Welcome to the Kill List
An interview with the Thriller & Mystery Author Directory's David Bruns
Shortly after Cold Caller launched, I crossed paths with David Bruns in the Substack trenches. David’s an author and Substacker himself, and he noticed early on that the search function on this site was just not a great tool for making professional connections.
David decided to do something about it. The mission of his project, the Thriller & Mystery Author Directory, is to provide a free resource for authors working in the same genre to connect for the purposes of promotion of their work and mutual growth of their readerships.
In just under a month, the directory has already grown to include dozens of writers and authors working in the thriller and mystery genre—making this project of great interest to Cold Caller’s readers and contributors.
You started the Thriller & Mystery Author Directory less than a month ago, but you already have an impressive collection of authors included. How has the reception to your project been? What’s been the most surprising thing you’ve learned since you’ve launched the directory?
When I started the Directory, I had no idea what to expect, but I have been pleasantly surprised at the response. I’ve met dozens of authors from across the genre spectrum, most of whom I’d never heard of before. People seem eager to have a place to find each other and connect.
The next step is to get a weekly Connections Clearinghouse post off the ground. I’m thinking of it as a classified ads for authors on Substack. If you’re launching a book or looking to guest post, trying to host a meet-up at a conference or putting out a call for submissions, you can quickly and easily reach your target audience via the Clearinghouse. (Plus, I love alliteration.)
This project is clearly a labor of love—it’s a lot of work to create and promote something like this. What’s motivating you to keep investing the time and energy to build this directory?
After two years on Substack, I am convinced this place has all the ingredients to be the future platform for writers. For starters, they have the right business model: they get paid when writers get paid.
That said, I think the platform’s serendipitous nature is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. The only people I know on Substack are (1) people I knew before I got here and (2) people I’ve found by stumbling around and falling down (wonderful) reading rabbit holes.
In January, I was releasing a new book and wanted to do some guest posting and connecting with other writers in my genre. It was almost impossible up with a list of candidates using the Substack search function.
To me, the need for a Directory was there, so I volunteered myself. (Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? The only thing I had to risk was time and my pride.) I gathered a few names, posted the first iteration on my personal Substack, and put it out on Notes. Within a week, I created a separate Substack to house the growing Directory and put out a mission statement post. Last week, I posted the inaugural Connections Clearinghouse of connection opportunities for authors in the genre.
This is an act of karmic merit. I’ll keep doing it as long as I have the resources to do it well.
You’re also a writer yourself, so I’d love to hear how you approach promotion and publicity in the social media era. There’s so much noise out there, how do you find, connect with, and engage your audience?
I’m very fortunate to have a publisher who does regular paid advertising, mostly on Amazon. That has enabled us to build a solid readership and sell a lot of copies. (Our flagship Command and Control series has sold over 200,000 copies.) We’ve put out a weekly email to our readers since 2019, first on MailChimp, then via our Substack, The Debrief.
That weekly post is and has been our primary method of connecting with readers. The content we produce is almost always book-adjacent, i.e. topics that expand on what we write about. Since our books are about near-future national security threats, we (unfortunately) have LOTS of material to work with these days. This type of deep-dive content is perfect for Substack readers.
It's an unflashy, slow-growth model, but it suits who we are. We prefer to connect with readers as part of a conversation, not via some viral social media campaign. When we find our people, they tend to stick around for a long time.
As an example, we were just looking at reviews on our latest book, Proxy War, that came out at the end of January. We realized there are some readers who have read and reviewed all six books in the series. We joked that they’re less less like reader-reviewers and more like pen pals—except our letter is 500 pages long and their reply is 2 paragraphs!
There’s a lot of doom and gloom around publishing, but at the same time Substack has proven there’s a huge appetite out there for great writing. Obviously, we’re both Substack users, but I’d love to hear your assessment of the pros and cons of the platform, particularly for writers.
I love Substack and see great potential in the platform. On the pros side, it’s a much less frenetic audience. These people are here to read and exchange ideas. That’s a crowd that attracts readers.
On the cons side, it’s a young platform. In some ways, they’re building the airplane as they fly it. That means the executive team has to make choices about what they need to work on and in what order. (That’s not a criticism, companies do this all the time.)
The search function, for example, is not very useful. It’s frustrating, but look at the silver lining: it gave me the chance to step up and fill that discoverability gap for authors in my genre. Along the way, I’ve met a whole new crop of people that are my jam. Rather than complain about it, let’s embrace the suck* and move forward smartly.
My sincere hope is that writers on Substack are at the leading edge of the Next Big Thing for book promotion, discoverability, and genuine audience building. If I can move the needle in the direction of goodness toward that goal, sign me up.
[Unsolicited advice to Substack management: why can’t I sell my book on Substack? You take a commission, and I get to keep a higher royalty than Amazon. Partner with Book Funnel for fulfillment, for Pete’s sake, but you’re missing a huge opportunity!]
*”Embrace the suck” is military shorthand for treating hardship as an opportunity. Ryan Holiday wrote a whole book about it, The Obstacle is the Way.
To me, a project like the Directory is a work of community building. Why is that important for writers and readers?
For my full answer, please read my post, Why have a Thriller & Mystery Author Directory?, but here’s the TL;DR version:
As writers, we need readers to survive. We all work hard to build a trusted relationship with our audience and we are protective of that relationship.
That said, if we create a Venn diagram of my readers with another author in my genre, there there will be some overlap, but there will be many differences.
My unrevolutionary theory is that if we connect with each other and build a relationship to the point that we are comfortable sharing each other with our readership, we can grow the pie of readership. The writers win because they grow their audience. Readers win because they find a new author.
This is the work of slow, unsexy, but genuine growth.
That’s the whole point of this experiment: Build a Directory where we can easily find other writers who might have a receptive audience to our work.
The connection is only the first step. The rest is up to you.
David Bruns is a former US Navy submarine officer who writes national security thrillers with co-author JR Olson, a retired naval intelligence officer. Over ten years and ten novels, they have crowdfunded, self-published, and been published by St. Martins Press/Macmillan. They are currently with Severn River Publishing, a small press specializing in mystery and thrillers, that publishes their bestselling Command and Control series. David is also a graduate of the prestigious Clarion West Writers Workshop and writes science fiction in his spare time.