AntiFool Transcript: Russell Nohelty on Building a Creative Career and Comic Book Writing

Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Russell Nohelty!

Russell is a USA today, bestselling author, publisher, and consultant. He runs the small press publisher, Wannabe Press as well as the Complete Creative, which helps creatives build better businesses.

As a prolific writer, he’s run successful Kickstarter campaigns for a lot of books like Katrina hates the Dead, My Father didn’t Kill Himself, Cthulu is hard to Spell, the Godsverse Chronicles, and many more raising over six figures until now.

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Transcript

Norman Chella: [00:00:00] Russell Nohelty, as the complete creative, the fiction writer on a mission to help you build your creative career.

Hello there to King of all fools Norm here. Welcome to the show. Today we’re going to talk about building worlds specifically in the realm of fiction, jumping from fantasy to romance, to thrillers, to mysteries.

If you are an aspiring writer, I’m sure that you’ve had a lot of thoughts in your head about all the ideas that you wanted to craft, the worlds that you want to build to share with all the people around the world, but. It can be a bit overwhelming.

Writing a novel or writing a story can be intimidating and that you may not know where to start or when compared with great writers that are prevalent nowadays, hearing their stories, hearing the successes that they have may inspire you to start your own. But what is step one and who better to talk about this with than Russell Nohelty?

Russell is a USA today, bestselling author, publisher, and consultant. He runs the small press  publisher,Wannabe Press as well as the Complete Creative, which helps creatives build better businesses. Russell dove into multiple genres from mystery thriller, to romance, to fantasy, talking about all sorts of topics like mythology and fantasy and magic and fairies and everything.

As a prolific writer, he’s run successful Kickstarter campaigns for a lot of books like Katrina hates the Dead, My Father didn’t Kill Himself, Cthulu is hard to Spell, the Godsverse Chronicles, and much more raising over six figures up to date. So many graphic novels, novels, and children’s books, which all can be found on his site.

Russellnohelty.com. I want us to take a deep dive into how he has built his creative career up until now. From becoming a writer of multiple books to helping other creatives with their own business. We talk about the pitfalls of becoming a writer nowadays, building an audience from scratch and jumping from format to format, from medium to medium.

And from general to genre, we also talked about. Writing for the first time for aspiring writers, how do you get past the first phase of writing, which is realizing or accepting that your words are bad and that you should plow through that regardless.

We also talked about phase two. How do you transition from being a writer to having more of a business mindset, to be able to serve your audience and actually create a sustainable creative career achieving maximum productivity and creating or drafting up your novels and books.

Russell shares a ton of stories from leaving school to starting three companies, his aspirations, to become a director shifting towards becoming a best selling fiction, author ways to raise money and Kickstarter and his introspection. The common pattern between all of these successes is Russell himself.

So I wanted to ask him more about how he writes, what he thinks about when writing and his thoughts on writers, try to make a living for themselves and how he helps them. We go through a lot in this episode, so I hope that you enjoy this. Let’s play the fool and learn from the wise, by diving into my chat with Russell Naulty best selling fiction author.

Russell Nohelty. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Russell Nohelty: [00:04:07] I’m doing very well. How are you doing?

Norman Chella: [00:04:09] Oh, doing good. I am pretty excited because we’re going to talk about pretty much how you came to write. So let me get this number, right. 18 books in one year, right? Are we reaching up to 20 by this point

in time?

Russell Nohelty: [00:04:22] Uh, so I, it ended up not being, it was 20 novels of about 40,000 words each. What I ended up doing was combining them into a several box sets. So it ended up being like six big novels, but I did end up writing 20 books in 20 months. So I complete stories. Uh, but if you went to look for them now, you would find, uh, the ones that are out are in, uh, like three books box sets, not out by themselves.

Cause we found that putting out the single books, uh, wasn’t as helpful as putting out like the three books at once. So that’s where they’ve come. That’s what we’ve come to now. But I did write, uh, people always ask me also, like, where are all the books? And I’m like, they are, what I end up doing is I stockpile 4 books.

And then I do a Kickstarter for them. And then I stockpile 4 more books and then I do a Kickstarter for them and then I release them. So a lot of the books are just like stockpiled on my hard drive, not out yet, but, uh, Complete.

Norman Chella: [00:05:24] So they are all already ready, but I guess that it’s your business decision to actually package them. Do a Kickstarter run for them and then release it all in one go, I guess that makes much more economical sense. I believe I would think that you would have them individually and then later on keep them as individuals, but then have it like have a backlog of like a box set coming out, have it released and keep the hype up.

But I would love to…

Russell Nohelty: [00:05:50] What happens is what happened last year was I had a really bad set of launches. So I’m mostly known as a comic book guy and, uh, novels had never been like a core function of my business. And, uh, it’s been very hard to get people to go from. Okay. My comics to my novels and my, and my fan base.

So I’ve been building out my own, like new brand new fan base, basically from scratch. And as some people have come over, but a lot of them haven’t. So what I found was when we were doing the launches on Amazon and the other platforms that weren’t going so well, and people would tell me that they were overwhelmed by like so many books coming out so fast.

So I found that I decided to test what if I just did like one bigger launch and, you know, we spent 10 days. 15 days or whatever the timeframe is that we’re going to do last time. It was 10 days and we just like really pushed like a set of books hard for that time. And then we just like, kind of shut up about the box for a little while.

Uh, and then like we did it again. And when we w when we, I ended up doing that earlier this year, we launched for 10 days and we, and we made 9,950. Dollars for $35 or something like that. And so, uh, that paid for all of the books and everything that we had left. Uh, and then we were able to launch them again as the box sets and start making money on Amazon.

Um, but we found that just doing fewer launches and expecting more out of them, uh, has always been a model that worked for me, uh, and doing these smaller launches every few weeks. Weeks or every month has just been, kind of, was kind of overwhelming for my audience. So I’ve decided to try and make it, uh, sort of experience where we’ll do a really big push, like twice a year for the knob poles and twice a year for comics and basically four launches a year.

Yeah. And then the rest of the time I’ll do ads and other stuff for the books, but I won’t be talking about them nearly as much.

Norman Chella: [00:07:47] There’s a lot of strategizing behind this. I would love to deconstruct it because I’m sure that are a lot of people who well are aspiring writers, aspiring novelists, and they want to dive into, well, the medium of their choice, whether it’s a graphic novel, or a comic or a full on novel, or, you know, a collection of short stories.

But Russell, before we could even touch on that, uh, I would love to hear, how did you even start on this journey to write so many books in multiple different formats?

Russell Nohelty: [00:08:21] Sure. So I am a, generally until 2015 failed entrepreneur. I had four companies that blew up in my face. Uh, uh, w before I, uh, before I found one that worked. Three in my twenties, and then one, like, kind of right before, Wannabe Press, started, uh, uh, becoming successful.

Uh, and so I graduated college university of Maryland.  20 2004. And, uh, started working on Capitol Hill and, uh, and Washington DC. I was doing like live shots for the Congressman and the daily show and a whole bunch of things, which sounds a lot more fun than it really was. I burned out on that pretty quickly.

And I went to start my first company, which I dropped about $35,000 on photography and other equipment. So I could do like fashion photography and I could shoot movies and TV shows. And I kind of was my own studio that led me to start a couple of production companies, one with one friend and then one with another friend, a group of friends.

And, uh, we produced a movie called connections that I wrote. And, uh, some short films that I also wrote and directed. And so I was, I wanted to be a filmmaker, uh, before then even I was shooting movies and TV, and I just found the scripts were just abysmal. And I was like, I don’t know if I can do it this really well, but like I can at least do what average can at least do better than what these people are doing.

And, uh, So, uh, that kind of was the first spark of the first thing that I wrote. I just wanted to have more control of my destiny as a director, which is what I really wanted to do. Uh, you just don’t get a lot of opportunities to direct unless you’re writing your own stuff or you, or you’re like partnering with other people who are like writers and producers.

So yeah, I decided to just write my own thing. I wanted to write it fast. And, uh, and we can get it done fast and then we can edit it fast and then it will be out there. And then we could, uh, do, do whatever we wanted to, with it, to take the next step. And so that got done in 2007, um, and came down in 2013, and it’s now a web series called the connections, which you can find on YouTube.

Um, but during the time between, uh, the editing, the, the finished the production and the end and the finished editing, which is about six years, I, uh, I ended up being told we moved to LA, uh, Los Angeles and we, um, And, uh, and my manager at the time told me showed me comics. And she he’s like, look, it takes a long time to get these movies through the pipeline.

I know that. Have you ever thought about doing comics? I was like, I don’t. No, I guess, no. I just, just didn’t know. And he’s like, well, you should look at it. It’s a visual medium, just like comment just to, it’s like a books and a chill or just like movies. And, uh, and I think you. Could kind of fit your style into it.

And so I read a bunch of the comics that he had in his office, and I like fell in love with them. And he told me that I could basically make the three, two or three comics for the same price as my movie that I had made, which was a, it’s not the greatest movie in the world. I like to consider it the median of movies, uh, that if I ever been produced, it’s not nothing mind blowing, nothing bad.

Like there are some moments that are really fun. Um, uh, but, uh, it’s definitely not like a. It was definitely not going to compete with like the best movies that have ever existed, but I could make a great comic book for about 10 grand, 10 to 15 grand. And so I decided to like dive head first into that and figure out how to make the comics and led to me writing novels because comics are quite expensive and also take a long time.

And so I started writing novels. And then I wrote more novels and then I started doing it theologies and then started doing comics and anthologies and novels. And what ended up happening was it just kind of compounded on top of each other. So, as I mentioned, I, uh, I work on a lot of stuff in the background.

Uh, so like, uh, I will be writing, uh, Volume of our book, Ichabod Jones Monster Hunter, or I’ll be putting together an anthology or I’ll be writing a novel, but those things sort of happen behind the scenes. So the novel I’m coming out with a new novel Kickstarter at the end of may, beginning of, um, beginning of June.

And so, uh, that’s those are novels that go all the way back to 2016, 17. Yeah. And so it feels like I’ve done a lot of work and I do a lot of work. Not saying I don’t do a lot of work. But, uh, uh, it, it feels like I do a lot more work because it has compounded over time and I’ve just kind of kept a lot of stuff back from, uh, from coming out.

Norman Chella: [00:12:55] So there’s a lot to unpack here because you, you tried out the medium of comics, then you jumped into graphic novels and then you jumped back to comics. Then you did anthologies and now you’re, well, I mean, I wouldn’t say that you’re not doing a lot of work. I just think that you’ve focused on. Production, right. The production of stories, no matter what format they are.

Russell Nohelty: [00:13:16] Yeah. I think I just bump around a lot. So I like to do like one or two novels, one or two anthology, sorry, four novels, a graphic novel. And in anthology a year. Now, if I’m not editing that anthology than I like to be in about four to six a year, and that restorative just from novels to comic work.

Uh, so I like to get my, my work out there and these like little shorter forms that are a lot easier for me to manage. And then, uh, I don’t really make any money from the anthology is, um, I mean, our company does on the anthologies that we edit, but like when it comes to writing pieces for anthologies, like, I really don’t make a lot of money.

It’s all for the, um, it’s all for like the publicity of being in the anthology and being able to work with other people and meeting other people. And then the novels. Obviously, I try to do four and then do the Kickstarter for the novels. So like there’s four and then the Kickstarter for the novel, maybe I can do five.

Uh, and then, uh, the comics are mostly things that I’m not working on. Uh, um, . Production managing them so like the artists are working on them and I’m writing, being them. So it ends up being, not so much work. It ends up being a big outlay of money, but not a big outlay of like my time to, to manage how the book is.

Especially now, Ichabod Jones is on its 10th issue, so it’s kind of like as long as the book looks good and Renzo says that the story is good enough for better than the last one. Then, uh, I feel pretty confident in, in that, like he can just handle most of it and he, you know, he does, uh, some of the character design work beforehand, but for the most part, like he’s just in there doing the work.

And I trust him now to do, uh, to do all of the stuff that he needs to do without my. A lot of my oversight. I mean, the notes that I have on him for comics are so minimal that, uh, uh, that, uh, and, and I do that because I just work with these people for so long. Most of my collaborators, people I’ve been working with five plus years at this point.

So it allows me to like, not think about those things, um, and just focus on the work of writing and then growing the brand.

Norman Chella: [00:15:24] Were there any, I don’t want to say conflicts, but were there any issues in the beginning from say sharing the responsibility of trying to create like a creative endeavor or a project or a new comic, uh, in the beginning, since you did a transition into comics, graphic novels, et cetera.

And then I guess you found that it was quite viable. And I guess there was a point of time when you decide to collaborate with someone to actually create something together.

Russell Nohelty: [00:15:53] Yeah. I mean, it’s really hard at the beginning. So I did, I made movies before this, so like, movies are about way more moving parts than, than a, than a, than a comic book does.

Um, but what I learned from movies is that, uh, spend 80% of your time hiring and then, uh, your job’s pretty much done as the director. So by the time I would step on set. Um, I mean, I would have. Um, I would have things to talk about every day and like every like moment of every day and have decisions to make all of the time.

But my job was to find the right person for the job. So I, uh, spent, and I always recommend when you’re getting, when you’re going to pay somebody or when you’re going to, uh, when you’re going to collaborate, whatever it is is to spend an outmoded amount of time figuring out the hiring process that you want to use, and there are all different sorts of hiring processes that you can use, but find the one that works for you and then spend.

10 times more than you think you need to hiring, and that will make your job a whole lot easier in the end, even if someone is slightly more expensive or they’re not in America. Then finding the right person who can really fulfill your vision is going to be the thing that, uh, that, that, that really determines whether the project is done.

Right. And then once to have the project it’s really important. For the people that are working with you to feel some ownership of it, even if they have no ownership, like I own all of the work for the graphic novels, but I co own all of the work for the anthology. Is that right? And I do so I’m on that, but I go into the process the same way, which is my goal is to write.

Just enough so that the artists can view it in their brain, but not so much that, uh, that like, if it feels like they don’t have ownership of the piece or they don’t have freedom. And then once I’ve hired somebody, um, I really try not to give up too many notes. Uh, because, uh, I’ve hired him for a reason and if they’re not working out, then I can go and fire them if I want to.

But, um, you know, there’s been very few times in my career where I’ve had to stop a project. That I hired somebody to do a specific piece of work and just like, I wouldn’t go in and tell an and, and like go and make an actor, uh, do something very specific. Uh, I would also not make an artist do something very specific.

I do not agree with every decision that they make, obviously. Um, but unless it really breaks the story, I, I, I try very, very, very, very, very hard not to interrupt their flow.

Norman Chella: [00:18:30] I like this. I like the fact that you. Allow a certain level of constraints for yourself to give them the space, to be completely free with how they interpret your writing or at least your creative input into the whole project, because it does, you are meant to share the responsibility.

If you are co co creating something together, I am quite interested in that myself since. It is quite difficult to on the most basic of all forms, write a story from beginning to end, um, designing the narrative, creating the characters and essentially creating a book that has your name on it.

Russell Nohelty: [00:19:09] Sure. Well, that also goes to a novel, just so you know.

So like I also feel that way about co creating the work with the, um, with the reader. So what’s amazing about novels is that every single person who reads them creates the world in their brain. And it’s your job to allow them to, um, to escape into their own imagination. And I don’t tend to write very, my prose tends to be pretty terse, uh, specifically because I like to allow the reader to have that imagination and be able to only be constrained by the bounds of their imagination. Now that means that I can’t, I can’t make it too terse though, because I need to make sure that they understand the bounds within which we are creating and which, and they trust that I’m going to lead them on a journey.

And that goes for comics and creating or, or, or novels or any piece. Like the goal that I’m trying to make as a business owner and as a creative and as a producer of these things is I’m trying to lay down a track like in a roller coaster and let you know that like you are going to have ups and downs, and then it’s going to feel scary, but like I have complete control over this roller coaster.

So that, and, and once you feel like I have control, that allows you to. Your conscious mind to step back and just enjoy the story. So I know people talk about all sorts of ways to get readers engaged, but for me, it’s about making them assuring them that you have control and all they have to do is read and they will get a satisfying story and there will be ups and downs and positives and negatives, and there’ll be the characters will go through some shit, but they’ll come out the other side and you’ll come out the other side, having enjoyed the process.

And that’s the same thing that I try and impart to my, um, my collaborators when it comes to a script that like I have control over where the narrative is going. You just have to come in and do your best work. And editors, whether it’s an editor who’s entering my novels or, uh, like my job, uh, if I’ve done it correctly is to allow whoever is collaborating with me on building that world to feel that all they have to do is come in and do their best work.

Everything else, whether it’s money. Yeah. Or whether it’s like story or whatever it is, they have freedom in that part because I have handled everything else that’s not that part.

Setting the foundation for trying to lay down the tracks because in in the end, I mean, you are packaging an experience for the reader or the viewer or someone who is wanting to go down said roller coaster, as you mentioned, and you have the ability to create those tracks and allow others to designed, uh, the ride that they’re going to be on.

Norman Chella: [00:22:14] I would love to take a deep dive into that. So I’m going to play. I’m going to play the fool here. Right? So I would love to be in your shoes. Russell, I’ve read your books. I want to write a book or I want to write my own novel, or I want to create my own narrative. I have a bazillion ideas, but I’ve never written a word before, or I’ve never taken writing so seriously before I’m obsessed with the idea of having this narrative out there.

What should I know first? What should I do?

Russell Nohelty: [00:22:42] So there are two parts of a career and the first part, I think really it’s about school. It doesn’t need to be like actually formal school, but it’s about having a safe space to fail, to find your voice and to be able to write and write different genres and write different characters.

And just, just, just to just get words out there without having to worry about them being good or not, because they are not going to be good. The first thing you have to know is like you work. Yeah. God awful as a right. You’re awful. Like it’s not bad. Like everyone is a godawful writer when they first start writing, just like, they’re a God painter.

There’s like, they, they, they just are, uh, just the worst. Uh, th this, this can be mitigated. If you’ve like done a lot of nonsense  work. You’ve done a lot of other stuff, but general, like if you’re coming in here with very little writing. The thing that stops people is that they are just not very good, and Ira Glass has this great quote, which is very long and I have not memorized, but the general thing is that no one does that.

Basically no one tells the young creatives that, uh, their taste is good when they start their career, but their ability to execute on that taste is very bad. Uh, so the first part of a career is basically just moving the gap from very bad to kind of bad to being able to execute the thing that you see in your mind, because you just can’t do it the first time you sat down to write.

Um, so, uh, we can get past that part. Then the next part is to not make your dream project first. So most people get stopped because they really love fantasy or scifi or thrillers or mystery or whatever romance, whatever that is genre is, and they can’t execute in that genre. They can’t execute anything.

Yet. Uh, so they are, uh, they, they look at what their work is and they’re always going back and tinkering with that work. So for me, when I, when, when, when, when, uh, Mmm, learning to write, I would prefer if you didn’t write in a genre that you loved more than anything preferred, if you wrote in a different genre.

So, um, My favorite genre to tell people to write in is thriller because thrillers have very strict or mystery, cause thrillers and mystery have very strict guidelines of what happens. I also think people should write movies and TV because there’s very strict guidelines of how movies and TV work.

TV especially  there are act breaks and you have to have something happen before that act break. You’ve got to have an up and a down and there’s, there’s like, there’s so many rules to structure and structure is kind of the first thing you have to learn. And so writing movies and TV is a really good way to like understand the parts of like what character and dialogue is.

The dialogue looks, and it’s like, it’s like pulled out from all the other stuff. Like the words are kind of at the top and then there’s character in dialogue and it makes it very easy to see what each piece is and what you have to work on. Uh, so it’s really about like, not making a thing that you have been thinking about for 10 years or 20 years. It’s about making something that isn’t a different genre or a different type of things.

So you, you’re not always nitpicking it. Um, the third piece is that since you’re not very good, uh, you should start, uh, writing smaller projects. Um, so, uh, the movies and TV are good example cause they’re relatively short to write and they’re very much, uh, that you can very much see the good and the bad.

And also you can, you, your bad stuff will never get produced. I mean, I wrote a movie that like is probably not my favorite work and I would like it to not have been produced, but it is produced. But generally if you write this stuff, like it’s not going to be produced. Like it won’t be produced. So there’s no, there’s no hope that like you will go and hit publish on a script.

You just won’t do it because like, you can’t do it. It’s not like how you write movies and TV like movies and TV need collaborators. Um, uh, but also short fiction is very good for like, figuring out how to do, uh, these, like these turns and these moments and getting your voice. And that first part of your career is really just like getting your voice and learning what you love and learning what you don’t love.

Being able to amalgamate. Like, I really like thriller, but like I prefer to write like romance thriller. I really liked it. I really like don’t like writing in reality. So I really would prefer to write like scifi, fantasy and horror and like just trying as many different genres as possible and putting on a lot of different hats.

Um, I get a lot of pushback from this from other writers cause they, uh, they, they’ve not done this exact thing. They usually try and write in the genre that they, that they want to write in. But yeah. Uh, I think that as a group, the writers who fail are the ones who keep rewriting the same story, because it’s never good enough.

And you really have to finish a ton of work like that. The work is not in the writing. The work is in the rewriting and the finishing and the polishing. And that’s when you learn the thing. So if you haven’t put out a product, that’s like, this is done. It’s hard for your brain to codify it. I think of it.

I have a nonfiction book called how to build your creative career, which I wrote in 2017. And it was like the first nonfiction work that I had really done. I had a podcast for a long time. I’d done a lot of lectures. Well, like, I didn’t know what. I didn’t know what I thought about like building a creative career, but then after finishing that book and like dumping all of the pieces and like moving them around and pulling out the things, I didn’t think were important.

And like I had a piece that was about 50. It’s 56 or 60,000 words long. So between 55 and 60,000 words long. And I was like, Oh, well, this is what I think is important about learning to build a creative career. And I had the, like the framework of like, basically my rest of my career. Uh, that I, uh, you know, has worked in like one of the framework, like it’ll make you something great, uh, uh, basics of sales, uh, building an audience from scratch, selling a live events for launching why launching products successfully.

That’s pretty much all the stuff that I teach in some level. It’s what brought into the complete creative as the framework. I brought it to my second book, but it became the framework of everything that I kind of thought, but I only really realized that that’s what I thought once I was done writing it.

And the same thing happened when I’ve finished like a script and I’d be like, Oh, I learned a little bit about structure this time. Like I think the structure, was a lot better and like characters the next time, but it really, my brain couldn’t codify it until like it was done. It was a finished piece.

And so often people are just so nervous to finish a piece. And so I guess the final piece of this is like your first stuff should not be coming out. So one of the reasons you shouldn’t be running your masterpiece tome first is because like, it’s probably not going to be good enough to come out.

And so you might as well put stuff out. That, uh, that like is not in the genre. That is not the thing that you love that is not like. And that that like, uh, is not going to be your life’s work. You know, it took me a decade to figure out what my life’s work kind of books are. And even if you take all of the, the, books I grouped together, Mmm.

It was, uh, it really, uh, is about 18 novels that I’ve written. And it took until I wrote. Maybe 15 of those novels that, uh, that, that I really understood what it meant to have a Russell Nohelty book. And I have written scifi and mystery and fantasy and thriller. And  I tried to do a whole bunch of stuff, a dystopian, and it took a while for me to be like, what does, what does a Russell Nohelty book say?

What are the themes of a Russell Nohelty book? What should I do? And this is from somebody who. You know, has been pretty successful in his career. I still didn’t know. Like it meant to have like a book. I like, like the construction of the things that I wanted to say in a book. And I sometimes veer off from that, but now at least this was sort of a guidepost.

And so that first part of your career is really important that you have a safe space to fail and you are under no illusion that you’re going to make money on that work. And then it’s part two is like once you have finished that part, that is when we can have the fun of like finding an audience and doing all of the fun things that I like to do.

Um, but it is really important that you kind of separate those parts of it because it’s so hard to. It’s so hard to, uh, to, to build the career or to not lose focus that you do need to be like, I’m just not good objectively. Like I’m not good. And that’s okay. I’m going to let this project go and I’m going to work on this project.

And sometimes you find a project that you really love, but wasn’t really well executed, like I had a script that I wrote initially called my father didn’t kill him. Uh, sorry, I I’m going to kill myself. That’s what it was called. And that became the seeds of My Father didn’t kill Himself, but I had to rework basically the whole of the script to make it really like work and resonate.

But, uh, there are some things like I had a couple of scripts optioned, uh, from that first initial, like, launch that I had, like the book called the Wannabes and Gumshoes became Gumshoes: The Case of Madison’s Father. I said, I’m not saying that nothing good can come out of those, uh, those, uh, those first scripts, but it is really important that you have the ability to, um, to, to fail and try new things and find your voice and understand that like your work is probably not good enough and it won’t be good enough until you finish at least 10 projects.

Norman Chella: [00:32:36] Having to quantify that is probably the most, shall we say the greatest guide to knowing that you’re on your way to becoming a good writer or at least a decent enough writer to actually get to phase two? I always like to think of it as phase one as writing your first million words, because once you get past the first million words, Then you’ll know that.

Okay. All the crap that I could write is now on paper, it’s done. I can put it aside. Let’s work on the real projects from there on, and I like how it took you so long to find specifically the voice that’s unique to your name, like the books that you’ve written, even though it could be, you know, the ride of a lifetime jumping from your genre to genre writing in this case, it’s an exploration of like what’s possible or at least what is unique to you.

Russell Nohelty: [00:33:26] Yes. So I was in my, when I was in my twenties, I had a policy that I would do anything that I wanted in my twenties, assuming that like I wasn’t illegal or, um, that I would say still able to pull in money that I would really take my twenties to figure it out.

So I would not have no regrets. And I brought that into my creative life where I was like. A lot of times people said things didn’t work and they were absolutely right. Sometimes they said it wouldn’t work and they were absolutely wrong. Um, but I was like, well, if I don’t try it, I’m going to regret it.

So like, I might as well try it and see, like, I know I do not. I do not like writing in reality very much. I just don’t like writing like. Uh, my manager would love it if I wrote more like a thriller fiction, like said in the real world, but I just don’t care. I don’t care at all about the real world.

Like I want to write about monsters and mythology and magic. And that’s the thing about like drives me forward. And when, when I’m not writing that project, a project like that, it feels like. Uh, I should, I just have a job when I’m writing, like the stuff that I really like then I, I, it still feels like work, but like, at least that’s the work that I want to do.

The stories that I want to tell. So. Mmm. But yeah, it takes a long time to figure that out. I, I mean, it took a long time for me to figure it out. Maybe it won’t take 10 projects. Maybe it won’t take five projects. Maybe you’ll maybe you’ll knock it out of the park, like right, right away. But the odds of that are very small.

And so when I tell people like, Oh, well this person did it in five books, or this person like did their first book. And it went well, like, look at Amanda Hawking. And I’m like, yeah, but like, the odds against that are so bad. So like, how do you want to build your career? Do you want to build your career in a way that like, the odds are pretty good?

Like not great. Cause like still, like, it’s very, very hard to do it, even if you’ve been successful to continue to be successful is incredibly hard. Um, but do you want to do it in a way that like you could follow or do you want to do it in a way? That’s like, well, J K Rawlings sold their first book and I’m like, great.

Well, uh, what if she didn’t? Like, what if she didn’t? Like, then, then what would she have? She spent so long on the first book and trying to sell the first book. Like, what if it didn’t work, then she would have had to go back and do a second book. It’s better to have two books or three books or five books that you’re trying to sell, because then if one doesn’t work, you can still be working on another book.

But if you’re, uh, if you’re putting all of your eggs in that one basket, then. I just, I just think that’s poor planning. Uh, now some people would say, yeah, but if like, if you, if you leap without a net, then like you have nowhere to go, but like to succeed and I’m like, no, you can break your leg. It’s the reason people have nets.

The reason that these things happen. It’s like, it’s not like, because people fall a lot. It’s because people fall sometimes. And so. Uh, and then a writing career or any creative career, it just takes so long. And the, the, the vast, the overwhelming amount of evidence is that it will take you 10 years to breakthrough.

That is the overwhelming amount of evidence. Even if there are people that have broken through earlier, even if they’re stuck for every Billie Eilish, there’s like a 45 year old person who never broke through, like there’s probably a thousand, maybe a hundred thousand, 45 year old people who never broke through.

So, uh, yes, you could do break the wonder debut novel because I of your break in, in your, in your, uh, breakthrough, uh, or. Music album or whatever it is. Yeah. You can it’s theoretically possible. I can’t say it’s not theoretically possible because I’ve literally seen it happen. Like I’ve watched people who are 12 or 13, like, like, like get movie deals and, and, and I’ve watched people who, well, who did their first full album, win the Grammy and I’ve watched it happen.

So I know it is possible, but like, It’s real freaking unlikely. It’s real unlikely. And I would prefer to not build my career on the supposition that I’m going to be the one in a million. I would rather build it on the career of like, Hey, uh, here’s what these people did. And here’s the things that I can go replicate.

Like I can go and I can write a bunch of like, uh, and a lot of people that succeed on that first novel, uh, also, uh, were people who wrote and newspapers or they wrote blog posts for a decade, or like they did a lot of writing before they wrote their. Or they write a lot of short fiction and like they got in, they did a lot of fanfic.

Um, they did whatever that is. Like, they’ve done a lot of writing. It just so happens that their first official novel was the thing that came out. But like they’ve usually spent 20 years doing some amount of writing or 10 years doing some manner of writing and you know, the odds against you getting a manager or an agent, then the odds against that manager, being able to or agent, being able to sell the thing to a publishing house are very small, but the odds of you writing a really good book and then writing another good book and then writing a third good book and just keeping, putting books out and doing marketing for and gaining an audience little by little, like that’s manageable.

Possible. Cause I’ve, I’ve watched that happen hundreds of thousands of times where like someone just like went to a show and they like, I’m a perfect example of that. Like I made a book and it sold a couple of copies and I spent the next 10 years going around to sell it like that is a possible career path.

Whereas, uh, uh, JK Rowlings’ career path is just not manageable because you don’t know if you’re going to be that good. Like you are not JK Rowling. Even the greatest writers in the world are not JK Rowling. I’m like, there’s one of them, a generation and, and, uh, and there’s one. Every once in a while I read a book and I’m just like, I can’t believe that someone is that good a writer.

Like, I just  can’t do it. Right. I read a book called the Hazelwood by Melissa Albert last year, two years ago. And it just like blew me away. And like, I was like, Oh wow. Like this person deserves to be a New York Time’s bestselling author like this personally. It’s an, it’s just. She’s better than every other writer that I read last year.

Like, this is just, she’s just, she’s not just better, but she’s leaps and bounds to so much better that life of like, like if I were her had her talent, then yes, I could be like, okay, maybe, maybe you, maybe you, Melissa Albert should like, get this, should like get the deal, but like how many of those people exist that are just.

10 times better than everyone else around them. Uh, and I mean like 10 times better than like the other professionals are out there, not just of your friend’s circle, but like so much better than the Oh, they’re authors that like exist and are there, I, there was other ones it’s not just this, not just her, but like the odds you’re going to be that talented and that lucky to get the right agent and, are.

They are so infinitesimal that I prefer to act as if I’m not that good. And then I can, uh, and then I can like live with myself because I had, there’s a process for like, even Melissa Albert. Like if she followed the other, the process, like she would probably also be successful because like her writing’s just that good.

But if someone who is not as good as that or JK Rowling level good, then they, they, they plan that, that path for success. They’re just never going to reach it. They’re never going to reach it. And so then they’re like kind of screwed, but if they plan for the, like, I’m going to be writing a bunch of novels and I’m going to be building my own and slowly, and I’m going to do this, that, and the other thing.

And then. And like, I’m going to have to fail a bunch of times. Then at that point there, it becomes like, when do you switch? Like when do you pull the trigger and stay? I’m no longer in phase one. I’m now in phase two.

Norman Chella: [00:41:45] There’s an interesting observation to this, at least that what I’ve noticed when you have aspiring writers who compare their possibilities, like their future self, potentially to someone as successful as JK Rowling, a little, little thing to that.

JK Rowling suffered for so long before she can get her book deal.

Russell Nohelty: [00:42:05] It’s on top of that, like she, she ran in a circle that gave her access to. Publishers, like also, like, she was not like, she was just like some Schmo from like, from like lower Chabot via like, trying to like, like go and like get. She ran in circles where she came in contact with publishers and agents and stuff.

So that made it easier for her. And if you have access like JK Rowling did then, okay. Okay. Maybe give it a go in that way, but you still want to make sure that you are. Like her book is still fabulous. Like, uh, like there’s no denying that, like it was worthy of publication. Uh, and a lot of times people will give me books that are not worthy of publications.

So you have to be very. That’d be very, uh, aware of like your skill level and like what is what you should take your shot with because some books are very well written, but they have very little shot shot at being published and some books, um, have a great shot being published if you work on the dialogue and all of that stuff.

But very few books are like, thought of in like, well, what. How is this going to sit on a bookshelf? Where is it going to sit next to where is it going to be around? Where are all of the pieces that like go into this and like, why should it, why should the bookseller put this book on a bookshelf when they could and instead of all of the other people, and why should this book be put into a Harper Collins’ publishing slate or your own publishing slate. Like frankly, most bookslike on Wannabe Press is a very small company. And we don’t publish very many books and they’re almost all my books, but I still have to fight and be like, well, why does this deserve to be in my publishing slate?

Like, why does this earn people’s money? Like, what is the point of this book existing? And, uh, and I think that not in the beginning of your career again, well, this is now the second part of it. Uh, you have to be ruthless about, like, this is the kind of book that I want to make. These are the kinds of books my audience is going to, like, or already does, like, and how can I keep feeding this beast?

Um, uh, and, and to make the books that I want to make as well, because once you start building an audience Mmm. Your ability to just make random, random ass books is very small. Like you, you, unless you want to build it all the way again, I have had to literally build my novel audience from pretty much scratch, even though I have a pretty successful, uh, comic book company.

Um, uh, the, my novels, uh, have very little traction even now. So I have to, I had to be willing. To like invest the time, energy and effort to build an entirely different kind of book up basically from scratch and in the same way that if you start writing thrillers and you’re successful in fantasy or romance or whatever, that, that is, that other part is, you’re going to be basically building it from scratch again.

And yes, some people will transfer over and some of my fans do transfer over, but generally, I have a really, a tough time with the novels and it’s just, it’s something that I desperately want to do. I desperately want people to take the novel seriously, so I am willing to suck it up and do all of the work necessary to make the novels a piece of my company.

Even if it takes a long time while I’m doing the other work that is already successful.

And of course diversifying yourself that way, even at the potential cost of not everybody resonating with it and for you to suck it up and actually keep it going ahead with the novel itself, I can imagine it to be quite a variety of learning experiences, all put into one.

Since you do have to cater to different kinds of audiences, the ones who expect per comics from you and the ones who are like, Oh, cool. Russell’s doing a novel. That’s pretty awesome.

And so interestingly that most of the novels are based on by most popular comic book series. Um, so I have a book called Katrina Hates The Dead and Pixie Dust.

My most popular comic book series, uh, novel series is the Godsverse, which incorporates the two main characters and novelized as their graphic novels and still it’s become, it’s nearly impossible to get people to try it who like comics and now we’re trying to follow me into novels and they’ve been the ones asking me for more Katrina and Okta stories for a long time.

Norman Chella: [00:46:40] Do you think it’s easier for you to start off into a new medium, like for example, comic book or graphic novel to novel by transferring over worlds or settings that you’ve already worked on?

Russell Nohelty: [00:46:53] Yeah, absolutely. I do. Um, well, I mean, it has to be successful. So, you know, Katrina and Okta is books have brought in, I don’t know, a hundred thousand dollars in comic book revenue, uh, close to a hundred thousand dollars in comics.

So like sold thousands upon thousands of copies of books. Uh, so it was it’s like that kind of success. I think it was worth transferring over. If you don’t have success in something, I think you probably want to like not do that? Um, but uh, I wanted to introduce my book world to people who wanted more of that.

And I, I thought that if I did that successfully and the books were good, then I could, and I could get them to read more of my novels. And, um, we’re going to see, cause I’m going to launch this new Kickstarter and it doesn’t have any of that, the Okta Katrina’s stories. So we’re going to see how it, uh, it all molds together.

Uh, when I, when I put that out, but generally, uh, yeah, I, I think that if you have something successful, I mean, that’s what they look for when they bring a movie or TV out. Right? Like they’re looking for success in another genre, if just to see if it’s worth. Uh, uh, trying to get traction for it. And I think that you, uh, your, your career can be looked at, especially because, uh, so if I never sold one copy of the Katrina of the Godsverse Chronicles, the Godsverse would still be massively popular as a, uh, as a, um, as a comic book entity.

So part of it is also like, okay, I’ve now made, let’s just call it for a hundred thousand dollars on this universe. It’s a lot easier to drop 10 grand or whatever you’re dropping to like make comic novels or to make something else because you’ve already, your profit margin is already like, Epic in the, in that one thing.

Uh, so, uh, yeah, I mean, I, I could, I could write novels in the country in the, in the Godsverse Chronicles universe for the next decade and never make a dollar on it. And it would still be. Uh, a incredibly popular franchise for me. And so I do think that part of that, part of the, the thing that we have to think about, or like, if you have the ability to be successful, this is why sequels happen.

This is why life transmedia happens, because like you now can take the profit that you’ve made and try and move it into another galaxy or universe. And, and it’s a lot harder to do that when you’re just bleeding money on something over and over again.

Norman Chella: [00:49:33] And I take it that you are now focusing on this upcoming Kickstarter for Godsverse.

I believe to see if you can continue on, uh, Exploring other mediums potentially. Is there any plans for any other kinds of formatting? Um, other than say maybe a novel or maybe even beyond that, or maybe like an audio podcast or…

Russell Nohelty: [00:49:55] My management team deals with all that stuff. I mean, there’s things in the works, but like, I don’t concentrate on that.

My management team concentrates on that and I focus on books and cause that’s what successful for me. Anybody who focuses the time on the, uh, on the, on the ancillary properties is going to be sorely pained. The most common way that novelists or comic book people especially fail is because they rely on the option or they rely on the production of a movie or TV show before they before they can hit profit.

I’ve always been of the opinion that I’m going to hit profit with the comics. And then anything else that’s going to be, anything else that’s going to be just gravy on top of the other stuff that we’re doing. So, um, what I love there to be stuff there’s been talks of of video games and movies and TV of all of my properties before, but nothing ever pans out.

And usually it takes a long time for that to pan out. And then when one pans out, a bunch of other ones pan out. This new Kickstarter though, is not about the Godsverse. It’s about four novels that as not, are not Godsverse related that are in each of their own universes that we’re trying to bring out. That’s sort of our capstone books of while you’re writing.

Once you have the flow of a series and the style of a series, you kind of have to deliver that same thing, every, every book. So, the Godsverse books are very like fast paced, fantasy thriller, very like, uh, Jack Ryan-y, or but with magic and monsters and mythology and stuff.

So they’re quite fast paced. And so whenever I want to explore something else and took my career, I ended up taking on one of these other projects. So a Worst Thing in the Universe is one is narrated by God, send the distant future, which are, you can be for the gods. First. It kind of was like the thing that coalesced, what I wanted to write about in my career.

Um, a book called Invasion taught me about how to incorporate romance. My books are quite violent. And so, um, uh, this book called The Marked Ones showed me how to like write a fantasy thriller, like Harry Potter, fantasy thriller, but within like a YA space. And then the book called The Void Calls Us Home.

It’s like a, yeah. Once I finished a bunch of these books, it was, you mentioned that the 19th, the 19th book in that 18 book year, um, was a, uh, book called. The void calls us home, which was an allegory for depression, which I just like, kind of dumped all of my life, neuroses on, I’ve been dealing with the pressure my whole life, basically.

And I kind of personified that depression in like a, a big Lovecraftian monster that like exists in this void called the Void. And like those four books are like very different, but they taught me a whole lot about like, not to do the Godsverse. Cause the Godsverse still the Godsvserse, like the Godsverse is still like these fast paced books.

But I have a secret project that I’ve been working on for about two years called the Obsidian Spindles saga. And I like kind of wanted to pour all of the new stuff into this new series. So the Godsverse again. Godsverse is the Godsverse. Like if you like, like fast paced, fantasy thriller, then the Godsverse is awesome. It’s mythology and magic and, and, and snarky characters and like a well, and like the stakes are always like really high and like the world’s always on edge and like, it’s awesome.

But, uh, The, uh, the Obsidian Spindle saga is awesome in a different way that like, has, it’s a lot harder for me to write because it’s got a lot more trauma in it. It’s got a lot more like interplay. The Godsverse is great, because like, yeah. Uh, it’s, it’s a very easy to write because the characters are so focused on the, what the truth is like they all like, sort of have their own like a magnet for like what they need to do. And they’re kind of undeterred by anything else.

My new book series is like the opposite. Like everyone questions themselves a lot when it’s a lot like more depth and a lot more like emotional, like ethos pathos and all of that stuff. Um, so these capstone books kind of relate specifically to the Obsidian Spindle saga. And they kind of grew like leveled up my ability as a writer to be able to write this series, which is full of fairytales and mythology and magic and monsters, just like all my other stuff just has a lot more of that like depth and emotional baggage that, uh, I don’t think that God’s first has.

Norman Chella: [00:54:34] That will be extremely exciting to see, uh, once the Obsidian Spindles saga comes out. Uh, and of course the continuation of the Godsverse, that’s a whole variety of experiences to choose from for the reader who is interested in reading all of your books. I do have to wrap this up with a couple of segments, which I’m sure you might find quite interesting.

One segment is called mementos. Do you have a personal memento that you, that represent you like an object or something more metaphysical?

Russell Nohelty: [00:55:08] So, I mean, each of my books is a piece of my soul is the bound in there, but I have this object that I’d been carrying around, which is the tentacle kitty named Hermoine. Uh, uh, it, uh, so I got it at Hawaii con a couple of many years ago now for my dear friends, Reyna and, uh, and John Merritt. And I, I have many more of their works too there. They’re amazing. And, but Hermoine has always been very special to me. I went after I bought it, it was the one thing that I bought at Hawaii con.

Mmm. And I put it in my pocket and then I lost it and I was like, Oh, because like, this show did not do very well for me, which it wasn’t supposed to, I was supposed to be a vacation partially. So like, it wasn’t that, but it was like the one thing that I had to remember Hawaii from. And I was like, you know, I’m just gonna, if I find it again, it’s magic.

Like it’s just like the, the, the thing is magic. And, uh, I was walking around at the end of the show and I saw her, you’re just sitting on like the end of a table. And I said, uh, I said, okay, That like yours. They’re like, no, it like got dropped. And I was like, I think it’s mine. Like, I, I, like, I dropped it a couple of days ago.

And so since then she traveled with me for a couple of years. I’ve since retired her cause she’s getting old. Um, but, um, she still sits on my desk. Oh yeah. Hermoine is, is, is, is, is something that, uh, probably the closest to a totem that I ever, uh, that I ever have. I also have. A little tiger, uh, named Klaus, which is somewhere around here, which is a, uh, I call him the ABC tiger.

Cause he’s the always be closing tiger. So, uh, that is, uh, I used to put him in my pocket when I worked in sales and I would put him in there and whenever I was like, Uh, whenever I was having a bad day, I would just pet it on a big call. Remember, remember it’s about the clothes. It’s about the close. it’s about the close. It’s about the close. So, um, probably those two things were the closest to sort of a memento of my career. Um, aside from the books, which as I mentioned all, have a piece of my soul bound inside of them.

Norman Chella: [00:57:23] Awesome, Hermoine and the Always Be Closing tiger and. The next segment is called walkaway wisdom to say, if we walk away from this conversation right now, and I meet someone in need or someone who.

Uh, become friends with me and I share a part of my story with them. A part of my life with them. Part of that is this conversation right now. Is there a piece of wisdom I can share with them that represents who you are?

Russell Nohelty: [00:57:49] Absolutely. So it’s not gonna have anything to do with anything we talked about though.

Uh, we talked about how a year ago, around a year ago, I had a really bad stories of launches and, uh, we didn’t talk about it as I was suicidal at the, at those things to the point of like, Mmm ideation. And like, it was pretty bad. It was the first time in like maybe a decade that I’ve dealt with this, even though I’ve dealt with it, my whole career and my, my whole life, um, depression on some level.

Um, and I really had to learn this lesson. Uh, we, we, I ended up getting out of it and like having a bunch of good launches after that. But what I learned was like was your self worth can not be tied to your success or failure. It is intrinsically different from them. Your self worth it’s intrinsic to you being born.

It exists outside of time-space success or failure. It is the same self-worth that Bill Gates has as, uh, as, as LeBron James has, as the homeless guy on the street has a, it exists just for you being born. Uh, if you tie it too much to your success or failure, it’s real fun to tie to your success because like suddenly, especially if you have very low self worth, like I have historically had watching your success go up is like, Oh my, my success now. Like, look, look at how much more I’m worth now.

The problem is that it’s going to crash and you’re going to hit a failure point. And you would think that if you started at the bottom and then you worked your way up, and then you came back down, uh, close to the bottom, uh, it would be a net gain. Doesn’t how your brain thinks about it. Your brain thinks that when you’ve had success, this is the new barometer.

So this is the level of your success now in which falls. Your self worth is then tied to that. Again, it doesn’t feel like you’re just going back down. It feels like a minus. So, um, it’s really important to remember that you are not someone who succeeds or fails. Sorry, you are not a success or failure.

You are a person who succeeds or who fails, but also does thousands of other things. So a writer, a drummer, uh, Husband, father, brother, sister, sibling, uh, uh, significant other, uh, toy maker, whatever it is, you’re all of these things together. And while one of those things is, is tied to failure.

The rest of them are all exists outside of, uh, of this thing. And even me who ties a lot of their, uh, identity to writing and doing this stuff. And, uh, it’s something that I. Work on every day, because if this all went away tomorrow, okay. I would still exist. Like I would still be a human who has had experiences, who does a bunch of other stuff and the money all went away tomorrow.

I would still be here and I would still have to like, Survive. And like, it’s not based upon my self worth about, about my success or failure, whether like I deserve to exist or not. It is outside of that stuff.

Norman Chella: [01:00:54] And indeed you do deserve to exist regardless of what you’ve done, your achievements, the effort that you’ve done, your success or failure, like you’ve said, it’s there already.

It is evident since you are born. And of course always be closing all of these amazing things that you are creating right now. Russell, thank you so much. If we want to reach out to you, or if we want to read up more about your books, or if you want to just email you or reach out to you or have a chat, where can we find you?

How do we contact you?

Russell Nohelty: [01:01:24] Right. I know that everyone always asks me to do one. One link, but I’m getting to do two, just to let you know. Cause I do two things. I’m two halves of the same, uh, Wannabe Press is our, um, publishing company. But the Complete Creative is my resource for creatives and the completecreative.com has epic blog posts, free courses. My podcast archives from my I can cast the complete creative where we, where we talked to craves about how they built in sustain their creative business. Uh, there is, uh, just an email, insane amount of information about building a creative career that I have put together in the past decade.

And it’s sort of an unbroken chain, partially unbroken chain, at least. Of like of what means to build a creative career and the things that go into that. And I really recommend, I put 90 to 95% of it away for free. I think before this call, I saw that you had signed up for our free writing course, so it’s a hundred percent free.

Uh, just have to go and take the initial steps to like go to the website. And there’s almost 200 episodes of the complete creative now that you can. That you can, uh, go through the archives and it’ll take you, uh, many, many, many hundreds of hours to do. The other part, if you like magic mythology and, and monsters, uh, that is sort of how I write, because the things that I write about, I love Greek, Roman, or Christian, a little bit of North, a little bit of Egypt in mythology. We add some, like other, other mythologies in their fairytales are coming. Um, but mostly Greek Roman geo Christian mythology, and, uh, and North are sort of the, the mythologist that I really like respond to my books, tend to be about humans or human-like monsters, um, that a rail against the destiny that the gods have created for them.

So these are generally normal people, uh, who, who to chase, who, who, who, who fight against the gods or something that the gods have done. And so that’s sort of my, um, that’s my, uh, that’s my God’s first mythology if also done dystopian and a bunch of stuff. But yeah. Uh, I really, the thing that, that I generally am going to be writing in the future is yeah, there’s this sort of like mythology fairy tale sort of world. And you can get a bunch of free stories, including the first issue of my psychological horror book, Ichabod Jones Monster Hunter, my most popular anthology, Cthulu is hard to spell, uh, and a couple of other really cool books at the first issue of, uh, Katrina Hates the Dead, which is part of the Godsverse and a short story.

That’s part of the Godsverse as well, by going to, uh, Russell Nohelty.com and signing up for the mailing list. You can see all of my books there. You can see the kind of writing style that I think that I have. And, uh, and yeah, it’s, uh, they’re very fun. Uh, there’s a lot of dark stuff that goes on in there, but it’s also like a whole bunch of fun as well.

So that’s Russellnohelty.com. If you’re a reader and want to see what I, uh, what I write and then the complete creative.com. If you are a creator yourself and want to build a better business.

Norman Chella: [01:04:38] Helping creatives and being a creative for yourself. Thank you so much, Russell, as the architect of all these worlds, I am sure that if you are on a never ending journey to write your own character arc, to be able to help others while writing your own worlds, yourself is a blessing to read as a reader. So I’m definitely gonna check it up. Thank you, Russell. And I will talk to you soon.

Russell Nohelty: [01:04:59] Thanks so much.

Norman Chella: [01:05:02] And that is it. My chat with Russell Nohelty, prolific writer, the author of many different worlds, mythologies, and all kinds of fiction writing, going from a genre to genre and helping other creative start their own creative career.

Despite the six-figures, despite the 18, 19 novels coming out within Russell’s career, he still shares a lot of his struggles. A lot of the powerful stories and struggles that shaped him as he is writing these stories every day and to de-mystify all the success stories that one might have as an aspiring writer to compare themselves to really great writers like JK Rowling, et cetera, et cetera. Russell talks about an alternative safer bet in trying to build your audience writing to become a good writer and building your list and serving your audiences over time to get from phase one, to phase two, and actually become a writer worth getting your books for, and to be able to hear about all of this from Russell’s perspective is extremely inspiring.

For me personally, because I would love to dive into this someday.

As always links to all of Russell’s social media, as well as Wannabe Press, Complete Creative and Russellnohelty.com. will be in the show notes or below. If you want to check out all of his books, his podcasts, as well as all the courses that will help you create your own creative career.

And if you are on your way there, then all as well, stay warm, stay lovely. And I will see you in the next episode. Your foolish friend Norm.

Thank you for listening to the show. Fool is hosted, produced and edited by me. Norman Chella. You can find out more about the show at thatsthenorm.com/Antifool. It’s where I host all my other podcasts shows and more live music and sound effects come from zapsplat.com.

If you have any questions. Recommendations for guests and more hit me up on Twitter at Norman Chella or on LinkedIn as well. There is only one of me in the world. I’m sure you can find me there. I love connecting with people and having warm, meaningful conversations. Don’t be foolish.

All right. Cheers.