I’ve been aware of Johnny B. Truant for years now. I was a long-time listener of the (now defunct) Self-Publishing Podcast. Truant cohosted this podcast with his writing partners, Sean Platt and David Wright.
The Self-Publishing Podcast was quite informative. I really miss it.
Truant and his two cowriters provided instruction on what quickly emerged as the “standard” way to do indie publishing in the era of Kindle Unlimited and increasing competition. But now Truant has become a critic of an overheated indie publishing ecosystem, dependent on high ad spends and mass production techniques.
Truant has encapsulated his revisionist analysis in a new nonfiction book, The Artisan Author: The Low-Stress, High-Quality, Fan-Focused Approach to Escaping the Publishing Rat Race
I recently listened to Truant being interviewed on the Self Publishing Info with the SPA Girls podcast. What follows are some highlights from the interview, with my own editorial asides liberally sprinkled in.
Two trends have distinguished indie publishing for at least a decade: a focus on high-volume output (aka “rapid release”, and a doctrinaire conformity to “tropes” within a very limited range of genres (aka “write to market”).
Neither of these was an entirely bad idea from the get-go.
Jonathan Franzen, after all, averages one novel every five years. No writer can make a living that way. Historically, fiction writers have had a tendency to be far too dithering and far too precious.
Writers may also be tempted to engage in excessive introspection, thereby writing self-indulgent stories that are too personal or too odd to ever find a mass audience. (Deeply autobiographical novels are notorious in this regard.) The writer should always ask herself: is anyone—besides me—going to want to read this?
Rapid release and write-to-market initially brought some business sense to what has traditionally been an artsy, undisciplined endeavor: the writing of fiction. Treat your writing like a business, was the overall message of rapid release and write-to-market.
This was, again, basically a good idea.
But as is so often the case in the Internet age, a basically sound idea was taken too far.
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Here are some of the problems that have caught my attention. They dovetail with some of what Truant talks about. (Truant is not the only one unhappy with the current state of indie publishing.)
I’ve noticed a trend toward ever-increasing subgenre specificity, and repetitiveness within genres. Everyone trying to copy (and thereby piggyback off the success of) everyone else.
Spend some time in any online indie publishing forum, and you’ll see what I’m talking about: endless novels in which witches, cats, or dogs solve mysteries…reverse harem romances…enemies-to-lovers romances…billionaire romances. (Okay, just about every kind of romance.)
Nothing wrong with any of these subgenres, per se. (Okay…some of the romance subgenres are just plain weird, but I’m trying to be diplomatic here.)
The point is: do we want a publishing landscape in which every author must join a particular “subgenre guild”, and then narrowly follow the rules and tropes laid out within?
The imitation and sameness within the current indie publishing landscape also open up the door to a looming threat: the spewing electronic anus known as AI. AI-generated novels have already become a threat to the Kindle Unlimited ecosystem. The more similar indie-published novels are, the easier they are to replicate with AI.
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Johnny B. Truant doesn’t seem to be telling anyone that they have to forget about market trends, or reduce their output to Franzen-like slowness. Instead he advocates a more traditional, fan-based approach. What he calls an artisan approach.
For example, Truant likes to focus on selling books at in-person events, rather than chasing algorithms on Amazon. In the SPA Girls interview, he states that in-person paperback sales have become his primary revenue stream.
He doesn’t tell anyone that they have to do the exact same thing. Rather, he encourages authors to do their own thing.
To consider my own situation as an example: I like blogging and essay writing. (I’m a big fan of PJ O’Rourke and Joseph Epstein.) I enjoy the essay just as much as I enjoy fiction (both as a reader and as a writer).
For years, though, the self-appointed high gurus of indie publishing have declared that blogging is a waste of time, as is every minute not spent writing in a long series in one of half a dozen pre-selected genres. (The only other worthwhile activity is spending money on PPC ads, tinkering with PPC ads, or taking the expensive PPC ads course of a certain indie author/guru based in the United Kingdom.)
Likewise, the writer’s website must not contain a blog. The writer’s website must not contain any frivolous content; everything must lead to the email autoresponder and the “sales funnel”.
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No one forces indie authors to listen to any of this advice, of course. But self-publishing is a lonely business. Most indie authors will eventually seek out information online, and most will find their way to a predictable group of forums, gurus, and (if the indie author is a true masochist) live communal events.
Johnny B. Truant’s artisan author message is a much-needed counterpoint to the hive mind. His new book is already in my Amazon shopping cart.
-ET
(Note: Johnny B. Truant doesn’t know me or endorse me. Nor did he have any part in my writing this piece. If any part of this offends you, blame me, not him.)