We all like to think of a writer’s literary career as a clean straight line climbing in a gradual upward trajectory until boom, it takes a sudden turn into that steep rise to the top of the bestsellerdom. Reality for most authors—even the most successful—is more often quite different, more like a roller coaster with a variety of ups and downs, and unexpected twists and turns.
Best-selling author Robert Dugoni—Bob to everyone who’s ever met him—had a roller coaster beginning. It started out like most rollercoasters on an upward trajectory. Well sort of. His first book, The Cyanide Canary, a nonfiction account of corporate abuse, won critical acclaim but not readers. The Washington Post called it one of the best books of the year, but his publisher, Simon & Schuster, did little promotion.
He switched to Hachette’s imprint, Grand Central Publishing, for his first legal thriller, The Jury Master, about attorney David Sloan. It landed on the New York Times bestseller list with more than 100,000 readers. “They marketed the hell out of it,” Dugoni says. He’d reached the pinnacle of his rollercoaster. Unfortunately for Dugoni that left only one direction to go.
For his next David Sloan legal thriller, Dugoni switched publishing houses. He readily admits he took the money over a publishing house that wanted to build his career and almost immediately realized his mistake. In two years, he was out on the street. He wondered what might have happened had he stayed with Hachette.
But not for long.
Dugoni kept moving and wrote, My Sister’s Grave, a police procedural with Seattle Violent Crimes Detective, Tracy Crosswhite. His agent received a call from Thomas & Mercer, the crime fiction imprint of Amazon Publishing, based in Seattle. They wanted the novel and their hometown boy.
His first encounter with Thomas & Mercer was in a large downtown Seattle conference room. There sat staff from editorial, marketing, sales, and digital production, all ready to go. They filled the room and promised their full support. And boy, did they deliver. Dugoni discovered Amazon’s marketing prowess, and his book sales soared. Today, My Sister’s Grave has sold more than two million copies.
That first in a series remains his biggest seller followed by his popular literary novel, The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell. One reason My Sister’s Grave remains popular, is Thomas & Mercer’s insistence they continue to promote it. Their goal is to introduce new readers at the beginning of his series so they will read all of the Tracy Crosswhite books. The marketing strategy works. Bob still receives monthly royalty checks from a novel he wrote a decade ago—and the second, third and fourth in the series and so on.
Like a small number of successful writers who revisit the bestseller list repeatedly, Bob has made it. Yet, he’s not on everyone’s bestseller list.
There are many reasons he shouldn’t be as popular as he is today. The most obvious is readers can’t find his books on any shelf in Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, and most independent bookstores because his publisher is an Amazon imprint. Most bookstore owners would rather wallow in pig slop than touch a print copy of an Amazon book, despite knowing they would make money on the sale of their competitor’s products. It’s the principle of the thing to them, even if it makes no financial sense.
And you’re not likely to find him on The New York Times bestseller list anytime soon either. His new publisher was astounded Bob made the list three weeks in a row with their first novel together, My Sister’s Grave. So, he called the Times editors to thank them for the recognition. The Times editors expressed surprise. They hadn’t realized Dugoni had moved from Simon & Schuster. The next day My Sister’s Gave disappeared from the bestseller list. Despite millions in book sales since then, Dugoni has never again appeared on the list.
For Dugoni, it doesn’t come down to whether you appear in print or e-books or appear online or in physical bookstores. Dugoni wants readers, and he’s found more than twelve million of them.
Writing started for him as a child in the seventh grade. He was assigned a class speech on slavery and chose the point of view of an abolitionist. He spoke before his classmates explaining how demoralizing and abhorrent slavery was. But when he finished, everyone in the class just stared at him, including his teacher, Sister Kathleen.
He was anxious. Was it really that bad? He suddenly felt embarrassed. Then Sister Kathleen pulled him from the classroom with no explanation and told him to stand in the hallway. Now he was really in trouble. She disappeared into the classroom next door while he wondered what went wrong. Finally, she returned.
She told young Bobby, she wanted him to give his speech to the other seventh grade class.
“I loved the moment,” Dugoni says. “I realized I could move people with words. That is the moment I decided I wanted to be a writer.”
Today he has progressed through several standalones and series and currently maintains two. He earned his literary chops on his two biggest standalone novels, The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell and his Vietnam era novel The World Played Chess. For the foreseeable future, Dugoni has set a path for himself of writing just two crimes series––his Tracy Crosswhite detective novels, and a new legal thriller series he introduced in 2023 with a young Irish American protagonist named Keera Duggan. His first in the new series, Her Deadly Game, was popular enough his publisher urged him to continue. The second in the series, Beyond Reasonable Doubt, is set for release on October 22nd. He has introduced a female protagonist into a genre dominated by men. In fact, both of his current crime series star female protagonists.
“Gracie Doyle (his editor and associate publisher) came to me and said, ‘Would you like to do a legal thriller?’ because they really like the way I write courtroom scenes. I said, ‘yes but I’d like it to be like a police procedural and have the family dynamic in there.”
“I wanted to do an Irish family. I think it’s an absolutely fabulous country. I’m half Irish and I’ve been to Ireland multiple times now. I find the people are incredibly generous and wonderful. But I also had a grandfather who was a professional and very successful, but also an alcoholic, and it very much scarred my mother and her family members. I saw what happened firsthand and I thought it was something I could write about with some honesty.”
His current writing schedule calls for a new novel every nine months alternating between Detective Tracy Crosswhite and attorney Keera Duggan. His next Crosswhite novel launches in early 2025.
To understand just how prolific he’s been, look back six months and forward six months. This spring he published, A Killing on the Hill, a standalone noir murder and corruption novel during the Great Depression based on old newspaper clippings his wife’s grandfather kept from one of his legal cases about a 1930s crime. Of all places, he found them in his own attic among some of his wife, Cristina’s, family treasures.
Then his new Keera Duggan legal thriller comes out in October, and then a co-authored novel about World War II, Hold Strong, based on a true story, debuts in December. And finally, the next installment of his Tracy Crosswhite series appears around February 2025. Four novels in less than a year. How does a writer work at such a pace?
“Four books a year? I go to work every day. This is not a hobby for me. It’s a job. Not to say I don’t love it. I do.”
Still, he plans to slow his pace to one book every nine months for the foreseeable future. He will be writing one Tracy Crosswhite detective novel and one Keera Duggan legal thriller—alternating a new book in each series every eighteen months.
Dugoni writes five days a week, leaving weekends for family. He often plays golf two or three times a week since he suffered a stroke after a fiftieth birthday party for Cristina. He was taken to the hospital where they found since birth, he’d had a heart valve that didn’t close properly––something he’d never known. A blood clot had passed through his heart to his brain. Fortunately for him, a leading specialist was at the nearby University of Washington Hospital to treat him.
Dugoni began playing golf about five years ago to reduce stress and help with anxiety. “I think it comes from my mom’s upbringing in an alcoholic household…I was never impacted by it until 2016 when I had the stroke. After I had a stroke, I had a couple of panic attacks. I reached a point where I needed to acknowledge it. I needed to realize it was nothing to be embarrassed or ashamed of. That it was part of who I was. That it was something many people dealt with, and it shouldn’t be hidden. So, I sort of embraced it. I’ve managed it and taken care of it now.”
Anxiety, he says, “is an unwanted passenger in my car, but I’ve learned how to not allow it to drive. And I’ve learned how to not allow it to sit in the passenger seat. It’s got to sit in the rear seat. So, I know it’s there, but I don’t acknowledge it. It doesn’t tell me how to drive. I think that’s the best way to define it.”
Today, he speaks openly about his anxiety at various writing conferences and many attendees later come up to him after his talk to tell their stories.
“My 50s were not a fun time in my life.” He had a heart patch implanted, suffered from anxiety and had hip surgery. “I told people when I turned 60, I was actually relieved.”
Yet, he says, “Everybody’s dealing with something. Nobody goes through life unscathed. In the whole scheme of things, I’ve been pretty lucky.”
In his new Keera Duggan novel, he uses his experience to build his story. Instead of introducing the stereotypical protagonist with a drinking problem, he makes her part of a scarred family that deals with the family’s alcoholic patriarch and legal rainmaker. At the beginning of his first Keera Duggan novel, Her Deadly Game, the father goes to a bar on a lunch break in the middle of a trial and doesn’t return. Keera, who has been watching the case, immediately jumps in for the client. This is the first time readers experience her courtroom prowess—and Dugoni’s. His courtroom scenes are unsurpassed in the genre for their legal sleight-of-hand maneuvering and drama. In fact, anyone considering law school who wants to become a litigator, should read both of Dugoni’s Keera Duggan novels. In the first, you must read the father’s courtroom scene where he subtly eviscerates the prosecutor in such a civil manner. In Beyond Reasonable Doubt, which comes out in October, read the scene where Keera turns her case inside-out. If those don’t make you want to become the next Perry Mason—excuse me, Keera Duggan—nothing will.
“In court she’s tough as nails. And out of court, she’s really complex,” Dugoni says. “Trial lawyers come off as fearless and I’ve observed enough trial lawyers to know that’s not true. It’s a facade they put on in the courtroom…. Outside of court, they have the same problems as everybody else.”
And Keera Duggan’s no exception.
After two legal thrillers in two years, Dugoni’s now in the planning stages for a third. “I’ve been toying with the idea,” he says. “What usually happens is I come up with an idea. It gets really complicated—overly complicated—and then I realize the answer is just keep it simple. Don’t try to come up with such an extravagant plot, because the book is more about the characters than it is about the plot. So, I’m trying to see if I can work something into this idea and I just haven’t been able to do it…I don’t know how much more I’ll deal with that before I just dive in and get started.”
He acknowledges his writing style can make getting started on his next book awkward. “I often struggle to come up with something that is some sort of kick ass idea. I’m just not that kind of writer. I’m more of a panster. I don’t know what story I have until I get into it and I’m writing it and seeing where the characters are going. But it doesn’t change the fact writers want some kind of security when we’re writing and that we should have an idea where the story’s going. But you also have to trust your instincts and say, ‘you know, I’m just going to wait on this. I’m just going to let this happen and see where it goes.’ And I’ve had multiple books now and that’s been successful for me, so you’d think I’d be willing to be trustful and just go with it. But it’s hard. It’s a hard thing to do.”
Writing for him, he says, “is like a Monet painting. It’s just swatches of color until you get to the point where you’re taking that fine paint brush and you’re putting in just a little flick. And it looks like just a little flick until you stand thirty feet from it and realize it’s an umbrella. You know that kind of thing.”
Dugoni works closely with his agent and editors from the very beginning of the process. Today, before he starts a novel he has a conversation with agent, Meg Ruley, who gives him suggestions. He then works on a first draft and sends that to Gracie Doyle at Thomas & Mercer.
“I write a first draft and get to a point I’m not finished, but I feel comfortable sending it to them so if there’s a glaring problem, I don’t spend nine months working on a book and they then say we can’t publish this.”
After Gracie does her magic, he sends it to his developmental editor, Charlotte Herscher. “I’m a very big proponent of allowing people to do their jobs,” he says.
And he prides himself on listening. The first page of Herscher’s editing memo tells him how wonderful he is. The next four pages rip his manuscript apart. He then revisits his work with diligence until he’s satisfied he’s resolved his editors’ issues.
“I’m a little OCD. That’s both a blessing and a curse.” What were we saying about being productive? “To be honest, I’ve never missed a deadline.”
Deadlines, he says, are important and a lot of first-time novelists don’t understand that. “I think a lot of writers who make it start off with another career and they have all the time in the world to write their first novel. Then they sign a contract,” he says and are facing a deadline.
Writers, he says, “can get too wrapped up in our head. That can be a product of people who become hopeless. They stop asking for help and they stay in their head trying to solve the problem. That’s what we writers do.” That may be too simplistic a description, he acknowledges, but it sounds spot on.
He encourages aspiring writers not to quit. “Just keep the faith. Keep putting one foot forward. The minute it starts to become a drag, step away. You’re no longer enjoying it. But if you really truly love it, you just keep doing it.”
“This is a really hard business. The key there is business. You can’t treat it as a hobby. You’ve got to treat it as a business. You’ve got to go to work every day, and you’ve got to be prepared when opportunity knocks.”
And opportunity knocked for Dugon, who has nothing to prove, but who still loves his daily routine. “The future is the fun part of this whole job. You never know what’s going to happen. I never thought I’d write a story about World War II (Hold Strong). I helped to bring the characters to life and get the story over the goal line.”
He never thought he’d write about Vietnam (The World Played Chess). “As I wrote this story…my son wanted to know about Vietnam. No one talks about it. Veterans have said it’s the most raw account they’ve read.”
While he loves writing, it is not sacrosanct in his life. It merely wins the silver. His family and friends win the gold. And while his body of work at age 63 is broad and popular, he still has a lot more he wants to say. No doubt, a standalone—maybe another literary novel—will slip in among his two series if his golf game doesn’t get in the way.
With a nice size body of work, you’d think he’d want to be remembered for his best literary effort, but that’s not the case.
“You hope it’s for the right thing…But there are few people in life who are truly remembered. It’s fun to go down to Palm Springs and hear young people say, ‘Who’s Frank Sinatra? Who’s Bob Hope?’ I don’t think it’s realistic for me to say I want to leave a legacy. At the same time. I want to leave a legacy for my wife and kids, but more so, I want them to love their husband and dad. That’s what I think is important to me, that my kids can look back on me and my life and say he was a good dad. He was a good man. He really gave us a leg up.”
