imagine it’s not all great and in this place where you live, your mind plays tricks on you. So that was the seed of the idea. So again, I had no idea where Book Two or Book Three was going to go, but I actually went with my family down to the Yucatan.
Alessandra Torre: I was going to ask.
Jeff Wheeler: As part of the research, I’ve been down there twice and climbed these pyramids and learned about Mayan history, Cortez, and the Spanish and how the impact they had on the people there. And it’s just visiting in person. I can’t visit any of my fantasy worlds. Right. They’re all in my imagination, but a lot of it, in fact, most of the places that are in this trilogy I visited, including where the author lives, Bozeman, Montana. That’s not where I live, but I took a trip there, to go scope it out and see what it was like. And a lot of the little details, like chase scenes in cars are places that I, you know, I’ve actually been to. So, very different. A fantasy author normally just has to imagine these things. But there was also a challenge for me, too, because I had a much higher level of realism.
Alessandra Torre: Actually, that you have to be.
Jeff Wheeler: I had to learn about the FBI and about how government agencies work and, and things like that, that, you know, leverage friends in law enforcement and other things like, okay, how would the police react to this kind of a situation? And so there were definitely more constraints than what I was than what I’m used to as a fantasy author where I don’t know what it is I can just make it up.
Alessandra Torre: Yeah!
Jeff Wheeler: And as long as that stays logically coherent within the world, the readers aren’t going to care. But I’ve had people complain about the speed of the airplanes that are flying in. “The jet doesn’t land at this speed.” I’m just like, well, I don’t know how fast they land. It wasn’t really the point. But it’s funny that people are more or more nitpicky when they have experience in an area, you’re showing that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Alessandra Torre: 100%. I have a lot of questions, but the first is this book does have a little bit of supernatural elements. I don’t know if supernatural is the right word, but was that intentionally added to connect with your fantasy audience or that was just the direction the story took?
Jeff Wheeler: That’s a wonderful question, and I thought about that. But as I immersed myself in the Mayan history, all of the magic in this book is magic from our world, right? So the more I researched, the more I learned about shape-shifting or the kinds of different magic that existed. If you read our own world’s history, it can kind of feel like a fantasy novel. So I think it didn’t hurt to leverage that. And as I read other thrillers, there’s often a supernatural element in them, too. It might be alien technology, or it might be some sort of—
Alessandra Torre: Psychic. Yeah.
Jeff Wheeler: So I thought if it’s not going to hurt, it’s definitely a thriller.
Alessandra Torre: Yeah, yeah. And as a reader, I’m a thriller reader. I don’t read any fantasy. The only fantasy I’ve read in the last year was for a book club, which was one of your books, which is why when you approached me, I’m like, oh yeah, I know I like Jeff’s writing and I read fantasy for Jeff, so I know that I’ll like a thriller, but it is 100% a thriller. And I love the action. So shifting to thrillers, what did you find in terms of craft and in terms of changing? Did you have to read thrillers? Was it in a world you were already familiar with as a reader? Did you have any concerns with the storytelling aspect of a thriller versus fantasy?
Jeff Wheeler: I did, and I wanted to make sure that I was doing it justice, and it was definitely a little nerve-wracking. And it reminded me of a quote. The head of Pixar, Ed Catmull, said that if you aren’t experiencing failure, then you’re making a far worse mistake. You’re being driven by the desire to avoid it. And I felt like where I had been in my career at that point. In all these fantasy novels, I showed what I could do, but I wanted to test myself. I had some series that hadn’t done as well as others, so I had experienced some degree of failure. But I didn’t want to be so afraid of trying something new that I wouldn’t even stretch myself. So to overcome that fear, I really dove into different thrillers. I asked my publisher, the folks at Thomas and Mercer, who are some of the top names that I can read? People like Blake Crouch or Dan Brown. I really liked Dan Brown’s work. But I got a list of who’s who of thrillers. And as I read it, with the eye of kind of understanding the tropes, the points of view, the pacing. And I definitely found the pacing to be much more than what I was doing even within my fantasy worlds. I thought my pacing was strong in fantasy. But often these thrillers might take place within 24 to 36 hours, really condensed. I wasn’t used to doing books like that. Mine were maybe weeks or months. And so I looked into those things, and as I was reading it, I looked at, OK, how can I leverage the tropes but can still keep it Jeff Wheeler? Keep it within my brand. I have a lot of family in my books. Relationships are important. I wanted that to be key, which is why I chose my protagonist as a family. It wasn’t just one person, but a father protecting his wife and kids. And I thought people would relate to that versus somebody, let’s say,.
Alessandra Torre: The stakes were much higher.. Yeah, yeah.
Jeff Wheeler: So I wanted to keep it kind of adjacent to the kinds of stories that I like to tell so that I wanted readers that were my fantasy fans to give it a try, as well as people that only maybe exclusively read thrillers to say, well, this cover looks interesting. Oh, I like the themes. I like the family. I like those things. Yeah. I wanted this to be the kind of thing you’d watch on Disney Plus or something, right? That was the brand I was going for. And so it worked very well. But I definitely immersed my brain in a lot of thrillers to be able to make sure I was understanding the tropes and what the readers would expect. Right? You want to just create something so different that no one says, “This isn’t what I was expecting it to be.” I wouldn’t want that kind of negative reaction. I’d want them to pull them in and then maybe entice them to come try some of my fantasy novels, too. So that’s one of the values, one of the positive outcomes of trying something else. Some of my reviews said this is my first Jeff Wheeler book. I’m going to give his fantasy a try now.
Alessandra Torre: I love that. So you had an idea, but is this like a career shift for you? Are you going to be a thriller author now, or do you see yourself returning to fantasy? What happens now that you’ve written these three books?
Jeff Wheeler: Good question. So, my next series is definitely going back to fantasy again. Because there’s such a long runway from the time I started writing all these books to the end, I wanted to make sure I’m also satisfying my core audience as well. I’m not going to preclude, I haven’t decided whether I’m going to write any more thrillers or not. It’s still too new to see what that pacing looks like. But I did decide my new fantasy series was going to be something brand new as well, because often I have several different worlds, and I’ve expanded those different worlds, and I wanted from the very beginning of my career, Alessandra, I wanted to not be kind of pigeonholed into just one thing. But sometimes the fantasy author has a very popular world, and then they end up going 20 books deep into it. But you lose fans, you know you only at most.
Alessandra Torre: You aren’t going to get a new fan at Book 12, right?
Jeff Wheeler: Yeah. No, you won’t. And so I thought I found some success by always introducing new worlds. You know, in fact, my websites are called The Worlds of Jeff Wheeler because I didn’t want to be pigeonholed into one. And so I wanted to have that, that creative freedom to be able to do some new things. And so I’ve got a new fantasy series coming out later this year. But I haven’t decided yet. It wasn’t a pivot like a permanent one, but I wanted to test it. I wanted to see, can I do this? I wanted to have that creative growth. I learned a lot doing it. And then, what can I do? How can I bring that knowledge back to what I was doing with the fantasy as well, and then decide, do I want, to write more in the future as well? It’s still too new to make any long-term decisions with it yet, but I’m so glad that I did it because of how I’ve grown as an author.
Alessandra Torre: I was going to say, I think just writing outside of our genres flexes different muscles, and we sometimes find pieces that we’re like, oh, I want to implement this into my other writing, or this is a strength of mine or a weakness of mine that I discovered through this. And so I think I also wrote romance for 6 or 7 years and then moved into suspense. I always wanted to be in suspense, but I found my romance always had suspense in it, and then I made the shift. And it is sort of different creatively, I think we can get in a rut and we can find a safe place. What is what is expected of us. And, I like moving into new genres, but it can be a difficult business decision because you do have where your money is. And then going into a new world can be risky.
Jeff Wheeler: No. It’s true. I can tell you understand how that works. And I think the value of having that creative freedom and not being constrained by “I have to keep writing in this world. I have to keep doing this.” Because I think that atrophies your creative muscles a little bit, too, and it makes the writing less vibrant. It makes it less interesting. And then I’m less excited. I like to have a little bit of fire in my belly. And I had a lot of fire in my belly during the Doomsday Match. And it’s the rest of the series. And so glad that I have that experience. And now I’ve got fire in the belly to go back to fantasy again. So I really have to make sure that that passion is there before I even start the project to begin with.
Alessandra Torre: So we have only two minutes left. So, a few quick questions. Rob from YouTube. Hi. Rob said, “Did your thinking process change when going from world-building versus researching real places?”
Jeff Wheeler: Yeah, it certainly did. And, it’s funny because, you know, some of the places. I started researching the Yucatan before I’d gone down there. I’d been to Mexico before, but I’d never been to the Yucatan Peninsula, which is very different from places around, say, Mexico City or other places. So actually going down there, I was like, OK, I’ve got to rewrite some of these things because just being in the climate, the physical things you could describe were so different. And so normally my world-building approach for fantasy is I might pick on, say, medieval England or medieval France or even, I’ve done a medieval China series. So all my research now about Mexico, about the Mayans, grabbing all these books, reading all these different things definitely informs my process as I was as I was doing it.
Alessandra Torre: Did you visit there during the time frame, like summer or winter, that the book was written? And how much of the book had been written before you went there?
Jeff Wheeler: About half of it had been written. So I had the idea and then had the idea of going down to Mexico for Christmas. My family, plus my brother’s family, went down there together to visit some of these places. And so we were down there exactly during the time that the book takes place, you know, spending Christmas Day on the beach eating ceviche with mantas swimming by your legs. It’s very different from the winters I’m used to now. So. Absolutely. And it required a lot. My imagination took me so far. But until I actually climbed a pyramid and saw how to climb them, or the narrow steps and how tall they were until I did that, that gave me such.
Alessandra Torre: Felt the burn in your legs with all those stairs. Yeah.
Jeff Wheeler: No kidding. Right. That just only added to the creative experience for sure.
Alessandra Torre: We are out of time. Maybe we can just give a quick piece of advice to Peter. Peter is also on YouTube. And he has years and years of diaries, in different areas, like business, but also his training as a forester, his family’s holidays, and rotaries. Do you have any suggestions on how to change those diaries into different books?
Jeff Wheeler: I always keep track of my dreams, stories, and things that kind of inspire me. But what inspires me the most are the characters. And that’s even when I was writing Doomsday Matches, I based so many of the characters on attributes that my family has.
Alessandra Torre: Yeah.
Jeff Wheeler: And of course, my kids have been reading it. They’re like, “Dad, you’re a little bit too revealing.” All the things that inspire us in our life. We have to do it, but we still have to distill the core from it. My time at Intel has influenced my writing. My time going on vacations has influenced my writing. Always keep an eye out for those things. But what’s the nugget? What’s the thing that you can distill from either the truth or the story that’s going to be compelling for others? Because just because it’s your life doesn’t mean it’s going to be interesting to other people, too. So it’s finding those nuggets, the things that, hey, I tell the story over and over again. People’s eyes light up. And I learned that as a high school student, I was a kind of a storyteller in high school, that certain stories got more interest. And when you’re watching for that interest, that’s how you know that is resonating with somebody else. Just because it’s interesting to you doesn’t mean it’s going to be interesting to you to a large readership. So that’s kind of the advice I would give.
Alessandra Torre: That’s fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Jeff. It’s been great to have you here. Thank you to everyone who joined us. And, and best of luck with your upcoming releases and the thrillers you’ve released.
Jeff Wheeler: The third book of the Dresden Codex is called Final Strike.
Alessandra Torre: Final Strike. But they can read Book One and Book Two now. And we did put those links, in both, Facebook and YouTube so y’all can check those out. Thank you so much, Jeff. Thank you to everyone who joined us.
