Becoming A Writer - Nat Eliason on his upcoming fiction release, traditional publishing vs. self-publishing, AI tools, tinkering, readers, launch plans

[01:15] Paul: Yeah. Welcome to The Pathless Path podcast, Nat.

[01:19] Nat Eliason: Good to be here. I'm excited to chat. I'm excited to be on this self-publishing journey with you.

[01:25] Paul: Finally, I am glad you reached out to me. I had not been running my podcast. I actually shut it down while writing my book last year because I found that part-time taking care of my daughter, writing a book, and also running a podcast for free and fun wasn't working.

[01:46] Nat Eliason: Yeah.

[01:46] Paul: And I was actually confused when you texted me. I thought you wanted me to, like, go on your podcast. But it was like, you know what, we're gonna, we're gonna fire this thing up. I think I get a lot of energy from it and it actually feeds a lot of my ideas. So first question for you, I'd love to hear like, what's like your relationship with like tinkering and playtime in terms of like feeding your creative energy?

[02:13] Nat Eliason: That's a good question. I feel like I used to do a lot more of exploring wide, and I think that was definitely what defined a lot of my twenties and my time in college and my time immediately after in like my early work years. And over time that like aperture has just narrowed more and more where I don't, I don't feel as called to like go off in some completely orthogonal direction and try something completely new, in part just because I don't have as much disposable time for those things. You know, you just mentioned having to set the podcast aside for a bit between, bookwork and your daughter. And it's like, yeah, once you have kids and other work, the, like the, the time for some of those things trickles away, but also, also in a good way.

And so this, this is a roundabout way of saying that like my, my tinkering and exploring has really confined itself to a much narrower field of like fitness. So, you know, I just enjoy various kinds of like fitness, strength and cardio and like got into high rocks this year and that's been a lot of fun with our mutual friend Alex Hardy and some of the other guys here in Austin and then books really and writing, you know, I just, I have, I think realized from the last 10 years of work that writing really is my thing. You know, it's something that I'm decently good at and can get better at and something where I'm like willing to put in the work to keep getting better and I can sit down and write for, 3, 4, 5 hours a day and be pretty productive doing that and not get tired of it. And that's not something most people can do, even people who like want to write.

And so it's like, I clearly have something here and I'm really enjoying it and just kind of keep wanting to get better at that and try new things and like read different books to explore other ways that I might wanna write. And, uh, I don't know, you know, it's just been, it's been really fun. It's been fun to tinker, tinker within narrower domains.

[04:42] Paul: Nice. Yeah. What, um, why did it take so long to wake up to writing? I actually have a similar story. Like when I look back, it's, I was literally writing throughout everything.

[04:54] Nat Eliason: Yeah.

[04:54] Paul: But I always saw it as this silly thing. And even when I quit my job, it was like, all right, I have to freelance to fund this writing, silly writing habit. I have. And even when I published my first book, I was like, well, probably not going to make money from this. I need to keep funding this silly hobby. What was it like early on for you and how did that evolve over time?

[05:20] Nat Eliason: I mean, writing, it started as just a means to an end. I was in college, I was a philosophy major, but I was really interested in tech, entrepreneurship, startups. And I think looking back, what I was really interested in was figuring out a way to hack the money-making system so that I didn't have to work anymore so that I could like go do other things. I didn't really know what those other things were, but doing some sort of entrepreneurship startup, like passive income lifestyle seemed like the secret to like get away with not having to work. And so I was pretty fixated on that. I tried doing a startup in college that didn't go anywhere.

And then I was like senior fall with a philosophy major and bad grades and basically no job prospects. And so I, I was like, okay, well I want to find a way to work at a startup or maybe work for myself. And this was the early era of content marketing. So, I mean, we're, we're dating ourselves here. This was 12 years ago and this was when Buffer, the social media scheduling tool, was like the hottest kid in town in terms of content marketing. And, you know, Tim Ferriss's blog was really big and you had RSS feeds and like nobody really had email newsletters the way they have today.

There was no Substack. There really wasn't like Twitter, you know, it was just like a totally different era, but there was demand for people who could do content marketing, you know, marketing a product through blogging. And I was a decent writer from studying philosophy and I was like, okay, well I'll figure out how to do content marketing and that will get me into tech. And then I just ended up getting really good at content marketing, which then turned into getting really good at SEO and kind of like figured out the SEO game for a few years.

There was this like very fun period in 2016, '17, '18, where between like all the clients I was working with through my marketing agency Growth Machine, there were just like millions and millions and millions and millions of page views per month that people were hitting across all these companies that were like downstream of the stuff that I had figured out. But similar to you, the writing, was always this kind of like means to an end. It was like, oh, the writing can't be the thing. The writing is how I start this agency business and that's gonna be, but you know, that building the agency and like hiring people and scaling that, you know, that's what's gonna pay off. And then it was, okay, writing content is how I get into crypto, but then like being in crypto and working in crypto, like that's gonna be how I make the money.

Uh, and you know, after a little bit, and honestly, once I had enough of a cash cushion to justify it, I was just kind of like, you know what, maybe like just writing can be the thing. And writing like books in particular as a career is maybe one of the most bimodal careers there is because 99. 99% of people who ever set out to write a book will never make a living doing it. You know, you, you won't finish the book, right? And even if you do finish the book, you either might not get a deal for it or you might not sell any copies. And then even if you do get a deal or even if you do start selling copies, it might never be enough to like pay your bills and whatever, right?

The, the long tail of people earning much smaller amounts from books is like quite high, but, or it's, you know, the vast majority of people who get into it. But then at, at the other end, at the success end, there's almost no profession where an individual working alone has more leverage. Because if you're Stephen King, you can sit in your house in Maine and put out a book every year and get paid, you know, $5 to $10 million per book, plus all of the residuals on every other book you've written. And like, not need to build a business or like build a team, like doing this, like you can literally just write and be one of the most like per-employee profitable businesses in the world. And so it is simultaneously this like, um, you know, kind of like numerically quite risky, but also potentially incredibly high leverage, incredibly successful, lucrative career.

And like, that's a little exciting too, you know, it's a little, it's a little fun.

[10:11] Paul: Yeah.

[10:12] Nat Eliason: And I, I've, I've sort of always had this mentality for better or worse that like, if there's one other person out there doing this successfully, then I can probably figure out how to do it too. And there's plenty of people who are, you know, doing incredibly well with self-published fiction. And I find that very inspiring. And that's what's been driving a lot of my focus for the last year and change.

[10:37] Paul: Yeah. And we should mention at this point, I'll probably throw it in at the beginning too, author of two books, Crypto Confidential and Husk. I loved both of them. It's a beautiful cover. I love this cover.

[10:51] Nat Eliason: They did a really good job. It came out great. Yeah, I'm a huge fan. I think the hardcover is going to look even nicer. It should be in next week.

[10:59] Paul: That's awesome. Yeah. And so I'm like blown away just as a friend and fellow writer. Going from nonfiction to fiction is so hard.

[11:09] Nat Eliason: It's really hard.

[11:10] Paul: I've been dabbling with fiction just for fun. Like, yeah, I haven't really shared much, but yeah, steep learning curve.

[11:18] Nat Eliason: Yeah. Yeah. Steep learning curve. I mean, thankfully I had a bit of a forcing function to figure it out because Crypto Confidential was so narrative-driven. And I didn't really think about that at all when I got into it. I just sort of naively assumed that if I knew how to write articles, then I would know how to write an 80,000-word cohesive narrative.

And I absolutely did not. And so that was a whole, like very, very challenging learning journey, but, you know, incredibly satisfying at the end of it. And so satisfying that at the end of it, I was like, I don't really care as much about focusing on nonfiction anymore. Like, I'm enjoying the storytelling so much more. I just want to focus there.

[12:02] Paul: Yeah. And the writing, that's sort of something I want to talk about. You, you wrote this book, Crypto Confidential. You probably could have started with stuff that was more aligned with some of the self-improvement stuff you've written in the past and maybe even like been more successful with that in terms of book sales, right? Yeah. There's sort of this interesting arbitrage opportunity where you can take sort of like internet-type communications, which totally hasn't mapped to the traditional publishing world yet.

Like they haven't caught up, but people love this kind of content. Like everyone's reading the internet all the time.

[12:42] Nat Eliason: Yeah.

[12:42] Paul: And traditional publishing is still, uh, sort of nudging authors who don't push back to like still write this sort of, uh, stuff that in my opinion feels more like the '90s or 2000s. Yeah.

[12:55] Nat Eliason: I mean, it sells though, right? And this is what I was like, yeah.

[12:59] Paul: And go back to, I'm just too stubborn, aren't I?

[13:02] Nat Eliason: I know. No, me too.

[13:04] Paul: And I, I, I feel like the, How to Crush The Pathless Path: 10 Steps to Become Free and Rich. And exactly, it probably would sell more.

[13:15] Nat Eliason: Yeah. That, and that's the thing is like, they, they are good at selling books and they, they know what is selling now, but they can't predict the next Atomic Habits. Right. And Atomic Habits was such a big deal because James was really the first blogger to get a book deal like that, as far as I can recall. You know, like Ramit had I Will Teach You to Be Rich, which was very successful, but obviously—

[13:45] Paul: what you mean is James got like a big offer?

[13:49] Nat Eliason: Well, he got a big offer and he got an offer to create a nonfiction business self-help book based on his blog and newsletter as his credentials. And that's—

[14:04] Paul: Yeah, that makes sense. 'Cause you had people like Tim Ferriss, but the blog sort of came after 4-Hour Workweek.

[14:09] Nat Eliason: Yeah, the blog came after for Tim and he, I mean, and he got a tiny, tiny book deal, right? Like he, and you know, he, and he really drove that success and he was kind of a standout in that sense. And he, he had, I think some of the, the business connections to lean on, which I guess James probably did too. But you know, when James got, and actually I think James got his book deal in 2017. So Tim Ferriss was still kind of like coming up, right? Like 4-Hour Workweek was obviously selling really well and I think he'd already done 4-Hour Body by that point too.

But you know, I think it was a big risk for a publisher to say like, okay, yeah, like you have a blog where you write about habits, like we'll give you a book deal. And then it's like the bestselling nonfiction book of all time, right? And so there's going to be the next, I think James Clear, who figures out— and now every nonfiction self-help like blog turned author book gets sculpted into a similar format as Atomic Habits. And you can like open up the table of contents of a nonfiction book and you can—

[15:14] Paul: they're all so similar.

[15:16] Nat Eliason: You can immediately tell that they used one of the editors who is sort of like going off the Atomic Habits format, right? And kind of like helping you turn your blog posts into this similar vehicle. And sometimes it works really well, but a lot of times it just like doesn't hit the same. Right. And so I think there will be someone who figures out what that next format is. Maybe it'll be you.

Hopefully it'll be you.

[15:43] Paul: We'll see. Yeah, I think there's this interesting push-pull if you're— I sort of had a mindset even before I wrote my first book, I want to write for like a really long time. And if that's the case, I need to sort of surrender to where my actual curiosity and interests go in terms of writing style and what sort of demands to come through in your writing. It seems like you've been on a similar journey too, right? Yeah. Maybe the business decision is to do more nonfiction, but I've seen you completely get captured by fiction and it's, it's clear like you're having a lot of fun.

[16:23] Nat Eliason: Yeah. Well, I think if the, you know, one thing that I realized as I looked at the professions more was that, you know, for most nonfiction writers, the, the business is not the books. Yeah. Occasionally you'll have somebody like a James Clear or a Mark Manson or a Ryan Holiday where the books do become the business. But you have a lot more, significantly more cases where the book is like supplementing some other business. It's speaking, it's coaching, it's conferences, it's courses, it's, you know, or it's just like a thing they do on the side while they, while they do other work.

If you, but if you want to be able to just like sit down and write books and then like publish them and move on to the next one. Like, I think there's, there's almost more opportunities to do that in fiction because at least in nonfiction, I only have so many ideas and I can only like rehash them so many times. And so there's a little bit of this like risk to it where if that, if the one or two books that like flow fully capture those ideas don't do well, then I have to like go figure out new ideas or something, right? Like it, and you see this a lot in nonfiction where a nonfiction author will have like a really great couple of books and then they kind of get like stuck talking about those same ideas over and over again. And you pick up like their 4th or 5th or 6th book and you're like, nah, I've kind of already read this, right? And I sort of didn't wanna fall into that trap.

And the fun thing with fiction is it's like, I just, I feel like I have infinite ideas for worlds or characters or stories. And it's very quickly getting to the point where I just like, you know, I'm, I'm already starting to have to, um, triage them a little bit of like, okay, well I'm just, I may be never going to get to this story. And that's like a little sad because, you know, as you know, books take quite a while to do, even, even in like the craziest sprint, it's like a 6-month, process, which means if we're, you know, in our 30s, we get to maybe do 120 before we die. And that would be like at the extremely high range. Um, it's probably closer to 50, 60, 70, if that.

[18:46] Paul: So you've gotta find your Asimov limit.

[18:50] Nat Eliason: I know, I know. Right. Although, but even with Asimov, you know, it's like, like, okay, yes, he wrote and edited 400 books. But most people can only name like 2, right?

[19:00] Paul: Yeah.

[19:01] Nat Eliason: Right.

[19:01] Paul: He, he might have done better just doing 100.

[19:04] Nat Eliason: Yeah. Uh, and sort of like the same with, uh, you know, somebody like Stephen King where he's written, I think, or he's published 80 books and yeah, I could probably name 2 or 3. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, okay, Shining, Carrie, Dark Tower, right? Whatever the most recent one was, Fairy Tale and stuff like.

Um, and, and so that's the other thing with fiction too, is it is kind of a numbers game. Like it's extremely rare that you have a fiction author who puts out their first book and it's just like a bestseller. You know, you, you don't really have any, um, who's To Kill a Mockingbird? Uh, Harper Lee, right?

[19:44] Paul: Where, yeah, she was working as an airline reservations person. Apparently.

[19:49] Nat Eliason: Yeah. And like she just published that one book and then didn't publish any others for what, like 30 years? And you know, that, that one book did all, like, those stories don't really happen. The vast majority of stories are a lot closer to, uh, like the one Brandon Sanderson tells where the first book he got a deal for was his 7th or 8th book. And the first book that really took off was his 14th. You know, like you, you've kind of got to write a lot of books.

But that's exciting to me because I like writing books. That's the thing that I want to do.

[20:24] Paul: Yeah. And, and so it does take this long-term mindset. But take me into the mind of Nat Eliason, who has this brain of how do I hack the system? How do I arbitrage my way to skipping some of the steps that other people are stubbornly taking?

[20:42] Nat Eliason: Yeah, I mean, so, you know, people discover novels all of the obvious ways, right? Yeah. So word of mouth is really going to always be the main driver with, with any book sales. But then the question is, okay, like how do you hack word of mouth? And the big difference between fiction and nonfiction is that in nonfiction, it's very common to build an audience before you publish your book because you, you know, have some ideas that you wanna talk about. And so you start writing blog posts or tweets or whatever about those ideas.

And then eventually you get the book deal and the people who are already interested in your ideas go and buy the book. And sometimes that works really well, right? Because the book gives you a space to, expand on it, codify it, a way for your ideas to spread. Sometimes it works really poorly, right? Like we've seen plenty examples of this, of people with like big audiences on a topic who then try to write a book on the topic and like no one buys it because they kind of feel like they've already learned everything that they need to on that topic from that person's tweets and blog posts and whatever. So like, you know, that can go either way.

But in fiction, the model is— or the prevailing wisdom is flipped. Which is you shouldn't really bother trying to build an audience at all until you have at least one, but ideally two or three books out, because why would anybody follow you if they haven't read one of your books and enjoyed it? And it, which is, which if I remember right, is basically what you did with Pathless Path too, right? Like you, you basically wrote the book and didn't have much of an audience at all when you wrote it, and then it came out and you've kind of like built your audience off the back of that, right?

[22:31] Paul: Yeah, I, and in some ways it's very narrative driven. It's narrative driven around my, my life. And yeah, I hadn't written much of that style of writing. I sort of pushed beyond my capacity in writing the book. And so what happened was the people that had followed me, I had like 3,000 newsletter subscribers. I had like 4,000 Twitter subscribers.

[22:53] Nat Eliason: That's pretty good. Yeah.

[22:55] Paul: And. Everyone was like shocked at like how different the book was. And like, I think it was above stuff I had written before. So there was this shock of like, then this word of mouth started spreading. And really the only thing I've done to lean into that, I literally did this yesterday. I had a random person I didn't know on Substack mention my book.

I just DM'd her. She said she's gifting it to friends. So I just DM'd her and said, hey, let me send you 5 books.

[23:25] Nat Eliason: That's awesome.

[23:26] Paul: And so this is all I do nonstop behind the scenes, all one-off readers. I don't really focus on like big names and the sort of like top-down reach of other influencers. I just reach out to these like super fans who are already spreading the book and just keep sending them books to give out. And I think that's, that's done really well. Yeah.

[23:47] Nat Eliason: And that, that's kind of similar to The Fiction Mindset and the, the Fiction Mindset is, is also really focused on like especially if you're self-publishing, there's a lot of this strategy around series and, you know, you, you're, you're gonna be leaning somewhat on ads to drive book sales. And so the more books you have in your series, the more you can—

[24:08] Paul: Ah, makes sense.

[24:09] Nat Eliason: The higher ROI you can get on an ad. And so people will track their read-through rates through their series. And so if you know that, if I know that Husk won, has a 70% read-through to book 2, which has an 80% read-through to book 3, then I can calculate the like average LTV of a new reader from selling a copy of Husk 1. And so I can put Husk 1 at like $2.99 on Kindle and then put the subsequent ones at say $7.99, because once you're kind of like bought into the world, you're gonna be, you know, interested in reading, in reading more, and you're gonna have that follow-through. And so I, Now an ad conversion isn't just getting me the like $2 from Husk 1, it's getting me whatever that actually like $12 from all 3 books or something. Or even better if they buy a paperback or hardcover, right?

Or the Audible. And you've got like the R-naught factor, right? Like how viral is the book? When somebody reads it, do they tell a friend? And then you have these other strategies around like, okay, a, a novel, especially a novel in a series, can be a big ask, right? Because Husk 1 is 400 pages.

So it's probably like a 6, 7, 8 hour read for an average reader. It was a decent ask. And you know that it's in a series. And so it obviously, you know, it resolves, it has a very satisfying payoff at the end and it leaves room for it, for it to continue beyond. But there's also that question of like, do I want to pick up a new series, right? Or do I want to spend 6, 7, 8 hours potentially with an author who I don't know if I actually like their writing style yet?

And so part of what I've been working on the last couple of months is a novella. So a much shorter story, 120 pages in the same universe, but in a different period of time. That could be read at any point in the series. So you could read the novella first, or you could read Husk I first. And so now I have a much smaller ask, like, hey, 120 pages, you could probably read it in an evening, maybe two evenings. And then you'll really quickly get a sense of, do I wanna read more of Nat's books or not?

Or am I interested in this universe or not? And that becomes like a really cool way to get people into your world as well. And what a lot of fiction authors will do is they'll just like give a novella away for free if you join their email list.

[26:39] Paul: Ah, I love that.

[26:40] Nat Eliason: So I'll probably do that too, where once it's done and published and I have like a PDF or an EPUB, anybody who signs up for the email list, I'll just give it to them for free because they might just go buy the Kindle or the paperback or whatever because reading an EPUB or PDF is kind of annoying, right? Or they'll, they'll wanna support, but even if they don't, it's going to market the other books in the series. And so it becomes this very effective like onboarding tool. And the fun thing about not working with a publisher is that I own all of it. And so if I want to just take a month and blog the whole novella to my 50,000 newsletter subscribers, like I can do that because the downside of, having a career like I've had where I've done, you know, 8 different things in the last decade is that basically no one has subscribed to me for fiction writing.

Like literally zero people on my newsletter have read a novel that I've written. And so my conversion on those 47,000 subscribers is gonna be significantly lower than it would for like a fiction author who had, all the subscribers. So I kind of have to like find ways to nudge them to be like, hey, you know, you're, you're actually going to enjoy this, right? Because at the end of the day, the reason I got into fiction was like all of these ideas that I talk about in my newsletter and on my blog, I kind of just decided that like I could convey them better through stories than through direct explanation. And so I love that. A lot of Husk, a lot of the Husk world is informed by my writing on like philosophy of mind, nature of consciousness, happiness, denial of death, like concepts I've come back to a lot over the years, but then wrapped in this like fast-paced techno thriller.

And that's been a very, very fun way to explore them.

[28:42] Paul: All right, so people listening now are like, wow, you're perfectly suited for self-publishing. You've got the marketing, all these things. Things, and this is my thought, um, when we first started hanging out and writing, like, wow, he would absolutely crush self-publishing. Um, so why did you think traditional publishing was the best? I wanted to try it. And this is sort of a fake beef.

I really think it's a very different game, um, to publish in two different ways. But yeah, interested to hear your perspectives on it, having gone down both routes.

[29:19] Nat Eliason: I mean, one, I wanted to try it. You know, I was curious to see what it was like. And you know, because I knew all of the self-publishing arguments very well from talking to you, talking to Eric, from looking into it quite a bit myself. But at the end of the day, like all of these big authors still go trad, right? And so why is Cal Newport still going trad? Why is Ryan Holiday still going trad?

Why was Tim Ferriss still going trad? Like, people who would be 100 times more effective at self-publishing than I would off the bat, like, why are they working with publishers? And I kind of had the sense that like, I wouldn't know until I tried it. And I also knew that even if I ended up not liking it, I would learn a lot about how books are made and how the like professionals make them and what goes into that and which parts of the process they're actually really good at and which parts they're not. And you know, that, that, that was very motivating. And getting the good advance was motivating too.

You know, it's like my advance for Crypto Confidential was $275K and the book hasn't done well enough where I'll probably ever like see more money than that. And so it was nice to have that as like the floor, right? For a, a first go. At publishing. And it was Portfolio within Penguin Random House, which is like a really great name, a really great publisher to get to work with. And so, you know, very, very happy that I did it.

And I absolutely loved and still love my editor there. Noah, you know, was just wonderful. But there were a lot of other parts of it that were like pretty frustrating and pretty annoying. And so when I started working on Husk, I kind of had the same question of like, okay, do I try to get a trad deal for this or do I go self-publishing? And, you know, all of the like financial and control and whatever arguments aside, like at the end of the day, working with a publisher was just not exciting to me. It was more like frustrating than it was energizing.

And so even though I think there is a pretty compelling argument to like trying to get the trad deal for fiction too, because so many books do get bought in bookstores or get bought through these lists that, you know, if Tor picks up the book and gives you a good advance, like they can make it a success in a way that will be very hard to do on my own. But it just wasn't exciting. You know, I was like, I kind of want to try to figure this out. And going back to like hearing that somebody else figured it out is kind of like enough. I just, you know, I kept finding more stories of self-published fiction authors doing incredibly well and getting this really good distribution. And I can always take the trad deal later.

And probably when I'm in a much better negotiating position than I would be coming in cold. 'Cause this is the thing that, uh, is, is kind of crazy in fiction is like your email list doesn't matter. Like they won't give you a deal. Just because you have a big email list or because you have Instagram followers, it'll help a little bit. But 90% of it is like, what's the story? How does the story fit into the current market?

You know, does it like check all of these boxes for what we want to publish right now?

[32:47] Paul: And what's driving that? Is that like the sales reps at bookstores who are like shaping this market dynamic?

[32:54] Nat Eliason: It's, it's a bit of the sales reps, you know, and it, it's a bit of what's popular like right now.

[33:00] Paul: Yeah.

[33:01] Nat Eliason: Right. Um, but that's always a lagging indicator, right? Like, you know, I, I've, I've been reading this series, uh, which is incredible Dungeon Crawler Carl, which is like a lit RPG. So it's a, it's a novel that's kind of structured like a video game.

[33:18] Paul: Wow.

[33:18] Nat Eliason: And, It's an incredible premise. Basically like aliens come to Earth and kill basically everybody, but the people who they leave alive get to compete in this video game dungeon under the Earth's surface as part of this intergalactic reality TV show where they just go to random sentient planets and then take them over, enslave the population, and make them like fight to the death through these progressive leveling system because it's the most profitable media enterprise in the galaxy. And it's—

[33:52] Paul: Wow.

[33:54] Nat Eliason: Yeah, and so the protagonist is just like a guy who's outside trying to like rescue his girlfriend's cat in the middle of the night when the aliens attack and gets, you know, goes into the dungeon to compete. His cat gets turned into like a sentient, you know, like human-level intelligence, but like still a cat. And so it's him and his cat like leveling up, becoming these like incredibly powerful combatants through this pretty insane quasi-fantasy world with a sci-fi drama backdrop to it. It's a wild premise. And I have read— I'm gonna finish the 7th book probably this week, and I picked up the first one 4 weeks ago.

[34:36] Paul: Wow.

[34:37] Nat Eliason: And these are like 600-page books. So like that tells you how good this is. Um, incredibly fun. But there's like, so there's a ton of demand for like Lit RPG right now because that's selling so well. But like, will that be selling well in 5 years? Like, I don't know.

You know, you kind of have to write what makes the most sense for you, which might not be what publishers are buying right now. And there is this like, Like, just, just to put it bluntly, like, if you're a white guy who is writing like mostly male heteronormative characters, you're basically like increasing the difficulty by 3, 4, 5x because there is still a little bit of the like, uh, you know, oh, we wanna, you know, promote other voices or like, you know, diversity of characters and all these things. And like, You know, there, there's definitely arguments to be made for that, but you know, if, if I'm gonna be playing on hard mode, like I may as well play on hard mode where I have like more control over everything. Um, and yeah.

[35:40] Paul: And that probably sets you up to be a little more dynamic and sort of read the, read the trends, shift your, shift your approach and style and techniques.

[35:49] Nat Eliason: Yeah. And you've talked about this before too, where like if you're self-publishing, you can respond to what's popular so much faster. Than you can in trad. Like, yeah, if, if I wanted to do a lit RPG book, which like part of me is tempted because it's just so fun and I'm such a—

[36:05] Paul: sounds perfectly up your alley.

[36:07] Nat Eliason: I know. And it's like, I love video games, right? Like it would really be up my alley. Like I could get a good one out in 8 months, but if I did the trad route, it would be like 2 years minimum. And who knows where the market would be at that point.

[36:21] Paul: Yeah. And this is a weird thing about books too. Like you, there's this phrase online of do 100, right? Do 100 blog posts and yes, you will get really good at doing blog posts, but like do 100 books literally takes forever. And this is sort of why I wanted to like just ship my second book. Maybe I could have like gone way deeper if I did 9 more months, but I sort of wanted to like get over the second book so I could then get to like the third and fourth books.

Yeah. And I don't even know if I'll have another hit until like, I honestly don't even know if I'll have another one, but I know I want to write a number of books and self-publishing does give you that, right? Because you can just ship, put things out. You can even update it after you publish it versus the 2 to 3 year timeline is very expensive, especially, I mean, you're a bit younger than me. I'm 40, so I don't have much time left.

[37:16] Nat Eliason: Well, yeah, and the, the getting the reps in is so true. Like I, I started the first version of Husk in November of '23 and I got it to a good, or I got it to what I thought was a good second draft by like July of '24. And then I got feedback on that. And, you know, basically just wasn't very good, right? But I had written a whole 120,000-word novel at that point. And so I threw that novel in the trash and started over in August of '24 and then basically finished it February of '25.

And now it's coming out in May. So next month. And so, you know, I wrote two novels in a little under 2 years. And while Husk has been getting produced, I've written this novella, which is actually pretty close to being done. I've got, I've got 2 drafts on it done. I'll probably get the 3rd draft and maybe the final draft done in May.

And so then that can probably come out around Thanksgiving this year. I'm almost 50,000 words into Husk 2. And so that will probably come out in like February or March of next year. And then there'll probably be another book in the universe that comes out mid-late next year. And so it was just like the rep cycle is so much faster than if I was doing trad. And, and you know, I, I, to a certain extent, yes, if you're going too fast, it's not gonna be good quality.

But a lot of why it takes so long in trad is that the way things are chunked up slow you down significantly. Like, you know, sending it to your editor for feedback, you might not get that feedback for like 6 weeks and you kind of don't know what you wanna do during that period. You don't necessarily wanna keep working on the book because you kind of need their sign-off on stuff. And so if they want you to go in a pretty different direction or change something significant, you don't want to like spend that time making other edits. And then even once it's done, it might take them 8 or 9 months to get it to market. Whereas with Scribe, I think we can get it down to like 3 or 4 months.

And so the cycles just get so much tighter. And I feel exactly the same way as you, where could I have spent another 6 months on Husk and done a couple more drafts and would it have been better? I actually don't know. Sometimes when you keep editing, it gets worse, right? Like, You, you need to kind of—

[39:54] Paul: It's very good. I ripped through it like—

[39:57] Nat Eliason: You didn't even read the final one. I think the final one's even better than the one you read.

[40:01] Paul: I'm sort of sad about that. Like, I want to stop reading your preview books. I'm like now a fan of the series. Like, I want to read the final one next.

[40:13] Nat Eliason: Yeah. Yeah, that's fair. I could just save the final for you, but it will. And that's, that's a whole funny thing in fiction. Where like with nonfiction, everybody knows what the book is about and like what's going to happen in the book. And so you're not like spoiling anything or like wasting a beta reader by giving it to them early.

But like fiction has surprises in it and twists and like plot arcs that really only hit the first time you read it because the second and third and fourth are always going to be colored by roughly knowing what's happening. And that's actually been kind of a challenge for me where it's like, okay, do I give this draft to someone knowing that I will not be able to give them a later draft and get their like accurate first reader impression on it anymore? That's kind of like a whole challenge with doing this kind of editing and feedback that I didn't have doing the nonfiction work. You still have it to some extent in nonfiction, but not quite the same.

[41:15] Paul: How do you integrate feedback? I, um, yeah, it's very much an art for me. I have some people who love my stuff, read everything, and are also good at giving feedback. There's like 2 of those people. And I basically just go to them, uh, because they're usually on point. But yeah, a lot of feedback's just not very good.

It's hard to sort of get feedback that's in the flow of like where your mind is headed with the book.

[41:45] Nat Eliason: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I definitely think that fewer high-quality readers is better than more shallower readers, right? Like you're just gonna get, I think, more useful feedback if you can slowly find those people over time who are gonna give you the really good feedback. And I think it's just like a slow process of sending stuff to people who seem interested, getting their feedback, seeing how insightful it is, and then like, okay, do I give this to them again in the future? Right?

And you kind of just like build your list over time like that. And it's often surprising people, you know, like I have a friend who doesn't write at all. He's like a startup founder tech guy, but reads an incredible amount of science fiction. And so his feedback on Husk was like some of the most useful feedback that I got. Wow. You know, he, he had very detailed thoughts and ideas and like, um, you know, could see potential arcs that like even I hadn't thought of and like, it was awesome, but like wasn't the person you would expect on paper to give really good feedback.

And then I've had other people who like do write a ton or do read a ton of fiction and are like super immersed in that world who give like No feedback. You know, good book. And it's like, oh yeah, exactly. Like, oh, I really enjoyed this part.

[43:12] Paul: You know?

[43:12] Nat Eliason: And it's like, oh, okay. Like, I didn't expect that at all, but like, good to know. And yeah, to your point, you kind of just have to like keep passing it to people and seeing what they come back with. And then when you find somebody who is really good, just like, I don't know, hold onto them for dear life because I think a few good beta readers is like kind of all you need. Like, a book is, at the end of the day, a work of art and an expression of the author. And so you kind of need to have the confidence to do what you think is right, even if some people don't like it or if it's not gonna resonate with everyone.

But the right beta readers can definitely point out things that you might have overlooked or might have missed. And there's sub-elements to that too, like, especially in fiction writing, right? Like, writing a female character is hard. You know, it's harder than writing a male character for me. And so having a few female beta readers is very helpful because they can point out when I'm writing, you know, when I'm writing a woman like a man, right? Like that's, that's really useful to hear.

And it's something that I'm going to be more blind to than other parts. Right. Um, you know, it'll also surprise you sometimes, like the things that you think you need to work on, other people don't think you need to work on. Because they think those parts are fine, but there's something else that you're not thinking about that you do. And the thing that I've come back to is like, you know, some people will say that you should give the book to like 10 or 20 or 30 people and see what people agree on as the things to improve or change or whatnot and focus there. And now I'm much more like, just see what people say and then compare it to my own intuition.

Because when I see a piece of feedback, I pretty much always either have the reaction of like, oh yes, that is a problem.

[44:58] Paul: Exactly.

[44:58] Nat Eliason: Yeah. Or I react like, "Hmm, no, I kind of like it the way it is." And I just don't second-guess myself, right? Like, yeah. And I, you know, I think early on in writing that can be dangerous because you don't wanna be like, you know, Dunning-Kruger, you know, irrationally exuberant about your work quality. But like, I know I'm at least decent at this now and I think I have a pretty good intuition of what feedback is correct or not. And just kind of like trusting that is very helpful.

Um, and honestly, like multi-shot GPT Pro, like putting the whole book in and getting 10 different rounds of feedback and seeing what it spits out. Again, you just check that against your intuition and I've found extremely helpful feedback that way too.

[45:40] Paul: Yeah, I've actually found LLMs are incredible for sort of structural editing.

[45:46] Nat Eliason: Yeah.

[45:46] Paul: Because with my human mind, I can't hold 10 chapters of context. In my head.

[45:52] Nat Eliason: It's hard. It's really hard.

[45:54] Paul: Yeah. And so my only way of approaching that in editing both of my books has been reading it from start to end like 15 times.

[46:05] Nat Eliason: Yeah.

[46:06] Paul: At the end. Yeah. Like straight through. Like, and like I'm losing my mind at the time as I'm doing it.

[46:13] Nat Eliason: And so, oh yeah, I can't read it more than 5 or 6 times before I hate it. It's like you kind of— I have to ration my own reads of the book, you know? Yeah.

[46:22] Paul: And it's even crazier when it's like about your own life. You're like, is that even true anymore?

[46:27] Nat Eliason: Yeah. Who's going to care about this? Like, nobody's going to read this. Like, I'm an idiot, you know? Just the mental talk is really fun.

[46:34] Paul: All right. So with this book, Husk, you are going direct, which means you're printing them yourself. And selling directly. You can also buy it on Amazon and Ingram and all the other places, but you're really pushing these direct sales. One, so you can send out signed copies, but two, I assume you can start to develop this connection with the readers and take some, a lot of what you've learned from nonfiction writing to this world.

[47:07] Nat Eliason: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so for the pre-orders, for Husk, I did this like bundle deal on my site where for the price of the hardcover, you get the hardcover, the audiobook, and the ebook, and you get like a signed hardcover. And I'm gonna send them out probably a week before the book publishes for everybody else. So it's kind of this like fun bundle deal that, you know, adds a little extra incentive. And then I put it on my own store on Shopify. Because one, you know, I remove Amazon's cut from the equation, so I'm making more per book, but also I'm getting email addresses and mailing addresses and just building that more direct relationship with the people who are like most interested in the book, right?

It's like you sell a book on Amazon, there's no way to follow up with anybody who bought it. You don't even know who bought it. You get no information. And, you know, when it's your like most enthusiastic readers, you kind of do want to have a bit of a relationship with them because I can like give them a discount on the next book when it launches or even just like let them know that it's launching, which you can't do on Amazon. Somebody buys your book and, you know, it's one of these things where I didn't have any expectations for it for this one because again, like no one's read any fiction from me. I don't expect them to completely trust that I've figured it out.

Like, I feel very confident in it, but it's kind of a big ask. And I just wanted to set a baseline for this book so that when I do the next book, you know, I'm trying to move that up and try to do bigger and bigger preorder campaigns as subsequent books in the series and whatnot come out. And so I put it up on my site about a month ago, and I've done like 220 copies directly through my site. Which is really cool. You know, that's awesome. 7 or 8 grand in revenue.

[49:03] Paul: And are you printing them yourself? Did you find like a print shop to print them or Lulu?

[49:08] Nat Eliason: I got them through Ingram.

[49:09] Paul: Ingram.

[49:10] Nat Eliason: Yeah. Yeah. So Ingram is going to print all the hardcovers and ship them to my office here, and then I'm going to package and send them out. And that's like really exciting. You know, that's going to be a lot of fun. And I'll keep selling signed hardcovers through my site.

So that if somebody wants that like extra personal touch, they can get it directly from me instead of buying it on Amazon. And in the indie fiction world, this is actually becoming a bigger and bigger thing. A lot of those authors on Instagram and whatnot will have links to their own bookstores above the link to their Amazon bookstore. And, you know, people just get a little bit more excited. I mean, fiction cares less about the seal of approval from a publisher. Like with nonfiction, you know, if somebody wrote a nonfiction book on like metabolism, right?

I'm going to assume that the one that got picked up by, you know, Penguin's health imprint is just going to be more authoritative than a self-published book on metabolism, right? Like the publisher seal of approval lends more credibility or lends more value in nonfiction than it does in fiction. At the end of the day, all people want in fiction is a good story. They just want to have fun. And yes, you want to think, and there's a social element. You want to read the books that other people are enjoying so you can talk about them.

But it's much more just like, is the book good? And you kind of get a little bit more of that trust with a trad pub, but not always. A lot of trad pub books are really boring, or you don't enjoy them. And so people are way more open to self-published fiction, I think, than they are self-published nonfiction. And then you take that a step further and people get excited about supporting someone who they follow on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube because they're kind of like building that relationship with that person. So I'm excited about that, you know, and it's like I only have 2 books on there right now, but I can imagine in 5 years there will be 10 books on there.

And that like library will continue to grow and can hopefully be a pretty good, uh, part of, part of my business as well, especially for doing these like special pre-order campaigns whenever a new book is coming out.

[51:28] Paul: Yeah. And you mentioned there that if you see other people doing stuff, uh, you sort of see, okay, I can do that too. Who are some of the models? I'm guessing Brandon Sanderson is—

[51:39] Nat Eliason: Well, Sanderson's interesting because he he doesn't keep the rights to his books. Like they're still published through Tor, but he keeps the rights to special editions.

[51:50] Paul: Ah, okay.

[51:50] Nat Eliason: So he sells a lot of special editions and he sells a lot of merch and a lot of like related stuff. But Tor still does the like primary book distribution for him. So, you know, but he's still a really good example because he did that $40 million Kickstarter campaign for you know, his, his 4 books. And I think he originally self-published those to the Kickstarter backers and then sold the rights to the publisher after. So it was kind of like an interesting deal structure. Um, but I'm trying to think if there's anybody who's really crushing with their own self-published bookstore.

I mean, Eliot Pepper set one up recently and he seems to be leaning, uh, somewhat heavily on it. He just did an interview with every about his writing process and he's like an interesting guy to follow. But honestly, there like aren't a ton of people I've found who are doing it like a really big scale, which is exciting. There's a lot of people self-publishing really successfully on Amazon, but doing it through Shopify is like a very new thing. And as far as I know, I haven't seen any big self-published fiction authors doing these preorder campaigns on their own site. The way like I was doing it.

Some of them will do it through a bookstore. So you'll see that kind of often where they partner with a local bookstore and the bookstore buys all the books from Ingram and then distributes it for them. But like doing all of their own fulfillment, you see less of. And so that's kind of like my twist on what's been working for other people right now is it's like this kind of exciting additional direction I can go in. And just like see how it works. Um, and there's an argument against it because anybody who's buying from me beforehand is not buying on Amazon during launch week.

So I might not get the same launch week pop, but I think that's worth it to build that closer relationship. Plus, if 50 of these people who are getting pre-orders read it in the week before launch and then post about it during launch week, that's 50 more people talking about the book than I would've had otherwise. And so that really helps get the like echo chamber effect going, uh, during that launch period, which is again, just pretty important for getting the initial pop.

[54:11] Paul: Yeah, I love this. I think the industry is so weird because there's sort of this duopoly of the traditional publishing world and then Amazon.

[54:20] Nat Eliason: Yeah.

[54:20] Paul: And there's basically been no innovation in terms of like how books are sold, the payments infrastructure, the backend, the marketing. And, uh, it's not good for authors. And so when authors are making these debates like, oh, traditional publisher, self-publish, I think it's silly. We just, I want more experimentation. Yeah. So like I want to see more weird stuff from the traditional publishing world.

I love what you're doing. I was just listening to Craig Mod and he's doing a book with Penguin, but he's retaining the, um, rights for his $100 version of his book.

[55:00] Nat Eliason: Oh, cool. Yeah.

[55:01] Paul: Yeah. Which is very interesting. Right. And just knowing that this exists is like risky for the traditional publishers because they basically are like, no, we don't do any special deals for anyone. Right. Yeah.

Um, I do think we're at a tipping point where there's going to be more people like you that are sort of going the third way and Smart publishers are going to say, hey, let's invest in this guy who's, uh, building a long-term career. And eventually markets will converge on, on talent.

[55:33] Nat Eliason: I think so. And I think that as the, as the marketing gets easier outside of a traditional publisher, the authors get more leverage too. And so many book sales are driven by Instagram and TikTok and YouTube. And the publishers don't do well there. Like nobody really follows the Penguin accounts or like engages with them. And their social media team is like not very good.

It's always these like independent bookstagrammers, book reviewers who are driving a lot of this activity. And, you know, if you know how to build rapport with that audience, like that's who's gonna drive most of the sales. It, it's not as, it's not, all through the bookstores the way it used to be. And especially in fiction, a lot of bookstores will just buy whatever's popular on Amazon. Like, they don't care about the sales reps or, you know, what Penguin wants them to push. They do to a certain extent, but they also just want to sell books, right?

And so they'll just go on and they'll go on Amazon and see what's ranking well, and they'll just order from Ingram and stock it that way. Like that. So if you can get those rankings, then you kind of end up getting into bookstores indirectly without having to get pushed into them.

[56:53] Paul: Yeah. And the, the other weird thing about books, I think, um, it seems like you're taking this approach too with a big launch timeline. Like if there's like 9 months before launch, you're you put 9 months into marketing presale, right? Whereas I think in self-publishing, most authors are like, well, it's done. I might as well put it out there. And so a lot of that 9 months, I think, shifts to after—

[57:20] Nat Eliason: pulled forward—

[57:21] Paul: the book is published and actually can be beneficial because people can go literally buy the book that day and start reading it. Yeah. Right. And so there's, there's this much more dynamic cycle that can continue to kick off at any time.

[57:36] Nat Eliason: And that's something I'm excited about with working on a series or like a universe too, is that, you know, when Husk comes out, there'll be everybody who pre-ordered it. And I'm doing some podcasts like we're doing right now and, you know, getting it to some influencers and whatnot. But it's gonna be easier to get it in front of people after a few weeks when there's some reviews on it and there's some activity. But also every time I'm talking about the novella, leading up to its launch at the end of the year, I'm also marketing Husk. And then once the novella is out and I'm talking about Husk 2, I'm also marketing Husk and the novella, right? And so just by continuing to work and by continuing to put more books out, I am marketing all of the books.

And so it turns into this like snowball effect where I don't expect most people are going to go buy Husk, preorder or the week it comes out, even if they've heard me mention it 5 or 10 times, because they're going to wait until they hear about it from other people. But if they keep hearing about it from me for 6 months, 12 months, and like are seeing the continual investment, like that's kind of the best marketing there is. And so I definitely feel like you said, a lot less of the pressure to do this huge preorder campaign, huge week 1 focus, knowing that I'm going to be talking about this world and the books in this world for at least the next 3 years. And so it doesn't need to like hit immediately because again, that marketing is gonna be happening constantly.

[59:06] Paul: How do you pitch a fiction book? Like, can you pitch Husk? I don't even know how to like properly ask you about it. Like how, how do we tell readers, um, like about this book? Even when I described it before, I'm like, oh, it was amazing.

[59:23] Nat Eliason: But like, yeah, yeah.

[59:25] Paul: I'm, I'm not doing a good job of like bringing it alive.

[59:28] Nat Eliason: I like comparisons help a lot. So, you know, I, I could say like The Matrix meets Fallout, or I could say like, uh, maybe like The Matrix meets Severance, right? So if somebody's more into like TV and movies, they would, you know, that, that might resonate.

[59:46] Paul: I like that. Yeah.

[59:47] Nat Eliason: You know, I could say like, if you, if you enjoy, fast-paced techno thrillers like Dark Matter by Blake Crouch, then you're probably really going to like Husk too. Um, you know, if I wanted to reference books, I could say, you know, if you really enjoyed Permutation City, or if you really enjoyed, uh, the Silo series like Woolshift and Dust, you know, then you're probably really going to like Husk as well. Um, those, those, I think comparisons are the easiest way to do it. Again, like I have the blurb, Right. And I have the premise, you know, I could say like, okay, humanity got wiped out by a plague and the only people who survived transferred their minds into computers and, or most of the people had to transfer their minds to computers. And the only people left are this small selection of humans whose job it is to keep the servers running.

And now somebody is trying to destroy this digital paradise, this digital immortality. And, you know, the main character Isaac has to figure out why and what to do about it, right? So there's kind of like a lot of ways I can come at it for pitching it. But I often find the comparisons work the best. 'Cause that at least gets them to go to the Amazon page and then the Amazon page, they get the blurb and then the blurb is like the next step, right? You think about it like multi-step that way.

[01:01:09] Paul: Awesome. So if you're on the fence, send me an email if you're listening or watching this. And the first person that emails me in the episode, I will actually send you my book because I ordered one. Oh, bastard. Nat's probably not gonna ship it to Asia. So we're gonna reroute that to you in the US.

So if you're listening and only email me if you've like never done fiction before and wanna give it a chance. Because we want to get more of those people, uh, reading these books. I think it's— and the great thing about sci-fi, I've been reading a lot more sci-fi in the past couple years, like these questions are so important. Like we're in— yeah, yeah, we're in a crazy timeline of life right now.

[01:01:53] Nat Eliason: Totally.

[01:01:54] Paul: Like what's happening, like the cert— just the idea of the servers running, and there's a different context you're giving, but how much of our lives is based on having electricity and internet connection now. Yeah. Um, it's pretty scary.

[01:02:08] Nat Eliason: I mean, we're sort of already like slaves to the servers and this is, uh, much more—

[01:02:13] Paul: it's just normalized so we don't think of like it like that.

[01:02:17] Nat Eliason: Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, that, that is the fun thing about sci-fi is it's like, yeah, we can explore what would happen if we take some of these ideas or these trends to their limit. And I also find that like sci-fi is often the one genre that like nonfiction people will read. And so I like having that angle too, where it's like, yeah, most of my audience is probably like nonfiction people, probably yours too. But if they read fiction, they often pick up a sci-fi novel.

And so I'm trying to like get to those people too, which is also part of why it's like very fast-paced and very readable. Like, you know, it's not hard to get through if you're not a fiction reader.

[01:02:56] Paul: Yeah, I'm realizing I don't actually know what readers of my book read, which is inspiring me to go more direct and actually talk to readers.

[01:03:07] Nat Eliason: It'd be interesting to find out.

[01:03:09] Paul: I actually did a launch on MetaLabel, which was founded by the former Kickstarter founder, and it positions books like you or whatever you're launching as something you collect. So I put out 250 free versions of Good Work and there's just a lot of positive energy behind it of people emailing me saying, this is cool. Like they get this cool badge that said I'm a collector of this release. And yeah, I'm a lot more excited about leaning in that direction, especially as I launched the special edition hardcover I'm doing this, this spring as well.

[01:03:49] Nat Eliason: I love that. It's a really, it's a neat idea. I should reach out to them, see if they wanna do something.

[01:03:55] Paul: Yeah. And it's actually shifted my, I was watching a video from Yancey Strickler. I'll send you this video, but yeah. Um, he really helped me rethink a creative path as you should be releasing stuff, right? As a creator, you're defined by your releases. And you should just be releasing more stuff because the people that are following you want to like keep collecting stuff from you, right?

Like the super fans of a musician. And I think music has done this really well. Somebody like Drake is releasing songs literally all the time.

[01:04:33] Nat Eliason: Yeah.

[01:04:34] Paul: And just single, single mashup, single, single. And it's, it's it's nonstop. So it's something I've been thinking about a lot.

[01:04:43] Nat Eliason: Yeah, I think a lot about that stat that more vinyl records are sold today.

[01:04:49] Paul: Wow.

[01:04:49] Nat Eliason: Than were sold when vinyl was like at its— when vinyl was like the way you bought music. They actually sell more of them now than they did back then because I think of the same thing. People are excited about collecting it.

[01:05:02] Paul: Yeah. And I think there's something there around books. I think this is the thing everyone misses. Oh, less people are reading books, but the people that are reading books are reading more books.

[01:05:13] Nat Eliason: Yeah. I mean, book sales are at an all-time high for like all of history right now. People are buying. And I've heard this a lot too, that people will buy the audiobook for a book and then if they like it, they'll buy the paperback or the hardcover.

[01:05:28] Paul: And that's their—

[01:05:29] Nat Eliason: that's basically their trophy for listening to the audiobook and like, that's cool.

[01:05:35] Paul: Yeah, it's fascinating. How are, how are you thinking about writing given your experiments with LLMs and AI? I know you've sort of built apps with it. You've played with it as a writing coach. You've used some of the AI writing tools like Novel Crafter. Um, I, every time these get an intelligence upgrade, I have this like feeling of Oh wow, I feel like some writing I used to do just got zapped or deleted.

Yeah, like I'll never do it again. Um, but at the same time, I'm having more fun than ever. It's like this creative sparring partner that's like pushing me to think and write even more.

[01:06:15] Nat Eliason: Yeah, I, I think that, you know, kind of like we're saying, people enjoy following people and they enjoy other people's perspectives on the world. And they, you know, enjoy collecting from individuals and seeing how they're thinking and writing. And so I'm pretty bullish on individuals continuing to be important in the book production process. Like, I don't think that they're— I don't think like authors are going to be out of a job because an author is at the end of the day like a person that people are interested in, like getting a certain style from. But the way you get to that style is probably going to change. Right?

So I find them, I find the AI tools really valuable for like editing and feedback, pointing out blind spots, really helpful for suggesting tweaks to like sentences and phrasings. Incredible for research, right? Like if you need to figure out, if you need to find sources or figure out how to explain something, you know, they're so useful for that and for getting through writer's block too. You know, just being like, either, you know, how do I describe this scene or, you know, what are some ideas that might happen next to go from like A to C?

And, you know, I find myself very rarely using what the AI writes, but the act of having a conversation about it with someone who is always available and responds immediately and is like quite intelligent and well-spoken, That is just like a major level up because, you know, even my, my best beta reader, Nathan, like it's still going to take him a week or two to read the book and send me thoughts on it. And, you know, I can get some feedback and some thoughts from GPT Pro in 2 minutes. Right. And like that, that's really powerful. And I think that kind of like, you know, what you said, it's like, It's making it more fun and it's making me write more and it's making the writing easier, but I'm still doing most of the writing. It just feels like the barriers are getting like pushed out of the way to a more constant stream of writing productivity.

And like, that's, that's very exciting.

[01:08:28] Paul: Yeah, it's— I think people who have this narrative of like writing must suck, writing must be a grind, and it's a very popular narrative, I think, especially in like literary circles, especially people who were sort of trained trained in the arts, um, I think that's gonna hold people back as these technologies get better. Because for me, being able to write and make money from it is far better than making PowerPoint slides at a consulting firm.

[01:08:58] Nat Eliason: Yeah.

[01:09:00] Paul: That was a certain kind of hard that is actually like, I had to like power through and like clench and grind through that, just like get it done. Whereas like writing, I do get stuck. It is challenging. It's like this, it's crazy, really, right? Like, writing is super challenging. How am I ever gonna pull off sticking the landing on this?

But at the same time, it's like, it's absolutely like delightful to be able to do this. And yeah, it's been cool to sort of watch your process behind the scenes too, cuz I think you have a similar relationship to it. And it's, uh, it's definitely inspired me to, uh, take it more seriously myself as well.

[01:09:39] Nat Eliason: Yeah, I mean, I agree. Like, it's fun. It's what I want to do when I wake up. I don't, I don't really empathize with the, oh, like, this sucks. It's so hard. Like, every word is a struggle.

I'm like, oh, you know, at the end of the day, like, you're sitting in an air-conditioned room, like, typing your hallucinations into a machine. You know, you're not like crab fishing in the Arctic. You're not breaking rocks. You're not like mining lithium. You've got like literally one of the cushiest, easiest, jobs in the world, right? Like, I just, I don't, I, and I kind of feel like the people who think it really sucks and you feel like it should suck, it's like maybe you just shouldn't be doing it.

All right. Like maybe you got in your head at some point that like, oh, you were supposed to be a writer, but if you have that relationship with it, like maybe you're not like, you know, you don't, you shouldn't have to force it that much. And like, that's not to say that I feel inspired and, you know, that it flows super easily every day when I sit down. But I like enjoy the challenge. You know, it's like working out, right? Like, yeah, running 6 miles is not explicitly easy, but the bit of challenge that happens within it is very satisfying and enjoyable.

And I think that's like a very lucky feeling to get to have in your work.

[01:11:01] Paul: Yeah. What you've dabbled in sci-fi and fiction, what do you think writing looks like 5, 10 years from now? Or is it not even worth speculating about?

[01:11:12] Nat Eliason: I think it probably just looks a lot like how it does now, but with better, better editing and, you know, ideating and everything tools. It's like we have this new primitive. With LLMs and chat. And I think that's going to get more deeply embedded in the work. I think there's going to be more tools for, you know, real-time or post-session feedback to help you improve. I think there will be tools in the near future where you can just describe a story and it'll create the whole story for you.

And I don't think that story, those stories will do very well outside of like smut and a few categories where people are like less invested in the particular author, right? And, you know, I mean, maybe the one change will be people will use voice more. Like, that's already really changed how I interact with my computer where I'm using voice so much more than I ever have. But I still don't really use it for like fiction writing because I find it weird to use it in that context. But for emails and for simpler blog post style stuff, it's a really nice tool to have. But I don't know, you know, it's like 100 years ago or 100 or however many years ago, people like sat at a desk with a typewriter and they produced pages and then they sent those pages off and those pages got turned into a book.

And now we like sit at a desk and type on a computer and then send those pages off and those pages get turned into a book. It's like most of it's probably going to be the same. Like, I don't think it's going to change that much.

[01:12:50] Paul: It will be interesting to see, like, the holdouts that are like, I only type my book on laptops.

[01:12:55] Nat Eliason: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I refuse to put this into an LLM.

[01:12:59] Paul: I mean, Robert Caro is still typing on his typewriter.

[01:13:05] Nat Eliason: Yeah.

[01:13:06] Paul: And part of me is like, yo, just use the tools. Like, I want you to finish. I want you to finish the book before you die.

[01:13:13] Nat Eliason: Exactly. Yeah. So you gotta finish LBJ and then you can go back to the typewriter.