Nat Eliason on shifting to fiction, self-publishing vs. traditional publishing, writing as a long-game and writing things readers love

Playback speed

Share post at current time

Share from 0:00

0:00

Transcript

Nat Eliason on shifting to fiction, self-publishing vs. traditional publishing, writing as a long-game and writing things readers love

Paul Millerd

and

Nat Eliason

May 16, 2025

Transcript

Hey!

This is part of an experiment of re-posting my videos of my podcasts here. I’m not tossing this one to the email list and so if you stumble upon this, let me know what you think. Should I keep sharing these here?

Teaser Video

Thoughts from Nat:

Writing as leverage (09:12):

“Writing books in particular as a career is maybe one of the most bimodal careers there is… but at the other end, at the success end, there’s almost no profession where an individual working alone has more leverage.”

Fiction over nonfiction (17:01):

“I just feel like I have infinite ideas for worlds or characters or stories… The fun thing with fiction is, you kind of have to triage them a little bit—like, I’m maybe never going to get to this story—and that’s a little sad.”

Playing on hard mode (34:20):

“If I’m going to be playing on hard mode, I may as well play on hard mode where I have more control over everything.”

Why writing doesn’t have to suck (01:08:56):

“I don’t really empathize with the, ‘this sucks, it’s so hard.’ You’re sitting in an air-conditioned room typing your hallucinations into a machine. You’re not crab fishing in the Arctic.”

Fast publishing cycle (38:00):

“I threw that novel in the trash and started over… I wrote two novels in under two years. The rep cycle is so much faster than if I were doing traditional publishing.”