Why Being an Author Is Like Running a Tech Startup, with Jennifer Klepper -118

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Kathleen Basi [: 00:00:02

Welcome to Author Express. Thanks for checking us out. This is the podcast where you give us fifteen minutes of your time, and we give you a chance to hear the voice behind the pages and get to know some of your favorite writers in a new light. I'm one of your hosts, Kathleen Basi I'm an award winning musical composer, feature writer, essayist, and of course, storyteller. Let me tell you a little about today's guest. Jennifer Klepper is The USA Today best selling author of Unbroken Threads and The Last Road Trip. She's a lawyer by trade, a tech startup founder, and a die hard Nebraska cornhusker fan.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:00:47

Jennifer will fight to the death that listening to audiobooks is reading, and she's come around to the idea that it's okay to dog ear pages on books. She lives near Annapolis, Maryland. Welcome, Jennifer, to Author Express.

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:01:00

Thank you. It's great to be here. And I still cringe a little bit even just hearing the dog earring pages on books, but I have come around a little bit on that.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:01:09

Well, you know, my husband and I are musicians, and we have Octavos that we use. And he plays piano, and he wants them all laid out. He does not want to have difficulty turning pages. So he, like, dog ears several pages, and he labels his so that he can, like, turn pages one and two are in this copy. Copy, pages three and four are in this copy, and then we go back and we turn it's all very complicated, but there's a lot of dog earring in my house. So you might cringe a lot here. Sounds pretty important, though. Right? Otherwise, pages might go flying all over the church. So it can be very exciting.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:01:41

So I'm curious about Nebraska Cornhusker. Are you from Nebraska?

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:01:46

I grew up in Nebraska, originally from Iowa, but I did grow up in Nebraska. And if you grew up in Nebraska, even even if you don't go to the University of Nebraska, you become a Cornhusker football fan.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:01:57

Of course.

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:01:58

That's all I knew growing up. My kids are fans. They've been in Nebraska, but they've grown up here in Maryland, and they are Nebraska fans. It's just part of the blood, and it's hard to let it go.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:02:10

Yeah. Well, I know that my sister is we're from Central Missouri, and she moved to New York, and her whole family are Chiefs fans. Well, that's not entirely true. Her family has sort of split loyalties because they also like the Buffs. So, you know, it happens. We move around the country and we carry our loyalties with us.

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:02:27

It's just a nice little bit of home, and it just warms me up while following them. It's a lot of fun.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:02:34

Yeah. So what's the most interesting thing about where you're from? I'm kinda curious about Iowa too.

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:02:39

Woah. Iowa. Let me talk about Iowa because that's where I'm truly that's where I'm originally from. My family's from there. I didn't appreciate the beauty of that state until I was an adult and returned and really took in the farmlands and kind of the lightly rolling landscape up there. And it has this rural sense of it that I don't get in my today life that really takes me back when I do visit. My sister is there, and I can go visit her there. My mom is a resident there as well.

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:03:14

So it's lovely to go back, and I think people would be surprised at what kind of almost getaway ness there is when you visit parts of Iowa. You really can separate yourself from everyday life there, I think.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:03:30

It truly is beautiful. I had no idea. I went to grad school in Northern Iowa. What part of Iowa did you grow up in?

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:03:35

A little tiny town called Hartley. We spent a lot of time at the Okoboji Lakes. I went to camp summer camps up there, and I still visit to this day. It's up in that northwestern quadrant.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:03:48

So didn't go too far to get into Nebraska then.

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:03:51

Right. Did you where did you go to?

Kathleen Basi [: 00:03:53

I was in Cedar Falls, so much farther east.

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:03:56

Okay.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:03:57

I like to say I've lived my whole life along US 63, basically. So so tell me, did you have siblings?

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:04:06

One sister.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:04:06

One sister. How would she describe you as a child?

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:04:10

Oh, as a child? Probably mean and annoying big sister.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:04:14

Nice.

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:04:16

We were just far apart in age. Like, we're three and a half years apart, so I didn't want her around, and I probably picked on her a little bit or ignored her, but we're really good friends now.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:04:30

That's good. Can you tell me what's your earliest memory growing up in Iowa?

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:04:36

I remember going to my grandmother's house a lot, my great grandmother's house, and playing cards.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:04:42

Oh, yeah.

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:04:43

Just a foundational childhood memory for me is playing cards with my grandparents.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:04:47

What games did your grandparents play?

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:04:49

Well, we would play Rummy and Old Maid and, oh, Solitaire, double Solitaire, so much double Solitaire.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:04:58

So double Solitaire, meaning you both you just played parallel?

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:05:01

No. You play across from each other, and then every all the aces go in the middle of the table, and you can play on anybody's ace?

Kathleen Basi [: 00:05:08

Yeah. Oh, yes. Yes. This c and it's a speed game then?

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:05:11

Oh, yes.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:05:12

Okay. This is what we call in my family, nerds, and all of my cousins are now geeking out. And we would get not doubles, but, like, in my mom's family, there would be, like, a whole table full of people and everybody has and it was, like, screaming, shouting, you know, it's very stressful. I never could manage it very well.

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:05:30

I have not heard it called Nerds, but we've definitely done the multi people version. Usually, it's a Thanksgiving activity for us. So Nerds, I will have to share that name.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:05:40

I think it goes by a number of names. I've heard other ones over the over the years, but that's how I grew up with it. So let's kinda shift gears and talk about your book. You've got a book coming out in February, which is about the time that this will probably air. So tell us about your new book, The Last Road Trip, in about a sentence or two.

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:05:58

The Last Road Trip is inspired by a trip that my husband and his friends took after college and is about five old sortie sisters who reunite to try to complete a cross country road trip that fell apart in tragedy twenty years before. But I changed all the facts. It has absolutely nothing to do with my husband's trip. They were just inspired by it.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:06:18

That's such a great idea. And, you know, I have a soft spot in my heart for road trip books because mine was a road trip book too. Is this just a story that has come up over the like, has in your family over the years and that just sort of took root? Or what made you decide that this needed to be written?

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:06:35

So these guys grew up together. They didn't go to college together, but they grew up together, went off to college, and then came back. And they're all friends to this day. So they did this cross country road trip. It was like a ten week trip across the country and back.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:06:50

Holy moly.

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:06:52

I know, right, back in the day when you could do that because kids weren't worried about internships and all that stuff in the summer of college.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:06:59

Summer jobs.

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:07:01

Exactly. And they took to all these pictures and videos back in the whenever this was the nineties, and they had a, like, a little movie made that they made of it. And to this day, they're still friends. Most of them were in our wedding. So it's always been this lore of this trip of theirs. And we were watching the video one night about six years ago, five or six years ago, and I was like, I wonder if it had just been a bunch of women who went did that trip, if they would all would if they would have stayed friends, would they have been in each other's weddings? You know, would it have been all sunshine and roses like this? And then I stood up straight, and I thought, okay. I've gotta write that book.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:07:45

I've got a book to write. Yeah. That's really cool. Very good. So you've got multiple characters in this. Is there one that you identify with most closely, one that you root for more than the others?

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:07:55

I think there's probably a little bit of me in every character or a little bit of every character in me. There's probably one character that is the exception. Her name's Mary Blake, and she's probably the one I like the most. And perhaps there might be a psychological analysis going into what I just said.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:08:16

I was wondering.

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:08:19

I like Mary Blake because she's incredibly, incredibly upbeat and all is all about trying to make sure everyone feels welcome, supported, and and valuable, maybe to the risk that she's not doing the same for herself. But she was very fun to write because I sort of got to try to channel people that I'm not to write her.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:08:42

Right. Yeah. Sometimes those characters are almost easier to write because there's less, baggage attached to them.

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:08:50

I have wondered that because I did get stuck on one character, and I could not figure out how to work with her. And I did start to wonder that if I said that, you know, is this because she's too much like me and I don't wanna go there? But I did finally breakthrough when I spoke with another author friend, and I was explaining the problem to her. And she said to me because I said, you know, I just she doesn't feel important enough. And my friend said, maybe she's the key to the whole thing.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:09:21

Oh, yeah.

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:09:22

And she set me on a new path of thinking about this character. And sure enough, she was the key to the whole thing. She's the only one who knows what happened the night of the tragedy. There's a crash and somebody dies, not one of them, but another person. And we know that in the beginning. We know that in this first chapter.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:09:39

No spoilers on Author Express.

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:09:41

No spoilers. And that's what it turned out. She knew. She's the only one who knows everything that happened. So that really unlocked a door for me.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:09:50

Mhmm. Yeah. I have a rule of thumb that says if you're beating your head on a wall, maybe it's because whatever you're trying to work out isn't supposed to be there at all. This sounds like a parallel kind of truism. Like, if you're beating a head on a wall, something is just entirely wrong. Like, you have to get around and look at it from a completely different angle. That's really cool. So on this road trip, did you get to do some research about what places they're going to visit, or did you have any of that, or was it really all focused on the story?

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:10:22

I did a lot of research. The research was not super deep. Like, I wasn't getting into any historical stuff. So as far as the locations, I've been to some of them. I haven't been to all of them. So I did have to do a heck of a lot of Google mapping and street view and reading reviews of places. So I did want originally to try to drive the whole route. I haven't done it yet, but maybe someday.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:10:47

You can do it in pieces, maybe.

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:10:49

Yes. And I've done parts of the route just because, you know, I went to I went to school in Dallas, and we drove out to Albuquerque for spring break to go skiing one year. So there is that stretch. So I have done that that stretch, for example.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:11:04

Very good. You have a Techstart company. So and you have a law background. So how does all of this fit together, all of the different facets of you?

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:11:13

One thing I've been fortunate to have is the ability to make shifts and sort of move from one space to the other, and I think everything has built on what came before it. So going into the startup space was possible because I had been a lawyer and because I learned to think like a lawyer and because I got those skills. And once I got into the startup space, I expanded and I learned more and more about the business side of things. And then moving into starting a new company, you know, I was able to build on what I learned working at a startup to starting a startup. And as far as the writing, I think that just came from I got to the point in my life where I realized I should just do stuff if I wanna do it Mhmm. For sure. And not be, not think, oh, someday, or I'm not good enough to do that, or I don't have any experience doing that. And so when I decided to write a novel, it was, I'm just gonna do it, and I did.

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:12:10

And then I was gonna write another one, and here we are.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:12:13

Here we are. Very good. And you even made a USA bestseller list with your first one.

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:12:18

I did. Yes.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:12:19

That's pretty fantastic. That's gotta feel great.

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:12:22

It was very exciting. Yeah. It's hard to break through the noise. You know, there's so many books that come out and voracious readers, but getting your cover in front of people is enough so they can start to decide if it's the book for them. It's a battle, and it's not getting any easier.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:12:38

Yeah. That's true. So on the topic of getting your peep book in front of people, what's the best place for people to find you?

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:12:45

My website is always up, jenniferklepper.com. And, of course, you can find my books on Amazon, Goodreads. The print book is not up for preorder yet for but by the time this comes out, it will be. It will be.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:13:00

That's right.

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:13:00

Yes. So the website's the best place to start.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:13:03

Very good. So in closing today, tell us what book or story inspires you the most?

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:13:08

So it's funny. Every time somebody asks me what's my favorite book, oftentimes, I'll go to the last great book I read because it's hard for me to have a, you know, a superlative. But one book does stand out for me, and it's partly because of when I read it and what I was writing was with my last book, but Jodi Picoult's Small Great Things. And there was so much about that that I admired. I admired her taking on a really difficult topic. I admired the way she approached it from the different characters that she put in to the story, and it was just a great read. I mean, the books that I love are ones that keep me engaged. And they don't have to be high literary.

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:13:50

They don't have to be super easy books, but they can be anywhere between that as long as they keep me engaged. And that one just had me pulled in every which way.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:14:00

Every step of the way. Yeah. For sure. That was quite a book. Alright. Well, thank you so much for being with us on Author Express today. Everybody go check out her book.

Jennifer Klepper [: 00:14:08

Okay. Thank you. It was great to be here.

Kathleen Basi [: 00:14:14

Thanks for joining us today. Reviews help other people to find us, so please take a minute to give us a rating and leave a few words. We'll be here again next Wednesday. In the meantime, follow us on Instagram at express podcast to see who's coming up next. Don't forget. Keep it express, but keep it interesting.