Jonny B. Truant (21:25)

Man, it is so fun to be on the creative pen. It's just like coming home. It's like, it's just so great. So thank you for having me.

Joanna Penn (21:31)

Oh, great. Well, you've been on the show multiple times over the years and the last time was in 2022 when you were pivoting into this stage, really of your author journey. So we're going to jump straight into the top. Why the artisan author and why now? What were you seeing in the author community that made you want to write this book?

Jonny B. Truant (21:52)

Well, for those people who don't know me, I used to do a lot of author education. For want of a better thing. We had a podcast and a book and all that. And in about, let's say, 2020, around Covid time, I just kind of stopped doing a lot of that and just did fiction. And when I came back to the 20 books conference, the last one in 2023, it was like so much had changed and people were really ramping up AI in a bunch of different ways. And people were all the rapid release had gotten faster and all the tactical stuff had gotten more tactical. And I just remembered thinking, boy, you know, 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 because you have to fit into all the very specific categories that the algorithms like to promote and a lot of people playing those games. And then in the midst of that, I did talk to another author. You may know her, she's British and runs a podcast.

Joanna Penn (22:51)

Yes, it was me.

Jonny B. Truant (22:53)

Well, and 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 like, well, 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. And 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 burnout related to that. What if instead we acted like artists who are selling fine goods to very discerning customers, which I would just call artists and readers. And 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 Penn (23:42)

Yeah, and I did use that word. In fact, in May 2023, I wrote a positioning paper for on the show about positioning myself as also in the artisan space. And I think this is really important. I think it's something that we obviously care about. And having known you for many years, our conversation was sort of, look, don't give it all up because you, you're great at this. I've been reading your writing for a long, long time before you wrote fiction. And I think what is nice about this period right now is that we do get to question because for a while there were kind of rules and you guys, you had a book, what's it, the fiction formula or something like that.

Jonny B. Truant (24:24)

Well, I, that was, 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 gonna 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 gonna be called the fiction formula. There is no formula, because he wants the catch.

Joanna Penn (24:42)

Yeah, but the thing is, there almost was for a bit the whole, like you said we would, we met again at the last 20 books to 50k. That was actually a thing for a period of time. And now I kind of say, well, one book to 50k, like you said, you can, if you do fine goods to a discerning customer, you can do one book to 50k. And so it's a very different time when it's almost like at the beginning of being of the indie revolution as such, we got to reinvent the way things were done. And I feel like that's where we are again. We're. We're reinventing the way things were done because what is new becomes old. And I feel like where we are now, 15 plus years into the indie revolution, or maybe 17 plus years into it now, we can reinvent it, I guess, all over again.

Jonny B. Truant (25:28)

Yeah. And that's something that I explored in the artist and author book 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. Coming 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. But then it started to be, well, okay, so if you write more books, you'll make more money. And we helped to contribute to that with write, publish, repeat. But then it became at all, with no governor on that, like, let's just go faster. Let's forget about the caveats of maybe trying to enjoy yourself and maybe trying to write art that you actually care about. And a lot of people just went to extremes with that. The rapid release thing. And that's what I think really hit me when I went back to 20 books, was 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 in that I came back and I was like, oh, I remember rapid release. It was this kind of. And I don't like rapid release, so I'm kind of. But it was this annoying little thing over there. And then it had become this huge thing, and it had become almost default. And I think that's what bothered me the most, was not that it was being that it was so dominant. It was that I knew that there were new writers coming in. Not just necessarily at that conference or the Author Nation conference to follow it, but people who watch from afar, who listen to the podcast and watch the YouTube videos. And I just thought those. Those poor authors coming in and what. 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 just. It's terrible.

Joanna Penn (27:16)

It is. But, I mean, I wanted to make the point that I've never done rapid release, and a lot of authors were never rapid release. It was just kind of became a loud segment of the community. And possibly, you know, possibly true that the people who were making more income that way, but as you say, also in the time that we've been doing this, people have disappeared now. You disappeared, but you came back.

Jonny B. Truant (27:42)

Yeah. And I'd like to key into that, that you said that they're loud and that more of them appeared. That's, I think, part of the problem really is because they are loud. And by loud I don't mean like necessarily obnoxious. I just mean that you tend to talk about it a lot when you found something that works like that. And. But it's a vanishingly small percentage of authors because they are so loud. They're the ones who usually speak or write books or whatever. And so it looks to people as if that's the norm. And if you want you aren't making serious bank as a rapid release author, then you're just not trying hard enough. But 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, okay, this number of books actually make money, and it's the vast, vast, vast majority who don't make any money at all. And yet those people are being given the same advice as everyone else, as if that's the majority and then that's the way the majority works and it's just not true. True.

Joanna Penn (28:38)

Yeah, exactly. So then, if we come to what you mean then by an artisan author, what are some of the hallmarks of how you think we could do that?

Jonny B. Truant (28:49)

Well, the first thing is it's art first and profit second. I think that 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 that 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. And when I came back in 2024 and gave a presentation called the Artisan Author with the tagline was the low stress, high quality, fan focused, way to beat the publishing rat race. And people came up to me after and they said, I didn't really know that this was an option. Thank you. Thank you for giving me some clarity into the fact that it's not rapid release or nothing, which is what most people kind of think. So, yeah, there was a lot of appetite for it.

Joanna Penn (29:41)

So art first, profit second. And I totally get that because one of my books was called Pilgrimage, really, really a very niche audience. And I think I told you I was working on a book on Gothic cathedrals, and I'm still working on that on that book. It's a photo book. And in fact, as we speak tomorrow, I'm off to another Gothic cathedral. So Definitely art first type of books. But what are the other kind of things you're focusing on under that artisan umbrella?

Jonny B. Truant (30:09)

Well, certainly, and I didn't really finish my thought so I apologize. But the idea is that release of pressure like that take your time is another one of the pillars. Connecting with fans is a huge one to me. And that leads to this weird kind of backwards logic where usually self published authors want to think bigger and f. Because we have this very strong entrepreneurial streak through a lot of us and it's almost kind of eclipsed the artistic streak that people used to predominantly come into publishing for. Used to be came in I wanted to write a book and maybe I'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. But I think that most people aren't doing that. But anyway, the customer focus thing is an anti leverage. So 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. And 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 and that's a super attractive like 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 it's like they leap very close to the fan end of the spectrum rather than the casual end. So I had somebody email me yesterday and say hey, I bought one of your books at some market, some like open air market here in Austin and I wish you had pressured me to buy the whole series because now I'm out of books and when are you doing this again? So anyway, I'm going tonight, he and one of his friends, I'm going to take books to them and I'm going to sell them. And it's 19 total books between these two guys. But that's the sort of. It's this quality connection to fans rather than connection one to many, to numerous fans. And that connection, that slow scale I think is much more, it's 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. You know, it was just anonymous algorithms. But that's because this entire thing, the founding principle, the core thing, is Kevin Kelly's thousand 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 Penn (32:58)

Yeah. And it's amazing how well that has stood the test of time. That was, I think the original One was in 2006, which again, would have been around the time when you were writing on Copyblogger and doing the online marketing stuff. And this is what's so crazy is you, you and I both kind of come from that highly leveraged world where online marketing was the primary thing. And yet now you've said in the book, and, you know, you just said there about how you love live selling. And I find that very surprising. I mean, I guess I'm an introvert and I find it incredibly hard. I don't know whether it's also a highly sensitive person, but I find a lot of visual stimulation just too tiring. Like, I can't look at all these people's faces. I can't deal with the noise. So I wonder if you could maybe talk about how did you discover that you like live selling and what are your tips for people?

Jonny B. Truant (33:47)

Well, so this is actually, 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. And when I was at, I think it was at the last Author Nation in 2024, and I actually had a presentation scheduled, but I hadn't done any of this live selling. This is six months old. And I talked to our mutual friend Mark, Lafayette Babe. And Mark was talking about how much he missed going out and doing book signings. And I said, oh, my God, I have nightmares about that. Just imagining being that poor author at the table, whoever he's trying not to make eye contact with. And his reaction was so genuinely shocked that he said that. He said, why? And it was like that in itself. Somebody that I knew and Respected. And I thought I share a lot in common with, really loves it, and was shocked that I was wouldn't. And what I started to realize is, yeah, 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 do I 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 farmers markets up to my first Comic Con coming soon. I've done huge street festivals. And 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, you know, 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. And I just, hey, you know, 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 kind of looking at that. I'll say, hey, did you see the original Battlestar Galactica? Oh, yes, they've always seen it. And 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 and blah, blah, blah. And so it becomes just much more about having conversations. And sometimes they don't buy, but that's fine. I've met some really interesting people. And 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. And I don't really care if they buy, although they tend to do so. It's kind of amazing. But the things that have shocked me the most are learning about my customers in ways that I never, ever could have before for. So 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 I would love to be back into reading, but, oh, I haven't done it as much. It's like they're apologizing to me, 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. And a lot of people go, oh, it's a fast paced short book that has that energy. Okay, I will do it. But I would never see those things and I would never meet these people. And I would never have people saying, I want to buy $300 worth of books from you if you come down and meet me today, if I wasn't doing all this stuff.

Joanna Penn (37:29)

Okay, so some practical questions. So you have a huge backlist, and when you're doing these in person sales at, say, a market, you've got to set up a table which is only so big, and you've got to schlep all the stuff down. And books are heavy, heavy stuff, and you need like banners and all this. So give us a sort of sense of what the physical setup is and how you decide which books to take out of your massive collection.

Jonny B. Truant (37:57)

Well, so one of the key things in the Artist and Author book that I talk about a lot is it depends. So what I just want to. I just want to say this ahead of time that I am giving. I'm going to tell you what I do, but it is not advice. It is not, you should do this. So I have several friends, we have some of them 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. But I'm going to bring absolutely everything I have to a Comic Con, which is not the, quote, official way to do it. It isn't what most people do, but it works really well with my style because what happens is, because I have such a broad backlist and because they're interested in me first, which is kind of 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? You know, do you like urban fantasy? Do you like regular fantasy? And so there's always something else. And that sense of overwhelm, visual overwhelm is actually a positive thing because it just looks like, wow, there's a lot of stuff here. So I typically, usually an outdoor booth space is 10ft by 10ft. And I have to do a lot of ones outside, which I'm not always super happy about, but that's the way they are here in Texas. And so I have a tent, I have a 10 by 10 tent. But for comic Cons, 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? So when I'm outside, I typically do a corner if I can because that allows me 20ft of space rather than just 10 to stack up all my books. But I have to adjust every single time. It's different buyers, it's different setups, it's different locations. And it's just about, for me, displaying the books. And then that attracts them. They come over. Usually the book people kind of come over with big eyes, like, ooh, books. And then they already like the idea of the books. They're already like, wow, I didn't think there were going to be book people here. And I just talk to them and I see where their tastes lie and then I kind of guide them towards something that they might enjoy.

Joanna Penn (40:04)

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

Jonny B. Truant (40:14)

Yes. And in the. So I have a section that's like finding readers, or there's two sections, selling as an artist and author, but also finding readers. And I kind of divided that into multiple buckets where you're either doing the passive thing, where you're trying to find readers on Amazon or wherever. But the best ways to do this, I think in. I call this the third bucket. Bucket, which is the first bucket is discovery. The second bucket is advertising, and the third is. What did I say? 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. And by the way, if you're getting like 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, me. But there is some degree of personal connection in everything that's in that, that finding readers out of nowhere sort of thing. Because if you let people know that you are an author, just as another example, just casually, people just know that you're an author in your personal life. Eventually you'll find that the word gets around because authors are interesting to people. And some of those people will. 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. Books. And that's what all of those most effective artisan strategies for me are, is. It's like you're fishing in a pond where nobody else is fishing. You're targeting customers who. Well, you aren't targeting customers, 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, they're books. And it's like, I don't have any competition. And they self sort. It's a very cool thing.

Joanna Penn (41:54)

Thing. Yeah, I like that. And perhaps it's also less intimidating because when, like when I saw your stall at Author Nation, you were in a room with like, I don't know whether it was hundreds of other authors with books. So it's very hard not to have some kind of comparison. Itis. Oh, I know Matt Dinnerman was there. Do you remember Matt Denim? He's absolutely huge lit RPG who had a queue out the plumbing door. And whereas if you're an author and you're at a fair next to, I don't know, cupcakes or soaps or something, I suppose you, you definitely can be noticed by the people who want that. So I actually like that tip. As you said, this is not a book on live selling. It's just that I'm fascinated by this. You have everything else in there as well. I do have one more question on this, which is, okay, so it sounds great, but you generally have to pay for these tables. You have to pay to print all those books. You have to pay for the more books than you will sell. And then I guess you have your tent and the banners, I don't know, flyers and all this. So how does it work financially?

Jonny B. Truant (42:53)

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. So I always want like, imagine you went into Barnes and Noble and there were three copies left. Like, no, you want those shelves overflowing. So in my house right now, I probably have five to 600 books and I'll typically take a few hundred to any given event, and it depends on the event. So I did a big event called the Pecan Street Festival here in Austin, and I sold about 220 books. But it's more common at a smaller one to sell 30 or something like that. So it'll give you an idea of the scope. But what I found is that as I've dialed this in, because I am iterating very quickly here I am doing an event and then calibrating and learning. And I also stepped up from very small markets to bigger markets. And what I've learned is that for me personally, and again, this is me personally, your mileage may vary. That my table fee, meaning what I paid to be there, tends to be 10 to 15% of my expected gross sales. And because that's such a reliable thing, I'm actually actively looking for ones with big table fees. Like, 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. And so you just kind of have to be aware that this is an area where, like, if you did want to get into live selling, you do need to invest in yourself, but you can start very small. Again, I don't want. Because it would be really easy for me to become like, okay, now I'm talking about live selling, just like Ben Wolf talks about live selling. And that's the new thing. But it is something that I've really learned to love. And it's been what I tell people is go slow if you're interested in this. You can split a table with somebody in 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 $35. And compare that to, like, the comic cons, which can be near $1,000. And. And if you just think small to begin with and you just take a limited stock, then your investment both in the table fee, in the equipment, in the books is much smaller. And I've just kept reinvesting. Okay, if I made $350 and I spent $150, then that gives me $200, 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 in Great.

Joanna Penn (45:35)

Well, then let's get back to the digital side because of course you cover that as well. You. The other thing that we talked about a couple of years ago now was Shopify, because I built my Shopify store and I was like, johnny, you've got such a big backlist. Why don't you do this? But I know this is a hell of a process and you have a lot of books. So tell us about the process of doing a Shopify store and any lessons learned from that.

Jonny B. Truant (46:01)

Well, again, I don't know if you know this podcaster. Did you see my Shout out? I did mention that Joe Penn has a really good minimum viable store episode. Yes, I did, actually, of her podcast. And so 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. It's like a rock rolling down a hill. It takes a lot of momentum to get it started. And I have found that if I'm not actively advertising that my store traffic dwindles to almost nothing. So given that you have to pay for it every single month, pay for the software, it's one of those things where I don't know whether to recommend it or not. And so I tried to give a whole bunch of caveats to people and said, if you're ready to go in or if you want to just have it, you want to just have it established that you can build it, then great. But know what you're getting into. Because there's so much talk about go direct, go direct that I think there's probably a lot of people who are investing all the time and money and hassle and like mental headaches of building a Shopify store store and then not getting the reward out of it to pay for it. But I also know so many people who I would consider artists and authors who do a lot of direct selling. I think that's almost half of it. And they. They're largely advertising driven. So that's kind of the way I look at it, is if you can afford to start playing with advertising, it might be financially a better move. But if you just want to begin growing your store, you can do it over time. Time. I mean, what do you think? Do you need to advertise aggressively?

Joanna Penn (47:31)

I don't advertise, but like you and I have always done email lists and also launching. So where you do in person? Sales. I guess 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. Yeah, my workbooks and all of my website stuff, the podcast, my email, all direct people to that. Those pages first. So you're right, you need traffic. I don't think you need to advertise because I don't advertise to my stores, but I do send traffic from my other sources. Like this show, for example.

Jonny B. Truant (48:12)

Right, well, you're kind of your own advertising too.

Joanna Penn (48:15)

Yeah, it's marketing. It's not. I'm not paying for the extra stuff. Yeah, you're right. You can't just build it. And they will come. But I don't mean you can do that anywhere. You can't do that on Amazon. You can't do that, do that wherever.

Jonny B. Truant (48:25)

No, but what I love about this is that it's. Every artist and author is different. You know, the metaphor is, is learn to use a compass, don't try to follow a map. And so the fact that your approach is already, and I would say that we're kind of similar in a lot of ways and the fact that your approach is, is already so different from my experience and some other people that I know, that's really cool. You're able to, to drive artisan traffic on your Shopify store. And I have focused so much on driving it in live sales and it's just different pools, different buckets.

Joanna Penn (48:55)

And I think if you, I don't know, I, I feel like the international focus as well. Obviously I'm here in the uk, you're in the US Maybe you have a lot more markets in Austin than I have in Bath.

Jonny B. Truant (49:08)

That's true. And what I hear it rains there sometimes.

Joanna Penn (49:10)

It really does. Yeah. The thought of outdoor markets, but I think that's really good either way. But. Well, 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 have taught marketing back in the day and in the book you say you don't do social media anymore. There's a lot of things that are stressful at social media being one of them for me, but marketing still matters. What can you recommend for people who do want this sort of low stress approach to particularly book marketing?

Jonny B. Truant (49:43)

Well, so interestingly, I work much more now than I used to and I was never doing. Neither of us, I think were ever rapid release. So I didn't really do rapid Release, not by its kind of formal definition, but it is, it is just such a high churn thing. And that low pressure thing is I think there's a huge difference between what you have to do and when you have options. So when I say that I work a lot now, I'm choosing to build something and it's on my own timetable and I can do it however I want and I can follow the results that I'm getting. What bugs me about rapid release is the have to of it. And I think that that's where the stress and the pressure comes from is because people are. The algorithm demands that you keep producing, otherwise it falls apart. So I'm defining kind of the target that I'm looking at as like maybe not so great for a lot of authors, just to be clear, is rapid release with almost an exclusive Kindle Unlimited focus. So there are plenty of people who use Kindle Unlimited who I think are artists and authors or can be because they just have that for their ebooks and they have a sensible funnel from one to the other. But that is typically what it is. It's typically this. And this is in the book too. It's that myopic focus on largely Amazon only because it's exclusive, largely just ebooks only, and then America only almost by default. So 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 us is what we're focusing on. So that sort of churn, that very specific thing, you don't have diversification of assets and so you have to keep producing because that's all you have to do, have. So when I say low pressure, it means that if you wanted to take a two week vacation, you could do it. But meanwhile, I know rapid release authors who are like, man, if I want to buy a two week vacation, I got to work really, really fast so that I have something to release while I'm on vacation because otherwise I'm going to get to the four or five week mark and my whole empire is going to collapse. But it's that relentless grind and that fact that the idea 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 Penn (52:08)

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.

Jonny B. Truant (52:19)

Yeah, I don't believe that at all. I don't like social media. And 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. And I think that an artist and author is kind of stubborn and kind of says, well, I don't want to do things that I don't want to do. So for me, I think that there are many different ways to focus. So I had a guy next to me at a live stall recently and he was just enamored with my displays and kept saying, you got to do social media, man, if you could have somebody do that. And what I kept trying to tell him was, I have X amount of energy and focus and no, it doesn't necessarily count if I hire it out, but I personally have. Have that much and I can spend it wherever I want. And at the time, as 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 that. 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, unless I just think we get spread too thin. So 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 heavy 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. But 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. And my off Amazon sales actually eclipse. Like, that's enough to live on. Like Kickstarter. And live sales alone right now are basically my bread and. But butter?

Joanna Penn (53:54)

Yeah, I mean, I'm almost completely off it, but I'm still on X for looking at things. And I put some pictures on Instagram, but I don't. I'm just not on it every day. And I think more and more, as you say, part of the artisan approach is choosing what, what you want to do because it's. 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 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 that, taking a break and stuff like that. So tell us why you like Kickstarter. Because this is what, your second, third, something like that?

Jonny B. Truant (54:47)

No, it's actually my sixth. So the Kickstarter for the artist and author is actually six. Because we were old school. Sean and I did fiction, unboxed and then storyshot back in like 2014 or 2016 or something. It was a while ago. It was 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 and 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 of thing. But what's been interesting is that as I have really, it's not that I've gone more into artisan direction, but I've really been thinking that way. Like my brain has been there and I've realized, oh, launches don't really matter in the way that they used to for me when I like a launch on Amazon, a typical book launch. So Kickstarter now, oh well, that should just be my launch. And then I don't really have to have a launch on the bookstores now that you need some mechanism to get some reviews and stuff because that matters, matters. But you can ask your Kickstarter backers to review your book on Amazon if you want. And so the, the back shelving of Amazon has kind of made me say, well the Kickstarter is just now like my main tool. 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. And 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, week are, they're already, they're self fueling. I don't need to hit them with some algorithmic thing on Amazon.

Joanna Penn (56:23)

Yeah, I agree. I find it also, I guess, a much more authentic platform. And you can just a bit like the live selling, I guess. You can put it all out there and you can have the really long sales page or the story as it's called. On Kickstarter and you can put it all there and all the cool pictures of stuff and then you're like, here I am and would you like this cool thing? And if people don't, then no worries. And if they do, then they do. And so I really like that. But tell us what you are doing for this Kickstarter because this interview goes out as you are doing a Kickstarter. So tell us about that.

Jonny B. Truant (56:57)

Yeah, it's live right now. So this is actually kind of fun because 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. But the more I thought about it and the more I kind of did comparisons and shopping and looking around and market research, I realized and I knew this, that usually a nonfiction Kickstarter, you're able to offer some sort of higher touch service than you normally would. So I've kind of reframed and stick with me on this because it's a little weird is I don't really like online courses because so many of them just, I don't know, they rub me the wrong way and I know I made a bunch of them and it's just I'm kind of burned out on that. And I was like, well, wouldn't it be cool if I could do a course? But I don't want to do a course. Like, that sucks. And I was talking to my wife who had coached me through something a little while ago where I was like, oh, I'm kind of lonely out here, you know, like I'm not around people. And she said, well, you always really liked college. You've talked about wanting to like lecture at a college. Wouldn't that be cool? And so that those conversations came together and I thought, well, what if I were to do like a college? Like, I get that it's a little weird that it would be like artists in university, but rather than having a bunch of prerecorded things with some sort of grandiose promises, it's more like, no, no, no. What if you were to go through and we were to treat the book like a textbook over a 10 week curriculum and have units and discussions and a final exam and all the sort of trappings of college 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 like just so 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 like attending the course, from auditing it to doing high touch accountability groups and like almost like private tutoring. So it's kind of cool. I'm really curious to see what happens and how people like it.

Joanna Penn (58:53)

And of course people can like, they can just get the ebook if they want. So that there's. This is one of the important things about Kickstarter is that have different tiers for different ways that people might want to interact with you. And the ebook is. Or even people can just support you without even getting the ebook. I mean, I'm always surprised when people do that. I'm like, wow, these people just chuck some money in.

Jonny B. Truant (59:15)

Yeah, yeah. And it'll be available as a normal book too. You know, if you aren't into Kickstarter, you can just go and search for it. It's on Amazon and Kobo and Barnes and Noble and all those places as a pre order. But for people who really like the Kickstarter energy, I thought this would be cool. And I kind of like the idea of doing the professor thing. I think that might be really neat.

Joanna Penn (59:33)

Yeah. You are a very highly educated person. I know this. And you love studying and all that. So.

Jonny B. Truant (59:39)

Yeah, I'm a nerd.

Joanna Penn (59:40)

Yeah. Well, we're all so nerdy. We really are. So that is brilliant. And we are out of time. So where can people find you and your books and the Kickstarter online?

Jonny B. Truant (59:51)

Well, most importantly, the Kickstarter is at johnnybtruant.com artisanal and that'll redirect after the Kickstarter to the regular book. But that's the Kickstarter. And then just I'm@johnnybtruen.com There are links to my like live selling schedule if you happen to be in or around Austin or anywhere I'm going or want to check out my book catalog or anything like that.

Joanna Penn (60:13)

Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for your time, Jonny. That was great.

Jonny B. Truant (60:16)

Thanks for having me on.

Joanna Penn (60:21)

So I hope you found the discussion with Jonny interesting. Does the artisan author approach interest you? Selling in person or selling in different ways that mean you can create in a more sustainable fashion? Let me know what you think. Please leave a comment on the podcast show notes at the creative pen.com or on the YouTube channel or email me joannathecreativepenn.com send me pictures of where you're listening or your favorite cemetery or churchyard next Monday. I'm talking about writing and directing audio, drama and the Constant Creator Mind Mindset with Alison Hazelden. In the meantime, happy writing and I'll see you next time. Thanks for listening today. I hope you found it helpful. You can find the backlist episodes and show notes@thecreativepen.com podcast and you can get your free author blueprint@thecreativepen.com blueprint. If you'd like to connect, you can find me on Facebook, Facebook and X at the Creative Pen, or on Instagram and Facebook at Jfpen. Author Happy writing and I'll see you next time.