Wolf Interviews: Russell Nohelty
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You have one of the most multifaceted substacks I've seen. You're serializing novels, writing essays, doing a podcast about becoming a success as an author, but also developing a broader framework of success. How did this all develop?
I've been a full-time writer since 2015, and I've published mostly my own work during that time, which gave me a huge catalog when I came to Substack. For instance, I produced a 200-episode podcast from 2016-2020, which allowed me a great base to pull from in order to start a new one on Substack. Additionally, I've had a rather productive career, writing over 40 novels along with over 1,000 pages of comics. So, when I came to Substack I already had that in my back pocket, which allowed me to serialize one of my most successful series without it being too taxing on my mental load.
I've also written several bestselling non-fiction books, along with co-authoring a few others with my business partner, Monica Leonelle. I've also been blogging since 2008, so I understand the blog format. I find it easier to write non-fiction than fiction, and since I used to write 25,000 words a week of fiction, paring that down to 5,000 words of non-fiction was very doable for me.
The Author Ecosystem framework Monica and I developed came from working with thousands of authors over our careers and realizing that everyone was trying to fit into one box that I call "the stack". The general thinking has always been that if certain things in the stack didn't work for you, then it must be a problem with you and not the platform.
However, we found that couldn't be further from the truth. There are authors that thrive on Kickstarter who don't sell 10 copies on Amazon, and people just killing it on Patreon who don't even put their books on retailers. After talking about it for a long time, the framework happened pretty organically as a way to give structure to our membership and help writers personalize their business.
When I came to Substack, my eyes immediately lit up with excitement because I finally saw a way to take all these disparate pieces of my practice and combine them together. I envisioned The Author Stack to live at the intersection of everything I've done in my career; fiction, non-fiction, comics, mailing lists, blogs, podcasts, social media, and helping writers build a successful business around their work.
You've also come up with a concept of the Author's Ecosystem, which was immediately interesting to me. For a few years, I've told other writers that they need to create an ecosystem for their work, or multiple funnels to drive people to you and your books. Maybe it's podcasting or blogging or tiktok or all of the above. Which seems to be exactly what you've been doing!
But talk a bit more about your concept of the Author's Ecosystem, because it's distinct from what I just said as well.
I'll be honest, when I started talking about author ecosystems years ago, that's what I meant, but in co-founding Writer MBA with Monica Leonelle, and working with hundreds of authors right off the bat, we started to realize that only certain subsets of our students were really responding well to the material for each course, and set out to find out why. We spent about six months digging into the data before realizing that our authors generally fell into five different kinds of personality types when it came to running their business.
There were deserts that focused on optimizations and they tended to do the best when focusing on one platform, like KU, and writing to market trends. They also tended to be the best at utilizing social media and other algorithms because they innately understood what was popular and how to join that conversation.
Then, there were grasslands who tended to want to go deep into one topic and explore it completely. They did best with content marketing, and as my business partner says "putting pennies in the bank". They also tended to be the expert people turned to when discussing a specific topic.
Third were tundras, and they were experts in building excitement and having huge launches. They tended to do the best with Kickstarter and other platforms where time-based launches were important.
Fourth were forests, who focused on interconnectivity of their work and building a community that loved everything they did. These were the most likely to have a bunch of pen names and work in different genres successfully, hopping around from cozy mystery to horror to thrillers or anything they wanted, and having success because they had a loyal following.
Finally, there were aquatics, who were most comfortable as brand managers for their work. They focused mostly on building out the intellectual property across multiple formats like movies, board games, podcasts, and more.
That's a very basic overview, but you can read more about each type here.
Everyone has a little bit of each in them, but writers tend to fall primarily into one of those paths in order to become successful. Once they are successful, then they can evolve to incorporate other ecosystems into their business, but still, when all the chips are down, even the most evolved authors will default to their base ecosystem to get back on track. We have developed a quiz and we're surprised how accurate it has been and how many writers have told us they finally understand their business because of it.
I have a big post talking about how I evolved my business coming out in a couple of weeks on The Author Stack if that part interests you as well.
You have a lot of practical business advice for authors at all stages of their careers. If you had to boil it down to a few points and then deliver it to yourself 20 years ago, what would you say?
No amount of success will heal you. That comes from doing a lot of inner work on yourself. Don't yoke yourself to success when you have some because while it feels great on the way up, there is always a way down, and it is crippling if you tie your self worth to your popularity when it starts to slip.
You're going to suck at first, and that's just part of it. The people who succeed are the ones who failed more times than others have even tried.
The money is in the email list, and the email list is about consistency. If you show up for the people you want to serve over and over again, and do it at a high level, then you'll succeed. Most people can be pleasant and write well, but they can't be consistent with it.
Take every opportunity to stand out from the rest of the market and don't take any opportunity for granted. Yes, opportunities come and go, but you only get 2-3 chances a year to really level up and if you don't take them you'll regret it in the future. Most of your year will be spent positioning yourself for big moves and lining up all the pieces for them. Read The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papisan if you want to understand what I mean by that.
People aren't trying to luff you off when they give you standard advice. They are giving you that advice because it worked for them. Now, you have to take that and figure out how to make it work for you, or discard it if it doesn't. There's nothing like first hand data. So, when you get advice, always try it and see if it works. If it does work, then maybe go down the rabbit hole of that creator a bit more and see if more of their advice works for you. I had a 200 episode podcast called The Complete Creative where I talked to successful creatives and following their advice leveled me up more than anything else.
You do not have to prove you deserve to exist. You have the same intrinsic self worth and right to exist as every other person that lives on this or any other planet. You do not have to keep proving yourself over and over. You are not broken even if you have fractured into a hundred pieces. In fact, it's usually those broken bits that become the reason you succeed.
You have no control over the emotions you feel, but you are responsible for how you express those emotions. Learn your enneagram and your CliftonStrengths early. They helped me express my emotions more than anything else. Follow Claire Taylor for Enneagrams and Becca Syme for CliftonStrengths.
You write prose but also comics. How do you choose whether something's going to be comics or prose?
By now it's a gut instinct, but I always think about what will serve the narrative best. With Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter, you never know if you're in the Apocalypse, in his head, or if he's having a psychotic break. Because of that tension I build throughout the series, it would be impossible for me to envision that in anything but a comic form without giving something away that breaks the immersion.
So, if you are thinking about making a graphic novel, I would suggest asking yourself what is something that only works in comics, or how can you present a project in a way that is uniquely suitable for comics. With Katrina Hates the Dead, Black Market Heroine, and Pixie Dust, which are adaptations of stories from my Godsverse Chronicles books, I chose to tell the stories from a first person perspective in the novels and then zoom out to a third person perspective with the comics.
In the novel Magic, Ollie can pierce through illusion spells and see the truth about a monster's appearance. However, in the Black Market Heroine graphic novel we actually see those monsters existing just like Ollie would see them. It's those subtle differences that allow comics and novels to enhance each other instead of weigh each other down.
The biggest mistake that novelists make when adapting their work to comics is to tell the exact same story with little to no variance. That's probably not going to work in comics because there are different audience expectations and rules for each format. If you look at the Coraline movie and novel, they are echos of each other but they are both allowed to exist in their own space and do what's right for the chosen medium.
You have a lot of novels and comics available on your substack. Since some of these are already published elsewhere, what made you decide to serializing them on substack as well
There is a different audience on Substack that reads in a different way than they do on Amazon or anywhere else. I always try to meet readers where they are on each platform and so it made sense to create different sections for each story, and then house them together under one Substack. I also wanted to create the maximum value for people who become paid members. I know some readers will only like fiction or non-fiction, but in my audience there's a big overlap. Plus, even though I attract a lot of writers to my publication, they also tend to be voracious readers, and I wanted to give them something to read on top of the essays I write.
I think this is pretty clever. Reducing barriers of entry by just having them all right there in front of your audience. Do you worry that you may overwhelm your audience with content? I know, personally, I sometimes fear that I send out too many emails to my subscribers. How do you balance these different audiences who may want different things from you?
I don't really worry about much when it comes to that stuff. Lots of my fans have been with me for years, even when I've sent up to 4 emails a day, so I don't really worry about overwhelming them. I do very much worry about value, and making sure that I am always adding value with everything I send to them. The reason I created so many sections in my Substack is so that people can unsubscribe to anything that doesn't resonate with them, or unsubscribe from my whole publication if it no longer serves them. Whether somebody subscribes or doesn't is very rarely about you. It's almost always about the position they are in at any given time in their lives.
As long as what I'm doing is adding value, then people are very forgiving about how often you send. However, most people don't really add value when they send emails, and that does get annoying. Or that value is so marginal that it's not worth constantly getting new emails from them. If they have a digest, I will usually just subscribe to that instead, which is why I added the digest format to my weekly email slate. I know people have a finite amount of time and money, so I want to make sure I overdeliver on value and quality so they keep coming back for more.
I am more worried about overwhelming myself than overwhelming readers because they can just unsubscribe if they don't like it, or zoom past my email in their inbox. It's up to me to make sure that I am adding value with everything I do so people want to stay engaged and look forward to hearing from me.
Final thoughts?
I suppose I would end by saying that this is all possible, but it takes a lot of hard work. I got very lucky, but I also worked hard to be very good and very personable. I have also always tried to take advantage of every opportunity and treat readers like more than a $20. When I have thought about money, it was almost always how to give people more value for their money. If you're interested in how to build a business from your creative work, then you can find me at The Author Stack.
