Networking in the Crime Fiction Community
Building Your Network by Being a Good Citizen in the Crime Fiction Community
By Julie Tollefson
Writer and reader Jeff Circle, fueled by a desire to promote under-appreciated books and authors he believes in, has carved his niche in the crime fiction world with The Dossier. As the website has grown, so has his writing community and network. Though he launched The Dossier to help other writers, the benefits to his career and his writing have been profound. Here, Jeff gives five tips for finding your unique place in the crime fiction community.
1) Find your north star — Jeff says The Dossier came about almost by accident, after meeting T. R. Hendricks at Thrillerfest 2023 and devouring his debut novel.
“I thought this was so good. Here I am in northwest Ohio and I don’t have anyone to tell,” Jeff says. So he turned to the digital world. “The whole point behind The Dossier was to tell people about cool writers and great books that I’ve found.”
With The Dossier, Jeff publishes short, fun Q&As with authors weekly. His original plans for the project were influenced by the bookish podcasts through which he discovered new authors.
“When I looked at what everyone was doing, I thought how can I be different? I wanted a positive message to get out there and stand out so these authors could get attention,” he says. “So I thought the way I can do it is I can be funny. What better way to have an interaction with another person than to invoke a smile?”
Though The Dossier has grown and evolved since he launched the site, the overriding goal has been the same: promote amazing authors, especially those who may be stuck in the middle and need a boost.
“I’ll do the people who don’t need my help because I think they’re interesting, who have things to offer other younger, growing writers,” he says. “I’ve got some big names on the website, but I want people to discover Eli Cranor, Alex Kenna, Bruce Borgos, and Gregg Podolski, if they haven’t. I want these people to be household names. They’re doing great things.”
2) Give selflessly, reap unexpected rewards — Jeff posts a new Dossier each week, usually on the day the author’s book releases but not always.
“When I sit down and interview someone,” he says, “I’ll ask, ‘What do you want? Do you want some lead up to your release to help boost preorder sales? Do you want a giant splash on release day?’”
His focus on the needs and wants of the authors he recruits for Dossier interviews has yielded unexpected personal benefits.
“I started The Dossier no question because I wanted to tell people about Tim Hendricks and Ilana Berry’s books,” he says. “But I am getting a giant return on the connections and the advice that the writers who have been in The Dossier have provided. It’s so different from being the guy who writes a book and wants help. I flipped the script. I’m offering them help. If I ever need anything, I can reach right out.”
3) Overcome your jitters — Approaching your literary heroes as Jeff does can be difficult.
“There’s you and me in our writing nooks surrounded by our keyboard and silence. It’s you and the page,” Jeff says. But he has suggestions to help you shed your trepidation and become an active participant in the mystery community.
“I think it’s critically important for groups like MWA, ITW, all these conferences, all these writers’ groups, all the podcasters who are out there, other people like me, I think those platforms are so important because it brings us all together,” he says. “Wherever you get information to help you as a writer, you’ve gotta clamp down and soak it up.”
The key to approaching a writer you admire, he says, is to activate the “switch”: pick a topic, think of a question, find common ground, and then… just do it. Switch off your solo-writer-at-the-keyboard persona.
“Meet that person with a smile and find the one common thing that you have and exploit the hell out of that,” Jeff says. “If they’re in public like they are at these conferences, they’re putting themselves out there. They want to be contacted, and they should be receptive.”
But read the room.
“Is it cool? Can I shoehorn in without being obnoxious or annoying?” he says.
For Jeff, another barrier in the early days of The Dossier lay in his background in counterintelligence work.
“I’m not used to putting my name and face out there together in public,” he says. But when he returned to Ohio after several years overseas, he found many of his friends had moved away. “In a way, I felt like I was really on an island. I needed to find my tribe.”
He found it in the mystery community. The Dossier helps him make new connections, and the authors featured on the website have all been more than willing to participate.
“They’re real people. They’re just like everybody else except that they have tenacity and skill, and they’ve put those two things together. I wanted to share that,” he says.
4) Tie it all together — Jeff’s goals in launching The Dossier were to stand out in a tasteful manner while linking his online presence thematically to his fiction writing and his background of more than 20 years in counterintelligence and law enforcement.
The Dossier (“Releasing previously undisclosed intel on today’s thriller, mystery, crime, and suspense writers”) features a graphic that looks like, you guessed it, a confidential dossier containing not-so-top-secret facts about the featured author accompanied by a short interview.
“I think it’s so important for writers to have as much of a unique and identifiable brand as possible without being outrageous or obnoxious or not tasteful,” Jeff says of the deliberate choices he’s made to help distinguish his work in a crowded field. “You can benefit greatly by promoting an image that people will recognize.”
5) Build on your successes — To date, Jeff has posted more than 125 Dossiers, and every week he finds more authors and industry experts to add to his list of future targets.
In the year and half since launching the website, he’s added an agents and editors segment and, as of this summer, an audiobook narrator segment. When a previously featured author publishes a new book, he reaches out to refresh the author’s Dossier. He also publishes a segment called the Watchlist (“find a future legend here”), where he spotlights writers in the early stages of their careers.
“I want people to come back again and again and find a new writer to really sink their teeth in,” he says.
In addition to the website, Jeff has a newsletter, a YouTube channel featuring two-minute “quick hits” videos, and plans to launch a TikTok eventually.