The Artisan Author With Johnny B Truant

Are you feeling overwhelmed by the pressure to constantly release new books and battle algorithms? Do you wonder if there's a more sustainable, low-stress path to a successful author career? Is it possible to focus on art, build a loyal fanbase, and escape the publishing rat race? In this episode, Johnny B. Truant discusses the artisan author approach.

In the intro, When your brain says “write!” but your body says, “nope.” [The Author Stack]; Productivity, AI, and pushback [Seth Godin]; The Buried and the Drowned, Short Story Collection.

This episode is sponsored by Publisher Rocket, which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at www.PublisherRocket.com

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Johnny B. Truant is the author of over one hundred and fifty books across multiple genres, including thriller, science fiction, fantasy, comedy, and nonfiction. His latest book is The Artisan Author: The Low-Stress, High-Quality, Fan-Focused Approach to Escaping the Publishing Rat Race.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• Prioritising art over profit and building direct connections with fans
• Moving away from the high-pressure, algorithm-focused “rapid release” model that can lead to burnout
• The benefits and strategies of in-person, live selling at markets and festivals to find new readers
• Utilising platforms like Kickstarter for book launches to create special editions and connect with true fans
• Adopting a “low-stress” approach to marketing by choosing what you enjoy and opting out of things like social media

You can find Johnny at JohnnyBTruant.com, and the Artisan Author Kickstarter here.

Transcript of Interview with Johnny B Truant

Joanna: Johnny B. Truant is the author of over one hundred and fifty books across multiple genres, including thriller, science fiction, fantasy, comedy, and nonfiction. His latest book is The Artisan Author: The Low-Stress, High-Quality, Fan-Focused Approach to Escaping the Publishing Rat Race. So welcome back to the show, Johnny.

Johnny: Man, it is so fun to be on The Creative Penn. It's just like coming home. It's just so great. So thank you for having me.

Joanna: Well, you've been on the show multiple times over the years, and the last time was a couple of years ago when you were pivoting into this stage of your author journey. So we are going to jump straight into the topic today.

Why The Artisan Author and why now? What were you seeing in the author community that made you want to write this book?

Johnny: I used to do a lot of author education. We had a podcast and a book and all that. Around the time COVID started, I stopped doing a lot of that and just focused on fiction.

When I came back to the 20Books Conference, the last one, so much had changed. People were really ramping up AI in different ways, the rapid release had gotten faster, and all the tactical stuff had gotten more tactical.

I just remembered thinking, “Boy, I always wanted to just write books my own way, at my own speed.” Despite going fast, I don't like being forced to go fast and I don't know if this is a game I want to play anymore.

You have to fit into all the very specific categories that the algorithms like to promote, and a lot of people are playing those games. In the midst of that, I did talk to another author. You may know her. She's British and runs a podcast.

Joanna: Yes, it was me!

Johnny: I know that you had said—I don't know if you used the word ‘artisan,' but you definitely described a lot of the things that I'm looking at now, which is, “I don't want to go in that direction either, and I'm doing more and more of what I want to do and trusting my true fans to be interested in it.”

Over the course of the next year, I started thinking more and more about that. What if instead of going into that faster, faster, rapid-release, kind of a death spiral sometimes—a lot of burnouts is related to that—

What if instead we acted like artists who are selling fine goods to very discerning customers?

I would just call them artists and readers. We don't have to worry about price and we don't have to worry about fighting the algorithms. We can just rely on a one-to-one connection to true fans rather than hoping the algorithms will find people for us.

Joanna: Yes, and I did use that word. In fact, a couple of years ago, I wrote a positioning paper for the show about positioning myself also in the artisan space. I think this is really important. It's something that we obviously care about.

Having known you for many years, our conversation was sort of, “Look, don't give it all up because you are great at this.” I've been reading your writing for a long, long time, before you wrote fiction. I think what is nice about this period right now is that we do get to question things.

For a while, there were kind of rules. You guys had a book, what was it, The Fiction Formula or something like that, at one point?

Johnny: You know, it's so funny because I work with Sean Platt. I was working with him a lot more in that nonfiction space, and Sean will do things like that. He'll say, “Okay, we're going to call it The Fiction Formula.” And I'm like, “But we've already talked about how there's no formula.”

He's like, “No, no, that's the genius. It's going to be called The Fiction Formula. There is no formula,” because he wants the catch.

Joanna: But the thing is, there almost was for a bit.

Like you said, we met again at the last 20BooksTo50k. That was actually a thing for a period of time. Now I kind of say, “Well, one book to 50k.” Like you said, you can, if you do fine goods to discerning customers, you can do one book to 50k. It's a very different time.

It's almost like at the beginning of the indie revolution, we got to reinvent the way things were done. I feel like that's where we are again.

We are reinventing the way things were done because what is new becomes old.

I feel like where we are now, fifteen-plus years into the indie revolution, or maybe seventeen-plus years into it, now we can reinvent it all over again.

Johnny: Yes, and that's something that I explored in The Artisan Author book. It was almost a little bit of a history lesson, not because I wanted to bore people with it, but because we were on this very sensible and aspirational trajectory for a while.

We came out of the old traditional publishing days where you had to query an agent and hope that you hit the right person at the right time and in the right mood. Instead, we were suddenly without gatekeepers and we could do what we wanted.

Then it started to be, “Okay, so if you write more books, you'll make more money.” We helped to contribute to that with Write. Publish. Repeat.

Then it became that at all costs, with no governor on it. Like, let's just go faster. Let's forget about the caveats of trying to enjoy yourself and maybe trying to write art that you actually care about.

A lot of people just went to extremes with the rapid release thing, and that's what I think really hit me when I went back to 20Books.

It was like when you watch a kid grow up and then you're away for a year and you see that kid again, and that kid has gotten so big. It's kind of like that. I came back and it was like, “Oh, I remember rapid release.” It was this annoying little thing over there, and then it had become this huge thing and had become almost default.

That's what bothered me the most. It wasn't that it was so dominant, it was that I knew that there were new writers coming in—not just at that conference or the Author Nation conference to follow it, but people who watch from afar, who listen to the podcasts and watch the YouTube videos.

I just thought of those poor authors coming in and how overwhelming this must be. “I finally finished the book I always wanted to write. Okay, now write six more and release them every three weeks.” It's just terrible.

Joanna: It is. But I wanted to make the point that —

I've never done rapid release, and a lot of authors were never rapid release. It just became a loud segment of the community —

— and possibly true that the people who were making more income that way. As you say, also in the time that we've been doing this, people have disappeared.

Now, you disappeared, but you came back.

Johnny: You said that they're loud and that more of them appeared. That's part of the problem, really. Because they are loud—and by loud I don't mean necessarily obnoxious, I just mean that you tend to talk about it a lot when you've found something that works like that.

It's a vanishingly small percentage of authors, but because they are so loud, they're the ones who usually speak or write books or whatever. So it looks to people as if that's the norm, and if you aren't making serious bank as a rapid-release author, then you're just not trying hard enough.

It's not; it's this tiny percentage. I remember reading in one of Becca Syme's books, she had done the research to determine how many books actually make money, and it's the vast, vast, vast majority who don't make any money at all.

Yet those people are being given the same advice as everyone else, as if that's the majority and that's the way the majority works, and it's just not true.

Then if we come to what you mean by an ‘artisan author,' what are some of the hallmarks?

Johnny: Well, the first thing is it's art first and profit second.

I think that's the key defining hallmark, meaning that you're writing what it is that you want to write. You can define art however you want to define it. It usually just means, “This is the thing I want to do, and so I'm going to do it.”

But practically speaking, the biggest thing that I think is going to be attractive to people is you don't have to burn yourself out. You don't have to keep doing this.

When I came back this year, I gave a presentation called “The Artisan Author,” with the tagline “the low-stress, high-quality, fan-focused way to beat the publishing rat race.”

People came up to me after and they said, “I didn't really know that this was an option. Thank you for giving me some clarity into the fact that it's not rapid release or nothing,” which is what most people think. So, yes, there was a lot of appetite for it.

Joanna: What are the other things you are focusing on under that artisan umbrella?

Johnny: Well, certainly—and I didn't really finish my thought, so I apologize—the idea is that release of pressure. “Take your time” is another one of the pillars. Connecting with fans is a huge one to me.

That leads to this weird kind of backwards logic where usually self-published authors want to think bigger and faster because a lot of us have this very strong entrepreneurial streak, and it's almost eclipsed the artistic streak that people used to predominantly come into publishing for.

It used to be you came in because you wanted to write a book, and maybe you'd make money at it. Now it's like, “Here's a way to make money, and so I'm going to do it as quickly as I can.”

The customer focus thing is anti-leverage. Rapid release is trying to do as much leverage as possible. “If I make this one book, if I use the algorithms to my maximal advantage, then I can blow up without needing to do necessarily as much work.”

It's very highly leveraged, and the artisan approach is actually the opposite, where it's very, very one-to-one. So that means that you're making individual connections.

So, I'll give you an example. I do a lot of live selling, and I know that you wanted to ask about that. That's a super high-quality bond. When I meet those people, it's like I almost get them to like me before they even buy the book. So they leap very close to the fan end of the spectrum rather than the casual end.

I had somebody email me yesterday and say, “Hey, I bought one of your books at some open-air market here in Austin. I wish you had pressured me to buy the whole series because now I'm out of books. When are you doing this again?”

So tonight, he and one of his friends, I'm going to take books to them and I'm going to sell them. It's nineteen total books between these two guys, but that's the sort of quality connection to fans rather than a one-to-many connection. That slow scale, I think, is much more logical to people.

It's something that we can actually imagine because it follows the normal rules of regular commerce and interpersonal communication in a way that rapid release never did, which was just anonymous algorithms.

This entire thing, the founding principle, is Kevin Kelly's “1000 True Fans.” We're not looking to do that rapid-release paradigm, so you can't do artisan things with those customers.

You need to invert the paradigm and say, “Okay, rather than trying for high leverage, I'm going to connect with people one-on-one. I'm going to create high-quality stuff, and then find the individual people who are interested in that and then bring them into my camp until I have theoretically a thousand of them,” according to Kevin Kelly.

Joanna: It's amazing how well that has stood the test of time. That was, I think the original one was back in 2006, which again, would've been around the time when you were writing on Copyblogger and doing the online marketing stuff.

This is what's so crazy, is you and I both come from that highly leveraged world where online marketing was the primary thing. Yet now, you've said in the book and you just said there about how you love live selling, and I find that very surprising.

I'm an introvert and I find it incredibly hard. I don't know whether it's also being a highly sensitive person, but I find a lot of visual stimulation just too tiring. I can't look at all these people's faces. I can't deal with the noise.

I wondered if you could talk about how you discovered that you like live selling? What are your tips for people?

Johnny: Well, this is actually kind of funny because it is a really good fit for me, and in retrospect, I see why. It's because I have a strong extrovert streak in me that a lot of authors don't. So it is a little more natural for me, but I didn't know that.

I was at the last Author Nation this year, and I actually had a presentation scheduled, but I hadn't done any of this live selling. This is only six months old.

I talked to our mutual friend, Mark Lefebvre, and Mark was talking about how much he missed going out and doing book signings. I said, “Oh my God, I have nightmares about that. Just imagining being that poor author at the table who everybody's trying not to make eye contact with.”

His reaction was so genuinely shocked. He said, “Why?” Someone that I knew and respected and who I thought I shared a lot in common with, really loves it, and was shocked that I wouldn't.

What I started to realize is, yes, you can go out and you can be the sad author behind the table who's just sitting there and everybody's ignoring. Or you can take it as part of the art, and the puzzle of solving how to market these books has become such a fun part of it. How can I sell them?

So to answer the question, I've done everything from small farmer's markets up to my first Comic-Con coming soon. I've done huge street festivals.

What I've started to realize is it's just about being nice. I mean, that sounds so basic, but I don't go out and say, “Hey, want a book? Want a book?” and chase people down the street.

Instead, the book people, they turn toward you.

They express interest, and so they're already warm by the time you talk to them. You're not having to go out there and be a carnival barker.

I just ask, “Hey, are you a reader? What are you into?” And we'll start talking about books.

So if somebody's interested in my Beam series, for instance, they're looking at that.

I'll say, “Hey, did you see the original Battlestar Galactica?” Oh yes, they've always seen it. Then I say, “You know how that was really a political power play drama that just happens to take place in space?” “Yes, I know that.” “Well, The Beam is a political power play drama that just happens to take place in blah, blah, blah.”

It becomes much more about having conversations, and sometimes they don't buy, but that's fine. I've met some really interesting people.

When you go in with that attitude of “I'm just going to go out and meet people who are interested in books,” that shift alone makes a huge difference, for me anyway. I don't really care if they buy, although they tend to do so. It's kind of amazing.

The things that have shocked me the most are learning about my customers in ways that I never ever could have before. I've learned which of my covers are most attractive. I've learned that my covers in particular are attractive enough, apparently, that people will usually buy a book without even reading the back.

I will talk to them, they'll say, “Oh, that sounds good,” and they don't ask the price and they don't read the back, and they just buy it.

I've learned that there are things that I can recommend to people. So one of the things I get a lot is, “Oh, I would love to get back into reading, but I haven't done it as much.” It's like they're apologizing to me.

So instead of saying, “Oh, well that's too bad, see ya,” I'll usually recommend something really fast-paced like The Target, which is like John Wick meets Fight Club. A lot of people go, “Oh, it's a fast-paced short book that has that energy. Okay, I will do it.”

I would never see these things and I would never meet these people and I would never have people saying, “I want to buy three hundred dollars worth of books from you if you come down and meet me today,” if I wasn't doing all this stuff.

Joanna: So, some practical questions. You have a huge backlist, and when you are doing these in-person sales at, say, a market, you've got to set up a table. It is only so big, and you've got to schlep all the stuff down, and books are heavy.

Give us a sense of what the physical setup is and how you decide which books to take out of your massive collection.

Johnny: Well, one of the key things in The Artisan Author book that I talk about a lot is, “it depends.” So I just want to say this ahead of time: I'm going tell you what I do, but it is not advice. It is not, “you should do this.”

I have several friends, some of them we have in common, who do a lot of conventions and they'll say things like, “Take fewer books, just take a few, because it's an overwhelming environment. Make your table really clean. Don't bring everything.”

I'm going to bring absolutely everything I have to a Comic-Con, which is not the quote-unquote “official” way to do it. It isn't what most people do.

It works really well with my style because I have such a broad backlist and because they're interested in me first—which is an artisan principle, you're trying to interest them in you, not just an individual book. There are people who will say, “Well, I don't really like sci-fi.”

“Okay, well, do you like thrillers? Do you like urban fantasy? Do you like regular fantasy?” There's always something else. That sense of visual overwhelm is actually a positive thing because it just looks like, “Wow, there's a lot of stuff here.”

Typically, an outdoor booth space is ten feet by ten feet. I have to do a lot of them outside, which I'm not always super happy about, but that's the way they are here in Texas. So I have a ten by ten tent.

For Comic-Con, it's a little smaller, it's eight by eight, and it's just a puzzle each time to say, “Well, how should I arrange things?” When I'm outside, I typically do a corner if I can, because that allows me twenty feet of space rather than just ten to stack up all my books.

I have to adjust every single time. It's different buyers, it's different setups, it's different locations. For me, it's just about displaying the books, and then that attracts them.

Usually the book people come over with big eyes like, “Ooh, books.” They already like the idea of the books. They're like, “Wow, I didn't think there were going to be book people here.” So I just talk to them and see where their tastes lie, and then I guide them towards something that they might enjoy.

Joanna: Yes, so what you just said there I think is a really big point: they didn't know there'd be book people there. So these are not book fairs in general, these are other types of markets.

Johnny: Yes. In the book, I have a section that's like, “Finding Readers.” I divided that into multiple buckets where you're either doing the passive thing, where you're trying to find readers on Amazon or wherever.

The best ways to do this, I think, is what I call the third bucket, which is “creating customers out of nowhere” or something like that, because that's what it feels like.

I'm going to somewhere where people are not expecting to buy books. They don't know that they're in the market for a book.

By the way, if you're getting cold chills at the idea of selling live, that's so not the point. This isn't a live-selling book. It just happens to be something that I really enjoy and that works well for me. But there is some degree of personal connection in everything in that “finding readers out of nowhere” sort of thing.

If you let people know that you are an author, just casually in your personal life, eventually you'll find that the word gets around, because authors are interesting to people.

Some of those people, they didn't know they were in the market, but hey, “I just met an author. Maybe I want to buy one of their books.” That's what all of those most effective artisan strategies are for me.

It's like you're fishing in a pond where nobody else is fishing. You're just meeting people and nobody else is pursuing them. So when I'm set up at a street festival, nobody is there trying to buy a book, and then they go, “Oh, there are books.” And it's like I don't have any competition, and they self-sort. It's a very cool thing.

Joanna: I like that. Perhaps it's also less intimidating because when I saw your stall at Author Nation, you were in a room with hundreds of other authors with books. So it's very hard not to have some kind of comparison.

I know Matt Dinniman, the huge LitRPG author, had a queue out the door. Whereas if you are an author and you are at a fair next to cupcakes or soaps or something, I suppose you definitely can be noticed by the people who want that. So I actually like that tip.

How does live selling work financially?

Johnny: Well, first of all, I want to say that yes, you do need to have more books than you're going to sell, because that's something that isn't always noticed. At least that's my philosophy, because a sparse table is kind of a sad table.

Imagine you went into Barnes and Noble and there were three copies left. No, you want those shelves overflowing. So in my house right now, I probably have five to six hundred books, and I'll typically take a few hundred to any given event.

It depends on the event. I did a big event called the Pecan Street Festival here in Austin and I sold about two hundred and twenty books, but it's more common at a smaller one to sell thirty or so. It'll give you an idea of the scope.

What I've found is that as I've dialed this in, because I am iterating very quickly, I'm doing an event and then calibrating and learning. I also stepped up from very small markets to bigger markets.

What I've learned is that for me personally—and again, this is me personally, your mileage may vary—

My table fee, meaning what I pay to be there, tends to be ten to fifteen percent of my expected gross sales.

Because that's such a reliable thing, I'm actually actively looking for ones with big table fees.

I want to pay as much as possible, because if I'm going to go out there for a weekend, I want something where I'm going to walk away with more money than I would otherwise.

You just kind of have to be aware that this is an area where if you did want to get into live selling, you do need to invest in yourself, but you can start very small. What I tell people is, go slow.

If you're interested in this, you can split a table with somebody at an event if you are intimidated by the idea of having to be there the entire time, because you can come and go if you have a table mate.

You can start at a very small farmer's market. The first farmer's market that I went to locally here was thirty-five dollars. Compare that to the Comic-Cons, which can be near a thousand dollars.

If you just think small to begin with and you just take a limited stock, then your investment in the table fee, the equipment, and the books is much smaller.

I've just kept reinvesting. If I made three hundred and fifty dollars and I spent one hundred and fifty dollars, then that gives me two hundred dollars that I then go back and buy more books for the next bigger event. So you can step into it, and I would suggest that people do, if they're interested.

Joanna: Tell us about the process of doing a Shopify store and any lessons learned from that.

Johnny: Well, again, did you see my shout-out? I did mention that Jo Penn has a really good “Minimum Viable Store” episode of a podcast. That's kind of the approach that I took.

The thing about Shopify for me, I don't know if this is true for everybody, is that it takes a certain amount of momentum to get it started, like a rock rolling down a hill. I have found that if I'm not actively advertising, my store traffic dwindles to almost nothing.

So given that you have to pay for the software every single month, it's one of those things where I don't know whether to recommend it or not. I tried to give a whole bunch of caveats to people and said, “If you're ready to go in, or if you just want to have it established so you can build it, then great, but know what you're getting into.”

There's so much talk about “go direct” that I think there's probably a lot of people who are investing all the time and money and hassle and mental headaches of building a Shopify store and then not getting the reward out of it to pay for it.

I also know so many people who I would consider artisan authors who do a lot of direct selling, and they're largely advertising-driven. So that's kind of the way I look at it.

If you can afford to start playing with advertising, it might be a better move financially, but if you just want to begin growing your store, you can do it over time. What do you think? Do you need to advertise aggressively?

Joanna: I don't advertise, but like you and I, I have always done email lists and also launching. Where you do in-person sales, I always say, “Buying direct from me means buying from my Shopify stores.”

So my hardbacks and stuff are on my Shopify, the bundles are on Shopify, the special deals, the whole series—

I just have so much that is Shopify-only.

My workbooks and all of my website stuff, the podcast, my emails—they all direct people to those pages first.

[My stores are at CreativePennBooks.com and JFPennBooks.com]

So you are right, you need traffic. I don't think you need to advertise because I don't advertise to my stores right now, but I do send traffic from my other sources, like this show, for example.

Johnny: Right. Well, you're kind of your own advertising too. That is a thing.

Joanna: It's marketing. It's not paid advertising. But you are right, you can't just build it and they will come, but I don't think you can do that anywhere. You can't do that on Amazon, you can't do that wherever.

Johnny: No, but what I love about this is that —

Every artisan author is different. The metaphor is, “learn to use a compass, don't try to follow a map.”

The fact that your approach is already so different from my experience and some other people that I know is really cool.

You're able to drive artisan traffic on your Shopify store, and I have focused so much on driving it in live sales. It's just different pools, different buckets.

Joanna: Let's come to one of the things in the subtitle of the book, which says “The Low-Stress Approach.” Low stress is a very interesting term to use, Johnny, because you taught marketing back in the day.

In the book, you say you don't do social media anymore. There's a lot of things that are stressful, social media being one of them for me, but marketing still matters.

What can you recommend for people who do want this low-stress approach to book marketing?

Johnny: So interestingly, I work much more now than I used to. Neither of us, I think, were ever doing rapid release, not by its formal definition, but it is such a high-churn thing. That low-pressure thing… I think there's a huge difference between what you have to do and when you have options.

When I say that I work a lot now, I'm choosing to build something on my own timetable, and I can do it however I want and follow the results that I'm getting. What bugs me about rapid release is the “have to” of it.

I think that's where the stress and the pressure comes from, because the algorithm demands that you keep producing, otherwise it falls apart. So, to be clear, the target I'm looking at as maybe not so great for a lot of authors is rapid release with an almost exclusive Kindle Unlimited focus.

There are plenty of people who use Kindle Unlimited who I think are artisan authors, or can be, because they just have that for their eBooks and they have a sensible funnel.

Typically it's that myopic focus on largely Amazon-only because it's exclusive, largely just eBooks only, and then America-only almost by default.

When you talk about international, that bugs the crap out of me that it seems like so many authors, including authors in other countries sometimes, are considering, “Well, I'm just going to hit the US market primarily.” Because, yes, Amazon has stores outside of the US, but it's really the US that we're focusing on.

So that sort of churn, that very specific thing… you don't have diversification of assets, so you have to keep producing because that's all you have. When I say low pressure, it means that if you wanted to take a two-week vacation, you could do it.

Meanwhile, I know rapid-release authors who are like, “Man, if I want to take a two-week vacation, I have to work really, really fast so that I have something to release while I'm on vacation. Otherwise, I'm going to get to the four or five-week mark and my whole empire is going to collapse.”

It's that relentless grind and the fact that you almost have to do it forever—because when does the algorithm give you a break? I think that's what's leading so many people into this horrible burnout.

Joanna: Well then, can you comment on the lack of social media? Because—

I feel like another rule that people have at the moment is you have to be on social media to be an author.

Johnny: Yes, I don't believe that at all. I don't like social media.

By the way, that's no judgment. I know plenty of people do like it. I just don't, and so I don't do the things that I don't want to do. I think that an artisan author is kind of stubborn and says, “Well, I don't want to do things that I don't want to do.”

For me, I think that there are many different ways to focus. I had a guy next to me at a live stall recently, and he was just enamored with my displays and kept saying, “You have to do social media, man.” What I kept trying to tell him was, “I have X amount of energy and focus, and I can spend it wherever I want.”

At the time I was talking to him, I was choosing to spend it around the square in a small Texas town selling books. That was how I was using my energy because there are many different things that you could do that could make a lot of money, but you have to pick and choose them. Otherwise, I just think we get spread too thin.

For me, that's just a choice that I've made not to do social media, but there are plenty of other choices. The people who do social media heavily might decide, “I'm not going to do advertising,” or, “I'm certainly not going to sell live.” So it's just a different choice for me. I have opted out of that.

You're right, everybody says you must do social media, and I'm here to tell you that you don't. I don't do it at all.

My off-Amazon sales—Kickstarter and live sales alone—are basically my bread and butter right now and are enough to live on.

Joanna: I'm almost completely off it, but I'm still on X for looking at things and I put some pictures on Instagram @jfpennauthor , but I'm just not on it every day.

I think more and more, as you say, part of the artisan approach is choosing what you want to do because it's a lifestyle as well, right? It's a lifestyle that we want, and we want to live this way, and we want it to be sustainable.

So you mentioned Kickstarter there, and of course I also love Kickstarter. What I love about it, apart from being able to do amazing books and gorgeous signed things, is that it's more campaign-focused.

So you can do a big push for a couple of weeks and then you fulfill. So I like that kind of approach too, which I think works with taking a break and stuff like that.

Why do you like Kickstarter?

Because this is your second or third, something like that?

Johnny: No, it's actually my sixth. The Kickstarter for The Artisan Author is my sixth because we were old school. Sean and I did Fiction Unboxed and then StoryShop back around 2014 or 2016 or so. It was a while ago, before Brandon Sanderson nuked Kickstarter with his books.

The reason that I like it… interestingly, I just thought it was a cool tool to play with originally. “Boy, I can do these cool, beautiful books and I can have a direct connection, and from a business standpoint, I can have a higher average order value” and that sort of thing.

What's been interesting is that as I've really been thinking in an artisan direction, my brain has been there and I've realized, “Oh, launches don't really matter in the way that they used to.”

For me, a typical book launch was on Amazon… now I think, “Oh, well, the Kickstarter should just be my launch.” Then I don't really have to have a launch on the bookstores.

Now, you need some mechanism to get some reviews and stuff because that matters, but you can ask your Kickstarter backers to review your book on Amazon if you want.

The back-shelving of Amazon has kind of made me say, “Well, the Kickstarter is just my main tool now. That's just how I launch.” And when it's been launched, then it's been launched and it becomes one more book in my catalog.

I don't have to keep throwing fuel on that fire in the same way because the people who are coming back to me week after week, they're self-fueling. I don't need to hit them with some algorithmic thing on Amazon.

Joanna: Tell us what you are doing for this Kickstarter because this interview goes out as you are doing a Kickstarter.

Johnny: Yes, it's live right now — The Artisan Author.

This is actually kind of fun. I wanted to just do the Kickstarter for the reasons that I've already mentioned, and I thought, “Well, okay, I can create the audiobook and the paperback and the ebook and then I'll have a nice hardback special edition.”

The more I thought about it and the more I did comparison shopping and market research, I realized—and I knew this—that usually for a non-fiction Kickstarter, you're able to offer some sort of higher-touch service.

So I've kind of reframed—and stick with me on this because it's a little weird—I don't really like online courses because so many of them just rub me the wrong way. I know I made a bunch of them, and I'm just kind of burned out on that. I was like, “Wouldn't it be cool if I could do a course, but I don't want to do a course like that? That sucks.”

I was talking to my wife, who had coached me through something a little while ago where I was feeling kind of lonely out here, not being around people. She said, “Well, you always really liked college. You've talked about wanting to lecture at a college. Wouldn't that be cool?”

Those conversations came together and I thought, “What if I were to do it like a college?”

I get that it's a little weird, that it would be like an Artisan University, but rather than having a bunch of pre-recorded things with some sort of grandiose promises, it's more like, “No, what if you were to go through and we were to treat the book like a textbook over a ten-week curriculum and have units and discussions and a final exam and all the sort of trappings of college?”

It felt like a really cool experiment. So it's very different from the typical online course, but that's the way I'm framing everything.

If you want to just self-learn and you just want to get the ebook or the paperback or whatever, that's great. But then I have these many tiers of attending the course, from auditing it to doing high-touch accountability groups and almost like private tutoring. So it's kind of cool. I'm really curious to see what happens and how people like it.

Joanna: And of course, people can just get the ebook if they want.

This is one of the important things about Kickstarter: to have different tiers for different ways that people might want to interact with you.

Johnny: Yes, and it'll be available as a normal book too. If you aren't into Kickstarter, you can just go and search for it. It's on Amazon and Kobo and Barnes & Noble and all those places as a pre-order.

For people who really like the Kickstarter energy, I thought this would be cool. I kind of like the idea of doing the professor thing. I think that might be really neat.

Joanna: Where can people find you and your books and the Kickstarter online?

Johnny: Well, most importantly, the Kickstarter is at JohnnyBTruant.com/artisan, and that'll redirect to the regular book after the Kickstarter.

Then I'm at JohnnyBTruant.com. There are links to my live selling schedule if you happen to be in or around Austin or anywhere I'm going, or if you want to check out my book catalog or anything like that.

Joanna: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for your time, Johnny. That was great.

Johnny: Thanks for having me on.

The post The Artisan Author With Johnny B Truant first appeared on The Creative Penn.