We're Entering the Age of the Iconoclast Writer

I’m so excited to have somebody with such deep institutional knowledge of the history of self-publishing join The Author Stack. Johnny has written over 120 novels and gotten several of them produced and/or optioned.

If you are a paid member, I recommend reading the Writing section of How To Become a Successful Author or the Making Great Content section of How to Build Your Creative Career to help give this article context.

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I met at 20Books, but I’ve known about his previous company through a conference called Smarter Artist that seemed to attract nearly everyone in my inner circle, including my business partner .

One of the best parts about conferences is the random meetings and convergences that happen around and through you. I told Johnny I was starting to bring in new writers and pitched him on writing for The Author Stack.

I was surprised by the degree of enthusiasm he showed at the prospect, but after getting to know him more it makes a lot more sense. This is a very personal piece from a human who has seen most of the history of indie publishing.

I love his publication Inspired as F*** and am super excited to find a home for him here. It was also fascinating to watch a Forest talk about their struggle to twist themselves into knots in order to build a career in an industry run by Deserts.

If you don’t know our Author Ecosystems, then I highly recommend you pop over to this post and read the overview, then come back and read this article through that lens.

I’ve been an author for about a dozen years now: an eternity by the standards of modern indie publishing. Things change whipsaw-fast in this business so twelve years has felt like fifty.

First, there was Amanda Hocking1. Then there was Hugh Howey2. I was a founder of the original Self Publishing Podcast and one of the authors of Write. Publish. Repeat — a book that espoused a churn-and-burn I began to regret when it spiraled out of control, same as the inventor of infinite scroll eventually regretted his own monster.

“What works now” changed so quickly that nobody could keep up. When I started, all you had to do to succeed was to make the first book in your series free using a few of the five free days Amazon gave you. Then they introduced countdowns, which made free days even hotter. If you managed to get a Daily Deal, you’d eat caviar for a year. After that, Bookbub was the secret.

You had to play the algorithms and watch your also-boughts3 to make sure you weren’t screwing them up. Set your categories just so. Build reader magnets4. Stack promotions5. Some people taught authors to buy reviews, but then Amazon cracked down on that. Others taught ways to game the system with partial books or reprinting public domain, but Amazon cracked down on that, too. There were bundles to get your book into and new promo strategies to try. 99-cent box sets were the bomb for a while, but then those stopped working, too.

But the one tactic that never changed — that always moved upward, demanding nothing other than to work it more and more — was volume and speed of release. The birth of Kindle Unlimited put an exclamation point on that, because KU readers were diners at an all-you-can-eat buffet and it seemed they never got full. Slow your writing in an atmosphere like that and you’d be buried in the deluge of books written by authors who’d worked harder than you … so the rule became: Never, ever slow down.

Authors began trying to publish a book every week or three just to keep revenue coming, afraid to go on vacation or take a break. On the podcast, we heard tales of burnout. Of authors sacrificing their health because they’d been bound by golden handcuffs: thriving careers that were as fragile as Faberge eggs, ready to collapse from hundreds of thousands to zero if they took too long between books and allowed readers to forget them, get bored, and move on. So many people I spoke to complained about the series they now hated but had to keep writing forever … because otherwise, all they’d built would fall to dust.

The company I was working with at the time stepped out of the race and into the sideways game of chasing Hollywood deals (EX: the TV series based on my Fat Vampire books), so for a long time I stopped worrying about rapid release. I ignored the front lines entirely until my first conference in five years, which I attended in Las Vegas just last month.

I went to 20books with grim expectations. Because now, atop the faster-faster-faster of it all, there was AI. Authors were finding ways to write books that were 90% or more AI-generated content, and we seemed just years away from saying, “Jeeves, write me a mystery novel” and thy will would be done. The conference, I was half-convinced, would end up being more of the same.

I thought: Maybe this will be the end for me as an author.

I’d written about 120 books, back when writing 120 books in ten years still sounded impressive — but speed was simply how I worked, not what I strove for. Truth was, I loved writing itself. It was the process, not just the product, that lit me up. I wasn’t interested in having AI write my books. At 1.5 million words per year, I simply was no longer fast enough to compete. And hey: Forget standing out. Forget having fans. It seemed to me that the game was now about outrunning and outlasting everyone else.

As a writer, I’ve always been an artist. I love telling the story, not reaching the point where the story’s been told as quickly as possible, then repeating forever. I love finding fans who appreciate the care I put into my work. I love it when readers get in touch and say they’d never heard of me, but then they found me and one of my books got them through a hard time.

No place for artists now, though, I assumed. Maybe my glory days — the days of spending my life doing what I loved more than anything — were gone.

That’s the mindset I took to Vegas.

But man oh man, were my dire predictions wrong.

On my first morning in Vegas, I spent a few hours walking and talking and having coffee with my friend Joanna Penn. If you’re an indie writer and you don’t know Joanna, you’re just not paying attention. Her podcast, The Creative Penn, existed before mine and survived long after mine was gone. It’s far better, far more organized, and far more forward-thinking. Plus, she’s British. Our Yankee voices were never going to be half as mellifluous as hers.

Joanna’s like me. She writes and does whatever she wants across many fields, genres, and disciplines. Because: Right. That’s something I haven’t told you yet about the problematic nature of my writing: I’m terrible at the consistency that bookseller algorithms require in order to succeed.

I’ve written sci-fi, horror, satire, comedy, romantic comedy, biological thrillers, political thrillers, straight thrillers, adventure, nonfiction, fiction-as-nonfiction, literature, dark comedy, allegory, martial arts, even some dabbling in romance. My second book was Unicorn Western, which couldn’t decide if it was fantasy, western, or humor. My favorite series is The Future of Sex, which began life as sci-fi erotica before being tuned down to hard-R science fiction … set (via a network of a thousand Easter eggs) in our Audie-Award-nominated world of The Beam.

Try to explain that to an algorithm. They simply freak out. The only proper classification for Johnny B. Truant books is a genre called “Johnny B. Truant.”

But that morning in Nevada, Joanna told me, “The market is splitting in two. For people like you and me, we’re entering the age of the artist. Now, your genre can be you.”

She said this to me while other writers at the conference were talking about maximizing throughput on AI authoring. While another prominent author was announcing his plan to publish a thousand books (!!!) next year. Let me be clear: I mean absolutely no disrespect to the faster-faster way of doing things because for plenty of authors, it’s ideal, fun, and profitable. It’s never been my way, though. I’ve tried it. I fail every single time.

Joanna’s words seemed truer and truer the more people I spoke to. I had no clue on my own; I’d been isolated for four years and hadn’t the foggiest idea how things worked nowadays. But she was right. Clearly, she was right.

The business of authoring seems to have reached a fork in the road. There are those who want to make a lot of books very quickly to satisfy the all-you-can-eat “whale readers,” yes … but as quick becomes quicker and the whales grow hungrier, the pace of it all is forcing authors who are like me (artist types, like carpenters who make furniture by hand) out of the game. But here’s the thing I hadn’t considered: It’s polarizing readers, too.

There are readers who burn through riveting story after riveting story on KU, or those willing to gamble on authors they’ve never heard of if the algorithms place their books prominently enough.

But there are also readers who are author-loyal — who want something different than the algorithms tend to give them. In the past, those readers tended to find their favorite authors and cling to them…but these days, they’re clinging much harder.

These aren’t whale readers. They’re picky, and they take their time getting to know an author … but once they do, they go back again and again.

In other words, Joanna is doing so well right now NOT because she’s attracting fans of thrillers or fans of podcasts … but because she’s attracting fans of Joanna Penn.

Suddenly, my genre called “Johnny B. Truant” had potential all over again.

The underserved and silent majority

It’s worth repeating: If you’re a fast-paced author for whom half the joy of writing is solving the discoverability-and-maximization puzzle, then more power to you. If the idea of teaching AI to write books is exciting, no judgment here.

But I have few worries for those folks because that kind of writer is being abundantly served right now. Abundantly spoken-to. I saw panel after panel about creating faster, creating more, publishing more efficiently, and making more money. Which is awesome. But the more I saw those topics, the more I wondered about a very different kind of author.

I pictured someone just starting out, who’s wanted to write all their life.

I pictured a craft-heavy author with an emotional story they just wanted to be told.

I pictured the struggling mid-list author because the mid-list is going the way of the corresponding middle class. Like Mr. Miyagi said in The Karate Kid, you can’t walk in the middle of the road. If you do, then sooner or later: Squish. Just like grapes.

Writing is an art. It can be a business too, but from the beginning, it’s always been an art. Its core remains art, for a lot of people. And yet the messaging out there for authors is increasingly about more and more and sell and sell. It’s easy to feel lately that unless you’re prepared to gird yourself and fire a book Uzi at the marketplace right from the beginning…

…well, then, maybe you shouldn’t even bother trying.

And that’s sad because although authoring has become a 2023-optimized business, that’s not the ambition with which most people approach it. Forget the 7-figure superstars; the vast, VAST majority of writers are people who just want to write a book. Or a few books. They’re doing it because they have a story they want to tell, not a story they want to have told as fast as possible so they can tell another and another on repeat … QUICKLY, THOUGH, because the clock is ticking.

I spent a lot of time thinking about all the would-be authors who are being left behind. All the new storytellers who are taking one look at the field and saying, “Never mind. There’s no point. Nobody will be able to find my book. Nobody will ever read my book. I’ve got stories in my heart … but the world’s a buffet now, and rising above the noise of everyone else is just too damn hard.”

I want to be one of the voices advocating for those authors

I want to add to the neglected, unpopulated world of opinion that runs counter to the big, loud, faster-faster way of doing things. Faster-faster is one way, sure, but it simply isn’t for everyone. If we count “number of authors” instead of “number of books sold,” I’d wager the “go big or go home” approach is actually wrong for most writers. We’ve got a 1% situation going on here. Everyone knows about the authors out there making bank, but those authors represent an infinitesimal minority compared to the total number of authors — or would-be authors, or aspiring authors — in the world today.

A few are making a lot of money by selling a lot of books. But most writers, I’m willing to bet, are never (and will never be) in that tip-of-the-pyramid elite.

And so to the little guys, I offer this: There’s hope in another way. There’s hope in the idea of a thousand true fans.

A Thousand True Fans

Based on everything I saw in Vegas — and everything I heard not just from Joanna, but from the other old-school publishing folks I count as my long-time friends — Kevin Kelly’s famous notion of “1000 true fans” is true all over again. The idea, if you don’t know it, is that artists of all stripes (writers, musicians, visual artists, and so on) don’t need worldwide fame to make a living. Instead, they only need a thousand true fans.6

True fans are people who will buy everything you make simply because you’re the one who made it. I’m a true fan of Austin musician Bob Schneider, for instance. If Bob released a coloring book or an ornate fountain pen, I’d be there…because it’s Bob and I love Bob.

Get a thousand true fans, and you, as an author, are golden.

That’s what Joanna was pointing me toward, on our coffee-and-walk date that sunny Monday morning. There are two paths through the yellow wood now, but most people only know about the one that’s well-traveled. But take heart, you millions of starving writers with just a handful of books to your name, because there’s also a less-traveled-by path … and if you decide to take that path, it might make all the difference.

Joanna told me, “I’m releasing a nonfiction book about gothic cathedrals next year. When in the past could I ever release a book about gothic cathedrals?”

Never, is the answer, if she wanted to be successful. Now that she’s taken the time to find her best readers, though? Now, she can absolutely do it. And why? Because she has true fans — not of any one of her books, but of her as a person.

How you find your true fans is straightforward, even if it’s not easy. I’m not going to go into tactics here because this article is already long enough, but the short version is this:

Cast a wide net when publicizing your book. Nurture the vanishingly small percentage of people from that wide net who join your mailing list or otherwise get in touch to tell you that they love your work. Then be patient. Be very, very patient.

If you’re lucky enough to already have some fans, wonderful. All you really need to do is to serve them well. Only: No, no, that’s not right. Don’t serve them. Delight them. Spoil them. If you only have a hundred true fans after tons of work, don’t get discouraged. You only need a thousand, remember?

Ignore the advice about finding hundreds of thousands of casual buyers and focus instead on finding — and carefully nurturing — devotees. We (the artist types, or at least the not-go-go-go types) are playing a different game than that.

Collect true fans one by one for long enough, and you’ll eventually end up in an artist-writer’s paradise, free of pigeonholes and the usual reindeer games. Do that, and you’ll be able to embark on crazy ventures that the book-a-week crowd could never pull off.

Maybe you release just one book a year, but maybe you offer it in leather-bound special editions that go for a mint on Kickstarter or in your private storefront. Maybe that single piece of IP each year ends up surrounded by a halo of lucrative bonus material that casual, non-true-fan readers would never buy, like side stories and audio releases and collector’s edition character cards. When you have true fans, your work is about quality, not quantity. When you have those kinds of readers — only about a thousand of them — you can write your own ticket and ignore the rat race completely.

I’m just getting back into the game after a long time away, but just between us I’m beyond excited.

We’re in an artist’s age now, and there’s nowhere I’d rather be.

I love this article because it shows a Forest that has been trying to conform to an industry that is wholly focused on using Desert tactics to succeed. You can see it all over this article. I was particularly drawn to this passage.

This is pure, unadulterated Desert methodology through-and-though. As he says in this piece, the “silent majority” doesn’t resonate with that publishing style. Even though Johnny had success, he wasn’t a Desert, so he burned out. It’s only embracing his true nature as a Forest that it allowed him to feel good about returning to publishing.

How can I tell Johnny is a Forest? This line right here:

Forests march to the beat of their own drummer and create a shared language their fans can use to identify themselves around a singular identity/author/brand.

What I love most about this article is that it shows how the industry has changed. It used to box out at least 60% of the industry who were not Deserts, or force them to use strategies that don’t feel good to them. Now, there is so much more room for everyone at the table.

I want to make sure you know, though, that if you are a Desert and just like jamming on your books and releasing a ton of books a year, then there’s still a place for you. It’s just that there has always been a place for you. Now, there is a place for everyone else, too.

If you haven’t yet, I highly recommend checking out Inspired as F***. This is one of my favorite articles he’s written.

If you are a paid member, I recommend reading the Writing section of How To Become a Successful Author, the Making Great Content section of How to Build Your Creative Career, and taking the Write a Great Novel course that came with your subscription.

If you are not a paid member, you can read everything with a 7-day free trial, or give us a one-time tip.