The Publishing Performance Show

Nat Eliason - The Entrepreneur's Approach to Self-Publishing: Direct Sales, Premium Products, and Marketing

• Teddy Smith • Episode 95

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Nat Eliason is a writer, entrepreneur, and founder of multiple successful online businesses who is now pivoting to science fiction writing. After securing a $275,000 advance for his traditionally published non-fiction book "Crypto Confidential" with Penguin Random House, Nat has chosen to self-publish his debut science fiction novel "Husk." His entrepreneurial approach to book publishing includes a strong focus on professional production quality, direct sales through his own website, and leveraging his existing audience while building new channels specifically for his fiction work.

In this episode:

  • Nat's transition from traditional publishing to self-publishing
  • Creating a high-quality self-published book that doesn't look self-published
  • The importance of investing in professional cover design and formatting
  • Using Ingram Spark vs. Amazon KDP for print-on-demand
  • Leveraging an existing audience for a genre pivot
  • Building a marketing strategy focused on BookTube and Bookstagram
  • The value of preselling books through your own website
  • Nat's process for plotting and writing his novel in just four weeks
  • How Nat's background in philosophy informed his sci-fi worldbuilding
  • The challenge of keeping track of complex worldbuilding details
  • Strategies for launching without a fiction-specific audience


Resources mentioned:

  • Ingram Spark - For high-quality print-on-demand paperbacks and hardcovers
  • Shopify - For selling signed book copies directly to readers
  • Story Origin - Newsletter swap platform (mentioned by Teddy)
  • Book Funnel - Reader magnet platform (mentioned by Teddy)
  • Google Notebook LM - AI tool for organizing book details (mentioned by Teddy)


Book Recommendations:

  • "Husk" - Nat's sci-fi debut novel about digital immortality
  • "Neuromancer" by William Gibson - Classic cyberpunk that inspired Nat
  • "Dune" by Frank Herbert - Example of long-lasting fiction impact


Connect with Nat Eliason:

  • Website: nateliason.com
  • Substack: blog.nateliason.com
  • Book website: huskbook.com


Connect with Teddy Smith:

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[00:00:00] Teddy Smith: Hi everyone and welcome to The Publishing Performance Show. Today I'm really delighted to be joined by Nat Eliason. He's someone I've been following on Twitter for a while and is someone I'm so happy to be able to finally get onto the show. So thank you for joining me, Nat. 

[00:00:17] Nat Eliason: Yeah, thanks for having me on. Teddy.

[00:00:18] Excited to be here. 

[00:00:20] Teddy Smith: So, Nat, you're writing your first book, self-published book, and previously with your old, old books, you landed a traditional publishing deal. And but for your new novel, you've chosen to go indie. So why did you walk away from doing that self pub, from pub doing publishing and go onto self-publishing your book?

[00:00:34] Nat Eliason: Yeah, a few reasons. So I published a nonfiction book last year called Crypto Confidential, about working in the crypto industry from 21 to 22. That was a traditionally published deal with Penguin Random House, their imprint portfolio. It was a really good deal too. It was a 270 5K advance, so, you know, wow.

[00:00:51] They, it was a sizable. a sizable deal and they, they put a lot of work into it and, and generally they were like pretty great. I really liked my editor. It was very helpful getting to go through that process and I. See how, you know, penguin Random House publishes a book, right. Like that. That's useful information, I think to, to be exposed to.

[00:01:10] Yeah. but you know, there were also parts of it that I didn't like and, and the big part of it was at the end of the day, I've been an internet entrepreneur in some capacity for a decade now. I've sort of always been used to, owning my upside and downside for better or worse. And there were just parts of the process where I didn't.

[00:01:29] Have that much control or insight that ended up being frustrating. And I didn't like how the incentives were aligned. And so when I decided to do this kind of pivot from nonfiction to fiction and, and really go in, all in on, sci-fi writing, which I'm, I'm really all in on at this point. I mean, I just, I love it.

[00:01:51] Ipu. If, you know in my head, if there is like at least one other person out there in the world doing something successfully, then like potentially I can figure out how to do it too. And there are a lot of people self-publishing fiction very successfully and Yeah. You know, eventually turning them into big tra deals or movie deals or you know, whatever.

[00:02:11] And it's like, okay, I think I can figure it out too. I just have to get started. So decided to self-publish, this book, and it's been a way more fun process than doing the TRA deal, to be honest. It's not a criticism of them, that's more of a, a personality thing. Uh, and it comes out in 20 days. So getting close now.

[00:02:30] Teddy Smith: Nice. Are you excited for it to be released? 

[00:02:33] Nat Eliason: Very excited. You know, I mean, you, you, you know how it is. It's like with a, with a book, it's something that's basically just in your head and maybe a dozen other people's hands over the course of, could be a year, two years, three years, and, and, and then one day it's just done and then it can be out in the world.

[00:02:50] And I mean, if you did a good enough job, somebody might read it in 40 years. Like, that's really cool. Yeah. There's almost no other product like that. So, I'm very excited, very excited to get it out. 

[00:03:00] Teddy Smith: Yeah, it's amazing. Like if you're Charles Dickens or something, your books are still being read like 150 years later.

[00:03:04] It's amazing. 

[00:03:05] Nat Eliason: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I was just reading Neuromancer last month by William Gibson, and that came out in, what, the eighties, so 40 years old. I mean, Jurassic Park, they're still making movies, and he published that in the nineties. I think. It's like, that's really cool. Dune, right. They just, they just remade dune the movies and he published that in.

[00:03:23] what, sixties, seventies, 80. It is a long time, right? Yeah. Yeah. Books do have this incredible longevity to them when they're good enough. 

[00:03:31] Teddy Smith: Yeah. I interviewed Kevin Anderson actually on this podcast, and he's still writing books about June, so that that whole series is just like really, really gone on and on.

[00:03:38] It's absolutely amazing. 

[00:03:39] Nat Eliason: Yeah. Yeah. I love it. 

[00:03:41] Teddy Smith: The, the first thing that made me want to message you actually to come on this show was when you sent an email out to your email list. And one of the things that I pulled out, and it kind of links back to what you just said, was that you wanted to make husk look like it wasn't self-published.

[00:03:54] Yeah. So what specifically were you gonna try to do to try and hit that bar? I. 

[00:03:58] Nat Eliason: Yeah, well, I mean, so I've got my, my paperbacks right here. Oh, wow. And which is like an awesome feeling, right? To actually get to hold your books. And my hard covers get delivered tomorrow, so I'm very excited to get those. And there were, there were a couple hangups I had with self-publishing.

[00:04:12] You know, one was big publishers are not very good at the marketing side, and they're good at pr. If you're already famous and you're already a big name. But the, the thing that they are very good at is getting books into bookstores and making books that look beautiful and high quality and very, very professionally done.

[00:04:37] do I have crypto confidential here? I have crypto. This is, but you know, so this is Crypto Confidential and it's like the, the cover's great, the spine and the back and like the page layouts. You know, they, they did a really incredible job making a beautiful book and you know, unfortunately most people don't.

[00:04:59] Invest enough in their self-published book to make it look like a serious book. And I, I hate to use that word because obviously people have put a ton of work into it and, you know, they, they've, they've written it for a very long time, but then they slap like a Fiverr cover on it, and they, they don't do kind of like a standard page layout and stuff.

[00:05:22] And the minute you open it, or the minute you look at it on Amazon, like, you know. This, you know, you, you know, it's self-published isn't necessarily bad, but when somebody hasn't heavily invested in the physical production of the book, to me that signals that they didn't invest that much in the writing either.

[00:05:40] And I know that's not always fair, and I know that's not, but it's a signal, right? It's like how you package it and present it. Is going to affect how people judge it. And so I knew that if I wanted to go the self-publishing route, I needed to do everything in my power to make it not look self-published.

[00:05:57] It needed to look as professionally polished as possible. And you know, I, I'm, I'm somewhat lucky in that. I've just been in the world of books in some capacity for a long time that I have decently good, like mental standards for what looks good and have a little bit of design experience and skills. So I have like some taste.

[00:06:18] But then a lot of it was just like I. Finding a good team to work with where I knew they were going to create like a really good package. And I mean, I, I love the cover. The cover's great and like, you know, all, all the fonts came out really good too. I love these like act titles and chapter titles and the page, you know, it's just like, it looks like a trad pub book.

[00:06:42] That, that was honestly the, one of the biggest factors to me with going self pub was investing heavily to make it not look like I kind of slapped it together at the end. Because especially in fiction, you'll you, if you go to Amazon. You look at like the top 100 hard sci-fi, Kindle books or something, if you just do a quick scroll through it, you can almost instantly tell which ones are like Traverse self, usually just like based on the cover.

[00:07:14] And to me though, that that's really promising because it's like, okay, some of these books with the like rougher covers and the rougher blurbs and stuff are still selling really well. So it's not a disqualifier, but I think there is a bridge. You know, there's people who like. Read a ton, a ton, a ton of books and are just like constantly getting the, the new book in their genre.

[00:07:35] And then the people who read like a few a year and the people who read a few a year are not like trolling the top charts for the next book. They're kinda like going, the book gets recommended to them and they're gonna be. I think a little bit more turned off by a casual production. And so, you know, to me it's like, yeah, you know, I, I wanted to make it look really, really good and, without completely like breaking the bank because you could spend a, a completely absurd amount on it.

[00:07:59] But, Yeah, that that was, that was the main thing I was trying to get past. 

[00:08:02] Teddy Smith: Yeah. No, a hundred. That's really good advice. 'cause it's what you just said. A lot of people, especially you see it in romance, people just read like sometimes even a book a day, they're called like whale readers. Oh yeah. And so you see those, the top charts all just like really hunky cowboys like Yep.

[00:08:16] Standing there. And you do have to kind of hit those tropes. But also you wanna make your book stand out and look really professional, like you mentioned. 

[00:08:23] Nat Eliason: Yeah, and I think there's actually some magic in, you know, like there, there are, romance is a great example where there are writers who are very good at like churning out those books that scratch that itch and then they have that kind of like, I.

[00:08:40] Tropey cover on them. And, but I suspect the way you go from that to, like Nora Roberts is investing a little bit more in the production so that it can make that gap from, or make the jump from the person who reads one of those a day to the person who reads one of them a month. Right. Yeah. Because it's like the writing quality isn't the only factor, you know, it's, it's also like how this is gonna look on a bookshelf.

[00:09:08] And when you look at like a Nora Roberts book on a bookshelf, it doesn't have that explicit, this is porn cover to it, even though the interior is like, you know, maybe similar like toned down a little bit. Right. But there, you know, there, there is I think a lot of value in making that extra investment and that, that's probably, I think one of the benefits of coming at this from the entrepreneur background.

[00:09:33] Is, I don't have the, like, I need to spend the smallest amount possible on this book mindset that I've noticed a lot of self-published authors have. You know, I, like you go on the self-published subreddit or whatever, and it's, you know, if you're spending a hundred dollars on a cover, like it's just not gonna look very good.

[00:09:50] I'm sorry. Like, it, it's, you're going to be able to tell. And so yeah, I, I do think. A little or some investment goes a long way because again, it's like this could be a 20 year product, so you may as well like put in more work up front. 

[00:10:06] Teddy Smith: So with all this effort you're putting into making the book look good on the screen as well, you also want to make sure it looks good when people are holding it.

[00:10:12] So how are you guessing that printing done or you're relying just on doing print through demand at Amazon? Ingram. Nice. 

[00:10:18] Nat Eliason: So using Ingram for the paperback and the hardcover, and then Kindle, obviously just directly through Amazon. which, and like Ingram, I've been really happy with you know, there, there, there are these little things like a, a print on demand.

[00:10:31] Paperback has the crease, you know, sort of like the, the inside baseball of self-publishing. Like you, you, you start to notice the crease on the spine that isn't really there. In a lot of traditionally published paperbacks, like the Crypto Confidential paperback, there's no crease on the spine, and Ingram still has it, but it's fainter.

[00:10:53] So you don't notice it quite as much. Whereas with a KDP print on demand, I really notice it and you can sort of like feel the cover textures a little bit different. and I mean, I'm kind of a nut about this, so I know that 99% of readers are not going to notice these things, but like I'm going to notice them and at the end of the day, it's like my product and I want to be really happy with it.

[00:11:12] So, Ingram's been really good and I'm excited to get the hard covers. I've gotten other hard covers through Ingram that look great. do you know Elliot Pepper? Sorry. So who, who, sorry. Elliot Pepper. 

[00:11:23] Teddy Smith: No, I dunno that name. 

[00:11:25] Nat Eliason: he's another self pub author. He's got 10, 11 books out.

[00:11:28] Oh, nice. Uh, and I got one of his hardcovers that he does through Ingram, and it looks fantastic. It looks really, really good. So, oh, 

[00:11:34] Teddy Smith: great. 

[00:11:34] Nat Eliason: Uh, I'm excited to see how mine come out too. 

[00:11:37] Teddy Smith: Ingram can help you get the book into stores as well, which is quite nice. If, uh, you with that. 

[00:11:42] Nat Eliason: Yeah. Yeah. And I, I didn't know this until I started, doing the production for Husk, but it's actually a, an argument for releasing a paperback and a hardcover is that even if.

[00:11:55] You don't sell many hardcover on, say, Amazon. A lot of bookstores will prefer to order hard covers instead of paperbacks just because they can charge more for them for like, about the same shelf space. And so it's, it's worth getting both of them produced on Ingram so that if a bookstore does order your book because you're, you know, ranking highly on Amazon or whatever, um, they have that option available and you make more money.

[00:12:19] Teddy Smith: Yeah. Nice. Now, obviously we've just touched on it being you looking at this as more of a business opportunity rather than just you writing it. I know that the writing is obviously the passionate part, but you obviously want it to sell and to do well. Now you've got a slight unfair advantage over a lot of people in that you've got hundreds of thousands of people following you on Twitter in your newsletter and things like that, but.

[00:12:39] Once you've got past that, uh, step of using your own audience to make your first sales, which is obviously the best strategy you can do, have you got any blueprint for how you're going to start getting it to a wider audience as well? 

[00:12:52] Nat Eliason: No, you know, it's, so, I, you know, the, I, I obviously have a big advantage having, having the large audience.

[00:13:01] The, the caveat with that being not a single one of them has subscribed to me or followed me for my fiction writing. Yeah. So it's very different from a, you know, a, a fiction author with a. 2000 person email list probably has more of an asset than me with 47,000 email subscribers who signed up to like learn about productivity or about note taking or about, you know, like crypto or completely different things.

[00:13:27] Like some of them are definitely going to buy my fiction, but I don't know how many of them that is. But. In terms of getting beyond my audience, you know, step one is just like getting the book out, right? Because I want to actually have the asset available before I go market it too hard because, you know, it's like, you know this, most people listening to this know this, like pre-selling a book is really hard.

[00:13:50] Yeah. People don't pre-order books. Unless it's like a series or, they absolutely love the author. Right? Yeah. And I don't really have either of those going for me in this situation, because again, no one's ever read any fiction from me. And this is the first book in a series. So, you know, I, I'm doing pre-sales and we could talk about that a bit too if you want.

[00:14:09] Um, I. So I did 'em through my site, and that's been a fun experiment. But once it's out, then I'm gonna push it harder to my audience to get as much as I can from them. and then, you know, you hopefully get the snowball rolling that way you get word of mouth going you start to get more reviews and, and all of that.

[00:14:26] But then from there, then I have to figure out, okay, like how do I reach all the people who I'm not already reaching? And the, the thing I'm really gonna focus on is like Instagram and book tube. Because I know how to do them. I already have a pretty big Instagram following from talking about nonfiction books, so I'm pivoting that to fiction and I'm just gonna go hard on being a sci-fi influencer.

[00:14:47] Like I don't know that that's a good strategy for most people to take. But I know how to do the influencer thing pretty well, and I know how to like. Make that content, get it in the algorithm, get it to do well, and I can just include my book in those lists, and just become somebody who people follow in the space.

[00:15:08] And so it, it makes it very easy for me to promote my book alongside that. So that'll be the big like marketing project along with, I think some of the other stuff, like figuring out Amazon ads, you know, I've never done that, but I'm excited to figure it out because there's probably gonna be some potential there too.

[00:15:26] Teddy Smith: Yeah. Nice. 

[00:15:27] Nat Eliason: I was gonna say, how, how does that answer land for you? Because you probably know more about this than I do, so, yeah. What, what are, what's your reaction hearing that 

[00:15:35] Teddy Smith: that was, so, that does sound good. I think, yeah. Advertising can be a great way to get your book in front of people who have never heard of you before, especially if you're targeting particular tropes, which will, I guess we'll come into in a little bit when we're talking about things like the AI sort of topics and things in your book.

[00:15:50] And, you know, people do search for those. Tropes like, especially like with romance, you see people search the weirdest things, you know? Yeah. They'll search like, cowboy Cozy Romance and that is people actually search. Yeah. The Empire 

[00:16:02] Nat Eliason: Billionaire Romance. Yeah. Yeah, 

[00:16:04] Teddy Smith: exactly. Yeah. People do get into that sort of thing.

[00:16:06] I think with you, especially considering you've got that audience as well, getting in front of sci-fi people physically, you know, with your large following, it'd be really easy for you to get. At places like sci-fi conferences or book clubs where people are talking about those sci-fi books. Yeah, and I think people would want to hear from you 'cause you've got that.

[00:16:24] That's a good idea. People would speak to you straight away just 'cause they, you can say, look, I've got however many followers on Twitter and Instagram, and this is where people are coming from. 

[00:16:32] Nat Eliason: Yeah. Yeah, that's a good idea. That, that didn't even cross my mind. But you're right, it's like the conference circuit is pretty big.

[00:16:39] Yeah. And so it'd be fun to be able to, uh, to get into that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and and that's the advantage I have too, reaching out to like podcasts and other influencers mm-hmm. Is being able to say like, oh yeah. You know, like if you mention my, my book on your books to Gram, I'll repost it and I've got. A ton of followers on Instagram.

[00:16:58] And so that'll hopefully help your account grow too. 

[00:17:01] Teddy Smith: Yeah, 

[00:17:01] Nat Eliason: definitely. Um, and I, I think that'll be a useful strategy. 

[00:17:04] Teddy Smith: The other thing I think you sort of touched on just now is your, your main email list, however many people are on it, they haven't followed you for your books. Yeah. So what you kind of wanna do is get that part of the audience who are interested in your fiction books separated so that you can send them stuff about fiction.

[00:17:18] I think building out that mailing list is. It's really, really important, but also you don't wanna make sure you lose people from your main, main list. 'cause you started talking about monsters and AI and things like that. I mean, I, I, 

[00:17:29] Nat Eliason: I think I'm actually just going to pivot my entire email list to fiction.

[00:17:34] Um, and I'm just gonna tell everybody who's on it right now, like I. Deal. I, I'm, I'm not, I'm not interested in talking about productivity or any of those old topics anymore. I'm pretty much like all in on making this career work. And if it doesn't work, I'm like, not gonna go back, I think to the influencer thing.

[00:17:53] I'm gonna like start a plumbing business or something that's not on the internet. Um, yeah. So I think I'm just gonna start sending them fiction content and if they wanna unsubscribe, cool. Like, yeah, I don't really care about losing subscribers. 

[00:18:07] Teddy Smith: The reason why, the other thing that's quite important is doing newsletter swaps can be a really effective way, you know, there's a couple of great tools you could use.

[00:18:13] Story Origin is one. I've interviewed him and also I. Book funnels. They're both really good ways for getting your books out there. And you can kind of do news that sorts of people. So if you are talking about sci-fi for example, there's other people you can sort of swap with and say, Hey, this is a book I'm talking about.

[00:18:28] Um, and then you can get your book in front of their audience too smart. And with your smart size audience, you might be able to do that with some quite big people. 

[00:18:34] Nat Eliason: Yeah. Yeah, I think you're right. That's a good idea. I should think about that. I need to, I think once Husk is out, then I'm gonna start going a little harder on like the newsletter pivot, because again, I, I've been holding off on a lot of these things just because the book isn't out yet.

[00:18:48] And if you have no audience than like, yes, it's worth starting to build the audience earlier to like get that ball rolling. But for me it's like I'd rather just wait until I can send people directly to the Amazon page and there are some reviews there and they could just click buy than try to drum up that interest.

[00:19:05] Now before. It's ready. So, um, but yeah, doing the newsletter swaps and things is a really good idea. What, what have you seen do well in the, like book newsletter, book Blog World? Is it lists, is it reviews? Like. What, what seems to do well there? 

[00:19:22] Teddy Smith: So in, in the newsletter swaps, it tends to often just be a shout out.

[00:19:25] Like this is 'cause the people who follow other au authors, they're usually like mega fans or they, they're like kind of read everything that person puts out. So it can often be just a case of, Hey, I've read this, this is something my friends read. Uh, you might like this too. And it's things you can read in between other people's books.

[00:19:42] Cool. But. Yeah. I mean, writing reviews of other people's books can go down really well. It just, it's obviously a bit more work. Right. I think you might have to experiment a bit with that one. It depends on the audience a little bit. 

[00:19:52] Nat Eliason: Yeah. I think I'll just start playing with it, but I'm excited for that.

[00:19:55] My newsletter hasn't had a focused topic in a very long time, and it's nice to just be committed to something and to really like, yeah. Like I said before, go all in on it. 

[00:20:06] Teddy Smith: Yeah, definitely. So obviously you did a lot of writing before this, but writing a book is completely different to writing blog posts, articles, and I know you wrote your nonfiction book, but it, again, it's completely different 'cause you're not really plotting it out in the same way.

[00:20:18] How did you approach plotting the book to make sure that it was doing really well? 'cause I know you wrote it in something like four weeks, so I'd love to go through that whole process. 

[00:20:26] Nat Eliason: Yeah, well there's a lot of caveats to that. I mean, one, so my nonfiction book was narrative nonfiction. Yeah. So I had to learn how to tell, you know, a, a book length story for that.

[00:20:37] And that was kind of what started all of this. But then in the process of, I. Doing that for Crypto Confidential, I kept having these moments of like, oh, this would actually be a better story if this happened. But I couldn't do that because, you know, had to be nonfiction. And so that, that kind of like piqued the interest in, in doing a, a novel.

[00:20:56] And there was still a lot of work that I had to figure out around like, okay, how do you actually. Plan this. How do you outline it? How do you review it? Like what's working, what's not, like how do you edit at the scene level or the act level or all of these things. And a lot of that was just reps. Like, you know, you, you mentioned that I, I, I wrote the first draft of HUSK in about four weeks, and that's true, but there was a like.

[00:21:23] Very first stab at doing something in this universe that got to like 30,000 words and I was trying to pants it, you know, I was trying to just like discovery, right? Figure it out as I went. And that didn't work at all. It was terrible. It was just like going around in circles. And so I threw that away. I.

[00:21:39] And then I started another attempt, uh, at doing something in this world. And that got to, I finished it, I did a second draft and I showed it to some people and they were kinda like, nah, it's okay. You know, it wasn't that good. And so I threw that one away. And so. This was really like the third attempt at doing something in this world.

[00:22:00] And by that point I knew the characters very well. I knew the world very well. I knew some of the characters very well. I knew the world very well. I had a very good idea of like where it was going to go. I. And before I did that crazy four week sprint, I spent a week like planning it out in relatively significant detail.

[00:22:22] So when I sat down for the writing sprint, I had the like 60 scenes that I thought were going to be in it. I had a lot of the chapters, I had a lot of the like, main arcs. And obviously stuff changed as I went. And you know, you, you like that happens as you're, as you're writing. But that made it a lot easier to like, sit down and do that sprint.

[00:22:42] I don't know that I could have done that if I was completely starting cold on a new idea and hadn't figured a lot of these things out yet. but I mean, you know, I, I, I've read like all the different ways to outline a book and how to plan a book and at, at the end of the day, I just feel like getting in reps is the most helpful thing.

[00:23:01] It's like, you know, this, this was, this was the, the third attempt at a novel, the fourth attempt at a book. And now I've, I'm finishing up a novella in the same universe and I've started on Husk two. And it's like each rep, it just gets easier and it starts to feel more natural. And I, I think one of the hardest things is learning to think on a.

[00:23:27] A hundred, 120, 150,000 word arc. Yeah. Versus thinking on a 1500 word article arc. You know, it's like that's a real reprogramming of your brain as a writer. And it's made it very hard to go back to writing articles because I just like, I'm not interested in that length anymore. And it feels like there's just too much to say.

[00:23:48] So. It's a boring answer, but it does feel like just getting more reps in is the most helpful thing. Yeah, and, and to a certain extent, getting new reps in, like, I, I think there, it's easy to waste a lot of time editing something over and over and over and over again, but like 70% of how good something is going to ever be is probably in the first draft.

[00:24:11] And so at some point I think you either need to just like ship it and move on or toss it and move on, like. You can only keep polishing it so much. and I think I've been good about, yeah, just like starting the next rep, getting into uz, I can, starting the next rep and, and continuing to learn that way.

[00:24:33] Teddy Smith: I like that answer. It reminds me a bit of that meme with that guy reading a book and he looks up and he is crying and the answer is to the book is just work harder, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

[00:24:44] Nat Eliason: Exactly. Yeah. The, the, the secrets to success or whatever, and then the answer is work harder. 

[00:24:49] Teddy Smith: Yeah. Yeah, 

[00:24:50] Nat Eliason: yeah, yeah.

[00:24:51] Teddy Smith: Now, when you, have, you wanted to write a book for a long time or was there a specific moment where you thought, okay, this is the book I want to write?

[00:25:03] Nat Eliason: I, I wanted to write a nonfiction book of some type for a long time, and I sort of always felt like the blog was building towards that eventually, but then kind of as soon as I did and, started to think about it as a career, I just, I got more and more interested in fiction. Because I think a lot of the ideas that I would be interested in writing a nonfiction book about, just work better in fiction.

[00:25:29] You know, like I, I'm very interested in some of these philosophy of mind concepts and like consciousness and identity and death and like, you know, all of those things. You definitely can write. A nonfiction book, like a philosophy book, and you know, 200 people will read it and it'll be kind of like this niche thing.

[00:25:48] Or you take a few of those ideas and you turn them into like a sci-fi thriller and suddenly it has mass market appeal. I. And the people who are interested in that part of it will really enjoy that part of it. And the people who aren't interested in that part of it will just have like a fun story.

[00:26:04] So it, it, it, it's, I think, a better way to package a lot of that content, uh, so that it's more marketable and so it can reach more people. And when I started looking through a lot of the topics that I wanted to write about, I was like, these would just be more fun of stories instead of nonfiction. Like I.

[00:26:24] Think pieces and that that's been a lot of fun and it's like, now I just have too many ideas and I don't know how I'm ever gonna have time for. 

[00:26:34] Teddy Smith: I love that answer because I speak to so many writers who are like, oh, I always wanted to be a writer. I've always just, you know, since childhood I wanted to do this, but you really are coming at this from a business point of view, which I, which I love.

[00:26:44] You know, you've got these ideas and your way of expressing them is actually. You want some, turn this into a business that's more sustainable. So I think that's a really interesting way of approaching it. 

[00:26:52] Nat Eliason: Yeah. Yeah. And I, I, I definitely wasn't somebody who like always wanted to write a book Growing up. I didn't do any real writing as a kid.

[00:27:01] I kind of stumbled into it in college for work and then I ended up writing in some capacity for the last. 13 years and from doing it a lot, ended up enjoying it more and it slowly becoming the thing that I got good at. And now I do really enjoy it and I do really like it and I, you know, if I can make it work as I.

[00:27:22] The main way I make money. It's like that's a huge win. So that, that's like you said, just coming at it from the business case as well as the romantic one. 

[00:27:30] Teddy Smith: Yeah, definitely. Were there any big influences that you had on writing this book and now, and those influences could be, you know, both other writers, or it could be things that are happening, which made you want to write this story?

[00:27:44] Nat Eliason: Mm,

[00:27:48] yes. You know, the. In terms of the, like concepts, it, a lot of it. Oh, oh, for Husk and, and for the, the Maru initiative, this whole world. Yeah. A lot of it is derived from this idea that we are accelerating faster and faster towards this technological future. And there are a lot of, you know, kinda like people out there talking about how we're going to achieve immortality through science.

[00:28:17] Hmm. That to me, you know, is sort of like fraught with potential problems. And like unintended consequences. And the, the, the world for the book came from considering, you know, two, two possible ways that we might try to do that, that could go. Wrongly. So, you know, one through re-engineering the food supply, right, for maximum like health and yield and all of these things.

[00:28:50] And that isn't discussed in Husk. It's part of the backstory. It'll be in a book eventually, but that's basically like. What causes the, like quasi apocalypse that like wipes out most of the world. And then the other side of it is achieving immortality through digital transference. So, you know, you hear this talked about in like the a, the AI discussions and computing discussions and tools like Neuralink and stuff where it's like, oh yeah, one day you might be able to just transfer your mind into a computer.

[00:29:21] Then you can like live forever in this digital world. And you know, that is that, that's actually based on a very aggressive assumption about the nature of consciousness that you can argue both sides of, and we can never completely know the answer to. because at the end of the day, like. The perception of subconsciousness will always be subjective.

[00:29:42] There's no way to have an objective understanding of somebody else's mind. And so even if you were in a world where it appeared we had solved transference you would never know if it was actually working or not, or if the person on the other side was just a really good copy until you tried it yourself.

[00:30:01] And so then the question is like, would you try it? Right? And I think there are some people who are like, hell yeah, like I'm going in. Other people will be like, hell no. There's no way that this thing actually works. And you could never be sure of the answer. I. You could never know, until you tried it yourself.

[00:30:15] And that's, that's kind of an interesting problem, right? Like most of these things, you know, we can look at somebody else's heart surgery and we can say like, oh, the heart surgery worked. Like your heart is beating. We can look at almost anything else and get a decent understanding of it from the outside.

[00:30:30] But like, theory of mind, we can't, and. And, and so in, in this world, everybody has transferred their minds into computers and are living in this kind of like server world with a small quasi slave population left on the outside to keep the servers running. And so what does that look like, right? Like what, you know, what is this world where.

[00:30:52] Most people are living in a digital paradise and a few people are on the outside having to maintain the servers and, you know, what kind of problems or things might happen in that world that like lead to these kinda like big conflicts. And so that, that was, that was the, the opening question. For, for creating the story.

[00:31:11] And it's just, it's a very fun world for me. It's very fun to build because like I was a philosophy major in college and so that's obviously had a decent impact here. And I, you know, I went to, uh, Carnegie Mellon, which is like a big tech school, and their philosophy program was very like philosophy of mind ai, nature of consciousness driven.

[00:31:31] And there are a ton of AI books coming out, you know, like, oh, rogue ais, and you know, giving Birth to Super Intelligence and whatnot. And like, to me it's kind of a boring topic. It's not like, boring is the wrong word. It's overplayed, right? Yeah. It's like everyone's talking about that, and I'm kind of coming at it from a different angle where I'm saying like, the AI isn't the interesting thing.

[00:31:50] The AI is like actual human minds in a computer and you know, can we get there and what will it look like if we do? And that's been a lot of fun to play with, especially when you bring in the like. Okay. All of the richest, most powerful people in the world can like now be immortal. So what happens if we lose?

[00:32:11] The natural transference of like power and influence and, ideas that comes from death. Like how important is death to the progress of civilization? And I think it's actually probably pretty important, right? Like I Einstein had that line where it's like, science advances one obituary at a time or something like that.

[00:32:32] I think you kind of have to let the old guard pass so that the new ideas can flourish. And so. If the old guard can live forever, right then, like what happens? So it's, it is all just been very, very fun. Um, and then with the, with the understanding that most people are not as interested in reading these ideas raw as I am.

[00:32:53] And so how do I create. A very fun, exciting, fast-paced story to wrap them in, to get them out there in a more mass market package, and that's a really cool challenge. 

[00:33:05] Teddy Smith: Yeah, definitely. The. The, the ideas you're talking about are obviously very interesting, but again, what you talked about before sounds more like philosophy or an idea, but you have to weave in that story of where there is jeopardy and where problems are happening.

[00:33:20] Yeah. So when you were building out that story of the, you know, the bad thing that was gonna happen, that was gonna cause the story to be interesting, how did you plot that out?

[00:33:36] Nat Eliason: I had a pretty good idea from the get go of like what the problem would be, which is like one, you know, you, when you hear like, okay, hu humanity's living in digital immortality. There's a small group on the outside who's trying to keep the lights on and you know, they're there, there's sort of beholden to the people and the servers.

[00:33:56] I, I think your, your first instinct when you hear that would be like, oh, this is going to be a sort of like. Uh, hunger Games or Red Rising esque, like Revolt Against the Upper Class. Right. This kind of like populist uprising story and you know, that, that was kinda like my first thought and I was like, well, that's, that, that can be a very interesting story for sure, but it feels a little bit too obvious.

[00:34:20] Yeah. And so, you know what, you know, let, let's keep the, somebody hates the digital paradise and wants to destroy it. But what if the person who wants to destroy it is actually one of the people in the paradise? So it's not somebody on the outside. It's not somebody who's like keeping the servers running so that they can transfer into it.

[00:34:42] It's somebody who's already in there who's apparently immortal and omnipotent and has this perfect life, but they want to destroy it, right? Like who is that and why do they want to take it down? And what could their motivations possibly be? And then how do these people on the outside who are spending their lives keeping this paradise running so that they can become a part of it?

[00:35:07] How are they reacting to it? And then who else is on the outside that might not be immediately obvious at the beginning of the story, right? Like, what are the people who are not living in these like centers maintaining the paradise? Like what are they doing and how do they factor into this? And then it started to get more interesting where it was like, oh, okay.

[00:35:25] You know, what's actually going on in there? What's going on out here? Like, what happens when it, it does get attacked? How do people react to their, their paradise, like being threatened? And, and then it started to build into this more interesting world of these like digital gods in a sense, warring amongst themselves for the power and control over.

[00:35:52] The new world, which is this digital world, while still being beholden to the whims of the people on the outside who could theoretically shut it off. At any time, it's like you're, you're both somewhat immortal and like can't die and whatever, but somebody could also just turn the power off. Yep. And so you're also kind of like very fragile, right?

[00:36:13] And so how, how do you protect against that and what do you, and what does your relationship look like with the people on the outside? Uh, and like then it just started to get a lot more interesting, I found where it wasn't this just struggle against power. It was like the struggle amongst powers. For control of kinda like what's left of a, of a dying world.

[00:36:33] and, and then it got a lot more fun. 

[00:36:35] Teddy Smith: Yeah, definitely. With it it is because you've, especially now you've got these two worlds. You've got the paradise world and the kind of dystopian world of the people who are like actually living in real life. Yeah. Did you find it hard to keep a track of everything that was going on whilst you're world building?

[00:36:50] Nat Eliason: Yes, and I still do. And 'cause you know, there, there are these two like important time periods. You know, one time period is like the fall. So it's when this bacteria breaks out, it's incredibly deadly. It's engineered and so we don't have natural immunity to it. It's, antibiotic resistant, everything, and it just like wipes out the vast majority of the world at the same time that meru, this paradise is coming online and transference is being offered to people as a salvation, but all of that happens a hundred years before Husk.

[00:37:23] And so. I needed to know that time period very well and like what happened during it so that when I'm referencing it as backstory in Husk, I'm not mixing anything up. And then you have these kinda like differences in knowledge between different characters, whether they're in Meru and like living in Visual World or they're in the physical world.

[00:37:46] And there are other aspects of that that get extra complicated for reasons that happen in the book that I'm not going to spoil. and so it's, I've, and then the thing that I could have maybe put a little bit more time into from the get go was like creating a strict timeline and, you know, a stricter wiki of like exactly what happened every step of the way.

[00:38:07] But mm-hmm. I've sort of been figuring out half of it as I go and then having to like. Slot it into the history is, you know, my understanding of it. 'cause, you know, the world just naturally grows and evolves as you explore it through your writing. But you have to, you know, maintain consistency and that can, you can, you know, paint yourself into corners sometimes.

[00:38:26] And so that's hard. Yeah. Especially with a series, I mean, wow. It, it, it's given me so much respect for people who do. 6, 7, 8 book series and have something from book one that like recurs very well in the final book. It's just like, how did you plan that? Or did you not plan it? And you were just like very creative in how you tied this random thing back in, you know, like, we'll never really know from the outside.

[00:38:47] But I, I could have put a little bit more time into that from the get go, I think. But it's still, it's still, you know, working very well and very fun too, because it's like, yeah. I'm discovering this world as well, and that's, I think one of the bits of magic of writing fiction is that even you, the author, don't really know what's going to happen until you're in it.

[00:39:06] Teddy Smith: Yeah, for sure. I mean, the reason I asked that question was because a lot of the stuff you've talked about before, your fiction journey is about productivity, you know? Creating notes. 

[00:39:14] Nat Eliason: Yeah. Yeah. Being good 

[00:39:15] Teddy Smith: at remembering that stuff. So did you have a system in place for trying to remember it, or is it now you've written the book and you have to wait 

[00:39:21] Nat Eliason: and now it's just like a, now it's just a Google doc of just running notes.

[00:39:25] You know, I don't have like a crazy internal wiki or anything like that. And, and in part I didn't do that because that seemed to me like the easiest way to procrastinate the actual writing. You know, I think a lot of books have died in the. Before putting pen to paper and also. When you do too much of that, you feel like you have to justify it by including all of it in the book.

[00:39:49] Yeah. And that can make books feel slow and heavy and over described and overbuilt. And so I, I kind of wanted to avoid that and wanted to, I. flush it out as I went, which has mostly worked. But, you know, I, I, for, for the next series, I'm gonna spend a little bit longer on that step upfront just to get like a good scaffold in place so I'm not building it on the way up.

[00:40:13] Teddy Smith: A good tip for that is I spoke to Joanna Penn on this podcast like a week ago. She's quite a big podcaster in this industry and she uses Google Notebook, lm, which it, you can basically plug all your previous work into and it. It can create like a wiki out of it so you can learn, right? You can ask your book questions and things like that.

[00:40:29] So smart. You could upload your manuscripts in there and start like asking questions like, oh, what was Isaac up to like back then? Oh, 

[00:40:35] Nat Eliason: that's a good idea. 

[00:40:36] Teddy Smith: Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:40:37] Nat Eliason: I should try that. 

[00:40:38] Teddy Smith: Yeah. That's really cool. 

[00:40:40] Nat Eliason: Yeah. 

[00:40:41] Teddy Smith: Now, one last couple of questions, but the first one was you talked a bit about the pre-sale.

[00:40:45] Now obviously you've got that audience, but how's that presale worked for you? And were there anything, is there anything you've learned that you would improve upon next time? I. 

[00:40:53] Nat Eliason: Yeah, no, the, the pre-sales been fun. So I, I, I, I built a Shopify store on, on my own domain and I'm selling signed copies of my books through that.

[00:41:04] And, you know, I'm just doing the fulfillment myself outta my office here. I. And that, that's been a really cool experiment because obviously you make more money if you sell your books directly than if you sell 'em through Amazon. And, uh, you know, having the email list and everything, I can, I can send some people there.

[00:41:20] And so I've sold like 220 copies of the book through, through my site, which is awesome. You know, it's like $7,000 something in revenue. Decent chunk of that's profit. And it's like, okay, cool. Like. I'm gonna be able to get those books out to people in the week before it publishes, and then I have their email addresses and whatnot, so I can ask 'em to leave a review or to share it or anything else, which you can't do when you sell through Amazon because you don't have any way to contact your customers.

[00:41:47] Yep. And so I, I, I feel really good about that. I think next time. You know, I, I launched it like two months before publication date. That was probably too early. I think maybe next time I'd do it two or three weeks before and do a little bit more of an aggressive push and then do the big launch week push.

[00:42:04] I just, I got excited and wanted to like, have it up early. But you know how it goes. You like announce it and you get a huge spike of sales and then it just dies off to like nothing, right? Yeah. Until you have the next big push. And so there's kind of like. Not much reason to do it a long period of time in advance.

[00:42:21] 'cause then you sort of dilute your marketing. So I think squishing it closer together would be better. And but I, I'm excited about that because you, you, you're building a more direct relationship with your audience. I did this cool bundle where if you buy the hardcover on pre-order, you're getting a signed copy, plus you're getting the audiobook and the ebook for free.

[00:42:40] Mm-hmm. So you're getting all three formats bundled together for the price of what the hardcover will be at launch. Uh, which I can't do on Amazon, but I can do through my own site. And so I think that's a nice little incentive and I can figure out other incentives I think, to offer in the future too.

[00:42:53] Yeah. And hopefully as the series grows and more people find out about it, more people get excited about it, the preorder numbers will grow as well. Yeah. So I, I, I didn't set any expectations. It was just like, however many pre-orders I get is great, and that's the floor for what I hope to improve on with the next book and the next book, and just keep growing that over time.

[00:43:13] Teddy Smith: Nice. You could consider doing a Kickstarter as well, maybe to launch the second book. It's a really big thing in self-publishing. 

[00:43:20] Nat Eliason: Yeah. Yeah. It seems like that's getting bigger and bigger. and they, their, their cut isn't huge. And the cool thing with Kickstarter too is it's like you could spill out beyond your audience because it is a platform.

[00:43:30] Yeah. So I, I might, I might look at that as well. 

[00:43:33] Teddy Smith: Nice. Was there anything that you missed about the publishing process? You know, any of the help that you got from the publishers that you haven't had this time? 

[00:43:41] Nat Eliason: Getting an advance was nice, you know, it's like I, I'm paying everything upfront for Husk and obviously I, I make a lot more per book than I did going through the publisher, and so I can earn that back and then it'll all be, you know, profit after that.

[00:43:56] But, you know, it's a big difference going from. Getting a quarter million dollar payment upfront to spending 25 grand to produce something and possibly never making that back. Right? Like, I've already made a decent chunk back, but, and you know, I, I'm, I, I, I'm confident that I will, but that calculus is very different.

[00:44:18] Like you have to be in a position where you can afford to take that risk. And thankfully I am, but it does add this extra, you know. Scary, uncertain element to it that you, you don't have with a publisher. So, but you know, that said, I really love the model of self-publishing your novel, getting it to a certain level of success, and then selling the tra rights or just selling the print rights, right?

[00:44:46] Like, Matt Denman did this for Dungeon Carl or Carl, where he published the first. Six books self-published and then sold the print and audio rights. But he kept the Kindle rights, and that seems to have gone incredibly well for him. And like, you know, Hugh Howie obviously is a big advocate for this, and I, I've, I've heard of tons of deals like that happening.

[00:45:06] And in fiction, your email list and your audience is not as big of a factor as it is in nonfiction. In nonfiction, you can sell a book just based on your audience. You don't even have to have written anything yet. But in fiction, it's so much more driven by the actual book and the market and all of that.

[00:45:22] But, and the competition's insane because everybody wants to sell a novel. But if you already are selling tens of thousands of copies a year on Amazon, I. Getting a book deal gets a lot easier and you get a much better deal. And I do think it's not worth taking a book deal unless you're in the six to seven figure range where the publisher needs to make their money back and they're going to push your book into stores to try to do that.

[00:45:45] Like at a, at a $10,000 deal, they have no incentive to try to help you sell the book. They're just gonna like print it and then tell you to do everything. And it's like, okay, why would I give up most of my profit if you're not gonna help me make this a success? 

[00:45:58] Teddy Smith: Yeah, definitely. Really interesting. Now just, just the last final question.

[00:46:02] Now, I know you've got your big audience and you've worked hard to get that, but let's, I just wanted to do a hypothetical situation where, say you didn't have your audience now, but you've retained the knowledge that you used to get that audience in the first place. Now, if you were launching yourself out as your science fiction author now, and you wanted to be just the author, not any of the other things you've done, what would be your strategy to growing the audience back up again.

[00:46:22] Nat Eliason: It'd be Instagram and YouTube. That just seems like there's so many book buyers there and so many readers there. It's a strong community and it's a community that likes indie authors as well. Yeah. And that I think would pretty clearly be the spot to, build that groundswell of momentum because, you know, with an email list, there's no algorithm helping you.

[00:46:41] Like, there's a little bit of one on Substack, but it's, it's a much slower burn and it's worth doing, but it's not going to get you the initial readers in the first year that you might want. Whereas, you know, if you, if you figure out how to, and you know, say, assuming that I'm keeping my knowledge, like I know how to play the algorithm game, I'm quite good at it.

[00:47:01] And so I could just start a new Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, build those up, talking very aggressively about sci-fi fantasy. And use that as the marketing channel. And I think that would be very, very powerful. 

[00:47:15] Teddy Smith: Amazing. Thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate you spending some time chatting to me.

[00:47:19] Yeah, thanks Tony. It's been really, really good conversation. 

[00:47:21] Nat Eliason: Thanks for answering my questions too. It was helpful. 

[00:47:23] Teddy Smith: Yeah, no problem. Um, anytime. so if people, your book is still in presale at the moment, but when's it launching and where can they get hold of it in the presale version as well? 

[00:47:31] Nat Eliason: May 27th is when it'll be out on Amazon and everywhere else.

[00:47:36] In the meantime, you can go to husk book.com and that'll redirect you to my site where you can get the pre-order bundle, to get the hardcover plus the audio and the. Kindle version and I'm gonna be sending out those hard covers like the week before it actually launches so people will get a little bit early if they pre-order it as well.

[00:47:53] And yeah, I get all 500 books delivered tomorrow, so I'm pretty excited to receive that shipment and beg forgiveness from the UPS man for making 'em drop all those boxes off. But, uh, it's gonna be a lot of fun. I'm excited to send 'em out. Big day for you tomorrow. Big day. Yeah. Yeah. Gonna get my workout in 

[00:48:12] Teddy Smith: and if people wanna follow me along with your newsletter or anything like that, where's the best place to find you?

[00:48:16] Nat Eliason: Just na lyon.com is gonna be the good place to go. Or blog.na Lyon if you want like the essays on Substack. But either one of those will work. 

[00:48:25] Teddy Smith: Nice. Well, thanks so much for coming on. It's been great chat and we'll speak again soon. Good luck with the launch. Yeah, thanks, 

[00:48:29] Nat Eliason: Eddie. 

[00:48:30] Teddy Smith: Thank you so much for tuning into the Publishing performance podcast.

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