Russell Nohelty: Advice Every Author Should Read

An interview with writing advice that is actually helpful

Interview with Russell Nohelty

I’m relatively new to Substack, but one of the authors I always enjoy reading articles from is USA Today bestselling fantasy author

Russell Nohelty

. I reached out to him to see if he would let me pick his brain for some helpful advice for writers, and he did not disappoint.

Russell Nohelty

has a unique and refreshingly honest voice. He helps demystify so much about the reality of being an author and building a business around the craft. This interview is on the lengthier side, but I promise it’s full of gold. I hope you enjoy this piece as much as I did!

You’ve written over 40 novels. What advice would you give to writers who struggle with completing their book?

The first question I ask is whether you are writing the right book. We all think we want to write what we’re writing. Do we, though? I’ve stopped several projects in the middle and realized either it was the wrong time or wrong book for me.

That said, most people just dive in without a plan, and writing an outline isn’t a moral failing. You can like…plan your books before you write them. I’m being a bit flippant, but you would be surprised how many people think they have to write with frenetic energy without a safety net. My writing got considerably better and faster when I started plotting my books before writing them.

Also, are you being too precious? A lot of authors want to make a book just like their heroes, but they aren’t very good at writing, certainly not as good at their favorite books, so they get discouraged and give up because they aren’t able to do the same things as their favorite author. Most authors should write their first book in either romance, thriller, or mystery because there is a strong structure there you can fall back on, and you always know where you are. It’s very hard to get lost writing a mystery.

I can’t tell you how many writers have told me they are lost in the middle of their 250,000-word epic fantasy and have no idea how to write themselves out of it. Even if you don’t write in one of those genres, you should at least write a timetable and/or quest into your story so your reader can track time, and so you can, too.

The only way you get better is by finishing things, especially since most of writing is rewriting, so you gotta finish a piece and know what a finished piece feels like to you. You have to be able to look at something and know it’s ready. You learn very little by abandoning things in the middle since so much of this work is about molding your thoughts and giving them form.

What are three things a writer can do to grow their audience without, as you often say, selling their soul?

The biggest thing you can do is improve your branding. Usually, it takes very little money to get your brand right so you attract the right people to your work. If you do branding right, then the right people will be magnetized to you without you having to do much work. They will see what you’re doing and immediately turn to you. That’s what people always miss about branding. If you do it right, you do less work in the long run because your brand speaks for you.

The next thing is making peace with commerce. I’m not saying you have to like capitalism, but some form of commerce exists in all societies dating back thousands of years. Even in a strict bartering society, there is some form of goods exchange. Capitalism is a very specific kind of commerce, but we all fall somewhere on the commerce spectrum between hyper capitalism and primitive bartering. We have to know what feels good to us, and make peace with the fact that we must make money to exchange for goods and services.

Finally, do things intentionally. You can give your work away for free, but there needs to be intention behind how you’re going about it. Maybe you are exchanging a book for an email list, or networking with other people to get exposure to their audience. Most everyone just does things without intention and end up spinning their wheels. The more intention you can bring to your practice, the better it will be and the further you will get.

Yes, eventually you might want to give your work away for free to everyone without getting even an email back from it, but that probably shouldn’t happen until you have some name recognition and know people seek you out. Before you do anything, know what you want to get out of it and make sure it furthers your goals.

When it comes to world building for your fantasy books, how do you create something that feels unique? Do you have a specific outline process?

Yes, a pretty strict outlining process I learned from an article on Ghostwoods about the process Michael Moorcock used to write a book in 3 days. I’m not as hardcore as that article, but I do follow that format.

As for the world building bit, most people want something they know, but a little different. Generally, people can only handle something 1-2 standard deviations from the world they know. This is why often people are “too soon” with a trend, because the Overton Window hasn’t expanded wide enough to encompass what they’re trying to do. We need to build a shared language for new things before people are comfortable with it. So, a lot of world building is slowly expanding that window with your world to bring your readers along for the ride. The things you can get away with in book one are very different than what you can get away with in book seven.

When you’re building a world, you always have to be conscious of what your audience already knows, which means knowing the conventions of your genre so you can expand and build upon them. I also think how far you can go with your world building comes back to structure. The more you can give your story a solid structure, the more your audience will allow you to get away with, like riding a roller coaster. If they know what ride they are going on, and trust you to take you on that ride, then you can get away with a lot more than if you just throw everything at the wall. Frank Gehry says that his work is 85% staying within the rules of architecture and physics, but that last 15% is where he can have a lot of creativity. Even though that’s a different field, I think about it often and find it equally true to my own work.

How do you recommend someone hone their voice as a writer?

By writing a lot, and writing a lot of different things. As Ira Glass says, when we start, we have good taste but aren’t very good, so most of this work for years, and I do mean years, is about narrowing that gap between taste and ability. The more work you produce, and the more varied that work, the stronger your voice. There is nothing wrong with taking a long time to learn to write before you even think about monetizing it or sharing it with others.

Writing the same story over and over doesn’t do very much for you. Abandoning work doesn’t do much for you. Studying without intention does nothing for you.

That’s the other thing. You need to read a wide variety of work, both in your genre and outside of it. You should definitely read avidly in any format you want to write in, but you should also read outside of that genre and format. Some of my best strategies came from very strange rabbit holes I didn’t even know I was going down. Who knows? You might find some technique in another format that you can bring into your writing like I did.

Voice comes from integrating a lot of strategies together to make something unique, and that doesn’t happen if you read a million of the same books. More than just reading, you need to analyze the work with intention to tease out the things that work for you. Read the ending and then see how they get there. Try to predict where the story is going. Get critical about what’s happening with each character.

When I’m watching a movie I will go read the plot summary and then watch how they get to the ending through character and conflict. I also think you need to read the tentpole books from the past in your genre as well, if for not other reason than so you have the source material to build upon in your own craft. I write a lot of portal fantasy, and I am widely read in that particular niche, and also in the wider fantasy genre. I also read hundreds of Substacks and subscribe to even more blogs, which allows me to know what’s going on and find tricks that people like which might be worth folding into my practice. If there’s somebody getting traction in publishing, or a big name author who comes to the platform, I will subscribe even if I don’t love their stuff on the off chance I can glean something from their work.

What do you personally look for when reading Substack articles?

Point of view and excitement for their topic. I will read an essay on just about anything, even if I don’t like the writing, but the ones I share have those two things. That said, I also like more reporterly stories that have a very neutral point of view. My favorites, though, the ones I recommend, all have a point of view, and can bring out the interesting bits on their given topic. It’s not easy to get there, but it’s a joy to read those articles.

What is something you wish you found more of in books?

I don’t know if I have an answer to that question. There are infinite books out there. I read over 200 books a year and never have a problem finding something new in the genres I like, especially now that there are more diverse voices hitting the market all the time. I think the industry does a good job giving just about anyone what they want if they just look for it. Also, I don’t really know what I’m looking for until I find it. Then, I turn around and find there are hundreds of other books in that genre that I didn’t even know existed until that moment.

How did you get over the cringe feeling of selling your work and creating a business as an author?

I’ve written whole books on this topic, and I don’t think it’s easy, but really it comes down to doing it and realizing the world didn’t explode. Unfortunately, when we think we’ve saturated the market, most of the time we haven’t even done 1% of the necessary work to get people excited about what you’re doing. I see this all the time. We have a conference called Writer MBA that dominates my whole life. I feel like Italk about it all the time, and yet even after a year barely anyone has heard about it.

I’ve done some super cringey things in my career, stuff I am truly embarrassed by, but it turns out that nobody cares about what you do. People are caught up in their own stuff. The people who do care forgive easily and the ones that won’t ever think about you again once they turn away.

If you want to do this for a living, and I’m not saying you do or should, but if you do then you need an audience, and marketing is a necessary byproduct of finding people who resonate with you. Money is the byproduct of building an audience for your work.

It takes talking to millions of people to find a thousand that love your work enough to pay you. It takes trying a lot of cringey things to find the things that don’t make you cringe. We have a whole methodology called The Author Ecosystems about how you can embrace your natural tendencies to grow your author business. It turns out for just about everyone there are marketing actions that feel fun and exciting. It’s about finding what those things are for you.

Russell Nohelty (www.russellnohelty.com) is a USA Today bestselling fantasy author who has written dozens of novels and graphic novels including The Godsverse Chronicles, The Obsidian Spindle Saga, and Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter. He is the publisher of Wannabe Press, co-host of the Kickstart Your Book Sales podcast, cofounder of the Writer MBA training academy, and cofounder of The Future of Publishing Mastermind. He also co-created the Author Ecosystem archetype system to help authors thrive. You can take the quiz to find your perfect ecosystem at www.authorecosystem.com or find most of his writing on his Substack at theauthorstack.com. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and dogs.

You can read more articles from him on his page

Russell Nohelty

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Hope this was helpful to all the fellow writers out there.

Your friendly neighborhood scribe,

Allie