My ALLi author guest this episode is Jerri Williams, a retired FBI agent who spent twenty-six years investigating major financial crimes before building a second career as an author and podcaster. Since 2016, she has produced a long-running FBI true crime podcast, written widely about FBI myths and misconceptions, and built a strong independent publishing platform.
Listen to the Inspirational Indie Author Interview: Jerri Williams
About the Host
Howard Lovy is an author, developmental editor, and writing coach with a long career in journalism and publishing. He works with writers at many stages of their careers, with a focus on helping them develop their ideas and strengthen their work while preserving their unique voices. He lives in Northern Michigan.
About the Guest
Retired FBI agent Jerri Williams spent twenty-six years as a special agent specializing in economic fraud and corruption investigations. She is now on a mission to show the public who the FBI is and what the FBI does. The FBI Agents Association recognized her as its Distinguished Service Honoree for sharing FBI stories. Through her police procedural novels, her nonfiction book, her blog, and her decade-old true crime podcast, “FBI Case File Review,” she debunks misconceptions about the FBI found in books, TV, and movies. She has also worked as a consultant for major TV studios, assisting producers and showrunners in developing realistic FBI characters and storylines.
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Read the Transcript
Jerri Williams: Hi Howard. It's great to be here. This is Jerri Williams — retired FBI agent, author, and podcaster. I've been writing books since 2016 when my first book was published, and I would call myself an accidental indie author.
Howard Lovy: Well, we'll go into that. And good thing you're retired, so I don't have the right to remain silent and anything I say will not be used against me.
Jerri Williams: Well, I should be asking you that — you're the one recording this. So I'll try to make sure I only say things I want everyone to hear.
Growing Up and a Love of Reading
Howard Lovy: You've said you've always been a storyteller. Tell me where you grew up, and was reading and writing always a part of your early life?
Jerri Williams: Absolutely. I'm an Air Force brat — my father was in the Air Force the entire time I was growing up. We never lived anywhere for more than three years, so we were always moving. And even during those three years, whether we were in England or Germany, we probably moved at least once during that period too.
I was always having to make new friends. I had two sisters, but I was always coming into a new environment. Sometimes, while I was getting settled, books were my friends. My whole family read books — we were the type of people who would visit someone and immediately look around to see if they had a magazine or a newspaper or a paperback nearby. We were very used to picking up a book and reading whenever we had any leisure time.
From Psychology to the FBI
Howard Lovy: So what eventually led you to law enforcement? What did you study in college?
Jerri Williams: I studied psychology, and after I graduated my first full-time job was what we call an aftercare counselor — essentially a juvenile probation officer. I worked with kids who had been sent to reform schools, placement centers, and group homes; kids who had gotten into trouble and been adjudicated and sent away for a while. When they returned to the community, I got to use my psychology degree and work through different treatments with the kids and their parents.
Howard Lovy: So psychology was your first connection with law enforcement?
Jerri Williams: Yeah, I was always fascinated by what makes people tick. I never looked directly at a law enforcement position — I was thinking more along the lines of psychologist or psychiatrist. I actually took all the prerequisite courses in college, like organic chemistry and physics, to go to medical school, but never got that far. But my college roommate became a Baltimore City police officer when she graduated. So when the FBI was looking to recruit more women and minorities, it wasn't something I rejected. I looked at it and thought, let me see what this is about.
Howard Lovy: And I'll bet the psychology degree didn't hurt either. Human motivations are very much a part of law enforcement — and also later for your writing career.
Jerri Williams: Absolutely. Both of those have been a great resource as I began my writing career. So I've written four books: two crime novels — Pay to Play and Greedy Givers — and an FBI puzzle book I put together with my son. But my bestseller, and what people know me most for as an author, is my book called FBI Myths and Misconceptions: A Manual for Armchair Detectives, where I help people understand the clichés and misconceptions about the FBI in books, TV, and movies. I speak to a lot of writers' groups — I was just speaking to the Mystery Writers of America's New York chapter about how to write authentic FBI characters.
An FBI Career in Financial Crimes
Howard Lovy: Tell me how you spent most of your career in the FBI.
Jerri Williams: I worked economic crime — financial crimes like Ponzi schemes, advance fee schemes, telemarketing frauds, embezzlements, things like that. I always found it fascinating what people had to say to themselves to make it okay to steal somebody else's money.
Howard Lovy: Was there a particular case or moment in your FBI career that made you realize you needed to someday tell these stories?
Jerri Williams: Well, I think I always knew that I wanted to write a book — I knew that before I even joined the FBI. Because I'm a reader, and when you really love books, there's always in the back of your mind the thought: I could do this too. So I definitely knew I always wanted to write a book. And hearing the true stories of the FBI, I knew I had a huge resource of potential plots and characters.
Howard Lovy: Now, toward the end of your career you became a spokesperson for the Philadelphia division. How did working with the media change the way you thought about public storytelling?
Jerri Williams: That was a strategic move on my part. By the end of my career I had already started writing a book — my first book took me eight years to write before it was published.
Howard Lovy: Only eight years.
Jerri Williams: Only eight years. I had been doing that spokesperson role part-time as a collateral duty, backing up the main spokesperson. So when she retired and I was offered the full-time position — no longer doing investigations, just helping shape the public perception of the FBI and the Philadelphia division — I said yes. I knew it would put me in proximity with writers, reporters, and producers who were interested in FBI stories. I did that job for my last four and a half to five years. And it was definitely helpful — my very first editor was the managing editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer. She was the one who taught me how to write.
Howard Lovy: So you knew you weren't going to ease into a quiet life after retirement. You had planned your writing life well in advance.
Jerri Williams: Yeah, it was definitely something I started before I retired and a goal I'd had throughout my career.
Launching the Podcast
Howard Lovy: What came first — did you start writing or did you start the podcast, or both at the same time?
Jerri Williams: I finished the book first, and at the time I was pursuing traditional publishing. I had a literary agent — I was with Curtis Brown — who told me that as we were submitting the book to publishers, I should start building my platform. This was around 2014 and 2015, when a lot of people were blogging. But I decided I was going to do a podcast. I was listening to podcasts, most of them about writing craft and books. I thought I would do a podcast, but it made more sense for me to do one about the FBI.
Howard Lovy: That was rather prescient of you — you kind of predicted the true crime podcast boom.
Jerri Williams: There were some already out there — I think Serial started in 2014. I started my podcast in January of 2016, but I really didn't know much about the true crime industry at the time. I actually put my podcast in the category of literary arts, because I thought of it as a way of helping other writers and authors learn how to write authentic FBI plots and characters. I had read a lot of books featuring the FBI, and there were a lot of things that were just wrong.
FBI Myths and Misconceptions
Howard Lovy: What frustrates you most about how the FBI is portrayed in popular culture?
Jerri Williams: Many of the books that feature an FBI character are serial crime books — books about FBI profilers who are shown going down a dark alley or into an abandoned basement, actively searching for the serial killer. We all know that FBI profilers are really more like consultants. They're not the investigator. They work with local law enforcement, state investigators, and FBI agents in the field to help find ways to solve what appear to be unsolvable cases. They're really not out there doing the things that most books, TV shows, and movies show an FBI profiler doing.
Now, as an author myself, I understand you can't have an FBI profiler sitting in an office flipping through a file. That's just not a story. So I'm not mad at people who want to write their FBI profiler out in the street with guns blazing and car chases. I understand that as an author, the most important thing is your story. If you have to make a creative compromise to create your tension and drama, I get it. But I do warn people: if you go too far, if you have it totally wrong, that's going to take your reader out of the story — and that's the one thing you definitely don't want to do.
Howard Lovy: So you're okay with creative license — having a profiler out in the field instead of behind a desk — even if that doesn't necessarily happen.
Jerri Williams: I understand it now. Serial killer books are a genre of their own, created probably by Silence of the Lambs and other great books like that, and now it's what people expect. I don't think you can really do a good crime novel the old way. I think the TV show Mindhunter did an excellent job — they had the profilers operating at a more academic level, but still found ways to create drama and tension while showing them in their real role and what they actually did.
My second big misconception — and I struggle between whether this is first or second — is that the FBI doesn't play well with others. You've seen that cliché where the FBI comes in and just takes over. But that just doesn't happen that way. In fact, there are many books where the FBI comes in and takes over a local murder investigation. That will really throw me out of the story, because in most situations the FBI does not have jurisdiction in a local murder case.
You may see the FBI working with a local police department, but that's when they're invited in. A current example — and I know ALLi is an international organization, so thank you for the context — is the Nancy Guthrie case. That's a famous news anchor whose mother went missing. The FBI was invited into that investigation. It was not necessarily something that would automatically fall under FBI jurisdiction, but they were invited to assist.
There are certain jurisdictions the FBI is allowed to investigate and some that just are not under what we do. The FBI-versus-local-police rivalry makes for great drama on TV, but it just doesn't happen that way. I understand why writers do it because you want to create tension, but there are other ways. Maybe show two characters — an agent and a detective — who are working together but just don't like each other personally. Setting it up as institutional rivalry isn't accurate, and it can actually be somewhat harmful. If someone in a small police department has never interacted with the FBI and all they know is what they've seen in books and TV shows, they might be suspicious of FBI assistance when it's actually being offered in good faith.
So when you do your research, don't rely on another TV show or movie to get your information about the FBI or law enforcement in general. Reach out. See if you can actually speak to someone in the law enforcement community to answer your questions — or read some of the great books out there, not just mine, that help answer questions about what an agent or police officer or detective would actually do in a given situation.
An Accidental Indie Author
Howard Lovy: You've been a strong advocate for indie publishing. You're kind of the poster person for it — you have your own platform, you're on print, ebook, audio, and podcasts. Are you still open to traditional publishing, or are you indie all the way?
Jerri Williams: I am still open. I actually have an agent now that I met somewhat unexpectedly — I was not actively looking to write more books and go traditional, but I met an agent who really liked my platform, enjoyed my indie published books, and offered me representation. So I'm pursuing that right now.
But I am definitely an advocate for indie publishing. I mentioned that I was an accidental indie — that was because I had an agent who was pursuing traditional publishing back in 2014 and 2015. By 2016, my agent had not been able to sell the book, and I did not want to put a book I had been working on for eight years into a drawer.
At the time, Curtis Brown was offering a white-glove Amazon publishing service, and so my book was published with the Curtis Brown logo on the spine. After that was done, I learned about indie publishing and realized I could have just done that myself without paying the 15% agency fee. I had already started writing the second book — it was going to be a trilogy but I made it a duology — and I realized no traditional publisher was going to want the second book in a series that had already been independently published. So I got the rights back from Curtis Brown, published the second book myself, and enjoyed that so much that when I decided to write the nonfiction book, I did that myself too. And it's done really well.
So yes, I'm definitely an advocate for indie publishing. What I would suggest to people is to look at all the pathways and figure out which one works best for you. If you have a platform — I've been doing the podcast for ten years now, I have thousands of listeners, my website is pretty robust, I also run a blog about the FBI in books, TV, and movies — you're in a position to do content marketing that leads back to your books. And so my books still sell today.
Howard Lovy: That was going to be my next question. Traditional publishers don't ask what they can do for you — they ask what you can do for them. Does the marketing kind of handle itself because you have such a long-established platform?
Jerri Williams: Absolutely. I have never done any paid ads or promotions for my books. The content marketing — the blog posts and the podcast episodes — does the work. I always put in a little plug for my work, and that works for me.
Audience, Awards, and the FBI Community
Howard Lovy: What kind of audience do you attract? Former law enforcement? True crime fans?
Jerri Williams: I actually have three types of audience. First, the traditional true crime people who just want to hear about true crime cases. My second largest group, I believe, are law enforcement people — retired agents and police officers. In fact, I was given a G-Men Honors Award by the current FBI Agents Association for telling FBI stories. And then there are also people interested in joining the FBI who listen. But the third group is authors, producers, scriptwriters, and people writing stories about the FBI. All of those people, at some point or another — whether out of loyalty, support, or research — will go out and pick up my book. So it's a great relationship between me and my listeners and my readers.
Sustaining a Creative Career After Retirement
Howard Lovy: Looking back on ten years as an author and podcaster, what have you learned about sustaining a creative career after retirement from your first profession?
Jerri Williams: You have to put yourself out there. I think there are some wonderful books that people are never going to have an opportunity to read, simply because they don't know those books exist. And I think that is one of the first things I say when I'm talking to somebody about indie publishing: great, I'm so glad you have this book you want to publish. But the second question is: how are you going to find readers? What are you going to do to make sure your book gets out there and into the hands of people who would love exactly what you've written?
I think sometimes as authors who want to go indie, people forget about that second part. But that second part is just as important as the first if you want to be successful — if you want people to know who you are and to want to pick up every book you publish.
Howard Lovy: Well, it sounds like you've found that perfect formula. Jerri, thank you so much for appearing on the show. I appreciate you setting the record straight on what the FBI does and does not do.
Jerri Williams: Thank you for having me. I've been a member of ALLi for many, many years now, and it's wonderful to be on a show that I've listened to so many times before.
Howard Lovy: Great. Thank you, Jerri. Bye.
Jerri Williams: Bye.
