AJ Wills is a thriller author. He mostly writes psychological thrillers and is proud to be an independent author. For more than twenty years he was a journalist working on newspapers and TV and more recently headed up the communications team at a busy charity in the UK. He’s published eight books over the course of the last ten years and in March he finally achieved his long-standing goal, to write full-time.
He is married to fellow thriller writer, AJ McDine, another former journalist. They have two boys, Oliver and Thomas and two cats. They live in Kent, in the south east of England.
His most recent thriller was His Wife’s Sister, a dark psychological thriller about a woman who returns home nineteen years after she was abducted as a child, and her trials as she tries to settle back into normal life with her brother-in-law who doesn’t trust her or believe the story of what she says happened to her.
His first psychological thriller, Between the Lies, was published in 2018 and before that he wrote The Tom Blake Thrillers, a series of military / espionage thrillers under the name Adrian Wills.
His third psychological thriller, She Knows is due to be published in April 2021.
Website: www.ajwillsauthor.com
Instagram: @ajwills_author
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His Wife’s Sister – https://books2read.com/u/bwvp10
Between the Lies – https://books2read.com/u/m2o0lG
Which authors inspired you most?
I grew up reading thrillers by authors like Alistair MacLean, Colin Forbes and Clive Cussler and later in life I fell in love with Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books. What they all have in common is a brilliant way of telling stories that envelopes you and transports you into a different world of adventure, thrills and danger – and what more could you ask for in a thriller?
More recently, I have been reading more psychological thrillers, books like Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, Lucy Foley’s The Hunting Party (more crime thriller than psychological thriller) and The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides. What I love about all these books and authors is that they don’t only draw you in with brilliant writing but they’re full of mystery and suspense, keeping you guessing and sending you off down blind alleys with red herrings. And that’s exactly what a good psychological thriller should do.
But probably my all-time favourite author, and I apologize if this is a bit of a cliché, is Ernest Hemingway, who I studied at university. I love his plain, uncomplicated language born from his years as a journalist and his deep, intense exploration of the human psyche. A special place in my heart still exists for Fiesta / The Sun Also Rises.
What advice do you have to offer in support of other authors?
Three words – learn your craft. It’s taken me ten years to reach a position where I now have the luxury of writing for a living but that’s because I’ve spent a long time trying to understand what makes a story work and how to make my stories better. It’s something I’m still learning and expect I always will be.
There are an overwhelming number of books, articles, podcasts and YouTube videos on the craft, but personally I’m a huge fan of Shawn Coyne’s Story Grid method. I would seriously suggest if you’ve not come across him before, go and check him out. His methods will blow your mind. They’ve certainly revolutionized my writing.
What is your genre of choice?
I now almost exclusively write psychological thrillers because it’s what I love to read. I’m a huge fan because they tend to have a domestic setting featuring ordinary people dealing with extraordinary situations and events – take Gone Girl for example. A regular couple facing the slings and arrows of everyday life, until Amy disappears, and her husband is accused of her murder.
I began my writing career penning military / espionage thrillers but switched when it occurred to me that I preferred reading something else. And what do they say? Write what you know!
Fortunately, there is a huge and hungry market for psychological thrillers but also more and more authors writing in that genre, so it’s becoming increasingly difficult to stand out. I welcome that challenge though as it inspires me to improve my skills and write better books.
Is writing for you synonymous with living and breathing, or just something you do as a hobby, and how so and why?
I’ve always loved to write since I was a child, but I never thought you could make a living from it. That’s how I ended up in journalism. Things changed for me in 2011 when I read a newspaper article about the rise of the self-published authors, people like Hugh Howie and Amanda Hocking. The gate to getting a book published had suddenly and unexpectedly become unlocked.
I dived in and wrote my first self-published novel, Deep Sleepers in 2013 with the aim of becoming a full-time author within a few years. I was convinced it was possible, but the sales didn’t come in the volume I’d hoped (because the story and my writing wasn’t good enough).
But I never once gave up hope and last year I finally had a break-out book when I published His Wife’s Sister. It far exceeded my expectations and allowed me to finally give up my day job in March 2021 to write full time.
It’s scary and exciting – but I love that I’m now not having to give up my early mornings, evenings and weekends to writing, and that I can give my full attention to it at last.
The moral of the story though is that if you want it badly enough, don’t give up, keep trying and you will get there eventually.
Indie/Self-Published Author and/or Traditionally Published? What do you favor more and why?
Self-published for me all the way. Indie and proud! I’ve never felt the need for the validation that some authors believe getting a traditional deal affords them, for several reasons.
Firstly, I never wanted to run the gauntlet of trying to persuade a publisher to take a chance on me, dealing with all those inevitable rejection letters.
Secondly, I’m a bit of a control freak. I can’t imagine giving up the decision on cover artwork, marketing and publishing timescales to someone else who then creams off the majority of your profits.
When I self-publish, (I’m currently exclusive to Amazon), I retain 70% of my royalties and get well-rewarded for page reads through the Kindle Unlimited subscription model too.
There is no doubt in my mind that if I hadn’t been self-published, I wouldn’t be sitting here as a full-time author today.
But to each their own. I have no problem with anyone being traditionally published, or hybrid. You have to do what works for you. It just happens I like the autonomy of self-publishing.
What’s your most memorable criticism?
I tend to avoid reading my reviews if I can help it because like most authors I usually obsess about the bad ones and dismiss the good ones. Why do we that to ourselves?
However, I found one the other day that had been posted on Amazon at the beginning of 2021 that really struck me. It was from a nurse on the frontline fighting the coronavirus pandemic who thanked me for a book that helped her through the dark days on the wards, providing some much-needed escapism.
Another was from a young guy thanking me for restoring his interest in reading as he’d not picked up a fiction book for many years.
Those sorts of reviews are the ones that keep you going, when you know you’ve touched people and made a difference for the better in their lives.
What have you sacrificed, if anything, to be a writer, or to write as you do?
Writing has been my life since 2011 and it’s true, I have sacrificed a lot in that time to achieve my ambition to become a full-time writer.
The problem with writing is that it takes a lot of time. And so, I ended up grabbing time where I could – mostly in the early mornings before work, in the evenings after work and on weekends.
It’s meant I’ve not spent as much time with my family as I would have liked and in many ways, I regret that – although it helped that my wife, as a fellow writer, completely understood.
But now I am my own boss, I can take time off whenever I like and I’m doing my best to make it up to them!
