#201: Nat Eliason – How he got a book deal and why traditional publishing is great

Nat Eliason [00:00:00]:
If you have a decent email list or decent following online and you can get that 150, 250 I mean, I know a few people who've gotten 1, 000, 000 plus dollar book deals. They're going to put a ton of work into making that book succeed, because their ass is on the line too. And that can be a pretty incredible team to have in your corner.

Jay Clouse [00:00:33]:
Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. This week, I'm speaking with Nat Eliason. I've been following Nat online for many, many years now. He's gone from a marketing agency owner to business writer to book influencer and a bunch of stops in between. And a common thread through all of these projects was Nat's ability to write. In 2021, Nat dove deep into the world of crypto and web 3 as many of us did. But when Nat goes into something, he goes really deep into that thing.

Jay Clouse [00:01:03]:
And he got much deeper into crypto and Web 3 than most. There were some big winners and big losers during that boom cycle, and Nat, at times, was both. He He left that world on top though and applied his writing ability to tell the story of just how insane things really were at the highest levels of crypto. And he got a book deal to write Crypto Confidential, winning and losing 1, 000, 000 in the new frontier of finance. Nat sent me an early version of that book, and it's genuinely the fastest I've read a book in years. I am serious. It's so so well written. And he worked with a traditional publisher portfolio to make it happen.

Jay Clouse [00:01:41]:
We've covered publishing a few times on this show, so a fair amount of this episode talks about his decision to traditionally publish and why he actually loved that experience.

Nat Eliason [00:01:50]:
At the end of the day, like, I wanna write. That's what I wanna become really good at. I wanna be an author. I wanna be a writer. I don't wanna learn how to do all these other things. And it's just like building a business, hiring employees, all of that. You give up a little bit of short term profit to maximize the long term impact of what you're doing. And that's really what a good publisher brings to the table.

Jay Clouse [00:02:12]:
Like my recent episode with Noah Kagan, Nat is very honest and transparent about his experience and even the financial details of his book deal in this episode. We also talk about why he believes creating on social media may be hurting your ability to create long form works of art like books or film.

Nat Eliason [00:02:27]:
I really started to feel more and more like everything I was doing to try to, like, win on social media was actually making my book writing worse, and I needed to let that go to focus on this other skill that actually felt way more valuable, way more useful. And so if if that's your goal, then you need to focus on that and learn how to do that, not how to do this much shorter, punchier engagement, baby version of the craft.

Jay Clouse [00:02:54]:
And if you listen through to the end, you'll hear a little bit of my internal conflict with writing and teaching business online. I published this episode today because crypto confidential is available for sale as of today, July 9th. And if you use the link in the show notes, you will be supporting this show. I'd love to hear what you think about this episode. Just tag me at jklaus and let me know. But now let's dive in. Let's talk with Nat. Alright.

Jay Clouse [00:03:21]:
Nat Eliasson, author of my favorite book that I have read recently.

Nat Eliason [00:03:25]:
Really? Awesome. How are you? I'm great. What an intro. Thanks, Jay.

Jay Clouse [00:03:31]:
I've historically been a pretty terrible reader to the point where there was a period of a couple of years where I just didn't read, like, any books. And it was very much a self conscious aspect of my life because I consider myself to be very thoughtful but I'm such a slow reader and I started to value efficiency so much that I just couldn't justify the time spent reading. But then reading your book, I had seen a few people rave about it. So I'm like, I gotta actually crack open this book and read it. And I couldn't put it down. And it reminded me that reading books is a leisure activity or can feel like joyful and good and not feel like work.

Nat Eliason [00:04:10]:
Totally. And I think the books that teach you the most often don't feel like work too. And that that was 1 of the goals was I I wanted to sneak in the crypto knowledge into a very fun and exciting and entertaining story and not make it feel like a textbook that somebody had to force themselves through because they felt like they needed to learn something. So it's awesome that you enjoyed it so much. That really, really means a lot. That's my favorite thing to hear.

Jay Clouse [00:04:37]:
Yeah. And it was remarkable for its format. I had a recent experience reading Morgan Housel's first book, The Psychology of Money, where I also, like, clocked how unique the format was. And I thought I've never read a book that was formatted this way and I had a similar thought with your book for a different formatting reason. The like storytelling that is threaded with hey, in between these stories, I'm actually gonna spend a couple of pages teaching you some really important prerequisite knowledge for the story I'm about to tell. And it was just so well done. Was that something that you came up with or had you seen that format elsewhere?

Nat Eliason [00:05:09]:
This was the biggest struggle writing the book was I had the story. I had all these exciting events and all of that, but I knew there was a certain amount of crypto knowledge that would be anywhere from essential to just useful and helpful for people to learn. And I couldn't figure out how to do some of those topics justice to the extent that I felt like I would want them to be done so that people really did come away with learning a decent bit about this industry without it too severely interrupting the flow of the story. Because if it's if it's a lighter idea, you can toss in a paragraph or 2 into the middle of the story. It doesn't interrupt it too much, then you can keep going. But for some of these topics, it was interrupting the flow too much, and then people would get bored and fall off, or they'd wanna skip ahead to where the story continued, but it'd be hard to do that because they couldn't see it in the story. And then I was actually listening to Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential book on audio, and he does a bit of this in his book where he has his stories working in the industry, and then he has a little aside or a mini chapter where he talks about what you should and shouldn't have in your kitchen. And those are really fun chapters, and you really learn something, and they're super concise and to the point, and then you can get back into the story.

Nat Eliason [00:06:29]:
And I thought that was just such a great way to do it for this topic because I hear from maybe half of the people that they just skip some of those explainer chapters because they just wanna get back to the story, and that's totally fine. You can do that. You won't get too lost. And if you do ever get lost, you can go back and read those bits. And for people who do want those explainers along the way, they have them. And each chapter ends almost every chapter ends on a cliffhanger of some sort. So there's pretty strong motivation to go to the next chapter whether or not you read that explainer bit. And the first 3 drafts, I was showing them to people, and I kept getting, it's kinda confusing.

Nat Eliason [00:07:05]:
It's kinda boring. I don't know. I I keep falling off. And then I made that big switch, and suddenly all the feedback changed where everybody was way more into it and getting through it a lot quicker, and that was just a a huge unlock for making something this dense of information work in a still fun story.

Jay Clouse [00:07:22]:
Yeah. And there's an aspect of style and design to how you've done this. Like, another example of how people do this in books, I feel, is they have an annotation, and then you have it at the bottom of the page or in the back. And that's, I I think, not a great reading experience. It also signals, like, a very almost academic book, which is not really the feel that I get from this book. And so in your explainer chapters, you've styled the literal page layout differently as well to signal that this is something different. Something I wanna talk about is some of the style choices you've made because the cover is a very unique cover. The font choice is a very unique font choice.

Jay Clouse [00:08:02]:
And this is all within the context of the biggest publisher on the planet that you're working with with Penguin. So I wanna hear if that was difficult for you to make these counter design choices when working with a traditional publisher.

Nat Eliason [00:08:19]:
Yes. It was. And the and, you know, it it from the beginning, I wanted the design to really stand out and really be something different because there aren't many books about crypto. There are some explainer type books. You know, the Bitcoin standard is kind of the big 1. And there are some more journalist books, like Michael Lewis is Going Infinite and Zeke Fox's Number Go Up, which are the these journalist takes on the industry and on the things that were going on, these kind of outsider looking in books. And I knew that if this was going to be in a finance section of a bookstore or in a business section of a bookstore, if it looked like it was an explainer book, it would kind of meld in with everything else. It wouldn't stand out, and it wouldn't be clear that this is so different from most other finance books.

Nat Eliason [00:09:10]:
It's this really fast paced adventure thriller style that just so happens to be a true story and to teach you some things along the way, and so I needed that to be really obvious when you looked at it that this was different. This was some other something else was going on here, which then got naturally a decent amount of pushback from the publisher because I'm in Penguin Random House, my publisher's portfolio, and portfolio does business nonfiction. They do a lot of Ryan Holiday's books. They do a lot of Cal Newport's books. They do Scott Galloway. They they do a lot of these big nonfiction business finance authors who are normally writing that style of book. They don't normally do this style. A narrative nonfiction is unusual for them.

Nat Eliason [00:09:53]:
So they have the normal way of doing things, the normal way you style a book cover, the normal way you style the interior, and it was this continual process of they would send a first idea and it would be in that style. And this was true for the cover. This was true for the interior layout, like, a lot of it. And I would come back and I'd say, no. You know, that's not right. We want to go more in this direction. And 1 1 of the examples I used was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas because that style is so scratchy and chaotic. You immediately know what you're getting into.

Nat Eliason [00:10:25]:
And I would push back, and I'd say, no. I don't wanna do the standard safe thing. I wanna do something fun and exciting. And they would they would come back with something a little bit in that direction kind of lightly, and then I push back a little more, and I would say, no. No. No. Go crazier. I want it to look like somebody is strung out on caffeine and nicotine and just really chaotic, and then they would really get into it.

Nat Eliason [00:10:46]:
And then they would be like, okay. Like, here. This is it. This is really fun, and we would all love it. It was, like, once they bought into that idea, I could tell they were having so much fun with it too because it was this very different thing than what they normally did. Like, the the first version of the chapter headers were in normal, like, block text, and I think it had a poker chip behind it. And that's okay, but it wasn't, you know, it wasn't the energy I was going for. And so we've pushed back, and then eventually we settle on this crazy, scrawling, chaotic handwriting for all the chapter titles.

Nat Eliason [00:11:20]:
And then for the little explainers, we have the the dark sidebar and the confidential stamp, So it looks like it's secret information. And once they were bought in, we all had so much fun with it. It just took a little bit of pushing to get there.

Jay Clouse [00:11:34]:
Yeah. There's so much opportunity right now in being a stylist because Yeah. So much stuff looks the same. My producer and I talk about this all the time for the channel and for the podcast. You released an essay that I'll link to in the show notes about how you designed the cover, which I think people should look at because the first version was terrible.

Nat Eliason [00:11:51]:
Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:11:51]:
It looks like I'm I'm sorry. No. Not your fault anyway, but

Nat Eliason [00:11:56]:
No. I I was pissed.

Jay Clouse [00:12:00]:
It literally looks like, like a parody of a business book.

Nat Eliason [00:12:05]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:12:06]:
And this is something that I find though, especially when you care about design and style. When you work with professionals, they're a function of the inputs that you put in and then they make something as best as they can and you have a choice if it doesn't feel right. You can either let your self consciousness and fear of you know pushing somebody result in a cover or whatever that you don't like or you can keep pushing and keep pushing and try to get the thing that you want we just recently did a rebrand of podcast cover art and like the entire brand and it was like I think there were 11 revisions on the main brand which is like way too many I was kind of a nightmare client probably But if I didn't do that, I would not be happy with the outcome. And I feel like you have to listen to that and do what it takes to get the outcome that you want.

Nat Eliason [00:12:52]:
Totally. Totally. And it's so important now, especially in books. I think that people are sleeping a little bit on just how much more important book design is now because so much of book buying happens on visual social media. TikTok and Instagram are some of the biggest drivers of book sales now. YouTubers who talk about books are really up there. And aside from what the person is saying about the book, the only thing the viewer has to go off of is the cover. And if your cover looks like every other book cover, it's not going to be memorable.

Nat Eliason [00:13:25]:
But if you have something that really catches people's attention, that's going to make a big difference when they're going through all of these videos on, you know, best nonfiction books or whatnot. It it I think it's gonna make a bigger and bigger difference, and I'm I'm hopeful that the nonfiction book industry tries to get a little more interesting with their covers because I do think there's a lot of opportunity there.

Jay Clouse [00:13:46]:
Yeah. Listen, we all judge books by their covers. We do. Totally.

Nat Eliason [00:13:48]:
I don't

Jay Clouse [00:13:48]:
care what the saying says. Yeah. So when you were working with the designer and this person was having fun, you're pushing them on the design, they feel unlocked. They're doing this crazy thing. You probably still have to present that to someone at the publisher and get them to go along with it. Right. Or does the designer have, like, the creative control to say, well, if I'm designing this, then this is gonna be fine coming out from us.

Nat Eliason [00:14:10]:
I had I had final approval or something, so I I kind of had to sign off on it. I think they could have overridden me if if they really thought I was going in a wrong direction, but they got bought in pretty quickly, where at the start, they sort of all wanted to do the safe thing, and I I was pushing back a little bit more. And once we started coming up with some fun ideas for where it could go, they got bought in pretty quickly. And my editor, thankfully, was really on my side with this, and he really loved the book, and he really wanted to do something cool with it. And, a big thing that I found working with a publisher is getting the advance and getting the book deal is kind of just getting your foot in the door, because they're giving out 35 or 50 or however many book deals a year, and then they're gonna publish that many books in a year, and probably only 1 or 2 of those books is paying for all the other books because a lot of them just aren't gonna do as well. And so part of your goal once you're in the publisher is to prove to them that your book is going to be the 1 that is worth heavily investing in. And the harder you work and the better of a book you produce, the more they are going to wanna support its launch and help line up media and all of this stuff. And it goes a really, really long way to be that obsessive and that committed and be making this case for for doing this really cool thing.

Nat Eliason [00:15:29]:
They came on board, I think, pretty quickly once it was clear that we had a cool idea of what we were doing with this and once people realized what it was. Because people at the publisher who hadn't read it might have thought that it was a little more of a crypto 101 book. And And then they read a couple chapters, and they go, oh, no. This is totally different, and, yeah, this style, like, let's go with that. That's gonna be a much more fun fit.

Jay Clouse [00:15:50]:
After a quick break, we talked to Nat about his decision to traditionally publish and why he loved that experience. So don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. And now back to my conversation with Nat Eliason. I saw in another essay of yours that the title was originally Is Everyone Getting Rich Without Me? Yeah. And that this is actually a note from the publisher to change the title. And part of what I wanna talk about in this conversation is your take on why traditional publishing is great because I do think that it's a little bit trendy to say just self publish. And I think, you know, as with any argument, usually the truth is somewhere in the middle and also context dependent.

Jay Clouse [00:16:26]:
But I think about packaging a lot as a concept. We really thought about it on YouTube with title and thumbnail. And then the more I got accustomed to packaging on YouTube, the more I realized everything is packaging. Packaging all the way down.

Nat Eliason [00:16:38]:
Totally.

Jay Clouse [00:16:39]:
And book packaging, I think, is something that people don't talk about enough. You know, if someone's gonna be reading this book, where are they gonna read it? Are they gonna read it on the subway? Are they gonna bring it to work with them? Like, I think the title is everyone getting rich without me sends a different signal to the people looking at that person reading that book than crypto confidential. So I think it's like such a positive packaging decision. Tell me more about reasons why working with a publisher has been positive for you.

Nat Eliason [00:17:06]:
Yeah. Hey. You know, when I decided to write this, I had the same question a lot of people have, which is, should I self publish this, or should I traditionally publish this? And I had heard all of the reasons to self publish because the people who promote that are pretty loud about it on Twitter and elsewhere. You know, you you get more of the upside. You have full creative control. You get to be on your own timeline, not theirs. You know, your book can't get spiked or axed. You'll you'll retain, like, all of the rights for everything.

Nat Eliason [00:17:34]:
You know, there there's all of those sides to it, but then I looked at the industry, and just about every big and successful author, even after they had 1 or 2 traditional publishing successes, didn't leave and self publish their book. You know, Michael Lewis still publishes with a trad publisher. Like, Malcolm Gladwell never started doing his own books. Like, James Patterson. Right? And 1 of the best song authors in the world, Stephen King. They all still work with traditional publishers. So there must be a reason. And to be honest, I didn't have a great explanation at the time.

Nat Eliason [00:18:10]:
I knew that there must be a reason because all of these big successful people are still doing it even though self publishing has been an option for a decade. And so I said, you know what? I'm I'm just gonna try to go Trad for the first 1 because, you know, there there is still this element where if you self publish, people are going to wonder, like, okay. Could you not get a book deal? Right? What were you not good enough? Was your idea not good enough for it to get picked up by someone? That question's always gonna be there, fair or not. And I figured that if I was going to do self publishing eventually, having at least 1 trad pub under my belt would give me a more fair understanding of the pros and cons. And then once I start working with the trad pub, I realize that a lot of those concerns are you know, they they might be wrong. They might be misleading. They might be sort of misrepresenting, or they're just representing the worst case scenario. And what I found is there are all of these wonderful benefits of working with them.

Nat Eliason [00:19:01]:
The the first and foremost is having a whole team that is working with you and is fully dedicated to the book's success and who have their incentives aligned with you. Because your editor wants as much as you to have a blockbuster hit, you know, because that's going to get them other amazing authors in the future. That's going to establish their career as a big editor at a big house. You've got a whole sales team at the publisher whose job it is to get books in stores and get them sold, and they're making more money the more books they sell. And so if your book is something that appeals to them as 1 that they can move a lot of copies of, they're out there working to get your book sold without you doing anything else. You've got, you know, designers who are helping create the whole thing. You've got teams of editors who are doing additional reviews. I mean, Crypto Confidential, we had my main editor who I worked with throughout the process, who he he read it 3 or 4 times, his assistant, who also read it in 3 odd times, 3 or 4 copy editors who read through for typos, explanations, missing words, things like that.

Nat Eliason [00:20:06]:
We had a legal editor who read through to, like, make sure I wasn't gonna get sued for this thing. The there was an audiobook producer, audiobook director, the audiobook editor, like, all of those people in it, the people who package it so that it looks perfectly formatted on Kindle. And, yes, you can go out and hire all of these people piecemeal, but doing it yourself is gonna be a nightmare because you don't know how to do all of these things. There's no way you're going to make it as nicely packaged as this team can without spending a crazy amount of money and a crazy amount of time. And at the end of the day, like, I wanna write. That's what I wanna become really good at. I wanna be an author. I wanna be a writer.

Nat Eliason [00:20:47]:
I don't wanna learn how to do all these other things. And it's just like building a business, hiring employees, all of that. You give up a little bit of short term profit to maximize the long term impact of what you're doing, and that's really what a good publisher brings to the table. Now the big caveat here is that there are bad publishers. And if you're not with, like, a big 5 or 1 of the big fiction, you know, sci fi fantasy, whatever houses, And, honestly, even if you are with 1 of the big houses and you don't get a big enough advance, they might not give you that many resources. And so the the caveat that I do put is if you can't get over probably a 6 figure advance, if you can't get over a 100 k, it might actually just be better to go self publish it. Because if they hadn't put in a certain amount of financial investment, they're not going to put in a ton of labor as well. They're going to just kinda, like, let you do your thing and hope that it goes well.

Nat Eliason [00:21:42]:
And in that case, well, you're gonna be doing your own thing anyway, so maybe it it would be better to self publish it. But if you have a decent email list or decent following online and you can get that 150, 250 I mean, I know a few people who've gotten 1, 000, 000 plus dollar book deals. They're going to put a ton of work into making that book succeed because their ass is on the line too, and that can be a a pretty incredible team to have in your corner.

Jay Clouse [00:22:06]:
Yeah. I was gonna ask you what that threshold is because I've heard similar points as to the advance and what that means for Skin in the Game for the publisher. I'd imagine they still give you a lot of the literal assets. Like, they still give you an editor. They still help you with cover design, but their sales team probably isn't pushing as hard. Their PR team probably isn't pushing as hard. So that's really helpful.

Nat Eliason [00:22:29]:
Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, you you might get a couple fewer revisions on the design. You might get a little less in terms of outreach for podcasts and media and stuff. I mean, I'll show it to you after the call, but we got these really, really cool big cardboard boxes designed that are in the bright orange from the book with confidential stamps all over them that have the blurbs from, like, Morgan Housel and Jimmy Soni and Zoe Schiffer on the side of the box. And it's gonna be filled with, like, orange crinkle paper, and the book is, like, in the middle and, you know, tied up with a little letter. And, like, that's what we're sending to people a week before it comes out. This is really, really cool.

Nat Eliason [00:23:04]:
And they're they handled all of that. They handle all of the shipping. We're sending out probably 300 of these. They can do all these really, really cool things, but, yeah, if they don't have a certain amount of investment, they're not going to do all that extra work for you.

Jay Clouse [00:23:18]:
Tell me about your journey getting this deal in the first place because I think it should be noted, you've started several businesses in the past. So if you're saying, yeah, you could self publish, but you're basically running a business and I wanted to be a writer. That to me signals you've really thought about this because you can run a business. You've done it many times super effectively. But let's talk about when you decided I wanna do Trad Pub and I wanna work with a big publisher. How did that process go for you? When did it start, and what did that look like kinda step by step?

Nat Eliason [00:23:46]:
Yeah. So it started in February of 2022, which is about when I started thinking, well, there might be a good story here that I could go turn into a book. And I had wanted a way to transition into writing full time for a while and just hadn't been able to figure out how to make the money work and, you know, where do you even get started. And I ended up being in this fortunate position of, 1, having a bit of a cushion financially from all the crypto shenanigans where, you know, certainly wasn't retired, but I had a few years to figure something else out. And I had this story, and I I thought there was a really cool opportunity to turn this story into a book. And so the the first thing I did is I reached out to people I knew who had published books, and this is kind of, like, the big endorsement for starting a newsletter, being active on Twitter, getting into these kinds of communities because breaking into publishing if you have no connections is insanely hard. You're trying to find agents and you're trying to query them, but you have no audience, you have no proof of, you know, why somebody should pay attention to you, and they're getting these emails and letters all day every day. Like, my agent has even said that he doesn't even take cold outreach for fiction anymore because he gets so much of it.

Nat Eliason [00:25:02]:
If somebody doesn't come intro to him, he just he can't look at it because he just doesn't have the bandwidth. So the first thing I did is I I texted a few people. I texted Tiago Forte about talking to his agent. I texted Chris Guillebeau. I texted my friend, Zach Oberont, who used to run Scribe Media, about talking to agents, and I just messaged them and I said, hey. I have this idea. You know, do you mind introing me to your agent or agents that you know? And all 3 of them were incredibly generous with their time and really, really helpful. And, you know, Tiago introed me to his agent.

Nat Eliason [00:25:33]:
Chris told me to write a proposal, and then he'd send it to his agent. And then Zach connected me with somebody who could show me how to write a really good proposal. And so I was, you know, taking this online course on proposal writing. And Tiago's agent, Lisa, she gave me some feedback on the proposal too, and so that was kind of step 1, was starting to talk to these people and really starting to hammer out a proposal. And I probably spent the first 2 or 3 months on just the proposal, on getting that as dialed in as possible, and that's a 45 page document about the idea for the book, why I should write it, why this is the right time for it, what all of my, like, influence and marketing assets and things like that are so that we can sell the book, table of contents for the book, a sample chapter, you know, all of that in 1 big document. And then I, you know, actually showed that to agents. And the first 4 all passed. They said, you know, it wasn't right for them or there was something about it that they didn't like.

Nat Eliason [00:26:30]:
And that that's that can be hard because you feel like you're getting rejected, but, finding an agent is really like dating. They really have to, like, get you and vibe with you as much as the idea itself. And then I showed it to Chris's agent, David. David looked at the proposal, and he was like, this is awesome. We can totally go sell this. Like like, let's go. He was just immediately bought in, and we immediately clicked and really hit it off. And then, you know, I I love David, and we've been working together ever since.

Nat Eliason [00:26:58]:
And it was kinda crazy too because he looked at the proposal. He said he was like, this is really good. Like, who helped you with this? And the the edits were the edits were pretty minor, and we would have gone and started shopping it right then, but it was the beginning of August, and publishers, like, don't work in August. So he said he was basically, like, just get to work writing the book, and we'll go shop it in September. And I'm pretty confident somebody's gonna pick this up, so, like, just start writing. And so I started focusing a lot more on actually writing it out. We went out in September and shopped it around. And, you know, it it was challenging because this was this was, like, the depths of crypto despair post bull market.

Nat Eliason [00:27:40]:
The FTX hadn't blown up yet, but it was gonna blow up next month. And, like, 3 arrows and all these other big ones had blown up. Crypto was down 70% from the highs. Everybody was like, okay. NFTs and all that stuff was stupid. Let's move on. Crypto's dead. And so pitching a book saying that, oh, no.

Nat Eliason [00:27:56]:
It's coming back. Like, this is all gonna happen again, and there's, you know, cool stuff going on here, and you should be interested in it was challenging. But Portfolio really liked the pitch, and they they made what's called a preempt. So a publisher will do this sometimes where they'll say, we really like the proposal, and we really like you. We're gonna offer you this amount of money right now. Take it or leave it so that you don't take this book to auction. And it's kind of a gamble because if you take it, then you lose the opportunity for multiple people to bid on the book, but you skip doing the auction, you save a month or 2, you get that amount locked in, and Portfolio was basically my number 1 target. They they were the publisher that I wanted the most, and so it was just perfect.

Nat Eliason [00:28:43]:
It was like, yeah. Let's do it. People would agree and disagree on this too. I I was of the mind that you wanna get a really good advance, but not too much. Because if you get too much, you might not earn it out, and it might be harder to get your next book deal. But if you get a good enough 1 where they're bought in and then you earn it out and you're making them a bunch of money right away, it's easier to get subsequent deals. And so I was fine possibly leaving some short term money on the table for long term career durability.

Jay Clouse [00:29:11]:
In retrospect, do you wish you would have gotten a higher advance? I guess, hard to say because we haven't gone to market yet.

Nat Eliason [00:29:15]:
Yeah. Yeah. You know, it hasn't gone to market. I don't know how it's performed, and they gave me 275, which was awesome. You know, that's that's a great advance, especially for a first time author, and especially for something like this where it's not it's not like I've been blogging about x topic for 5 years. My audience is obsessed with x topic. I am writing a book on x topic. It wasn't that, And so it was a little bit harder to make that pitch.

Nat Eliason [00:29:39]:
You know? Of course, then I hear, you know, somebody else who also got a preempt from somebody like Portfolio for 2.50, and they said no to it, and it went to auction, and they got $900. And I hear that, and I go, okay. Like, maybe I made a mistake here, but I I don't think I did. I I was pretty happy with with the decision. I I would make it again.

Jay Clouse [00:29:57]:
Now my understanding is advances are in, like, 4 different stages. Was that your experience as well? It's not you're not you're not getting all of this the day you sign the contract. It's, like, in 4 tranches.

Nat Eliason [00:30:09]:
It's almost a misnomer because you get a quarter when you sign, you get another quarter when you turn in the book, another quarter when the book publishes, and another quarter a year later. And that's sort of the the standard way it gets tranched out. There might be little variations there. Sometimes you can get 35% upfront and 15% a year later depending on what you negotiate, but the breaking down in quarters like that is pretty typical.

Jay Clouse [00:30:33]:
You said that portfolio was your number 1, and there's there's, like, a big 5 of publishers. I forget the names of all of them. But Yeah. Was portfolio the number 1 because they tend to come up the most from, like, a status place, or is there something functionally different that portfolio does versus the other 4?

Nat Eliason [00:30:50]:
A couple things. You know, 1, they had published some of these big names in nonfiction who I knew and whose books I read and really loved at various points. You know, I'm a big fan of Cal Newport. I, obviously, like Simon Sinek, Scott Galloway, Ryan Holiday, like, all of these guys had published published very successful books with them and had published multiple books with them, which is always a good sign. Because if they went back and they kept working with this publisher and they had worked with other publishers, that must mean there's something kinda special here. And the other thing that stood out about portfolio is they were clearly taking this strategy of targeting people who were active on Twitter and had newsletters, because when I was talking to them, I had heard from other people that Portfolio was reaching out to them too, and it's become more obviously part of their strategy as time has gone on. You know, they just published Noah Kagan's book. They published Morgan Housel's second book.

Nat Eliason [00:31:45]:
They've got a few other people who I don't know if I can say publicly, but who are in that sphere. And I think this is portfolio strategy is is, you know, don't focus on the academics as much, and they do that too. But, like, go after the people who have really built these Internet native audiences on Twitter and newsletters and give them book deals and work with them and trust them because they're going to be the next James Clear Mark Manson. They saw that success, and they said, okay. Those were the 2 best selling 2 of the best selling nonfiction books in the world the last few years. There's clearly something here with bloggers and Twitter people. Let's round them all up and build a publisher on that. And we all know each other, and so we're all promoting each other's books.

Nat Eliason [00:32:21]:
It's a really cool, like, mafia to be in, I think, as Trad Pub figures out, like, the next stage of its career as an industry.

Jay Clouse [00:32:31]:
Well, as you said, if they're if they're doing 30 book deals a year and they expect 2 to pay off the rest of the portfolio, it's basically venture capital. And I would think if you're working with creators who have a platform of any size, it's going to derisk the whole portfolio a little bit. Like, the the floor will be lower. Ceiling might not be necessarily higher, maybe it will be, but at least the floor is lower on how a book would perform, I would imagine.

Nat Eliason [00:32:53]:
Totally. Totally. I mean, the the fact that I could ping my editor and say, hey. It'd be really cool if we could show the book to this person for a blurb or something. And this happened multiple times. They said, oh, yeah. They're a portfolio author. Their their book is coming out in a year and a half.

Nat Eliason [00:33:09]:
Like, I'll just shoot them an email, and maybe you can get on their podcast or something. Like, that was so cool because so many of these people, even if you cold email them and you have an audience or whatnot, no. They might not respond. They might not take it seriously. They might wait. But if you're kind of prequalified by being within this group, that goes a really, really long way to getting on people's radar.

Jay Clouse [00:33:28]:
After 1 last break, we explore Nat's writing process and his plan for marketing the book. As a former marketer, his strategy may surprise you. So stick around. We'll be right back. And now please enjoy the rest of my conversation with Nat Eliason. How did you think about releasing some of the writing as you went? You know, you mentioned that there are some authors who they come in, they say, I built this platform where I talk about x. I'm gonna write a book about x. Mhmm.

Jay Clouse [00:33:54]:
And either because they've already written about it or as they're writing the book, it's just very clear alignment with the material they already write. They're publishing a lot of the stuff that they're writing in some form before the book comes out. I don't think you did that.

Nat Eliason [00:34:08]:
Not really.

Jay Clouse [00:34:08]:
But you probably had the opportunity. So how did you think

Nat Eliason [00:34:11]:
about it? I mean, there a couple of the explainer chapters are based off of articles I wrote during the cryptomania, so I I had those to use as some inspiration. But for this type of book, since it's so narrative driven, I can't really pull out chapters and publish them because you wouldn't have you know, it it'd be like reading a random chapter of Harry Potter. It just wouldn't make that much sense. And so I I didn't think about that as much, but the other reason that I I don't love that strategy is that a book is, to me, a fundamentally different reading experience and asset than an article, and I I generally think that if you think of your book as a series of articles, it's going to be a worse book. I really think having a cohesive narrative through it makes it a lot stronger and a lot more memorable. Now, obviously, there are exceptions to this. Atomic Habits, Psychology of Money, both have kind of that, like, exceptions to this. Atomic Habits, Psychology of Money, both have kind of that, like, article style of chapters, and they do incredibly well.

Nat Eliason [00:35:06]:
But I didn't want to be thinking, how can I write this chapter in a way that I could make it into an article while I was writing? And, like, now that it's done, I feel like I would be kind of forcing it with a lot of the chapters, and so it didn't make as much sense for me, but it could definitely make sense for other people. And some of it I can pull out, and I I like using the prologue because the prologue really sets the stakes really quickly and kinda pulls people in. And and you can read that without any other context, and it makes sense on its own. So I've been leaning on that a lot as the the teaser, but I didn't think about publishing little bits as I went as much also because I wanted there to be this kind of, like, ramp up of excitement for the whole book and for people not to think that, oh, I could just read a couple of articles and get the gist of it.

Jay Clouse [00:35:54]:
Right. I've had some friends who publish, and it is kind of a I wouldn't say an amalgamation of their essays, but a lot of the writing has been done to some degree. And then they kind of pull it all together with a cohesive through line and everything. But the risk is if your first customers are your biggest fans your biggest fans have already read a lot of that material I think the book is gonna be kind of a let down as an experience to them and I've actually seen some book reviews that reflect this where it's like this had no new information. I've been following this person for years. But then I have this tension of there's this opportunity to test certain things and see how it resonates before baking it into a book. So I don't quite know how to resolve that tension.

Nat Eliason [00:36:33]:
Yeah. And and this is a great question. And I you know, sometimes a book is written to expand your audience. Right? I don't think Tiago would mind me saying this. Like, if you had gone through the Building a Second Brain course, you didn't learn a ton more in the Building a Second Brain book. But the Building a Second Brain book has gone so much wider and further than Thiago ever could have gone with just his blog and his newsletter and the course. And so it's dramatically expanded his audience and been incredibly powerful in that sense, even if people who took the course might not have gotten as much from the book. And he'd probably say that was intentional because a book for the people who took the course would have only sold a couple thousand copies.

Nat Eliason [00:37:14]:
Right? Whereas for this and Crypto Confidential, like, nobody knows this story except the other people who lived it with me. And so for me, it's really fun because people who have read every article I've ever written, this is still new and exciting to them, and I kind of love that and that potential for it. So I I think it's just all about the strategy you're going for with the book. Right? Because it can do both. Or there's even, like, a a third version. I I feel like psychology of money would fit into this, where I had been reading Morgan Housel's stuff for years before he published Psychology of Money, but reading Psychology of Money did a really good job of distilling core ideas from a bunch of those articles in, like, a a concise organized format where he never had, like, a course that it was already organized in. And so it it it was almost like in between where, yes, these ideas were familiar if you had read his blog posts, but it was also in this cool new form that it didn't exist before. And so it kind of did both.

Nat Eliason [00:38:10]:
I I feel like it's just being really honest about what game you're playing and who you're targeting. And, yeah, if you're doing a simplified version of more complex stuff you already have, then you have to be okay with your your most diehard fans not getting new material out of it.

Jay Clouse [00:38:25]:
In the past, in running businesses, you've worn the hat of marketer. And I think we have a really interesting opportunity here to kinda get a moment in time snapshot as to how you're thinking about the marketing approach for this book. Obviously, the publisher is gonna do their part in it. But I'm curious to hear how you're thinking about this effort that's coming forward now that the book is finished and about to be publicly released.

Nat Eliason [00:38:48]:
I really, really, pretty deeply believe that almost all book buying happens via word-of-mouth and happens via excited recommendations. And if you think about whenever you've bought a book, sometimes it's because you listen to a podcast like this and maybe you heard the author or you heard the podcast host mention it in another episode. But a lot of the times, you hear about it that way, but then a friend recommends it or somebody who you really trust recommends it, and that is the thing that, like, gets you over the line and gets you to actually pull the trigger. And if you focus really heavily on doing preorder bonuses and big marketing campaigns and buying a ton of ads and, you know, doing the media circuit, that's going to provide some initial baseline of sales because people hear about it that way and they'll buy it. But the only way people are still reading it in 5 or 10 years is if the book is really good and if people just naturally recommend it. Right? That's that's, like, 95% of book marketing is having a book that people finish and they recommend. That was most of what I tried to focus on was making something that people would get through and enjoy and then wanna talk about because that is what I believe really does most of the work long term. And so I, you know, I am doing the marketing.

Nat Eliason [00:40:05]:
I I'm doing, you know, podcasts and through my newsletter and portfolios, booking interviews, and I'm did some minor giveaway bonuses and things like that. But to me, I almost feel like that most of the marketing work is done because I've spent so much time and energy on writing something that was entertaining and good and, like, lent itself to recommendations. And now it's almost a hurry up and wait, and then just get it in as many early people's hands as as possible. So the the main thing that I did was more than asking for podcast interviews or anything like that. I just messaged everybody I knew who had almost any amount of audience and asked if I could just send them a copy. And I really didn't say, can I send you a copy, and then maybe you can post about it during launch week? I didn't you know, there there was no ask. It was just, can I send it to you? And it was only if people actually read it and enjoyed it in most cases that I followed up and said, hey. Cool.

Nat Eliason [00:41:03]:
Can I, like, use that? Or, you know, during launch week, I'm gonna message people who actually finished it, and so they liked it and asked them to retweet it. But I I really, really wanted just to make it good, get it in people's hands, and then hopefully kind of, like, let it go from there. And the last piece that I think works with this is because crypto is cyclical and because it goes through these, like, manic peaks, I was betting a decent amount on there being another mania and there being another big cycle of crypto getting exciting again and it becoming bigger and bigger over time. And so it was kind of a bit of a gamble and a bit of an investment in that next time it starts to get exciting again, what's the book people are going to go read to figure out, like, how to participate in the mania? They're probably not gonna go read a book about SPF because it's too you know, it's like this 1 guy and it's not, like, relatable, but if there's a book about a guy who was on the outside, wanted to make as much money as quickly as possible, dove in, had this crazy adventure, had a good outcome, and, like, lost a ton of money along the way and all these experiences, that might have more longevity whenever the craziness comes back. So a bit of waiting for that opportunity too.

Jay Clouse [00:42:17]:
Well, I don't wanna, like, create anxiety for you, but how do you not feel pressure to do, like, just the most during this period of time? It feels like 1 of those things where there's no limit to how much you could be doing in terms of reaching out to people and saying, hey, can I send you a book? Or reaching out to people and saying, how do you think about the book? It seems like there's no limit on what you could do in that realm. How do you put your arms around that and say, this is the effort I'm willing to put forward, and that's enough.

Nat Eliason [00:42:44]:
To me, it's a question of what's the highest and best use of my time. And, you know, I I'm fully committed to the author career at this point, fully committed to book writing, and the best way to have a successful career as an author is to publish a lot of books. And so ideally publishing, like, a book a year between fiction and nonfiction. And if I take 2 months off of writing every year to do promo, I'm losing 20% of my writing time almost, And that's a pretty massive cost over the course of a career to lose 20% of the writing time. And I I do ultimately think that so much of success comes down to writing good books and getting them out there and giving them time that when I'm looking at how I should be spending my days, the most important thing is that I should be working on the next book. And so that's the first thing that I do most days, is I get up and I work on the next book, whether that's the next proposal or the sci fi novel, whatever it is. And then in the afternoons, I do this promo work and this marketing work. And, yeah, there is an infinite amount of stuff I could do, but I kind of have to be okay not doing everything in the interest of making progress on the stuff that I think will really, really compound over the long term.

Nat Eliason [00:44:03]:
Because at the end of the day, there is no right answer. Right? Like, you can always think of more stuff you could do, more people you could reach out to. And so I think just accepting that I'm doing what I can and and putting a good amount of time into it. And sometimes you just can't fully control these things, and you have to be okay living in in that uncertainty.

Jay Clouse [00:44:21]:
Does writing feel easy to you?

Nat Eliason [00:44:25]:
It's easy is not the right word, but it's not a struggle. It's a fun challenge. You know, like, rock climbing might be a good example here. Like, rock climbing is physically tiring, but it's fun. And that's kind of how writing feels. It's mentally tiring, but I really enjoy doing it, and there are definitely moments of writer's block or I hit challenging pieces or I'm not sure how to fix something, but it's really rare that I I mean, basically never that I wake up and say I don't wanna write today. It's very self fulfilling, self rewarding at this point, so I always wanna do it even though it might be challenging at moments.

Jay Clouse [00:45:07]:
Does it feel like you wanna write today because you know exactly what you want to write about? Like, how often do you approach the page knowing, here's what I'm gonna be writing about today?

Nat Eliason [00:45:16]:
I'd say I usually approach it with a 50% idea. So with an article, I'll often have a core idea and some of the derivative ideas, but then as I start writing, a lot of it gets flushed out in the process of writing. And for working on the novel, I have my outline and I have my ideas of what beats are going to happen next, but often in the process of starting to write, I realize this other thing should happen or now this whole other scene needs to be here or I should really go back and change this thing about this character. And so it it's really never that I have a highly structured outline, and then I sit down and write exactly that outline. I've got some idea of where I'm going and where I wanna finish, and I get started, and then there's this different journey along the way. And it's kind of self reinforcing because that will often inform the outline for the next day or or where I'm going tomorrow or where I need to come back. And it's kind of this constant balance of having a plan, discovering a new plan, having the new plan, discovering a new plan, and flowing in that way.

Jay Clouse [00:46:20]:
I realize I'm kind of putting you in the seat of being my writing coach here for a couple of minutes. But Yeah.

Nat Eliason [00:46:24]:
Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:46:24]:
Something I struggle with when it comes to writing is for a long time, I've written in small pieces, you know, even essays that turn out to be like 1500 words, relatively small chunk of writing. But a lot of times, it's less. It's a 1, 000 or 500 words. And so a lot of my organization time I find happens when I'm not writing and so I've created this expectation that when I sit down to write it should be a linear journey from start to finish. And when I approach larger projects, potentially larger essays or a book, my brain breaks because I can't do that linearly in my head before I sit down. Yeah. Do you relate to that at all? Basically, I'm looking to hear if you have overcome this and have found a solution.

Nat Eliason [00:47:07]:
Yes. And it took, like, a year of very diligently focusing on it. And and I'll be honest, I had to stop writing articles for a while because it was very hard to be in both mindsets at the same time because I wanted that too. And the thing that I realized I wanted was I wanted to know I had finished something and published it, And I was so hooked on the dopamine of writing a tweet, hitting publish, and then, you know, I'm getting likes and replies. Or this morning, I published an article, and, literally, I had the idea for the article in the car this morning. I drafted an outline on my, like, audio recorder. I got to the office. I banged out the article in an hour and a half.

Nat Eliason [00:47:49]:
I hit publish, and it was done. Right? Awesome. Feels great. But then I I start working on Crypto Confidential, and it's it's days and days weeks weeks of making progress, but not getting to publish anything and not finishing anything. And it really, really ate away at me. And for crypto confidential, I I was in this structure of I need to finish the whole first draft, and then I can look at it and and get feedback on it. And, you know, then I can finish the whole second draft, and then I can, like, look at it and get feedback and make changes. And over time, you know, now that I'm on the sci fi novel, I I've gotten a lot better at, okay.

Nat Eliason [00:48:26]:
I'm gonna get a rough first draft done. Now I'm going to just get the first act really good, and I'm gonna be okay. You know, I've got this rough plan, and every day I'm chipping away at it, but I know I'm making progress, and I have this, like, intermediate state that I can get to. But it it's it is really hard to get used to that and to hold everything in your head about where you are and where it's going to know what you need to do the next day or the next week or month. And I think it really like, you just have to start doing it and kind of force yourself to do it and force yourself to get comfortable with it because it is super rewarding once it feels more natural. It's like I have a hard time focusing on articles now because they almost feel like a little bit of a waste, because I could be using that time on a book and a book might sell for 30 years, but an article is probably gonna be forgotten in a couple months, a couple years, maybe. And so it's super rewarding in that sense. It just requires that that real real reorientation, and and honestly finding a way to give yourself credit for the intermediate steps is huge.

Nat Eliason [00:49:30]:
I I built this whole writing tracking app so that I could publish my writing sessions each day just to say that I, like, did something beyond what I could see in my spreadsheet. Because getting some sort of social proof for the work does help stay motivated with it.

Jay Clouse [00:49:44]:
Is that app available for folks yet?

Nat Eliason [00:49:46]:
When this podcast comes out, it will be. Yeah. I'm I'm finishing what I need to do to get it on the App Store now. So you should by the time people hear this, they should be able to go to the App Store and search prolific and find it. And it's basically like Strava for writers. So you can, like, log your writing sessions each day and follow people and comment and like and stuff. And it's it's surprising how rewarding that is, at least for me.

Jay Clouse [00:50:07]:
Yeah. I'm realizing as you're speaking that it has been a long time since I've sat down and had a writing session and didn't have a very discrete finished output for that writing session. I actually get airplane. I was writing an essay, and I couldn't get to where I wanted with, like, the full depth that I wanted. So I ended up writing and publishing something entirely different that was short Yeah.

Nat Eliason [00:50:33]:
Because I just couldn't bear to

Jay Clouse [00:50:34]:
go back and finish working on this thing. You tweeted recently along these lines. You said, every minute you spend getting better at writing for social media, you're getting worse at the kind of writing that lasts. I would love to expand upon the sub 280 characters there to hear where that came

Nat Eliason [00:50:52]:
from. This is, it's been an ongoing conversation with me and my friend, Nathan Baugh, who's a wonderful follow on Twitter, and he's also very focused on fiction writing. And both of us realizing that, really, what lasts are stories and worlds and these stories that you can kinda, like, lose yourself in, get fully immersed in, that you can come out of having this this full experience. And the very tactical, very short, concise, like, nonfiction style, almost none of those books have any serious longevity, and they're pretty forgettable. Right? This is sort of my my article this morning was if you ask somebody on the street to name a few spells from Harry Potter, they can probably do it even if they haven't read a Harry Potter book or watched a Harry Potter movie in years years years, but they were so immersed in that world that they learned all these little things along the way even without trying to learn them. And that type of writing is so different from what feeds the algorithms on Twitter or LinkedIn, where you've got these short sentences, this hyper tactical, that style just doesn't translate very well to a full book experience. And so if you want to really write a book that captures people, that engages them, you do have to spend more time writing in that style and practicing that and practicing drawing things out and building suspense and tension over pages and pages and, like, world building and character building and and all of these things that really make somebody immersed in it versus creating the most concise dopamine satisfying thing for for Twitter and LinkedIn. And there are certainly many versions of this.

Nat Eliason [00:52:35]:
You know, crafting a good hook is kind of like the the social media version of suspense and and conflict in a story, but they're still so different that I I really started to feel more and more like everything I was doing to try to, like, win on social media was actually making my book writing worse, and I needed to let that go to focus on this other skill that actually felt way more valuable and way more useful. Another good example might be the super engagement editing for TikTok, right, where you, like, flip the camera around and there's the zooms and the pans and all that stuff to get people to stay. If you went to this the theater and you watched a movie that was edited like that, you would walk out. It would be awful. It's a completely different editing and art style. And so if you're waking up every day and trying to get better at the engagement editing for TikTok, you're actually getting further from your goal of becoming a great movie editor. And so if if that's your goal, then you need to focus on that and learn how to do that, not how to do this much shorter, punchier engagement, baby version of the craft.

Jay Clouse [00:53:41]:
Last thing I wanna talk about. You wrote this great essay that I felt personally attacked by called How to Get Insanely Rich in the Creator Economy. Hilarious. True. As a writer who is formerly a an agency owner and, you know, a large part of your audience building career has been creating content.

Nat Eliason [00:54:01]:
Mhmm.

Jay Clouse [00:54:01]:
What is your relationship to business right now?

Nat Eliason [00:54:04]:
Yeah. It's, you know, it's tough because if you want to make a lot of money as a writer, especially in the Internet era, you almost always have to turn it into some kind of business unless you can become a best selling author, And the most obvious 1 that a lot of people go to is courses, and there's nothing explicitly wrong with courses. But courses do create this sometimes a perverse incentive where you need to make things extra complicated in order to, like, build up the mystique and the allure of this course that you're teaching. You no longer want to give away your best information for free because you need to, like, tease it in the course, or you do give your best information away and the course is, like, kind of disappointing. Right? You've got this kind of unfair challenge there. And then you're you're now stuck in this realm of you can no longer just write the articles that you wanna write because you need to write the articles that will get you the email subscribers and get you the LinkedIn followers and get people to buy your course and do all this other stuff, which is probably not why you started writing online in the first place. So you run into this audience capture problem really quickly where you were so interested and so passionate about writing and you're you're writing about, you know let's say you're writing about writing, but then you realize that what people actually wanna know is they wanna know how to write for getting Twitter likes. And that might not be what you're interested in, but that's what people will pay you to write about.

Nat Eliason [00:55:31]:
And so now you're just writing about that, and now suddenly you don't like writing online anymore. And it's not a fun position to be in, but it happens to a lot of creators.

Jay Clouse [00:55:39]:
Yeah.

Nat Eliason [00:55:39]:
They get captured by their own business, and then they end up hating it, and they don't like making the content that they started off making anymore. And that's a really unfortunate position to be in, and it's not 1 that I wanted to get stuck in. And I've gotten stuck in it multiple times. This is this is why I quit doing SEO because I figured out how to do it. I got really good at it, and then I hated it because I was just writing articles for Google, not for me, and it took all the love of writing out. And so going this, like, author route and going this, like, writing books route is I mean, it's it's a way harder way to make money than a lot of the other ways I could try to monetize writing. And, you know, it's a challenging industry, and it's so long term, and you've got to have this incredible patience and all this stuff. But for me, it's the only way to actually write full time about the things that I want to write about and have a chance of it becoming a self sustaining career that I don't end up hating in a few years.

Nat Eliason [00:56:38]:
And I think just admitting that to myself and being okay with that was really, really helpful because I didn't wanna get in another situation where where I'm captured by my audience and end up hating what I'm doing a few years down the line. And I wanna do something that I could keep doing for 30 years, and and I think this is it.

Jay Clouse [00:56:54]:
And there's a large group of creators for creators, myself being 1 of them, that is a broad spectrum of like doing their best and willfully predatory. In crypto confidential, you you go in, there's this chapter about, like, how to be a shitty crypto influencer.

Nat Eliason [00:57:13]:
Yeah. How to be a shady influencer. Yeah. Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:57:16]:
And there's a cycle of if you want to make money doing a thing, there's a way of doing the thing, telling people how great it is so that they rush in to do the thing, and then they are what is called your exit liquidity. It's this idea. Actually, can you explain exit liquidity from a quick crypto sense before I make the point that I'm trying to make?

Nat Eliason [00:57:34]:
Yes. So, basically, a lot of crypto tokens cryptocurrencies don't have cash flows behind them. There's no business. You're not getting dividends from a successful company that this token is representing. You only make money if the token goes up in value and if somebody buys it from you for a higher price. Like, Dogecoin is a good example of this. And so the way that you made money in Doge was by being really early to it, holding on to it, and then selling it when it's at the peak of the mania. And the people who run-in at the peak of the mania who see Elon Musk on SNL talking about Dogecoin, they are the exit liquidity for the people who got in early because you're holding all this Doge, and you need to sell it to someone.

Nat Eliason [00:58:21]:
You need to exit your position, but there needs to be money on the other side that wants what you have. And, you know, that's the liquidity. And so they come in at the peak of the mania. You sell to them. They're the exit liquidity, and they end up losing what they put into it. And the speculative gambling side of crypto is really all about getting in early, waiting for the exit liquidity, and then cashing out, and then people lose their really speculative investment. So you never wanna be the extra liquidity because you don't wanna be the 1 who's going in and paying for somebody who got in earlier to get rich. But a lot of the times, you will be if you're getting your advice from Twitter influencers.

Nat Eliason [00:58:59]:
Because the Twitter influencer probably got into this position months ago, and now they're talking about it because their position has run up a bunch. Their followers are rushing in to buy it, but they're selling on the back end now that they've got all these these new buyers interested. So you've gotta be really careful who you get your advice and your investment ideas from.

Jay Clouse [00:59:19]:
This isn't a perfect metaphor, but there's so much of that in the creator space right now Yes. Where it's like, let me show you how I grew on x so that you can grow on x. And now that person starts talking about how they grew on x. When it's especially related to, like, how to get more attention. I find that a lot of it. People are almost the exit liquidity of people who are teaching it first. There's, like, an early adopter advantage of this.

Nat Eliason [00:59:44]:
And it's not always Yeah. Well, and and the challenging thing the really challenging thing is it's not always nefarious because Right. You know, let's let's say that I started on YouTube today, and I'm working really hard at it, and I figure a bunch of stuff out. And in a year, I have a 100000 subscribers. And I I come back on this show, and I say, here's how I grew from 0 to a 100000 subscribers. I might be trying to give good advice and trying to be helpful, but most of what I'm saying is what worked for me a year ago, and it might no longer work today. And the the playbooks today might be totally different, but you only figure that out by being on the ground and trying it yourself. And so people are, like, paying for courses and paying for expert advice and doing and reading all these Twitter threads and everything for outdated information because the only way those people are able to share that information is because that's what worked for them x period ago.

Nat Eliason [01:00:34]:
And some of that advice, like publish a video every week or whatever, is going to be timeless, but other advice on, you know, thumbnails and tags and keywords and whatever might be totally outdated, but you don't know that as a newcomer. And so, yeah, you're sort of the exit liquidity for the work that that person put in over the last year to build an audience.

Jay Clouse [01:00:54]:
Totally. Sometimes when I'm, like, being exceptionally rude to myself and I'm down to the dumpies, I'm like, am I bullshit? Is is what I'm doing bullshit?

Nat Eliason [01:01:02]:
But what I what I come around to means you're 1 of the good ones.

Jay Clouse [01:01:06]:
Yeah. And what I come around to is I'm very skeptical of people who are following the incentive of making people start a thing rather than servicing existing demand. That's kind of the line that I try to tell for myself is like if there's existing demand and I can help I wanna meet that demand but if I start following my pure cash incentives of saying let me convince people to do this really hard path that probably won't work out for most people, that's when I think I've jumped the shark.

Nat Eliason [01:01:35]:
Yeah. And that's where you see a lot of the, like, pyramid schemey aspect of the creator economy is somebody who builds a huge Twitter following and then says buy my course on how to build a Twitter following from 0 because it's like okay. It seems like you'd be able to use that following for something else besides selling people on how to start from 0, and a lot of those people might not have the, like, discipline and attention and the focus to, you know, follow through on what you're saying. And you're probably stripping out some of the hardest and most essential parts of, like, you know, spending hours a day studying Twitter and and getting better at writing and all of these things. But to your point, if you're servicing people who are already doing the thing, there is a lot more honesty or helpfulness because you're not you're not selling people some, like, fantasy of getting famous or getting rich quickly. It's like you're already committed to doing the work, so here's how to do the work a little bit better.

Jay Clouse [01:02:30]:
Alright. I feel better. Nat, awesome to have you here. Love the book. So thanks for coming and sharing your your your publishing process and giving us a counter perspective than what we've had here on the show previously.

Nat Eliason [01:02:41]:
For sure. Anytime.

Jay Clouse [01:02:53]:
Once again, Nat's book, Crypto Confidential, is available now and a link to buy the book is in the show notes. Using our link will support this show. And if you want to explore the world of publishing further, I've also linked a few episodes that may interest you. A conversation with Noah Kagan about his publishing deal, David Moldauer talking about the publishing industry, and April Dunford makes her case for self publishing. Lastly, if you have a second, please consider leaving a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Sincerely, it really goes a long way in supporting the show. Thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you next week.