← The Art & Business of Writing Podcast with Nicolas Cole
The Art & Business of Writing Podcast with Nicolas Cole
Writer Q&A - How To Be A Successful Fiction Author
00:18:33
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My name is Nicholas Cole. I've made millions of dollars writing online, and I want to answer your questions so that you can make money writing online, too. So I run a fiction newsletter called Commercial Fiction Club, in addition to all the other places that I write on the Internet. And what I'm going to start doing is answering reader questions. And so if you have any questions and you want me to answer them, I encourage you to comment on something of mine. And I will pull them each week, and I will answer your questions. So this week, Sebastian asked a bunch of really good questions that I thought would be applicable to a lot of writers, especially authors. This is going to be true for both nonfiction and fiction. But especially if you're interested in fiction, I think this will be helpful for you as well. So the first question Sebastian asked is, how should I structure my pen names for clear positioning? I think fundamentally this comes down to whether or not you want to build a library under your own name and position yourself as an author, or if you want to build more of a publishing house. The reason that I say that is because. Because I think if you're interested in writing, it actually doesn't matter if you want to write about lots of different things. If you want to write both nonfiction and fiction, that's what I want to do. I think that there is more benefit long term, to putting all of that under one name. I like to use the equivalent of playing a video game. You know, which. Which character are you more likely to see success on? A character that you invest all of your time and energy into or fun? Five different characters that you invest time and energy into. Fundamentally, if you only had one character, that character would be the one that leveled the fastest, got the most gear, acquired the most gold, right? Because all your time and energy is going into that one character. The more other characters you create, the more your time and energy and focus and resource gets split. And so, you know, another great example, I think, is James Patterson. I think he's done an amazing job of essentially building an entire publishing house, quote, unquote, around his name. He publishes both fiction and nonfiction, and he writes lots of different types of fiction and nonfiction. So I think if you enjoy writing, that is what you should do. If you're less interested in writing, less interested in you being the primary author, but you still want to monetize books, you know, you might approach this more through the lens of being a publisher. I think AI is going to unlock a lot of this for people where it's not necessarily about you. It's More, you're orchestrating maybe five or ten different pen names that span different genres. I think that is certainly an option, but it's a very different path. You know, I've thought about this a lot, and even though I think that there's things that are interesting about that, the truth for me is I enjoy writing too much. And I also enjoy communicating to other people why I write what I write, you know, and how I write and why I pick certain projects, and I want certain projects to represent me, you know, but, like, I care about all of those things. So that's why I think it makes more sense to put it all under one name rather than fragment it across a bunch of different pet names. All right, the second question is, what's the best way to test what sells fast? Now, in nonfiction, the answer would be create as much content as possible. I mean, the example I use all the time is most people don't realize that one of the best selling nonfiction books of the past two decades was the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. That book did not start as a book. That book started as an article that he wrote for the New Yorker back in 1996 called the Tipping Point. So he was a very popular columnist. And when a publisher came knocking and said, we would love for you to write a book, their first question was, well, of all the pieces that you've written, what's been one that performed really well? And he goes, well, I have this one. It's called the Tipping Point. Readers loved it. They go, great. You should just expand that into a book. So nonfiction is fairly straightforward. You know, tweets can become books. Viral posts or articles can become books. Newsletters that really resonate can become books. Articles can become books. Another one is when Ryan Holiday wrote the obstacle is the way that actually didn't start as a book. That started as a guest blog post about stoicism on Tim Ferriss website that Ryan Holiday wrote. So nonfiction is fairly straightforward. You want to test ideas through content. Fiction is a little bit different. And the reason that it's different is because, yes, you can get distribution on social platforms, but it's just. It's not the same as nonfiction. So even though you can get some signals by publishing maybe short stories or ideas or excerpts on social platforms, like for a while I saw people doing that on Medium. I'm now seeing people do that on Substack. That is an option. But I really feel like this question actually comes more down to what game are you going to. Are you trying to play in the world? Of fiction. Are you trying to play the KDP exclusive to Amazon game or are you trying to play the go wide publish anywhere? You're publishing on Amazon, but you're also publishing on Google Books, Apple Books, all of the other digital bookstores. The reason that distinction is important is because if you want to go exclusive with Amazon, then you want to think of Amazon as a, as a publishing channel in and of itself. And so how you test what sells is by writing as many things as possible on Amazon. So instead of signing yourself up to write a 400 page fantasy novel, for example, I would encourage you to maybe start with hundred page stories, right? Think more shorter pieces and little advanced tactic here. Amazon has tons of other subcategories, so these aren't necessarily public, but if you really dig into it, Amazon has these shadow tags for, you know, if you write something that's really short, it could be like 30 pages. It's going to organize it under their short reads section. And then inside of short reads there's also even more sub categories like short reads that you can read in under 15 minutes or 15 minutes to 30 minutes or short reads under an hour. So it actually doesn't matter how long the story is. You could test anything. You could test a 15 page story, you could test a 500 page story. You just want to think of Amazon as a publishing channel in and of itself and you want to produce as much as possible. If you're going wide, then I think you can pull back on the volume a little bit. Amazon is a channel, but really the way that you test what sells is a combination of producing work quickly and then also combining it with some social content as well. So either way, all roads in fiction lead back to you want to produce as much as possible and there's really no other way around it. All right, question three, how fast is too fast when publishing under a single pen name? So again, there's no perfect answer here. I will tell you that from what I've gathered in my own research, it seems like the ideal cadence would be a book a month. Now what's interesting about that is even a book a month is a tremendous amount of volume, especially when you take into consideration the writing and doing cover design and formatting and all of these things. Now there are some pretty great tools and resources that you can use to streamline this. Like for example, you could format an ebook for free in 15 minutes using the free tool that Reedsy has. So R E e d s y.com I used this a lot when I was Building the publishing flywheel for Category Pirates, which was a six figure paid newsletter that I built a couple years ago. So that's a very easy way of increasing your ability, you know, increasing output. You can find like perfectly fine cover designers on upwork and fiverr if you want to keep costs low. So there's definitely ways where you could produce a book a month. I think with AI you have the ability to produce a book a week if you wanted to, but I actually don't think that that's necessarily ideal. I would encourage targeting a book a month or a book every two months at most, probably a book a quarter. You know, if you're doing a book once a year, that's not enough. If you're doing a book once every six months, that's also not enough. Like, if you really want to enter the self published game, the typical cadence is somewhere in the ballpark of a book every one to three months. And that has been a humbling realization for me as well. And also this, I just want to point out questions like this, this is a little bit like solving a problem you don't have yet. You know, it's like, how fast is too fast? Well, you should only feel compelled to ask that question if you're like, well, right now I'm producing a book a day, is that too fast? You know, like this is solving a problem you don't have yet. So start with as much volume as possible and then you could always adjust from there. Question 4. How do I experiment to create my niche without confusing readers or the algorithm? Again, I think this is solving a problem you don't have yet. In the beginning, there is no perfect answer. And the reality is, no matter how long you sit at your desk and you stare out the window and you light a candle and you do your manifestations, the answer of what your niche should be is never going to come to you. The only way that you can figure this out is by doing things. And so in the beginning it's not even worth asking this question. It's not like you don't even have readers to confuse. You know what I mean? And so if I were you, I would just focus on producing the things that you're excited about as often as possible. And then over time, as things perform, you could always reel it back like something. I am a great example. The first ebook I ever published on the Internet had nothing to do with writing. The first ebook I published was called Skinny to Shredded. It was about fitness. And at the time that's what I was really into. And that's, you know, just what I wanted to talk about and share with people. And then, you know, I saw that and I was like, actually, I don't want to be in fitness long term. So then I shifted to writing on Quora, and then I shifted to, oh, wait, why don't I. I just talk about writing on the Internet in general. Right? Then I got into ghost writing. Like you. The answer always reveals itself. So don't feel like you. You have to have all the answers before you begin the journey. That's not how it works. Begin the journey and then the answers reveal themselves. All right, question number five. At which point should I start building an email list and social presence? All right, Same thing with books. Something that has been a painful realization for me is that writers, and I am very guilty of this, and it's something that I've been really trying to work on these past few years. Writers love researching everything that surrounds the writing as a way of avoiding the one thing that matters, which is writing. If you want to be an author, literally nothing else matters in the beginning except writing books and writing a lot of them and getting good at it. Okay? And nothing really showed me this more than earlier this year, in 2025, I went to Denver. I went to a LitRPG conference, and it was fascinating to me to see how many authors were there. And I would attend panels and I listened to all sorts of different people talk. And it was fascinating how many of them were successful. They were generating 10, 20, 30, 50, $100,000 a month on Amazon with their books. And they had no email list. They had no social following. They literally had, like, nothing else. And if they did have an email list, it was like 2,000 people. Or if they did have social profiles, it was like 2,000 followers. It really made me realize how much, especially when you're playing the Amazon game. Amazon is a publishing channel in and of itself. And the thing like the big rock, the thing that moves the needle the most, is producing lots of work, high quality novels. That's the thing. Everything else is gravy. Everything else accelerates that. But you shouldn't even be entertaining these other things until you're producing volume. And this is something that, as much as I'm sharing this with you and with everyone else here, I am saying this to myself as well, because it is so easy to fall into that. Well, let me research marketing. When should I build an email list? What should my content strategy be? The reality is all of those things come after. Are you writing books consistently? Yes or no? That's the big rock. Question six, how do I create vertical product ladders for fiction to maximize ltv? Again, little bit of solving problems you don't have yet. You know, this is sort of like, yeah, but when I get to a million dollars a year, then what do I do? It's like, well, why don't we just get to ten grand a month first? How about that? You know, because that's gonna take a bunch of work in and of itself. But I will, I will answer this question. So how I'm thinking about this and there is no one right answer. There's lots of things you can do in fiction. It's very common for people to use Patreon. Truthfully, as I've dug into the world of fiction, I think that there is a massive, a massive misunderstanding in the world of fiction of how to monetize and all the different ways you can monetize. I also think that fiction writers are notorious for undervaluing their value. Like I see people having discords where it's like join for a dollar a month. It's like, well, how are you going to make any money doing that? So there are lots of things that you can do. The way that I'm approaching this is thinking about it in tiers. So you have your traffic drivers, which is social content, a newsletter. I'm really interested in the paid newsletter component. So you could think of a paid tier as. Or a paid subscription tier as a paid newsletter or Patreon, something that has that is recurring and then you have like one off sales which are essentially books. And then you also have another one off sale option which is products like. I think it's really interesting that fiction writers don't also think to monetize their talents with some sort of digital product or course sharing how they do what they do. Like when I discover an author I really like, I would love to buy $150 to $350 course from them learning well, how do you write, how do you come up with ideas, how do you do what you do? So I think that that's a great thing. So I think really those are sort of the big four pieces. It's traffic slash nurture, email list. It's some sort of subs tier which is either paid newsletter or Patreon, something like that. It's standalone books obviously and then potentially adding in a low ticket digital product on top of that. Again though, all of those things don't matter until you get the book library stuff right first. That, that is the core thing, you know, like nobody's going to want to buy your course on how you write books if you're not writing books, right? No one's going to want to subscribe to your Patreon where you share chapters or you share behind the scenes about how you write your books. If you're not writing books, all roads lead back to you got to be producing a book in volume. Books in volume. And question seven, which skills bring the most bang for your buck for success as an author? I mean, where do you even begin? All of these skills are important, I think again through the lens of if you want to make money as an author, the number one skill is writing books. Every other skill comes second to that. That said, I think the next best skill to build would be taking time and investing in understanding business models. I think whenever I look around at other writers, there is a huge deficit in terms of understanding ways to monetize. And business models is sort of the gateway into things like copywriting, upsells down, sells. All of those skills are important because they're what allow you to capitalize on business models. But for example, like most writers who sell books, it doesn't even occur to them that you could use a subscription mechanism like a paid newsletter or a patreon. Most writers who sell books, it doesn't even occur to them that you could upsell to some sort of digital product. But there's all sorts of other ones you could upsell to services. You could upsell to a coaching program. You could upsell to your own mastermind. You could downsell to like really tactical guides and ebooks. There's lots of things that you can do to monetize. And it's actually not that any one of these are better or worse. They're all options. I have generated over a million dollars in eight different business models as a writer. So they all work. It just comes down to which business model do you enjoy, which business model are you game to lean into and learn about? Because each one has its own learning curve. And which one do you feel like provides the most value to the person that you're helping, the person that you're selling to. Right. So I would say aside from just writing books and being really proficient with writing books, the next skill that I would dig into is studying business models. That's why, you know, as much as I study literature, I also attend business masterminds. You know, as much as I study how to write really great sentences or great intros or great hooks, the art of writing, I also Study what? What do other industries do? You know, I'm always going down rabbit holes like, well, how do e commerce products upsell customers? You know, or how do different coaching programs sell to customers? I'm always studying as many things as possible so that I can find something that is maybe working in a completely different industry and then ask myself, how could I apply this to what I'm doing? So these are all great individual questions, but the TLDR here is if you want to be a successful author, and especially this is especially true if you want to be a successful fiction writer, it is 100% a game of volume. It is a game of volume and becoming proficient in the skill of writing books. Everything else comes second to that. So if you think of your daily priorities, your weekly priorities, your monthly priorities, your yearly priorities, the number one priority always on the list is am I producing enough books that are high quality? Fast enough. And if you aren't, then it's a mistake to allocate that time and headspace and any resources to anything else because everything else comes second to that. All right, so great questions. I appreciate you asking them. Sebastian and I want to continue doing this writer Q and A series. So if you have any questions, especially if you're subscribed to my fiction newsletter, Commercial Fiction Club, drop a comment. Ask me anything. I'll also pull questions from my ex my LinkedIn. So drop drop me questions anywhere. I'll look for them. But I'm happy to share. Happy to chat. I really enjoy sharing things that I've learned. It's also sometimes hard for me to sit here and come up with topics on my own. It's much easier when I'm prompted. So if you have a question or you want to know more about something, or you just want my thoughts on a certain topic, please ask it because it gives me great ideas for content too.