Nat Eliason: From Blogging to Sci-Fi Novels, Writing Books That Last, and Owning Your Audience
In this episode of Smart Friends, we hang with Nat Eliason—author, entrepreneur, and now full-time sci-fi novelist—for an in-depth conversation about creativity, risk, and the long game of building a writing career from scratch. Nat opens up about leaving behind a successful nonfiction book and audience to chase something more personal.
We talk about his transition from traditional publishing to self-publishing, how his background in entrepreneurship shapes his approach to writing, and what it really takes to make a living as an author in today’s world. Nat shares what he's learned from launching his first novel Husk, building an audience of readers (not just writers), and why he believes fiction is a long-term craft worth mastering.
Links to Platforms:
We also cover:
How book sales through Shopify unlocked direct reader relationships
The pros and cons of traditional publishing vs. self-publishing
Lessons from launching online courses, building products, and writing blogs
Structuring a writing life around deep work and consistent output
The underrated power of physical books and slow-burning success
Why being a novelist is the most entrepreneurial thing he’s ever done
Whether you’re a writer, a founder, or someone figuring out your next creative chapter, this episode is packed with real insight on choosing your path and sticking with it.
Quotes from Nat:
“Writing is the one thing I love doing enough to commit to for the next 30 years.”
“Traditional publishing taught me how to make a really good book, but I wouldn’t do it again.”
“Holding your book for the first time—and shipping it yourself to your first readers—is pure magic.”
“The best marketing for your book is writing the next one—that’s the fiction game.”
“I used to chase whatever was interesting… now I’m building something I want to last 30 years.”
“Fiction lets me explore big ideas without pretending to be an expert.”
“The self-pub stigma is fading… especially when the book looks and reads like a trad pub hit.”
“Characters start doing things I didn’t plan—then I realize, oh, that’s why they’re here.”
“There’s no product in the world like a book—you can sell the same file for 50 years.”
“My dream is to have a warehouse full of books I wrote. That’s the romantic version of success.”
If you’re considering writing or publishing a book, be like Nat and go self-publish! Come talk with my team at Scribe Media.
Scribe Media helps executives, entrepreneurs, and business leaders to write, edit, publish and market their books.
Scribe created a new category called "Professional Publishing" -- the best of both self-publishing and traditional publishing. With Professional Publishing, the author owns all rights and full creative freedom, so you can do anything with your book. You also keep 100% of your royalties.
You're getting the same level of professionalism as a traditional publisher—book design, interior design, and your own publishing imprint. All with maximum author freedom.
This is how I published The Almanack of Naval Ravikant and The Anthology of Balaji, and what I believe is the future of publishing.
If you’re considering publishing a book, take 20 minutes to meet with someone from Scribe to learn more about the publishing landscape. To get in touch with Scribe, click here or email me to get started.
Learn more about Nat Eliason
Additional episodes if you enjoyed:
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Learning to Learn, AI Disruption, and the Future of Publishing
Klaus Kleinfeld: How to Lead Fortune 500 Companies, Manage Energy, Inspire Teams
Paul Millerd: Profits in Publishing, Why Self-Publish, How Authors Make Big Money
Episode Transcript:
Eric Jorgenson: I find, I don't know if you have the same thing, but like once you have started writing books, the spiritual rewards of that medium just outweigh, I find it so much more satisfying than Twitter and blogging.
Nat Eliason: Oh, it's so true. And there's the question that I ask myself a lot, which is like, okay, if I'm on this path of trying to, quote unquote, make it as an author and write books full time, what are the things that are necessary for that success and what are kind of like tangential? And the necessary thing is writing more books and marketing them and getting them out there, and like there's nobody who has succeeded in that career who hasn't done that. And while there are a lot of successful authors who blog, there are also a lot of successful authors who don't blog at all. So, if I have to pick on a given day where to put my writing energy, I'm always going to pick the book over the blog. And so, the blog has just become less and less of a priority.
Eric Jorgenson: And it's tough that they both like draw from the same pool of energy.
Nat Eliason: That is hard. That's the nice thing about bookstagram and booktube and those things is like it's different enough that I can write 3,000 words and then record a YouTube video and it doesn't feel as hard as it would be to write 3,000 words of fiction and then write a blog post. That just feels way more challenging.
Eric Jorgenson: That does feel like way more your advantage too. I mean, you've always been great at video, outrageously handsome, beautiful hair... So rather than doing like James Clear has his newsletter, you have like the YouTube channel, the bookstagram, you are building an audience that you know is going to be aligned with you and your taste and the books that you write, which is the same thing that the newsletter accomplishes. You're just doing it in a way that's more fun for you.
Nat Eliason: Totally. And there's been challenges with that too because I built those audiences around non-fiction, and now pivoting them to fiction has been frustrating and slow, but it's starting to pay small dividends. But yeah, that's really true. And in the fiction world, I mean, this is true in non-fiction as well, but also in the fiction world, I think the YouTubes and the Instagrams and the TikToks are quite a bit bigger than the blogs because people who read a lot of nonfiction books read a lot of short form nonfiction, but people who read a lot of fiction don't necessarily read a lot of short stories. And so, you don't see the same like Substack following for fiction authors the way there's a substack following for non-fiction authors. Like that doesn't translate as directly. There are roundups and lists and stuff that do very well, but that... that was the old advice 40 years ago or something, like write short stories, get them published in magazines, and then you might get a book deal eventually, and then you can write novels. But like now that you don't need to do that, the short story market has gotten a decent bit smaller and I think is in some ways almost like a distraction from, if you want to write novels, it's like you should write novels because it's sort of a different muscle. It's a whole different skill set. Because you're thinking at different timelines and all of this stuff. So, yeah, it's a little easier to justify doing more video stuff for fiction for me.
Eric Jorgenson: So, if you're building an audience to de-risk your book, build an audience that's likely to buy the book that's like along the same lines and interested in the same mediums.
Nat Eliason: And that's what I'm trying to do more of now because, historically, the audiences I've built have been kind of like people who are similar to me but maybe six months behind whatever new trend I'm interested in. And so, I got really interested in SEO and like growing sites using SEO. And so I was talking a lot about SEO and teaching other people how to do SEO. And that was really good for building an SEO business. And then, getting really into Roam research and note-taking and creating a course around that, and then with the AI course that I did earlier this year. And like all of those have been really successful for marketing to people like me. But for the book stuff, I kind of don't want to build an audience of other writers because, I mean, that can be a valuable audience, but I don't want to like make a writing course. I don't want to like teach writers how to write. I don't think I'm qualified to do that, necessarily. I want to reach readers who want to buy sci-fi books. And so, I almost have to keep fighting this urge to make content about writing into instead make content about books that I'm enjoying and that I'm reading, which is like a, it sounds silly, but it's a pretty meaningful shift for me because I'm so eager to like talk about what I'm learning about how I'm doing the thing, but for my business goals right now, that just makes a lot less sense.
Eric Jorgenson: And I imagine, given that you have this drive to write sci-fi, that you are also a big fan of sci-fi?
Nat Eliason: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's really been the big shift in my reading the last year and a half, two years, because I read a lot more of it growing up. And then I kind of in college got hooked on the nonfiction train and that was basically all I read for 10 years. And now I'm going back to reading predominantly sci-fi and then some lit fic and fantasy and some other things too. But sci-fi is my favorite category and the one that I want to do well in. And so, it's just where I naturally gravitate to now.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, you've done an amazing job of- I was trying to think about how to like classify you. Like, you are this canonical like internet renaissance man.
Nat Eliason: The poster child of you could just do things.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Like you're- the varied, the variety of projects that you've had over your career is incredible. And I think like, I don't know, I wanted to ask you about your project selection, I don't know, method. Like, are you just going on vibes all the time? What's the triage?
Nat Eliason: I mean, it has been vibes for the last 10 years, and I think there's good and bad to this. In some ways, I almost generally don't recommend other people early in their whatever, internet entrepreneur journey, I try not to say like, oh, you should do what I did. You should just try tons of stuff, and it'll work out because it's like the reality is it usually doesn't. If you're kind of a dilettante and are constantly jumping between things, it usually doesn't go very well. You never get very far. And I'm like maybe one of the weird exceptions where like enough of these things have worked out that I've been able to build a pretty like comfortable life for myself and my family. And obviously, I've had some things go very not well. Like opening a tea cafe before COVID. But I've had other things that do work out.
Eric Jorgenson: That was just bad luck.
Nat Eliason: Yeah, I mean, man, that timing was just brutal. In our defense, we hit break even the second month. So, it was on a good track. But no, it really has been vibes based since I graduated college and started doing this stuff. And there hasn't been a ton of thought. It's just been like what's interesting and what can I get really interested in and then how do I turn that into some sort of business to support me continuing to be interested in it. And I think the shift really happened in the last few years once I started having kids, where I kind of realized, I can't keep doing this. This is not going to be sustainable long-term because if one of these things didn't work out six years ago, that was fine, it was just me and my then girlfriend and our dog, and like I didn't have that many things to worry about, and now I do and so trying to be a lot more intentional about my focus and what I work on and realizing that writing is really the thing for me. That's what I enjoy most. That's where I think I can actually have some long-term competitive advantage between both skill and consistency. But also recognizing that if your goal is to be a career author who primarily makes their money from like making books, I mean, one, that's one of the hardest careers in the world to pull off. It's just the numbers are terrible on it. And the only way you pull it off is pretty much through, except for extreme luck situations, the only way you pull it off with some reliability is just extreme consistency and commitment and not getting distracted and sticking with it and shipping and shipping and shipping and shipping, and then it slowly compounds into something pretty incredible over time. You look at somebody like, I mentioned James Patterson, he's published, or he has his name at least, on 400 books. Or no, sorry, 200, 230 odd books. And like, he's got a system for writing them. He has help, he has ghostwriters, whatever, he works with, but he's published 200 some books in his life, and he's worth $800 million or whatever. And you go into the airport and you see his name everywhere. But it's like he published 200 books. That's sort of the manic consistency you need to be willing to commit to, I think, to pull this kind of writing career off. And that's really exciting to me now. That's really where all of my energy is focused at this point.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I noticed your- I don't know how you would have described yourself five years ago, but like when I go to nateliason.com now, which everyone should do, it's author and entrepreneur, not internet renaissance man or...
Nat Eliason: Yeah, yeah. No, and I still struggle with that. I still struggle with that sometimes too, because my kids are in preschool, and so I'm meeting other parents all the time. And it's different meeting other people in the real world versus like Twitter world because most of them don't work like we work. They work at big companies and stuff, and there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not saying it as a judgment. It just makes it hard for me to explain my work sometimes because I'll say, oh, I'm an author. I published my crypto book last year and I have this sci-fi novel coming out this year. And they're like, oh my god, so you're making your living as an author? And I'm like, well, not yet. I did these other things, like, oh, I was a crypto engineer and I sold courses and I had a marketing agency and I have this app that helps you train your penis muscles that still pays me $1,000 a month. It's just like, there's that stuff. It's like, what I want to be able to say is like, yes, I'm a full-time author and that's what pays off the bills, but I'm still bridging that gap.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, dude, I had no idea that keggle app was still paying you. That's awesome.
Nat Eliason: Dude, it's the gift that keeps on giving. I think it's just in the flywheel now of like Amazon or of Apple reviews. And I made this choice to make it a one-time fee when I launched it. Which the standard advice is like, no, you need a monthly subscription because that's how you get- But everybody else launched monthly subscription ones, and I feel like the reason mine still has a place in that market is because you're not like committing to a subscription. So that's the only way that I can explain that it still gets downloaded after nine years.
Eric Jorgenson: That's awesome. I love that. That is the perfect anecdote to highlight just how much of an internet renaissance man you are. It's also an interesting point of like, I don't know, I bet a lot of authors have this dynamic, especially the ones that like can really make a huge go of it. Like they have to have either a foundation somewhere else or a big break that gives them the foundation to continue to experiment, and that window where you have to make it through the early innings of compounding is brutal. Like, in the same way that becoming a Hollywood star is brutal. Like when Arnold was trying to become a Hollywood star, like he didn't- he could take parts for $0 because he had this real estate empire, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he’d get reps and work his way up and prove that he could do this before he had the position to claim a high price and demand leverage and stuff like that.
Nat Eliason: No, it's really true. And you usually see one of a few stories. I mean, one, the author has a partner who's paying the bills while they figure it out. Like, Brandon Sanderson talked about this in his Tim Ferriss interview about how when he was getting started and even when he got his first book deal, his wife was actually making most of the money as an elementary school teacher. So, they were living on mostly an elementary school teacher's salary while he got the writing going, which is crazy, to compare to where he is now compared to back then 20 years ago. But like that was how he got started. Or another one you see, like Andy Weir apparently had some like meaningful enough exit from AOL where like I guess he was an early employee at AOL, and so when they sold or IPOed or one of the two, he got some liquidity, and that was part of what allowed him to like take the time to eventually write, well, yeah, The Martian and some of the other stories that came before that. There's this other guy, James Islington, he wrote The Will of the Many, which has been this like huge blow-up fantasy novel that came out last year, but he wrote a fantasy trilogy before that that's less well known, and the way he afforded to take the time to do that was he was a startup founder before that as well or like worked in startups. Pierce Brown, I don't know the full story here, but the guy who wrote the Red Rising saga, he worked in tech for 8, 9, 10 years before, I think he was writing novels on the side. But it's kind of a common story. It's like you- especially maybe in the like sci fi fantasy world, that you either start really young so that you have almost no burn rate so you can afford to take the time to make it work, or you get some liquidity doing something else to give you the, I mean, it's probably like five years minimum, if not longer, in a good case for like a fiction writing career to pay you what you could get doing almost anything else, hell, like mowing lawns. It’s slow.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And the hope is that you can break out, but there's still no kind of guarantee of that. But like, you've got to make it through those first five years to get there by any means necessary. And... bootstraps in there, writing short stories or writing blogs, writing fan fiction in part time that can help you get some of those iterations in.
Nat Eliason: Yeah. And really anything you can do to shorten the timeline is going to make a difference. And, for me, I still have a lot of insecurity about doing this because, one, it's a pretty high risk, and potentially high reward career, but there is that risk element to it of like, oh, I could do sci-fi for five years and it just never catches on with anyone. And the like, well, there are these other things that I could be doing too that like probably would pay a lot better, a faster. But at the same time, it's like something that's helpful to me is that there are other people out there who pull this off and who succeed at it, starting from objectively a way worse position than I am. I mean, it's like, I've got the email list, I've got a big, decently large Instagram following and YouTube, and it's like I'm here talking to you. It's just like, I kind of have to... I don't know, this sounds a little like hubris-y or whatnot, but it's like, if anyone's in a good position to pull it off, like I feel like it'd be hard for me to ask for a better one. Like, ultra rich parent who's the managing editor at Tor or something, like that would be a bigger advantage. But like, at some point, it's just like, yeah, it's like, I just got to keep going after it.
Eric Jorgenson: Well, and you've got a good- I think being an entrepreneur also gives you an appetite for that risk and an understanding of the reward and the J curve that you have to go through in a new cycle because you do this all the time with new products or new businesses and you've been doing that pattern for 10 years, maybe more. And so, you've grinded for a big payoff before, and like it or not, as an author, you are an entrepreneur. Like at the end of the day, you are the owner of that book. Even if you sell the majority of it, you're the one who has to make it work and you're the one who has to own it and you're the one who has to drive it through to make the product excellent and see that it gets well received by readers.
Nat Eliason: And it's kind of a crazy type of entrepreneurship too because there's almost no other type of entrepreneurship where you can sit alone in a room for six months and build a product that you can then independently sell without creating any sort of company under you, and you can sell it for the next 50 years with no modifications to the product. Like, that's insane when you actually think about it from that perspective. And there are people who do that who sell a book for millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars. It's like, there's literally no other product in the world that I can think of where that is possible. And that's kind of cool and exciting in its own way too. It's like, yes, there is this extremely large majority of writers never make a meaningful living from their work. And it's in some ways one of the like highest possible profit per employee businesses in the world. And that's kind of cool too.
Eric Jorgenson: Those are both, yeah, very cool. I think there's a great tweet along these lines that's like, if you open your laptop and type the right string of characters into it, $10 million will come out of it. And like, that is true in software and as an indie hacker and stuff, but maybe there's no more generally accessible example than writing a book that sells a million copies or 10 million copies. That's the test that everyone has access to take, which is a wild thing. I always use, when you run across a zero-sum mindset or an internet anonymous socialist, my test for them is always like, who did JK Rowling rob to become a billionaire? If it is true that billionaires shouldn't exist, like what went wrong in that equation? Like, all she did was type and a bunch of people loved what she typed and bought it. And the world became richer for it. And she was rewarded for her efforts. And that's happening at a variety of scales all over the world all the time with anybody who's writing and publishing a book and I think that is such a cool thing. I mean, that's alchemy.
Nat Eliason: Super cool. And to your point about an author ultimately being an entrepreneur, that was a big part of why I ended up deciding to go the self-pub route for my fiction work after doing the trad deal for Crypto Confidential. It was just like having some entrepreneurship experience made it very frustrating to be in the like trad pub apparatus and made going this route a lot more exciting, having had that experience.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay, well, with that teaser, let's go back to your first book. And what was the transition, really? Where were you when that idea and when that first book sort of emerged as a real project that took shape? And how did you transition from kind of like general internet renaissance man to author the first time?
Nat Eliason: Yes. So I was running a marketing agency from like 2017 through 2020, basically until the very end of 2020. And then going to 2021, was kind of like looking for something new to do, ended up getting sucked into the crypto world, was doing a lot of like programming, day trading shenanigans through that era and writing about it because I had a decent blog following already. And one thing I've been decently good at with blogging is explaining complex concepts in a more approachable way. So, kind of like being at that bleeding edge of something, seeing what's cool about it, and then explaining that to other people who are curious, maybe haven't gotten through the confusing fog of war around it.
Eric Jorgenson: And crypto was the ultimate test of that skill set.
Nat Eliason: Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was a great test. And I started writing about it. I was explaining some of what was going on, and my friend Evan Armstrong who was writing at Every for a long time and just started his own publication, he DMed me on Twitter and basically said, some of the stuff you're talking about reminds me a lot of the mortgage-backed security shenanigans that were going on leading up to 2008. And he's like... he kind of put that idea of a book in my head of, okay, can I write something to explain some of these crypto concepts that's also like a fun, entertaining read. And so, like February ’22, I decided I wanted to do that and started... and so then I had the question the first time of like, okay, do I go trad pub or self pub? And you and I already knew each other. I knew people who had done self pub like Paul Millard. I knew most of the arguments in favor of it. And the thing I kept coming back to was like, but a lot of these people keep doing trad. Like people who seemingly would be very well positioned to do self-publishing, they still work with the traditional publishers. So like, why? And my assumption was that there was just something that I was missing there. And there wasn't anybody like beating that drum as loudly as there were people beating the self-publishing drum. So, I was like, well, I want to try to get a trad deal at least, see if I can because that'll also de-risk things a little bit. Like, it might be nice to have the advance, it’d be nice to know that it's getting published. There's definitely some insecurity, I think, around self-publishing versus having that like seal of approval from Penguin Random House or whatever. So came up with an initial proposal, a few people really helpful here. Tiago Forte was extremely helpful. Chris Guillebeau, $100 Startup, was really helpful here too. My friend Zach Oberon, who used to run Scribe. And so I started talking to all of them, put the proposal together, talked to agents, got an agent, got the book deal, published it through PRH's imprint portfolio, which is their business non-fiction imprint. And going through that experience was extremely helpful. I'm very glad that I did it. Seeing how they make a book, seeing everything that goes into it, seeing what they do on the editing side, as well as the marketing and PR and just like how they operate, like I'm very, very glad I did it, and having gone through it, I'm not sure that I would want to do it again. I think maybe for the right topic or for a certain topic, I would consider it. But there were just a number of frustrations or like disappointments that came from it that made me kind of feel like, okay, again, I'm very glad I had the experience, otherwise I'd just be wondering, but now having gone through it, I feel a lot more comfortable just going after self-publishing, especially for fiction.
Eric Jorgenson: What were some of the things you picked up from them, like the positives through the process that you learned?
Nat Eliason: So, I'd say one big positive that they do a really incredible job of is the like editing and the attention to detail. I mean, they're really, really good at creating books. Like my editor Noah was wonderful. He was very, very thoughtful throughout the process. He did three or four full reads with great feedback each time. He had his assistant read it and she sent the feedback once or twice. And then even after I was mostly done and had all the structural developmental editing completed with him, there were three or four different proofreaders. There was a legal reader. They had the indexer. I got to work with their design team around the internal layout, and the final production of the book is something I'm really proud of. It all came together into what I think is like this really great asset. And in my head going into it, I was kind of like, okay, you have your high-level editor and then you have your copy editor and like that's kind of it. And so those are all the people that you need to make a good book. And now I'm much more of the mind of like you probably want at least five or six different people looking at it throughout that process because it's so easy to miss things. And you just get blindness to certain stuff if you've been looking at your book for too long. And that degree of attention was really impressive and very, very helpful.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, the book turned out amazing. Like it's really beautiful, like well done, well designed all throughout.
Nat Eliason: Yeah, they did a really great job with it. Go ahead.
Eric Jorgenson: I think a lot of people don't realize how, like to the point about like typos and details, like how- when you see a published book that has three typos in it, that's like probably the average. It is so, even like professionals and experts, it's so easy, the brain just like glosses over them and it actually takes a lot of effort. It's like sifting and sifting and sifting, to your point, five or ten times with not just smart people, not just detail-oriented people, but like experts and professional proofreaders, and still there's things that get through. It's just almost like how it is no matter how polished the process is. It's wild.
Nat Eliason: Oh yeah, you think about a hundred thousand word book, if 0.01% of those words are typos, then that's still, what, like 10 words? So, it doesn't take... that's an incredible success rate – 99.99% success. You're still going to have 10 typos. And if you're reading a book and there are 10 typos in it, you're going to catch one probably.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, at least one. Yeah. It's a very interesting thing.
Nat Eliason: Yeah, I mean, that part was really impressive. And the thing that they do well too is it's like, when they know a book is going to be a success or when they really, really want a book to be a success, they've put like a huge advance or whatever into it, they can kind of make it happen. They can kind of like force one or two books down the media's throat per year to give them that huge blast. But it's a pretty- they only have so many of those like shots they can fire. And the odds are overwhelmingly that they're not going to pick your book to do that with. And there is a little bit of a- sort of what I realized was that they can be helpful on the marketing and PR front, but only if you have already gotten it to a certain threshold of excitement where media people are going to feel like they are not covering something important if they don't cover it. So, what ended up happening with some of the media and PR stuff was we had all these meetings. We were meeting like almost every week leading up to launch and talking about all the stuff they had planned and all the people they had arcs out to and whatnot, and there were all these people who were, quote-unquote, interested, and I don't know to what extent they were really interested, but when none of the big ones came through, like none of the others did either. And they mentioned that that was sort of like a common thing was you needed like one anchor review or one anchor like endorsement from somebody really big, and then all the others would kind of like cascade in after them. And when you don't have that, a lot of it just doesn't happen. And so that part was kind of frustrating, was feeling like we had done- we'd had all these meetings and all this planning and done all this coordinating around marketing and PR for it to not really come through in any significant way. It's like, I got a really nice review in Forbes, but like I got that. And I got a lot of activity on Twitter, but I got that, and on Instagram, but like that was all my coordination, too. And there was even on the like Instagram and YouTube front, there was almost this like resistance from them around me handling it. I think because they wanted to own some of the relationships. But for me, as a like, quote-unquote, book influencer on Instagram, I was like, when a publisher reaches out to me, I usually ignore it. Like, I'm not responding to most of those because they have kind of a form letter that they always send and it's never that personalized to me and it's not based on other things that I'm reading and whatnot. And so, I was like, it's going to be better if I do it. And then we had this one sort of like really frustrating situation where I had done tons of outreach to like bookstagramers and Twitter people and like other influencers to see if they wanted an advanced copy of the book because my thinking was like get them the advanced copy like a month before so they have some time to read it, they can hopefully post during launch week, and I'd lined up like 120 of these to send out. And then they said that they like wouldn't send them. They're like, well, we can just give them a PDF. We never send this many arcs. And I kind of like lost my shit. Like, I could have handled it better and been a little nicer. But it was- I was basically like, are you guys fucking kidding me? Like, I just lined up all these people who are actually- who have big audiences who are interested in reading the book. And books are such a visual thing now that you want like a physical copy, one, because it plays way better on, it's like, I have this interview and I can hold up my copy of Husk. It's like, it's a prop. Taking a picture of your iPad, like that doesn't hit the same. And then it's like a reminder on their desk or on their bookshelf. It's like, hey, maybe you should post about this on social media. And so we had that like big fight. They did end up sending them, thankfully. But it was just some of that stuff was really challenging. And so coming out of it, I was like, well, they can get books into bookstores better than I can. They can get some of these big media appearances for sure, if I already have some steam around the book. But a lot of the grassroots marketing that gets this thing going, it's like, I'm going to be doing that anyway. And so if I can find someone who can help me make a book as high quality as the publisher can, then I'd kind of rather do that and take a little bit more of that risk so that I can own more of the upside. And really, my last hangup was just like the book quality because like most self-published books look self-published, especially in fiction. I mean, the covers are just bad. And like the type layout in the book is weird and the paperback looks kind of cheap because it's doing like the cheapest KDP printing or whatever. And it's just like I don't like the feel of a self-published book. And that was a big hang up for me. But I've been very impressed with how these came out using Ingram and the layout work that you guys do because it’s like there are tiny things that give away that this is self-published that I notice, but most people are not going to notice them, and a lot of them too I think we could actually like tweak with another print run. Like you can get it damn close now, and that's pretty exciting because it's like when I sell a copy of Husk through my website, I make like 20 bucks versus the $4 that I make for every Crypto Confidential hardcover that sells through Amazon. There's a big difference.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's another thing that you did uniquely well that I think comes from your sort of entrepreneurial background, which is going direct to customer and having a really novel like launch strategy for Husk. So actually, why don't we do the transition from finished Crypto Confidential, then transition to Husk, then do the launch of Husk? Because I think this is all like...
Nat Eliason: I gave you like 20 threads in that monologue. I should have broke it up more.
Eric Jorgenson: That was so rough. I can cope. Luckily, I know this story well. So, I think it's a really- you had a very good, in my index of traditional publishing stories, you actually had overall a really good experience. Like you got a very, you don't have to share what it is, but I will just say it is like a very generous advance. Like if you're going to be one of those like two books a year that gets shoved down the media's throat, like you'll know. That is a seven-figure advance, which they don't give out a lot of. But even in the world of non-seven-figure advances, you got a great advance. You knew they cared about the book. You knew they saw a market for it. And I think you got a reasonable effort.
Nat Eliason: Yeah, totally. No, no. I'm definitely not in the, oh, trad pub is terrible and nobody should ever do it. It's like, I had a $275,000 advance, which is, I mean, it's a lot of money. Like, the vast majority of books never make that much money. And to get paid-
Eric Jorgenson: I think the median is like 10 grand of a first advance for what it's worth.
Nat Eliason: Oh, yeah. I mean, that's an incredible advance. And to get that amount of money to like go try being an author for two years is like a pretty insanely great deal. And then on top of that, I mean, my editor, Noah, I've said this everywhere. I mean, he was incredible. I've heard so many bad stories about working with editors and publishers where they just like kind of rubber stamp things or don't give very much feedback or it's really shallow. But like Noah really cared about making it a good book, was very invested, had fantastic feedback all along the way, and also knew when to just say like, hey, you're on the right track, like keep going, which sometimes that's kind of all you need too. And so overall just a really great experience. But then some of the frustrations plus the different calculus with fiction versus non-fiction made it way more appealing to go this self-pub route for Husk.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. So that's the- what was the decision to go fiction now for this, for Husk, before you even sort of decided on the route, you got off of a very long nonfiction train, even though you had an incredible nonfiction audience, a very successful advance, and a pretty well received book. I mean, Crypto Confidential is a really good book and I think you got a lot of good feedback on it. And you kind of like put all of that down and turned around and like jumped out the window and started doing fiction.
Nat Eliason: Yeah. Well, a couple of things came in here. I mean, one, going back to the like always jumping between different interests and being curious about a lot of different things, my blog has succeeded despite not having a focus really for the last 10 years and there aren't many of us. And I don't have a huge blog. I mean, it's bigger than the vast majority; it's like 50,000 subscribers, just short of that. But in most cases, you succeed by having a topic that you write about and you keep writing about that topic and you own that topic. And then your non-fiction books, if you're doing like pop business, blogger to book non-fiction, not like history books or politics books or whatever, you kind of like have some of those topics that you keep coming back to and you keep writing about those areas. And what my agent told me was helpful is he was kind of like you're not really going to be able to do- it's going to be very hard for you to do the kind of like non-fiction book deal career that you might want to do because if you want to sell a book on a different topic, you're going to need to build an audience or some proof of interest around that topic first. Like, I really, and part of me still wants to do this, I kind of wanted to do a book on like learning new things, like not in an 80-20 hacky way, but a like actual somewhat accelerated mastery diving into these new areas, figuring them out, sifting through the noise. Like it's something that I'm good at, but I don't really have an audience around that. And so we talked about doing a book on that topic for a bit, and it was just hard to get it to a point where I could sell it unless I went out and built an audience around it for a year or two first. And it became kind of obvious that if I wanted to go the trad nonfiction route, I kind of needed to pick a narrower topic area and focus on it and keep selling books within that topic area. And a lot of the money would probably not come from the book writing. The book writing would support other things like speaking and courses and consulting. And there's nothing wrong with that. Like that's a great career, and there are exceptions to that. I mean, James Clear makes money from a lot of things, but like his book probably makes enough money for him to not do the other things, like Mark Manson, some of these... Yeah, yeah, but the vast majority of non-fiction authors, it's like supporting something else. And for me, I just like the writing. I just wanted to be able to like keep working on the next book and keep writing books, keep writing books, and have that be the thing. And it's pretty hard to do that in a trad non-fiction world, again unless you're like a Robert Caro or something where it's like you're doing these, and like there might not even be much of a space in the market for somebody like that anymore. Anyway, it's a side tangent. I was like, okay, well, one, if I want to like just focus on writing books, fiction actually gives me more freedom to do that than nonfiction. And so that was kind of an interesting consideration. The second interesting part of it was like, I just had so much more fun with the storytelling part of Crypto Confidential than I expected. And I thought that the hard thing was going to be explaining the crypto concepts. But in reality, the hard thing was like telling an exciting story that like pulled people through the book and building a cohesive narrative. And that was what I spent most of that year and change learning how to do. And once I learned how to do that, I kind of didn't want to keep writing the type of non-fiction stuff that I had been writing before. I wanted to keep going hard on the storytelling side. And so, for long-form storytelling, again, unless you're doing history books or whatnot, it's just like fiction would let me do that. And then third, for some of these topics where I'm not an expert by any means, I'm sort of like an armchair philosopher, health guy, whatever, you can get away with that in fiction. There's no way that I could go sell a book about philosophy of mind and get a good book deal, or really get hardly any readers outside of a pretty, I think, narrow bunch of nerds. But if I wrap some of those philosophy of mind concepts in a sci-fi thriller, suddenly it's got a bigger market. Because it doesn't- if you're not interested in the philosophy of mind stuff, like that's fine. But if you like sci-fi with that hint to it, then like here it is. And that was really exciting to me as well. And so, in the middle of one of the Crypto Confidential drafts, I just said, well, let's just start trying to write a novel and see how it goes. And I got like 30,000 words into it, and it wasn't good, and it was completely lost and rambling and not going anywhere, but I was having a lot of fun. And I was like, there might actually be something here that I can actually try to do. And so, I threw that draft in the trash. And then when I finished Crypto Confidential, I started writing a more well planned out draft of a sci-fi novel and ended up finishing it and was like that was really fun. And I think there might actually be something here and I like actually want to go after this. And then kind of the train had left the station.
Eric Jorgenson: How different is the day-to-day of writing a fiction book versus a non-fiction book as somebody who's like very recently done both?
Nat Eliason: Yeah, yeah, the biggest difference really is like in nonfiction, I think you have a pretty good idea of what you're trying to say because what you're trying to say is basically like how the nonfiction book starts. And so, you kind of know your main argument and you know your supporting arguments. And a lot of what you're doing is refining every piece of those arguments to make them as compelling and digestible while still being entertaining and whatnot as you can. And so, there's kind of this top-down approach to it where, yes, there's obviously some bottom-up discovery that's going on, but you're probably not going to be like surprised in some whole new direction by like some piece of your argument. Like you will because writing an essay is always partially it's an act of discovery, but you kind of like keep pulling it back to these main things you're talking about. Whereas in fiction, the more you get to know your world and your characters, the more it kind of surprises you as you go. And so, I have an outline of a rough idea of where I'm going, but with Husk and also with the novella that I'm close to finishing, the ending is completely different than what I thought it was when I started. I thought it was going to be one thing, and then I get to kind of like the climactic moment and I realized that like one of the main characters would actually have done something completely different here or there’s something else that would happen here now that I know this world and these people better and it goes off in this new direction. And then I'm kind of like- Stephen King has this great line that he's just sort of following along narrating what the characters are doing, and you slip into that sometimes too. And that's a really neat experience as well. Like, I was working on Husk 2 earlier this morning, and I have this character I really like but I wasn't sure what to do with him, and I was kind of like, why is he here? And then I sort of let him start monologuing a little bit. And as I was letting him monologue, which is me writing just in his voice, I'm sort of realizing like, oh, he's actually a sort of philosophical foil to this other main character because his approach to coping with death also works but is diametrically opposed to one of the core ideas. And that's really why he's here, is he's providing this other perspective, as well as this exciting persona and this partner on some of these adventures. But like that wasn't something I had planned out. But once he was there and moving around a little bit, it kind of like became obvious, and then in doing that, I suddenly knew this character a lot better. And that's just a fucking weird experience. It's like you're literally, you're just like hallucinating, but then the hallucination kind of like makes sense. And it becomes this like shared hallucination that other people get to enjoy. And you kind of have to like get the shit back on track eventually because you still have to like get to port, but it's very weird in that sense. But also very fun and very rewarding and very exciting.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I could not tell from that explanation, the broad categorization of fiction writers is like you're either a planner or a pantser. Have you heard that before? Like seat of the pants. Which side of that fence do you think you fall on?
Nat Eliason: I've tried pantser where you just start with- Stephen King describes it as he starts with a character and a situation and then just sees where it goes from there, and I've tried that. I mean, maybe if you're Stephen King, you can like actually pull that off. But the number one criticism of Stephen King is that his endings aren't that good. And so, that could be why. But also, maybe if you're that good, you can actually do that. Like, I can't because when I tried it, I just sort of got like stuck in the wilderness, going in circles, unsure what this was leading to. And I found it much more helpful to have some kind of outline of, I like to think, there’s a couple structures that I really like that that are really helpful. The one that I’ll usually start with is called the Seven Point Plot Structure. So it’s a little bit- everyone knows like beginning, middle and end, and Brandon Sanderson has his promise, progress, and payoff which is kind of like beginning, middle and end but a little more structured of like here's where you're- The beginning is when you promise to the reader what kind of experience they're about to have. Then you have the progress of getting the character closer to whatever that goal is. Then you have the payoff at the end. And that's definitely what you want at a high level, but it isn't that useful for actually like putting the story together. And so, one that I really like is called the Seven Point Plot Structure where you start with like the character in their normal world. Like what is this world? Who are they? Kind of like what's going on? Like Luke is farming on Tatooine. And then you have this resolution that's going to happen at the end. So, you jump from the normal world to the resolution. You say, what is this going to resolve to? And it's going to resolve to Luke is a Jedi with his friends, and he's destroyed the Death Star. And then in between those, you say, okay, what is the like midpoint where your character stops reacting to the world that they are in, stops like being an observer, stops being a like character in this world and becomes somebody with like autonomy who's driving the action forward, who is like doing things? And this is like kind of around the middle where Luke just decides like yes, we are going to go to destroy the Death Star, like I am going to go fight Vader, like I am going to do these things. Like Obi Wan has been pushing him a little bit, but he kind of has this click where he's like, no, I'm doing that now. And then you say, okay, well, how do we go from like farm boy on Tatooine to- Is it Tatooine? No, it's something else, isn't it? No, it is... to deciding to go fight the evil head of the galaxy. And so, it’s like, well, there’s got to be some- there’s got to be the inciting incident where he goes from the normal world to this like strange new world. And that's meeting Kenobi and getting the lightsaber, and then you say, okay, now we jump back to the end and we say what's going to be the like everything is lost, like I can't do this, I'm going to fail moment. And you could pick a couple where it's like, oh, Obi Wan dies. Like the missiles miss the- making it into the Death Star. Then you have the like final moment where they like find the secret that allows them to solve the big problem, the like final key to unlock their goal and that's like, okay, he closes his eyes, he embraces the force, the missiles go into the Death Star. And then there's like one more, which is like, after the inciting incident, what ups the stakes? Like what makes it a lot worse? So that he is thrust into having to no longer be a passenger, but become a driver in this world. And so, you can kind of like think of those seven, and they give you this like initial outline for the book. And then from those seven, you can say, okay, from normal world to inciting incident, that might be like five or ten scenes. And a scene is going to be a character in a situation who wants something, and then they either get it or don't get it. And so, from that, now you've maybe got like 50 to 100 scenes. And once I have that, then I feel like I can actually start writing them. And within three or four or five scenes, it's like kind of gone off the rails and I start having to like delete things and move things and change things and like I discover new stuff, but it gives a little bit of something to get started. And if you listen to some of these really prolific authors, they'll often say a similar thing where it's like, yeah, I outline, but once I'm in the outline, it's kind of constantly changing and moving around. And that's what I found to be the most helpful is I start with this outline, I start with these like 50 to 70 scenes or whatever, and then every few days as I'm drafting, I'm going back and looking at the outline and saying like, okay, what needs to change here? What has changed here? What should I shift? I mean, this morning or yesterday, this past week, I've been struggling with like what to do in part of the middle of Husk 2 because I know that it has to go from this turning point to this kind of climactic thing, but I wasn't really sure like what was going on in the middle there. And then, just like in the process of writing this, where I was like, oh, it's this. Like, this is what's- this is these five scenes that are missing. And now that chunk of the outline is filled. And I kind of had the confidence that if I just started writing, I would eventually figure out what went in that gap. And sure enough, it like popped out 50,000 words into it. So, it's kind of this just like flow back and forth between the two. And I think at the end of the day, that's what like most people are doing, unless you're truly a like discovery pantser writer, which is just like a different breed that is really impressive.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, if George R.R. Martin is truly pantsing this level of like character complexity and history, like I just- but also like ending challenges. Like he's on the cusp of closing it out for a long time without...
Nat Eliason: Yeah, yeah, I mean, that could be why it's taken him 13 years or whatever to do Winds of Winter is he's just like not sure how to... somebody mentioned this with Robert Jordan too where it's like, this isn't like a terribly nice thing to say, but like people will know what I mean when I say this, like he kind of got the easy way out of finishing his story in the sense of like by not finishing it and leaving the ending open for somebody else to come in who didn't have as much of the like emotional weight of trying to piece all this together, it might have actually been easier for Sanderson to come in and wrap it up then it would have been for Jordan to do it. And so, like that didn't really work with Game of Thrones with the final TV season, but maybe another writer, not a TV producer or whatnot, could come in and wrap it up in a way that would be even more satisfying to Martin than it would be for him to do it himself.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I didn't have as much, I didn't have beef with the Game of Thrones ending, but I know a lot of people did. But Patrick Rothfuss I know has been like stuck on his final input for a really long time. Frank Herbert is, I think, pretty similar to Robert Jordan, they just kind of like started really strong with Dune, and even Dune Messiah, but he just kind of like kept writing into, either stopping or transitioning or handing somebody else the reins or outright giving up. And it just kind of like, the series petered out in a way that I think... I am a Harry Potter JK Rowling stan, but it is unbelievably impressive the tidiness of that whole series and how well it was planned from the very beginning and how fast she wrote it. So, I think part of that whole phenomenon is that like all those books were delivered within a- I think published within a 14 year time span or something, 13 maybe, and like movies starting along the way, and it's because she planned so methodically from the very start. And that's part of what made it so satisfying is the ending is mirrored 15 years later as a reader what happened in book one in the final-final scenes. And that was incredible.
Nat Eliason: Yeah, and that's just like- It's so impressive to me now when an author really pulls that off. And I always wonder too, it's like how much did you really have planned versus pulled together at the end. But yeah, for Rowling, there's certain things where it's just like you had to have some idea of this from the get-go because the like Voldemort dying, trying to kill Harry and having the scars and having the like intrusive thoughts and the parcel tongue and everything. It's like you clearly had some idea of the Horcrux from book one, even though you didn't introduce it until book six.
Eric Jorgenson: Well, this is actually like, I wonder, I don't know how intentional it was, but the seven acts or the seven point plot structure, there are seven books in the Harry Potter series and characters are sort of introduced and started and lost in roughly parallel lines on either side. Like you meet Sirius in book three, you lose him in book five, you meet Dumbledore in one, but you lose him in six. Harry becomes, in book four, Voldemort actually reveals himself as a real manifested human physical threat in a way that he was just kind of like a phantom for the first three books. And that's the turning point where Harry’s like, oh, fuck, I got to fight this dude. And then the prophecy is revealed in book five, which ups the stakes, as you described. And then six, he sort of loses his support system, and seven goes into like the climax where Harry is a wizard with his friends destroying the evil. Like that's a pretty cool...
Nat Eliason: That's a really neat way to think about it. Yeah, you're right.
Eric Jorgenson: Cool. Okay. Sorry. That was a fun riff. All right. So Husk, wrote the first draft, threw it in the trash, started a new outline, filled out this whole thing, discovered your process as a science fiction author, had your manuscript, didn't want to go trad pub again, brought it to Scribe, and we've been very happy to, proud and honored to do the work to get it into a physical book and help you get it out. But I want to focus, I want to like talk about your unique, where your entrepreneurial skills, direct to consumer and how you're like taking this book to market because I think it's really cool. And I think a lot of authors can learn from kind of like how you're experimenting with the formats, the packages and the sales and things like that.
Nat Eliason: Yeah, yeah. So, once I was getting close to publishing, one kind of crazy thing about selling books is that, for the most part, you're going to be selling through Amazon and through other bookstores. And when you do that, you get no relationship with your readers at all, which is kind of wild. It's like, if somebody could subscribe to your product or to your SaaS tool, and you had no idea who they were, or if they could buy something from your online store or come into your store and you just have like no connection to them whatsoever, like that's sort of wild. And I know that's the case for a lot of products that sell through stores or sell through Amazon or whatnot, but as an author, it is kind of like a personal thing and people do build relationships with authors. And I think that, as like a small aside, I think that's why authors are going to have a lot of defensibility in the AI era because people will still want an individual who they're like getting a perspective from and whatnot. And so even if that individual is using AI to assist their work, it'll still be a reflection of them and their voice and their perspective and their tastes. And that relationship is really important. So, when we were wrapping up production on Husk and I was getting ready to get on Amazon and do pre-sales and everything, I kind of thought it would be fun to try doing direct sales through my own site for the pre-sale bundle or for the pre-sales because, I mean, one, you're just going to make more money if you sell through your site instead of through Amazon. Like you're not doing Amazon's cut, you're going to take home more even when you factor in shipping and things. And if you're selling through your own Shopify store, then you're actually getting your readers' email addresses or even mailing addresses and things like that. And that's a pretty powerful thing to have for when you publish subsequent books or when you want to get reviews or when you want to do any of this other stuff that goes into supporting your book. So what I decided to do was I made a Shopify store on my site. So, it's just shop.nateliason.com where I'm going to sell my books. And there's only two books there right now. It's Husk and Crypto Confidential, but over time, there will be more. And the ones that I sell on my site, I'll have signed copies. So, Amazon, you'll be able to just get like a normal hardcover, but through my site, you'll be able to get a signed one. And I've done fulfillment before because I had an e-commerce business selling tea. That was the cafe that I alluded to earlier. So I kind of like know the nuts and bolts of how this works. And I figured like there's almost no cost to running this experiment. Like, I may as well try it and see what happens. If it fails, I can just do Amazon all the way, like most people do, next time. But I put up one blog post and a post on Twitter kind of announcing it, saying like, hey, I'm going to do this, if you want to pre-order Husk, pre-order it through me, and you'll get a signed hardcover as well as the ePub and the audiobook for free. So this is something that people have wanted a lot, is a bundle to get multiple formats of the book. And it doesn't make any sense for trad pub books because those are technically different rights and it's really messy to combine them, and Amazon makes more money if they don't combine them, and so they don't want to do it. And there's really no way to do it through the traditional channels, but if I'm distributing it through my site, I can do it. And so I put that up and basically said, yeah, for the price of the hardcover, you get a signed one plus the digital versions and just sent the email and posted on Twitter and have sold like 220 copies or so that way, which is not an insane number of copies, I need to sell more than that to like recoup my costs and everything, but for a, I mean, for a first fiction book, that's an incredible number of pre-orders, especially for a like self-published one and especially for a self-published first novel on my own store and not on Amazon. That's like a really, I think, fantastic outcome. And like, sure, it's...
Eric Jorgenson: And where they're not getting it immediately. It's still like pre-ordering it. So, you still need to like- that's the Kickstarter conversion rate too, people who are willing to wait.
Nat Eliason: Totally. And so that was like pretty validating, I felt. And the downside of it is that I'm not getting those sales on Amazon during launch week. So I might not get the same Amazon pop that I would if I had just waited and pushed everyone to Amazon during launch week. But I also feel like, the flip side of that is I'm going to send all 200 of these books like a week before publication date. So I'm going to actually send it to them early. I haven't like told the people yet, but I'm going to try to get it to them up to a week before the pub date. So, they'll have some time to maybe like start reading it or to be able to like snap a picture or whatever on launch day. And so that's like 200 possible people helping promote it when it comes out that I wouldn't have had otherwise. It's people who can like leave reviews the first week who wouldn't have been able to otherwise. Like, I think it's a lot of other cool benefits from it that I wouldn't get by purely doing the Amazon route. So I feel really good about that. And the other thing that's neat is in the indie fiction world, there's a pretty strong subculture of buying books directly from authors. They advocate for it a lot more, for various reasons, one, to support authors, two, because Amazon's run by an evil billionaire, and you shouldn't give him any money. But it's like, whatever the reason is, I'm happy to lean on that excitement and have my own store for fulfillment as well as Amazon. Because it's like, yeah, you just get that better relationship with the customer and you can make more money off of it. So, I'm excited to see where that goes.
Eric Jorgenson: And it's awesome for a reader to get three formats of a book for, what, 30 bucks? And directly support the author. How are you- are you literally doing your own fulfillment, like in your kitchen table garage situation?
Nat Eliason: Yeah, I have an office. So I've got 500 hardcovers coming to the office in 34 UPS boxes. My driver's going to kill me, I think. But I figured I'd over-order because I'm going to do a last call email and that might sell another like 100 copies or something. And then I'll have the others for shipping out over the next months and years. Because it's like you don't want to have to pay the shipping costs and the whatever multiple times. So, it just made it more efficient. But yeah, and then I'm just going to- I've got my label printer and my mailers and stuff and ship them out from here. I mean, my dream and my like stretch goal is to actually have a warehouse at some point or a meaningful 3pl setup where I'm actually doing enough volume through my own store that it makes sense to store them elsewhere because that just seems romantic and cool. But this is how you get there eventually. And even though it's not a $1,000 an hour use of my time, I really enjoy printing labels and putting them on packages and taking them to the UPS store and sending them to people, like it makes me happy. And I can listen to a podcast while I do it. And there is something romantic about it. It's like if I succeed at this and in 10 years, I have that warehouse or whatnot, this is going to be a very like fond era to look back on.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it's part of the becoming an author montage... shipping your own books. And there's something, like that is a- I always ask authors what they're like, what their highs and lows are through the journey, like whether creative or like what are they most going to remember from this year of this book, and sometimes it's seeing their cover for the first time or printing out the manuscript and like sitting in a cafe with a red pen. Sometimes it's like the most canonical is like holding the physical book for the first time. But I think an underrated one is like packing and shipping your own copies to your first 50 readers, 100 readers, friends, customers, clients. Because that's really like where the interaction with the real world starts to happen.
Nat Eliason: It's such a great experience. Yeah. And getting to open the box for the first time and pull out the books. Yeah, you guys did a really great job with the packaging. The cover's sick. And the font, the act headers and stuff and then the fonts for the chapter headers, like it all looks really cool, really good. And that was very exciting to like get to see it and hold it and then, yeah, to send it off to people. Like that's pretty awesome.
Eric Jorgenson: For something that's like been in your head for three years, to see how the design transforms it into like a more real thing that other people can relate to.
Nat Eliason: And did you... go ahead.
Eric Jorgenson: I was going to- no, go ahead, please.
Nat Eliason: No, I was going to say the last thing on that too is just like there is also this just like sense of, relief is the wrong word, but like satisfied accomplishment with finishing the book and getting it to this stage too. Because, I mean, I was reading Neuromancer a month ago, and that book came out in like the 80s or something. And so, people are still reading it 40 years later. And again, it's like there's almost no other product in the world where you can make it and finish it and people might still be buying that exact same product unchanged in 40 years. That's really cool to think about.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, and you've run an agency and a course and building businesses, you're fighting entropy so hard and forever, forever. That thing will be attacked. It'll erode, it'll be attacked. Like it's a very dynamic thing, and you're just never done. You're never done building a business. You have to kind of like sell it or shut it down or know that like it'll get eaten at some point. And there's something so satisfying about writing a book because you are at one point done, and it will live on, and it will outlive you, and that's a really- it's a little bit of an artistic pursuit in that because you can just be a craftsperson about this thing and know that like there is a finish line at some point, that you can just like call it done and hand it off and get on to the next one. I love that, that feeling.
Nat Eliason: Yeah. I mean, and like you said, it's somebody coming from like agency work and, I mean, doing online courses, like I did this AI course earlier this year, and it had this crazy blowout launch, and now five months later, there there's like 100 competitors and everyone's trying to capitalize on that. And it would have to become my complete full-time thing with employees and all that just to keep the place in the market that I had. And that could be a really good business. But to be working on something that's the polar opposite, where I launched that course with a tweet, and in the first weekend, it did like six figures in revenue. Like it might take three or four years before Husk does six figures in revenue, like hopefully a lot less than that, but it's possible. Like technically it could never do that, but it could also just like slow roll keep growing for 5, 10, 15 years. And I've never really worked on something where that's a possibility before. And that's a really nice experience.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it changes your perspective a lot. And in the same way, I've seen- I've been thinking about, when you see the Harry Potter like theme park or a Hobbit house in real life or there's a whole handful of examples of like if you write something sufficiently powerful, in like 10 years or 50 years or 100 years, someone will build the thing that you had in your head that you wrote down... maybe it's Palmer Luckey comes around and builds VR because of Snow Crash or whatever, or Ready Player One. Like the influence that books have as like the headwaters of culture, I think sci-fi in particular is like really incredible, high leverage, sort of a neck that turns the head of a lot of people over a course of decades.
Nat Eliason: Yeah. I mean, the number of businesses and things that have spawned from, like you said, Snow Crash, or, I mean, Neuromancer invented the term cyberspace. Like that just wasn't a word before that book came out and he came up with it, and we use that word all the time now. Like that's pretty cool.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's so awesome. Okay, so tell me, as we kind of like wrap up here, paint me a picture of like your- how you hope the rest of this sort of author career unfolds, maybe like near term, long term. What's your ideal vision?
Nat Eliason: I mean, the one thing that I love about the fiction publishing world is that the attitude in like a lot of nonfiction stuff is, okay, go build the audience, get the email subscribers, like do the other stuff and focus on those to sell the book. And the conventional wisdom, and I'm not saying that's wrong, like that is a very good strategy, and the conventional wisdom in fiction is like the best way to market your book is to write the next one. And so, with something like Husk, Husk is book one of what I think is going to be a trilogy in this universe, and within the universe, I think there will be other offshoot novels and novellas. And so, with Husk coming out, I already have the novella that's kind of like related to it. It's in the same universe, but can be read in either order. You could read it before or after. Like I've already got that decently drafted. And so, I'm doing marketing, obviously. I'm going to try to get Husk in as many hands as possible. And I recognize that in some ways the best thing I can do for it is to just keep writing the next books in the series and keep talking about them and keep getting them out. Because if you think about the books in the series that you've really enjoyed, you often don't pick them up until it's the second or third or fourth or fifth in the series. I didn't read Three-Body Problem until all three were already out. Or Red Rising I think I picked up after the third book had came out. I just absolutely binged through the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, which is incredibly good fun. And the only reason it hit my radar was that book seven just came out and I read all seven books in a month. So, it's like... some of this is just like you keep building the universe, keep building the portfolio, and the more books you have, the more ways you have to reach people. And once they find you through one of them, they're going to hopefully go read two or three or four of them. And so, for the near future, my focus is like, okay, build out this world, get it to a point where I'm like very happy with it, and like I know there are at least five books, maybe more, so the three core ones, then two tangential ones, and then I already have ideas for completely separate series that I want to do. And now it's becoming a problem of like, okay, how the hell do I fit these in? Like I can't. And going back to the like learning how to focus, there's this other book that I really want to do, but it's not in the Meru, Husk universe. And so, I'm like, okay, I just kind of got to wait like two years and then I can come back to it and see if it's still of focus. That's hard. But it is the way that you pull this off, I think, is that laser focus and the supporting assets before you move on to less direct supporting ones.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I mean, by the time you finish a book, it's very easy for three really good next book ideas to have come up. And that's a painful equation.
Nat Eliason: Yeah. And a book is like a six to twelve to twenty-four month commitment, and you only have so many of those in your life. So, which ideas are good enough to spend them on? Like, it can be, it's a very mortalizing thought to have. It's like, okay, if each book takes a year and I'm 32 and I do this until I'm 82 or whatever, it's like, all right, I've got 50 books. Like, that's a lot of books, but it's also not that many books. It does require pretty diligent selection, and that's scary, but yeah.
Eric Jorgenson: I think it's a good sign when the opportunity cost keeps going up, when your bar for new opportunities, new ideas, new projects keeps rising, like it's painful to pass on something that was maybe a life-changing idea five years ago or three years ago, but that's the game. And somebody will eagerly snap that up and we can hand those off to the next... It's interesting when you do look at a series, a world like this, you got eight books, it does change the math a little bit. Your average lifetime customer value is not five bucks a book or 20 bucks a book. It could be if somebody buys eight books from you directly, the full package, that's 150 bucks a person.
Nat Eliason: Well, that's what they say about ads. If you're getting into the Amazon ads game for self-published fiction authors, there's a big focus on series because if somebody reads one book in a series, there's a high likelihood they'll read subsequent ones. But there's a much lower likelihood that they'll jump to a completely unrelated book in your bibliography. And so, people will like wait until they get two or three books out before they start doing ads, and then they'll heavily discount the first book but they make these subsequent ones a little bit more expensive because once they're committed to the world, they'll pay $7.99 for an e-book versus they might only want to pay $2.99 or get Kindle Unlimited if they aren't as sold on it. And so, like you said, there is this like economic side to it too that's kind of interesting to think about the different levers for.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I love that. Okay. I'm so glad to be like a fan and follower and in your orbit. I'm so excited to see where this career takes you, and it's been really secondhand satisfying to see you like find this groove and really get into it. I mean, you're a good follow in the sense of you are very open about your process and how diligent you're being about your 3,000 words a day and here's my spreadsheet and work in public and just really opening up the process of what it's like to be a full-time author and how to grind through that first five years and build this groundswell and even between different formats and different channels and everything that you're sharing. It's just been a huge pleasure to watch and I know we're still in early innings.
Nat Eliason: Yeah, thanks, man. I really appreciate it. And I really appreciate how supportive you've been through this process too and just getting to talk about self-publishing and publishing in general and also just like having Scribe there to help with getting the book together. Like, it's been really awesome working together too. So I’m excited to do a lot more.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, you gave incredible feedback on multiple drafts of different books that I've written, and hopefully I've at least been some small amount of help for some of these. But yeah, it's a really- I know I am only where I am because so many authors ahead of me were willing to kind of pay it forward and support somebody who is like a no-name DM and give advice. And hopefully by sharing what we're going through and sharing what we know and what we think we know and what works and what hasn't, other people can, yeah, continue rolling with that. Because I think books are a super important, beautiful medium that deserve to stay really core to culture, even in a very digital, high dopamine, crazy app... world. It's a really important thing and a beautiful thing. And it's good to have fellows in this fight. All right. Appreciate you, man. Everybody go buy Husk and whatever comes next. And yeah, follow Nat if you have any aspirations at all about reading good books or writing them for sure, he's a good one and will teach you a lot. Thanks for coming on.
Nat Eliason: Thanks for having me.