Interview with Clay Stafford – S. 11, Ep. 1

My guest for this episode of the Crime Cafe podcast is crime writer and media entrepreneur, Clay Stafford.

Don’t miss our discussion of the ways the publishing and filmmaking worlds collide, so to speak. 🙂

To download a PDF of the transcript, just click here.

Debbi (00:54): Hi everyone. We are back with a new season of the show, which is starting its 11th year. I can’t believe I’ve been doing it this long. And once again, I have with me one of the crime genre’s most multimedia and multihyphenate entrepreneurs out there. His business, American Blackguard, does film and television production as well as publishing. He’s also the organizer and promoter for the Killer Nashville Conference, which will be coming up later this year. It’s my pleasure to introduce my guest, Clay Stafford. Hi, Clay. How are you doing?

Clay (01:34): Hi, Debbi,

Debbi (01:34): Gotta get you on camera. There we go.

Clay (01:38): Hey, how are you?

Debbi (01:39): I’m fine, thank you. How are you?

Clay (01:41): Eleven years.

Debbi (01:42): Eleven freaking years. Can you freaking believe?

Clay (01:45): Stamina. Stamina.

Debbi (01:47): It’s insane. There’s stamina. Yeah, I’m mustering up the stamina to keep it going. Yeah.

Clay (01:56): Well, for Killer Nashville, we’re coming up on 20 years.

Debbi (01:59): Wow, that’s impressive.

Clay (02:02): Yeah, so … stamina.

Debbi (02:06): Amen to that, man. Amen. I hear you. Apart from getting ready for the conference, what projects are you currently working on? What’s on your front burner, so to speak?

Clay (02:17): I’ve actually got three projects that I’m working on right now. One is a nonfiction book and the other is a memoir. And because I come from a very eclectic kind of Appalachian background, and then Country Boy went to the city, and so there’s some things to discuss there. And then I’m working on a novel now, the first in his series, and it’s got a few short stories and poems and stuff like that out and some essays, but those are the long-term projects that I’m working on right now.

Debbi (02:58): Very cool. It’s funny you should say you were a country boy who found the city. I was a city girl who ended up in the country. Briefly.

Clay (03:10): Yeah. So I sort of came back. I was a New York guy, a Los Angeles guy, and a Miami guy, and went back and forth from place to place in those areas, but ended up in Nashville. So I don’t know if I’ll actually, we can call Nashville the country, but it’s back towards home where I’m from in Tennessee.

Debbi (03:38): It’s not quite as country as say, Bakersfield, California.

Clay (03:43): No, I’ve been to Bakersfield. I love Bakersfield. But no, it’s still, we’ve got our family farm back in east Tennessee, and so I’ve still got roots in that area and spend a lot of time in north Georgia and areas like that. So I get out in the tick country, so.

Debbi (04:10): Excellent, excellent. Very good. Nashville is also a big place for music, correct?

Clay (04:16): Yeah, they do a little bit of music here,

Debbi (04:20): A little bit of music, just a little,

Clay (04:26): Yeah. And the little community I live in is replete with country music and gospel pop performers, writers, producers and stuff. And so we have these tour buses that come by all the time, and I never thought I would live in an area where tour buses come by to point at houses and things and say, so and so lives there, so-and-so lives there, but it’s just, yeah, Nashville’s got its charm, that’s for sure.

Debbi (05:00): My goodness, that must be quite a thing. Having tour buses come through your neighborhood. Things have changed so fast in terms of the publishing industry and the movie industry and the television industry that I see them kind of coming together. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Clay (05:24): Well, I think that they’re definitely tied together now because we are in a position where we’re doing IP, intellectual property more. That’s what I focus on more right now. I used to say that I was a writer or a filmmaker, but right now I would say that I’m an IP creator. And because so many, it’s different. It’s no different than you take a book and then make an audiobook and make a ebook from it. It’s the same property that’s being construed in multiple media. And so I think yes, they all come together because it’s the way people are digesting the entertainment and information right now, so it is becoming one. But for me, with my eclectic life as a filmmaker and a writer and all of that, for me it has always been one. So for me, it’s almost like, oh, the world is coming full circle back to where I’ve always been, which was create something and then just decide what plate we want to serve the meal on.

I used to say that I was a writer or a filmmaker, but right now I would say that I’m an IP creator.

(06:40): And that’s what all these different medias are, just the plate that you’re serving the meal on. And some people want to eat out of a hardcover book and some people want to eat out of a movie theater. And so really you’re just satisfying the needs and the options and choices, the wonderful options and choices because there are people who are auditory, people who are visual and being able to read and comprehend. All of those are strengths, and we’re all wired differently. And more and more we’re finding psychologically that each of us learns differently and processes differently. And creating all these avenues for single stories is to me, like all progress for me. I love progress. I love technology, I love innovation. And so for me, I think that it’s an incredible time to be in.

Debbi (07:43): It is definitely. People are doing things out there that are just amazing, but sometimes it’s a matter of being seen, being visible. Do you have any thoughts on what authors can do to make themselves more visible in a way that’s not simply saying, Hey, buy my book. Buy my book?

Clay (08:05): Yeah, I think just being authentic. I think we are really in a position where writers used to have this hallowed place as these intellectual people who lived in ivory towers and produce tomes that everyone loved to read. And I think even the noir authors were romanticized to a great degree because we know what writing is. It’s sitting there and typing on a keyboard and watching the cursor go across the screen. It’s very exciting. I think that there’s been a change in our society, just like there is a change in technology that we just talked about in the previous paragraph where you don’t even have to have, you’re going to get hate mail for this maybe, but you don’t even have to have any talent. You don’t have to have skills, you don’t have to have whatever to be a celebrity. You just have to be on TV.

(09:28): I mean, you can take this any way you want, but you can be anybody in America that you want, as long as you’ve been on TV and have had no experience at all, you can be anything you want because you’ve been on TV. So in terms of that, I say that writers have come to a point that they can’t rely on their intellectual laurels. They can’t rely on their talent and skills anymore. They have to become visual. And that means being on TV. Well, even in our lifetime, that whole concept has changed. It’s no longer TV, but what in the world is TV? Everything’s a streaming something. So I think the way to get out there and people have become, I think you’ve got to get out of your head in terms of being and thinking, looking at it from your side out, and instead look from the other side towards you.

(10:39): And what they really, really are looking for is some truth and reality. They’re fascinated by people’s lives. That’s why you have so many reality TV shows and reality programs and even reality forensic files, reality, whatever, because people are really interested in other people’s lives. Some fancy and glamorous and some just strange and crazy, but all of them seem to be like a train wreck. You watch, I don’t want to say that your life, writers, needs to become a train wreck, but I would say that getting your story, getting your personality out there and in a way, becoming your own celebrity, because even posting on everybody used to put on post on social media, even just posting on social media now with the algorithms, you’re completely lost on that. I think you should do things that you can control,

(11:50): Have your own, if you have a YouTube channel or you have your own newsletter list or you have your own something that you can control and something that you own as opposed to social media and things that you have no control over their algorithms. That’s the things that writers need to do in terms of building a platform. And then I’d say build it on authenticity, not fluff, not buy my product. But I mean on social media, I guess some of my greatest likes and positive comments when I’m sitting there with my Doberman lap dogs sitting in my lap because people, they respond to things that are real. And so I think, in that, people get to know you, not because you’re pushing it on them, but because of their natural curiosity of, oh, Debbi Mack seems very interesting. What does she do? Oh, she does that. Well, that’s interesting. I’ll take a look at that. And I think you let the, we are at a place now where the consumer, the reader is the one who will follow the breadcrumbs if they choose to follow the breadcrumbs, but we no longer sell anything. And I think writers, many of the writers that I know and meet and talk with are wanting to sell something. We no longer sell anything anymore.

Have your own, if you have a YouTube channel or you have your own newsletter list or you have your own something that you can control and something that you own as opposed to social media and things that you have no control over their algorithms.

Debbi (13:36): Exactly.

Clay (13:38): We show up, we be ourselves, and we attract the people just like friends. We attract people that are like us that have something interesting, even if they’re not like us and people we just want to hang out with. And then that leads them naturally into, well, if I’m going to hang out with, I like hanging out with ’em on social media. I like hanging out with ’em when I get their newsletter. I might spend eight hours and hang out with ’em and read their book, and that’s the choice that falls on the reader. So I really think that we need, to get directly to your question of how to get out there. I really think that, as you were saying initially, you know how the book world and the film world and all the visual world, it’s all coming together. Put yourself out there in a multimedia mentality.

I really think that, as you were saying initially, you know how the book world and the film world and all the visual world, it’s all coming together. Put yourself out there in a multimedia mentality.

(14:42): And that will attract people in to you because it’s discoverability, right? Again, there’s people who look at social media, they like to follow it. There’s people who like to read newsletters. There’s people who like to learn, and there comes your YouTube channel. And so all of that stuff coming together creates an audience of people who actually want to, in their minds, there’s this feeling too of now psychologically, lots of studies done on it where people feel like they … you know, a celebrity or somebody dies. And you would think, by the way people were asking that it was their best friend, because they’re that close. But people are looking, starving for that connection with other people. And if you provide that in an honest way, I think you build an audience and you become high profile. And then what leads from there? As I said before, jokingly, you could be anything you want after that point in all seriousness, because you’ve created a group of people who actually have a genuine, not a pressured sales, not any kind of thing, but a genuine interest in who you are.

Debbi (16:04): Exactly.

Clay (16:05): And what your product is.

Debbi (16:07): I think that’s great advice. I mean, you want to attract people who get you.

Clay (16:12): Yes, absolutely.

Debbi (16:13): Who are interested in you, not force them to look at you. It’s like when I used to do book signings, I would sit at a table, maybe toward the front of the store sometimes, sometimes in the back, and I would see people and say, do you enjoy mysteries? That’s the way I would introduce myself. And if they didn’t, well, okay, never mind. I don’t want to bother you. I just happened to write them. If somebody was interested, I would just say, well, this is my book. And I would tell ’em about it. And it was simple as that to make a sale sometimes. But that kind of personal touch tends to get missing sometimes in all the technology.

Clay (16:56): And I think that it’s really, what do you want? And I think there’s, I want to be famous. I want to make a whole lot of money. Those aren’t good reasons to be a writer. I want you to buy my book. It’s not even necessarily a good reason for be a writer. I want to write something that communicates to you. Now, there’s a good reason to be a writer.

Debbi (17:27): Exactly.

Clay (17:28): And the beautiful thing about that is I have control over that. I can refine and refine. I mean, I have a limit to my talent. I have a limit to my skillset, but I can refine and refine to the point that I feel like I am communicating with you. And that should be the end result for me as a writer. And you know what? That takes the whole sales pressure off of everything. This is a story that meant something or means something to me, and I hope it means something to you. And if you don’t want to buy it, probably in the library, it’s somewhere else, you can get it. It doesn’t matter. But the focus, I think, really, once again, is on the audience now rather than on us as writers trying to hawk our wares. It’s on building that connection. It’s the connection that a) people are starved for, but b) it’s the connection that brings them in and wants them to be a part of your life, which includes all of your books and everything else.

I have a limit to my talent. I have a limit to my skillset, but I can refine and refine to the point that I feel like I am communicating with you. And that should be the end result for me as a writer.

Debbi (18:40): Exactly. Yeah. So yeah, I agree. Yeah. What would you say a typical day is like for you?

Clay (18:50): A typical day?

Debbi (18:52): A typical day if there is such a thing?

Clay (18:54): Well, now I’m giving away my trade secrets. People are trying to find me know what’s going on now. I wake up very early and I do emails to catch up on what happened over the night, and then I turn my email program off and I turn my phone off.

Debbi (19:16): Good move.

Clay (19:16): And then around five o’clock in the afternoon, my wife gets home and we have dinner, and then I go out and work some more. And then the last thing I do around eight o’clock, I look at emails and clean out my email box. And that way I haven’t been bothered all day long by emails, and I answer emails and then that’s clear, and then I shut everything up. And then, because I do so many interviews for the next two hours, I’m usually reading books, not always, I don’t want to say ones that I don’t want to read because I only review and do interviews with people that are really turned on by, but it’s not books that I would, there’s some books that come out that I want to just personally read that I’m not going to interview the author. I’m not going to do anything. And I find I don’t get to do that because my job requires that I read the stuff for my interviews just like you’re doing here with me. And so that’s my typical day then I go to bed and I sleep very well, and then I get up the next morning and I do it, and I do that seven days a week.

Debbi (20:33): Wow.

Clay (20:34): Yes. I don’t take time off. I lose momentum if I take time off. And I really am just very grateful for having a job where I can be creative. I have an incredible team that works with me at American Blackguard, and I put them up and match them against anybody. They are incredible. They’re supportive, they’re understanding, they’re compassionate. They care about not only what’s going on within our nucleus, but also care about people through Killer Nashville, because they work on Killer Nashville as well. And then we started the streaming service, The Balanced Writer, you know that. And so they’re there and they’re very supportive. And so my family is very supportive of my lifestyle and work. And so when you have all the boxes checked, why not show up and play every day? I can remember as a kid, I would wake up in the morning and write a story, or I’d wake up in the morning and get my eight millimeter camera, and I’d take off with my buddies and we would start shooting a film. And I don’t think much has changed in all of that time. I’m still that little kid with a manual typewriter and an eight millimeter black and white camera and it’s play. Kids don’t wake up in the morning and work.

I don’t take time off. I lose momentum if I take time off. And I really am just very grateful for having a job where I can be creative.

(22:24): They wake up in the morning and play. And so seven days a week? Yes, seven days a week, because I absolutely love it. And I feel very fortunate to have been given an opportunity to do the things that I love.

Debbi (22:43): Well, that’s fantastic. And you’re doing a great job. It’s amazing what you’re doing.

Clay (22:48): Well, thank you.

Debbi (22:49): What advice would you give to people who want to make a living as a writer?

Clay (22:58): Write. And that sounds silly, doesn’t it? But write. Don’t spend all your time focused on trying to be successful. Don’t spend all your time focused on trying to get people to like you on Facebook and don’t spend time looking at social media. Write. After I do my emails in the morning, I write, I don’t, like today, my son came home and said, have you eaten today? And I said, no. And he brought me a sandwich, but most days I don’t even eat breakfast or I don’t eat lunch because I drink a lot of coffee, but I’m really into what I’m doing to the point that my physical sensations don’t seem to matter that much. It’s what’s gone here. And then I have dinner in the evening. So I pretty much just, I focus in on what I’m working on. And what was your original question with that one right there?

Don’t spend all your time focused on trying to be successful. Don’t spend all your time focused on trying to get people to like you on Facebook and don’t spend time looking at social media. Write.

Debbi (24:07): Oh, just, what your advice would be to somebody who wants to make a living as a writer.

Clay (24:11): Yeah. So that comes down to that. After I do those emails in the morning, I start writing and I write, and I am an outliner and I do research, and I’m writing and doing research and outlining from that point all the way until five o’clock. And I’ve been able in my life to get a lot of product out. And I think you can’t become that celebrity that you want to be as a writer until you’ve got product that’s available. I mean, somebody can say, I have this credible idea for some new toothpaste. Well, until you can go to your local shopping market and buy the toothpaste, it really doesn’t matter. So I would say what is the best thing for writers to do is write. Forget all of this peripheral stuff that’s going on. And our society really, there’s this whole market that I think capitalizes on writers by saying, let me teach you how to be a social media success. Let me teach you about branding. Let me teach you about marketing. And my question is, what are you marketing? If you don’t have your book, what are you marketing?

Debbi (25:34): Exactly.

Clay (25:35): So what’s my advice to writers? Write, spend the time writing. And then once you get something perfected to the point that you feel, I doubt if it’s perfect, but it’s the best I can do.

Debbi (25:51): Exactly.

Clay (25:51): At that point, you put it out into the world and then you go back and write something else. And I really think you don’t … there’s this whole pressure that’s on. I’m writing something and it has to be super successful and I have to make a lot of money off of it. No, where you’re successful and where people become successful is their backlist. Not that frontlist book that comes out. Sure, you got to have a frontlist, you got to have frontlist to get to the backlist. But it’s people discovering these little nuggets that you’ve written. And that can be short stories, essays, poems. Somebody can, I mean, lots of people have gotten agents, they’ve gotten people who bought their books because they saw your mystery story published in a particular mystery periodical and said, well, I really like what Debbi Mack is doing there and check her out. And lo and behold, she’s got some books. And so I buy a book and those backlists then move things along. So I really think the best advice you can give a writer is write. I grew up as the son of a brick mason, and I knew how to lay brick. And the best way to build a house is brick by brick. And if you’re not bricking the house, then you’re not producing anything, so … write.

Debbi (27:21): So right. So correct. Yes. Absolutely. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we finish up?

Clay (27:28): No, I always enjoy talking to you. It seems like we have our little annual gathering here. It seems like such a truth. But what I was thinking today is that I was like, okay, oh good, I got to see Debbi Mack today. And then I was like, it couldn’t have been a year since the last time we had a conversation, but I guess it was.

Debbi (27:52): It was actually a year. Yeah.

Clay (27:54): Time just flies. So I guess the last comment I want to make is for your listeners who are writers, because time passed so quickly between the last time I talked to Debbi and now, everything about your life is passing so quickly. And if you don’t write today, it doesn’t seem like a big deal. But if you don’t write for 30 days, if you don’t write for a year, you’ve lost some incredible time to share your story and to share your perspective with other people and learn new skills and have a great time, I mean, you and I know writing is incredibly fun. They say it’s solitary and lonely. I don’t know. I’ve got a head full of characters and stuff, so it never gets lonely for me. They won’t shut up.

[E]verything about your life is passing so quickly. And if you don’t write today, it doesn’t seem like a big deal. But if you don’t write for 30 days, if you don’t write for a year, you’ve lost some incredible time to share your story …

Debbi (28:49): Exactly.

Clay (28:49): So it’s a lovely time, but time does pass quickly. And I really would encourage, if your listeners are not diligently doing, you don’t have to be crazy like me and do seven in the morning to 10 at night every single day for seven days a week, 365 a year. You don’t have to be crazy like that, but donate 30 minutes or something every day and just write something that helps you discover something new about yourself. I think that’s what writing really is for me, even if it’s fictional, it’s discovering something new about myself. And I think the growth that comes from that enhances the rest of your life, not the distance of your life, but the surrounding life that you have at the present. And I would encourage your listeners to pick up a pen or start typing and just make it a practice every day, because time is fleeting and you’ve got all this in here and you need to share it out there so people know it.

Debbi (30:04): Amen to that. I agree with you completely. The book will not write itself. You have to get started.

Clay (30:12): No, the funny thing is about writing, the book doesn’t write itself. It evolves and you evolve as you go along. And I really think it’s the evolution of it all that provides the center of who you are as a writer, and that’s how you improve and grow. By not necessarily growing as a writer or growing as a social media marketer or whatever. It’s growing as a person because that personhood is going to come through in that writing that you do.

Debbi (30:55): I agree. I agree. These are great points. Thank you, Clay.

Clay (30:59): Absolutely, Debbi. And thank you for having me on your show. I always look forward to it.

Debbi (31:04): I do, too. It’s good to see you, and I’m glad you were on today and very happy to have you on.

Clay (31:13): Yeah, and if anybody would like to get more of what I’m talking about and stuff, I’d love for them to check out my newsletter, a weekly newsletter where I give more tips on writing, marketing, the writer’s life and everything like that. And then we’ve got Killer Nashville coming up. Let’s have everybody check out killernashville.com. My website is claystafford.com. And then for those people who are not able to come to conferences, we’re putting 5,000 sessions up on a new streaming service called The Balanced Writer, and go to thebalancedwriter.com and check that out. So if you can’t afford to go to conferences, then let the conference come to you. Once again, it’s streaming in, not TV anymore. It’s streaming into whatever device you have.

Debbi (32:07): Alright, well thank you so much for that information, Clay.

Clay (32:11): Absolutely.

Debbi (32:12): I’m sure a lot of people appreciate that. I would also like to thank my Patreon supporters as well as my supporters on Substack. Your generosity really does mean the world to me. My thanks to everyone who’s listening. Thank you, Clay, for being here again. It is, as always, enjoyable to talk to you. And if you would, listeners, please leave a review for the podcast, if you enjoyed this episode. They help. So with that, that’s it for me. Until next time, my guest will be Jonathan Whitelaw next time. And until then, take care and happy reading.

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