TWB Conversations, Ep. 1: Russell Nohelty

A Chat About AI, Reading and Writing, and Goals and Expectations in the Publishing Industry

The man himself at San Diego ComicCon

Welcome to the first episode in a series of informal conversations with other writers here on Substack.

Russell Nohelty

was kind enough to join me for this maiden voyage and it was a great chat about a lot of interesting subjects. I hope you enjoy it! And do be on the lookout for many more to come.

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Brady: Russell, thanks for joining me. Can you say a few things about who you are and what you’re up to here on Substack?

Russell: I’m a USA Today bestselling author of fantasy and non-fiction books. I’ve been writing professionally since 2004, writing books and comics since 2010, and non-fiction since 2016. Currently, I write The Author Stack, all about how to build your own creative career at authorstack.substack.com 

B: Thanks! That’s awesome. Tell me something that’s on your mind lately. What’s occupying your thoughts? Exciting you? Or maybe even keeping you up at night? 

R: I co-own a conference called The Future of Publishing Mastermind, so I spend an outmoded amount of time thinking about and processing AI. Right now, I’m just wondering why white dudes named Sam (Altman and Bankman-Fried) are so intent on fundamentally altering the world, and are so convinced that alteration will be a good thing. I’m not saying AI and NFTs are intrinsically bad, but they seem to flippantly dismiss or shrug off the downside consequences. Blindly following the advancement of technology without giving thought to the potential pitfalls is how we got into this position in the first place, and I am wondering why men named Sam are the harbingers of that future. 

B: I must confess to being out of the loop on the Sam scenario haha. I’ve heard the names but you may have to “explain like I’m five” what they are saying about this stuff. But it definitely calls to mind an issue I think about a lot, which is “CAN does not mean SHOULD”. Sounds like that’s your concern, yeah? Tempted to quote uncle Ben about power and responsibility. I agree we get into tons of problems both globally and in particular societies by not considering the moral implications of our technical power. 

R: Sam Altman is the face of ChatGPT and Sam Bankman-Fried is the face of the failed FTX crypto exchange. I feel like it’s exhausting to even think about them, let alone explain what they are talking about without wanting to punch myself in the face thinking about it, so I’ll leave it to people to Google what they are saying, but they are techno-optimists, or where in SBF’s case, I have to assume a massive fraud trial based around the crypto exchange you were running sobers you to the negatives of technology, but maybe I’m wrong. 

B: Hahaha. Fair enough. I’d say we probably can’t underestimate people’s hubris in general. I don’t think power corrupts absolutely but very, very often it does. Certainly hard to imagine trusting someone’s take if they are demonstrably guilty of fraud. I have a lot of mixed feelings about ChatGPT and similar programs. On one hand I think technologies are tools and want to believe they are neutral and given meaning by the user. But I’m also sensitive to the possibility that some mediums and tools are inherently bad. I’m still mentally caught up in the old Neil Postman/Jerry Mander argument about television being destructive as a medium per se. It’s a tangled thing, no doubt. As a writer, what are you thinking about ChatGPT? I assume you’re involved in how it affects fiction writing and publishing, based on your CV. Yeah?

R: I use it like any other tool. In fact, I’m designing a questionnaire like Oldster and Beyond, but more geared to creative entrepreneur growth, and I went back and forth with ChatGPT on what questions to ask and how to phrase them. I wanted to have a good collection of fluff and hard hitting questions without it going too long. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time and having that sounding board that could act as an expert was really helpful. 

I don’t blame a hammer for being a hammer, even if it caves in somebody’s skull. It’s just a hammer. Humanity is equal parts horrible monkey lizard mind and incredible gentle artist, and it’s all in how to use it. 

My friend Steph Pajones really changed my opinion on this. She has a disability that prevents her from being able to generate first drafts of books very well, and she used AI to help her organize thoughts and then edits them pretty extensively, and I think that’s great. I’m all for accessible ways to help us do work. 

The problem is not the tool, it’s that hypercapitalism will use it to extract maximum value for shareholders, which includes cutting labor costs to the bone in any way they can. Personally, I don’t want to read anything that only an AI created without a lot of human intervention, but I have to admit that a lot of the bland marketing copy it creates is as good as most of the stuff I’ve seen on the internet over the years. 

So, I’m not scared of AI. I’m scared of capitalism, but that has always been true for me. The question is whether technology will save us before it destroys us, which has been true for thousands of years. 

B: Yeah, I agree in this case, at least from what I’ve seen so far, that “neutral tool” is probably the most rational approach. The people with the messiah complexes about it all, like the Sams you mentioned, do give me some pause, though. Then again, that’s probably on them and not the tool, end of the day.

I have found, like you say, that there are lots of situations where the technology is a real boon. I’m thinking specifically in terms of research for writing. I’m not very skilled in prompting something like ChatGPT, but even using it like a search engine works wonders. Of course, you have to check the factual information it spits out, since I do notice it will generate a lot of demonstrably false stuff sometimes. Still, it’s lightyears ahead of a simple Google search. I think the use case of your friend is an excellent example of using it for the right ends. And I guess that’s the salient point here. It’s a double-edged sword, like even the internet itself can be. There’s lots of near-miraculous utility in it and also the potential to magnify our faults in a disastrous way. Perhaps all we can do is hope that the properly motivated people are the ones leading the charge in development and usage.

I hesitate to get too political because by and large people have a binary lens on such things and nuance gets obliterated in senseless tribalism. At the same time, I get what you’re saying about the cost cutting impulse at the expense of human value in what you’re calling hypercapitalism. I don’t know that I see a good alternative there, but I’m also no political theorist. I tend conservative in my thinking, but I hate even that label because it’s going to conjure all kinds of images in the readers’ minds that almost certainly don’t reflect my true thoughts on the matter. In the most general sense, I mean what Roger Scruton meant using the term, which is simply that we have inherited something of value from our ancestors and we have a responsibility to steward and build off of that, rather than default to tearing it down out of dissatisfaction with it. But this view logically leads to things like environmental conservation, which is of course something that people do not associate with the word “conservative”. Only going to show the corruption of meaning there, since obviously someone who is truly conservative is going to be opposed to destroying the planet in the service of profit. 

What I’m trying to say, I think, is that I don’t believe you can regulate and legislate the desires of the human heart. Something has to happen that is meta-legal to the individual to set them on a path to virtuous action. What that looks like is incredibly granular and it’s hard to make sweeping suggestions on how that would be carried out in practice. While some who are focused on societal level change might view that as a cop-out, I really think the only way you can affect anything and drive meaningful change is by behaving rightly within your sphere of influence and trusting the macro-results to the ripple effect of that. So in the end, I don’t think salvation or destruction lies in any technological advancement. Which if I’m following you is also kind of what you’re saying. 

Finally, on the issue of creative writing and LLMs, I agree that I have no interest in reading primarily machine-generated content. My belief is that this holds across a broad readership and that readers who invest in books desire a relationship with the author and that you can’t fake that across the course of a career. The attempt to deceive people in that way seems to me that it would be quickly outed and dealt with in the marketplace by destruction of interest in the “fake” product. Have any thoughts on that? Are you still writing fiction yourself? I do see a lot of writers worrying about AI fiction and because of what I’ve just said, I always find it to be a kind of non-issue. No matter how technically advanced it gets, I think people simply will not want to buy such things. I’m not quick to dismiss the intelligence of a reading audience, which I think a lot of people are when having that particular discussion, vis a vis creative work and AI systems.

R: I don’t worry about any of that stuff. I work mostly direct-to-customer, so my customers know who I am and want me writing books. The author community is often up in arms with one thing or another, and in almost every case in the end it wasn’t worth the fuss. I’ve been doing this for long enough to see lots of things rise in importance, everyone get upset about them, and then watch them fade away as barely a blip, barely worth paying attention to in the end.

Yes, there are people who will read AI books, but there are also who want to read indie books written by humans, at least on some level even if it’s with a lot of AI assistance. I think about this the same way as I think about trad published authors. Yes, there are people who will ONLY read trad pub authors, but does that mean we shouldn’t be writing books, because some segment of the market is locked off to us, or should we just do better magnetizing the right people to us?

I do think it’s good that there is advocacy in the author community, but how many things can I be expected to freak out about as the end of the publishing world before it becomes Chicken Little? Is the sky falling? Maybe. Should we be worried? Maybe, but we’re already using a lot of AI in our writing lives. Grammarly and spell check are both AI. Google has predictive text for email already. Did they destroy the written word? No, they didn’t. Will the next thing? Maybe, but we don’t know yet and I would rather direct my finite energy into writing books and helping other writers control the things they can control. 

I also think that Amazon already filters out a ton of garbage content. How much harder will it be to filter out more garbage content because of AI, especially now that they ask everything with AI be labeled as AI?

I don’t know, but I let the publishing community do their thing and I just keep doing my thing over here, controlling the things I can control and letting go of the things I can’t. All you have control over is the stuff you put out into the world. You can manipulate your world only so much, and most things you have to just let go, especially when the implications are opaque at best. I read a lot about AI, and nothing has shown me it will destroy the publishing industry. It will change it, but the publishing landscape has been changing for 600 years or so, and will keep doing so at an accelerated rate into the future. 

B: Couldn’t agree more with all that. I’m very new to this industry, compared to yourself, having only one novel out independent, but I’ve already observed the freakouts you’re talking about, and aside from being overreactions like I do think they are, they are indeed issues outside our control. For myself, pursuing a trad deal doesn’t have much appeal for me (except in the case of something distribution-related down the line, should there be enough buzz on something for me to be approached). I’m interested, like you’re talking about, in getting connected directly with my readers. 

Getting to the more personal level for authors, and I don’t mean to talk out of turn about anyone in particular, I think the tendency to obsess about these external and largely logistical matters is placing the focus on the wrong thing. If we are fiction writers, we must feel some call to doing that or we won’t have any longevity in our careers or joy in the process. The fundamental thing is “would you still write even if you never sold anything and the industry factors totally decimated you?” Obviously I want to be paid for my work, and as handsomely as possible, but that’s going to be down to focusing on those things in my control, like you say. To wit, writing more books and practicing my craft. Before writing I was a professional musician for over a decade, and so I do believe very strongly that quality and dedication win the day. It’s important to have an ear to the ground on industry trends that can be of benefit to us, but I think the primary focus has to be on becoming a better writer and delighting your readers. That’s what it’s about at the end of the day and I fear, unfortunately, that over-focus on the commercial factors can destroy this purer passion for writing for a lot of younger writers like myself. But again, I believe very strongly if your focus is lifelong commitment to the craft, you will eventually find a satisfying measure of success, provided you have the tenacity to keep going in spite of the shifting world around you. All of these commercial factors don’t really say anything about whether you are writing good books. Sales may reflect that someday, but that’s a result of your effort in some indirect way and not any causative factor. 

So yeah, I suppose we both ultimately come down on the side of “okay cool, let’s see what we can do with what’s happening but, end of the day, I don’t really care about all this”. I hope that’s not simplifying your position too much. To state it more cleanly, I think we need to be focused on process and discipline, rather than outcome. Outcomes in my experience tend to handle themselves if we keep our eyes on that small circle of things we can directly control. For me that’s daily output, with an eye to improving quality.

Let me ask you, for the greener folks like myself, what kind of advice would you give to people looking to do this long term, as an industry vet yourself? And I’m also curious if you set goals or projections for your career and involvement in the writing community. What’s the next five years look like for you in this regard?

R: The first piece of advice is that if you can do anything else, then you should do it. If I could do anything else, I would have stopped writing a long time ago. Publishing is a bad business. It’s low margin, high competition, no pain points, and brutal overall. Seriously, if there is anything else you can do, go do it. This is so hard. 

So, if you’re still here after that point, I would say that you need to decouple your self-worth from your success. Most of us get into this to connect with people, and, frankly, a lot of writers get into it for the fame and glory, which is a really bad reason to write things. However, no matter your reasoning, most of us were oddballs when we grew up, and found people resonated with our writing, so it’s natural for us to equate more people liking our work with feeling better about ourselves. That is a curse, and you have to stop it now. You have self-worth just for existing, and it does not increase when more people like your work. Success will not fill the hole inside of you. It will not fix what you think is broken about you. It will only amplify it. 

Then, you’re going to fail a lot more than you succeed. This whole business is mostly failure after failure with momentary and fleeting bouts of success, so you have to get really okay with rejection, and failure. I am fascinated by failure, why things fail, and why they succeed, almost to a sickening degree. Every book is a chance to fail, but it’s also a chance to succeed beyond your wildest dreams. I’ve watched enough people fail and succeed to know that it only takes one book to turn it around, in either direction. Whether you are on a failure or success streak, you can always turn it around. 

I guess the last thing is to control the data. Always work with platforms where you control the data as much as possible, because platforms fail, and algorithms change. The people who have continual success are the ones that have access to their customers. If you don’t, you’re basically building other people’s businesses for them. You have to have control over the data, or you have a shaky foundation to build a business. 

Publishing is not easy. It’s a really terrible business model. If you love it though, it can be very rewarding. 

As for the next five years, your 40s are when you are supposed to make the biggest gains in your career, especially because your 50s are where your relevancy falls off a cliff, so I’m hoping to establish myself in the next few years as a fiction powerhouse in fantasy, and build the Author Ecosystems into something that can endure for the long haul. I’m mostly just trying to build a moat around myself that will protect me in the future and keep me having a career for the long term without working as hard as I have for the past decade to get where I am right now. I’ve come a long way in the past couple of years, but there’s a long way to go to cement my legacy, which is what I’m working on right now. 

B: Yeah, I hear you. I’m in that same boat where this is the only thing for me. Novel writing, specifically. I’m reconciled to the idea of having at least a part time j-o-b in perpetuity. I am also open to massive financial success haha. Like I sort of implied above, I don’t think about it too much. I definitely agree that the fame and glory motive is a bad one. Probably a bad goal for any endeavor, unless you are focused on legacy building and are other-focused, like you said. Ego-inflation goals are always going to bite you in the ass. Hard. 

Not to pretend I’m super enlightened about this. It does feel nice when people really love my writing. I’m at a place where I mostly find that encouraging, but I get pangs of wanting to live up to expectations. I also definitely get that a lot of people get tied into more knots with this sort of thing than I do. So I think your advice is sound. The vast majority of people underestimate what it will take to succeed in a career like this. Really at anything in life. It can be a bitter pill in some ways but you’re better off if you take it fast and early. Again, I’m a relative neophyte but I know skill acquisition and craft learning and I always say you have to be married to it, practically, for it to work. That means all that stuff that’s in the vows applied to your art. Sickness and health, rich and poor, etc. 

I do think the metrics for success and failure are something for each of us to examine. Quality and improved writing does not equal sales, does not equal any number of other evaluative frameworks, and so on. I have a thing I call “The 10M Project” that I started up with some other newer writers and the aim there is to kind of approximate the Gladwell thing about 10,000 hours to mastery converted into a word count goal. Obviously, there will be some variance in how that plays out for individual writers, but I think long-term thinking like that, with the real goal being becoming great at the craft per se, is the best measure of success. So for those of us doing this probably decades-long challenge, every bit of practice is success as far as I’m concerned. 

R: Okay, I love this but 10 million words is so many. I don’t think I’ve written more than a few million in my whole career. I think 1 million is a good mark to judge when you have some level of writing mastery. It is admirable though. The goal I think should be to get to a place where you are having logarithmic increases in your skills, not exponential. At the beginning of your career you see huge gains, and then start to lessen as time goes on, so if that’s at 2 million or 10 million or whatever, eventually the gains are minimal and that’s when I think it makes sense to go really hard on the marketing part of it. 

B: Definitely. It’s meant to be a bit mental, as my Brit friends would say. Incidentally though, our first milestone is 1 Million, so we are tracking on what you’re saying, I think. And I agree with how the skill progression happens and where to focus.

Your long-term goals there also definitely track for me, and I think they are admirable. I do wonder a bit what you mean about your relevance dropping off at your 50s. I’m not sure why this must be so, but you will have some insights I don’t have.

R: Oh, you haven’t heard this? At least in comics once you hit 50, you’re basically useless to the whole industry. With literary fiction it’s a bit different, but there is rampant ageism in publishing. It’s changing a bit now, but lots of my friends have gotten kicked to the curb at 50. It’s actually kind of terrifying. 

B: Oh wow. That’s a shame. Well, I hope the indie sphere has the potential to change some of that. Would be a bummer to miss out on great work for such a silly, myopic reason.

Well, I think we’ve covered a lot of ground here and maybe we can end on a few personal notes. My Substack ultimately is about reading and writing, so I wonder if you would say a bit about some books that are really important to you. Things you recommend. Desert Island stuff, etc. Or anything you’ve come across lately that wowed you.  

Also, just in the spirit of informal conversation, what’s something you’re working on or enjoying outside all of this writing stuff? Could be anything you find interesting. Hobby, fitness goal, learning to cook souffle. I don’t know haha. Just something where people reading can get to know you a little better, if you don’t mind saying.

R: I watch a lot of movies and listen to a lot of music when I’m not reading or writing. So, I am eagerly anticipating 1989 (Taylor’s version) like half the planet. I saw the concert film last weekend and it holds up very well to my experience seeing her tour. I am very excited about the slate of movies coming out at the end of the year. It hasn’t been a great two month stretch for movies, so I am excited for what I see coming out in November and December. I’m really excited for Poor Things and The Holdovers specifically.

As for reading, my jam is portal fantasy, so I’m going to recommend my three favorite recent-ish books in that genre; Melissa Albert’s The Hazel Wood, Stephanie Garber’s Caraval, and Alix Harrow’s Ten Thousand Doors of January. If I had to only have one book, probably my favorite book of all time is Alice in Wonderland, so I would just pick that one to read over and over again. I keep a running list of all my recommendations for just about everything on my website. 

B: Great, thanks! I don't know any of those books except for Alice, which I must confess to not having read yet. I’ve got a copy on the shelf and I’ll definitely bump it up my TBR list. 

I kind of fell off the Taylor train after RED, but I’ll keep my ears open. I’m not entirely hip to the whole master recording dispute with her, but I do know a bit in passing, so I’ll check it out when that releases. I don’t know those upcoming films either, so lots of good stuff to explore. Thank you!

Finally, where should readers go to check out more of your stuff?

R: If you want to learn more about my work, I have 16 novels and a bunch of my non-fiction books available to my members at authorstack.substack.com. I also serialize my best-selling series for free every Monday. 

If you’d like a 30 day trial, you can get one here. 

We also have an archetyping system to help authors with their sales and marketing by leaning into their natural tendencies. You can find more about that at authorecosystems.substack.com or take the quiz at authorecosystem.com. 

Then, we have a conference called The Future of Publishing Mastermind if you want to join us in New Orleans to talk about all this stuff in person happening in February. You can find more info about it at futureofpublishingmastermind.com.

B: Very cool. I want to thank you for taking the time to chat, Russell. It was a lot of fun and I’m sure everyone will get a lot out of reading this. Let’s do it again!

R: Thanks for having me. It was great fun.

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Thank you for reading. Please check out Russell’s work and if you have any interest in my 10M Project, you can read about that here.

And of course, my essay and fiction work are available on this Substack page, and you can find my novel ((s), soon to be plural) on Amazon.