Self-publishing via Amazon has now been around for 18 years, nearly a generation. When it arrived it was so new and so unlike other publishing paths that I liked to call it “instant publishing.”
Author Johnny B. Truant, alongside collaborators Sean Platt and David W. Wright, was among the early voices guiding authors through this new and quickly evolving publishing landscape. He’s the previous host and co-creator of The Self-Publishing Podcast; he was also behind the Smarter Artist Summit that ran for several years in Austin, Texas, where he lives. In 2013, he co-wrote Write. Publish. Repeat, a guide meant for self-publishing writers. Its core message is right there in the title: Writing more can be the best way to find readers and develop a career, although the book did not advise doing so without regard for quality.
Now, after stepping back from the self-publishing community for a number of years, Truant has returned with a new book, The Artisan Author, which he’s supporting through a Kickstarter campaign. The Artisan Author has a message that isn’t out of alignment with Write. Publish. Repeat but that centers a different message: quality over quantity.
Truant and I spoke over Zoom last week about how things have changed since he began self-publishing about 15 years ago and how he succeeds on his own terms today, without Amazon. In particular, we discussed the pitfalls of the rapid-release strategy that’s been prevalent for years, where authors write and publish a book a month (or more) to stay visible on Amazon and stoke earnings.
Key takeaways:
- Today’s self-publishing environment has become hyper-prescriptive as authors seek to please Amazon’s algorithms and make money through Kindle Unlimited. The shift has pushed many writers to chase rank-boosting tactics rather than serve readers, draining the fun and community spirit from publishing.
- Truant believes AI will upend the rapid-release strategy. He argues the model already strains authors, and automated AI-generated novels will only saturate the KU market further. The future, he predicts, will split: algorithm-friendly pulp on one side; slower, craft-driven “artisan” books on the other.
- Truant offers permission for authors to write what matters to them. The goal is fewer “ninja tricks” and more genuine writer-reader connection, with business strategies tailored to an author’s own strengths.
I hope you enjoy our conversation.
Jane Friedman: I’d like to start by personally saying thank you for the case study that you wrote years ago, Five Ways a Book Cover Could Hurt Sales and How To Fix It. After all this time, I think it’s still one of the most brilliant case studies I’ve seen about why cover design matters—saying, Look, just changing the cover can multiply your book sales. You have to look like other books in your genre or category. You can’t just go with your own personal preference.
Johnny B. Truant: My God, I don’t remotely remember doing that.
Jane: [laughs]
Johnny: You sure that was me?
Jane: Your name’s on it.
Johnny: [laughs] I don’t know if this happens to you, but I find that I lose track of my many comings and goings. I wonder if Sean wrote it. [Jane shares link to article.] Let’s see. No, it’s written by me. Go figure. Oh, that’s hilarious. I remember it now. But it’s so funny because I wouldn’t remember doing it at all.
Jane: That article came out in 2017, but your publishing activity goes back to at least 2011. And I was wondering if we could go down memory lane for a minute, because I feel like the environment and the community in 2011 or thereabouts was so different than it is now. How did you see the field then?
Johnny: That’s super appropriate because Sean [Platt] and I found ourselves nostalgic and talking about, “Oh my god, the heady days of the early things.” And it was so fun. And I talked about that in The Artisan Author, about how we had this period where everyone was giddy and excited, and then it became rigorous and then ultimately kinda cutthroat.
And that is something that I’ve been centering on. I just want it to be fun again, for me, or as many people as want to recapture it. People have come out of the woodwork for this [Kickstarter] campaign and said, “Oh, it was so fun back then.” And I’m like, “Yes, it should be fun.”
Jane: In 2013, you and Sean, along with David Wright, published a book called Write. Publish. Repeat. And you and Sean have blamed that book for pushing the idea that became too entrenched—that maybe people took too seriously—that to succeed you should write and publish more books. Or, the best marketing of all is writing and publishing another book.
Johnny: I feel like rapid release became tied to the idea of Write. Publish. Repeat because they share DNA. Write, publish, repeat—okay, that’s a multiple publishing thing. And then rapid release was like that but stripped of all nuance and context. That’s the way it seemed to me. I never liked the idea of rapid release; then, once it was kind of tied to us, I started to resent it. I don’t like it to begin with, so don’t tie me to it.
Jane: I last saw Sean at StoryShop in 2020, and I remember him vividly expressing some level of—I don’t know if exhaustion is the right word, but the grind, let’s say, of trying to serve the algorithm so that your books get noticed. And that was in 2020, which, to me, was still more gentle than where we are today. So when did you start to see the screws tighten? I assume it’s Amazon algorithms driving a lot of this phenomenon, of people trying to stay on top of the rankings and get visibility to drive sales.
Johnny: I remember very early in The Self-Publishing Podcast, we had a guest named Ed Robertson [episode link], and he was the first person who mentioned algorithms on the show in a way that made sense to my brain.
And I thought, “Oh, okay. So if you do certain things, then those machines know who to recommend your book to.” But it was a much softer version of what it became. And as the algorithms matured and as Kindle Unlimited came out and as Amazon started to express more preference for the people who were exclusive [on the ebook], that’s when it started to seem like, “Okay, well, so we can get more visibility if we do this,” or, “We can, if we lower our prices to 99 cents and keep them there permanently, then we can make up that in volume.” And it started to look a lot more tactical.
The idea of algorithms made sense at the beginning, when it was just a way to get in front of more readers. And then I feel today like the algorithms are like a middleman. It’s the new middleman, honestly, between us and the readers. It’s one of those boiling frog things, where now a lot of people are writing for the algorithms almost exclusively. In theory we all understand that there are readers on the other side, but you’re not really writing for the readers. You’re writing for the algorithms and the very specific readers that are served by those algorithms. The key characteristic is that whale reader on Kindle Unlimited, the person who’s just consuming tons and tons of books who says, “Well, there’s a new space opera with a cover that I recognize. It’s got a ship, it’s got a planet, it’s got, you know, the same tropes that I like, and so I’ll read it.”
I was talking to Damon [Courtney] from BookFunnel on his podcast, and he said that his son reads in Kindle Unlimited and was on the eighth book of a series that he really liked. And Damon asked, “Who wrote it?” And he said, “I don’t know.” He had no awareness of who it was that wrote this book series that he was into, because the mentality is, “Give me the next book, give me the next book.”
Jane: When did everything take a dark turn? Was it Kindle Unlimited?
Johnny: It wasn’t like one moment. It was that things slowly became a little less Wild West, a little less “Let’s figure it out together as a community” and a little bit more “Well, this is exactly the prescriptive thing that you need to do.” And then we started to see on [social media] that authors became very dogmatic.
So in addition to the prescriptive, it was like, “Well, if you aren’t doing it this way, you’re kinda dumb. You’re torpedoing your author career.” And with Sean and I having titles like Unicorn Western, which was weird enough in itself, and then the next thing we wrote was The Beam, which is a hard sci-fi world, we were doing everything wrong. And that’s when, you know, we had people trying to save us from ourselves. People kind of treated us like authorities at the beginning, and then they started to act like, “Well, yeah. But you guys are dumb now because you’re doing all these things that don’t make any sense.”
I remember we wanted to price The Beam at a higher price than a lot of people thought was a good idea. And people said, “You know, this would sell much, much better if you guys would price it at 99 cents,” or do whatever it was.
So, yeah—I’ve done a lot of thinking about this recently, and I feel like I was always firmly in the camp that I am in now, which is: I’m gonna write what I’m gonna wanna write, and then I’m gonna find the people who are interested in it, and there are gonna be people who are interested and people who aren’t. And it’s kinda take it or leave it, honestly. I’ve always thought that way. But now I have this huge contrast of people who are wanting to do the algorithmic approach, which is basically write the same book and follow the rules.
Jane: A common indie strategy I see is first in a series free, and it acts as a loss leader, or maybe it’s 99 cents, then the rest of the pricing goes up after that. Is that strategy still sound today?
Johnny: It’s still used. People are definitely still doing it. What I’m seeing—it’s hard to tell if this is more common or if it’s just that the contingent that does it is a little louder—I see so many people just going all in on Kindle Unlimited with ebooks only, not trying to do anything else. And that’s great if it’s a considered approach.
But as a default, I don’t know about that. So I’m seeing a lot more of that, like that’s just the way that you do it, the pundits say in the self-publishing world that’s what you do. And that’s not even 99 cents. That’s this arbitrary thing called Page Reads, and who knows what that is? Amazon can change it whenever they want—they have changed it in the past. Certainly in my circles, there have been two or three distinct times when Amazon made some huge change to the algorithms and all the authors said, “Oh my God, it’s over.”
Jane: [laughs]
Johnny: What bugs me is that we’re giving Amazon specifically all of the control, the people who are all in on that. Again, if you have considered that and you’ve decided it’s worth the risk and you have a plan, fine.
But if you go in with a lot of books and you don’t realize [Amazon] could change, or I could be injured and not be able to make a deadline, and suddenly it all collapses and you haven’t made any other plans. So, long answer to your question, I think a lot of people are doing free as an initial or 99 cents. I’ve certainly done both of those things, but then the next book is full price or something like that. I think you need a strategy. What bugs me is when people just sell something for cheap and there’s no backend on it, there’s no strategy, there’s no funnel.
It’s almost this quiet, “Well, you know, I don’t really believe that anybody’s gonna pay for my book, so I guess if I can get a lotta people to read it and then magic happens, somehow through alchemy I’m going to become successful.” I don’t think you’re attracting readers who value your work when you do that.
It’s not a new thing to price a book what it’s worth. It’s not a new thing for readers to be willing to pay what I would consider those prices that are worth something. It’s not new to value your customers and treat them like people and try to connect with them one on one.
All the ninja tactics, if you strip that away, you get back to a writer and a reader. And that’s everything. I base everything around that. I was just at a market this past weekend for two days, meeting people, and nobody ever knows me at those. All they know is there’s a cool book in front of them. We talked about covers earlier, and one of the things I’ve discovered is that my covers are magnetic. So, good author presence, good physical presence that makes the books look professional, and people who are interested in buying, and they don’t know anything about, “Well, hold on, was this in Kindle Unlimited?”
Jane: [laughs]
Johnny: “Is it 99 cents? Can I get the sequel in three weeks?” Nobody’s asking those questions. It’s just this very myopic perspective and this very relatively small pool of readers that feels really big because it’s where all the self-publishers are focusing, but as a percentage of, like, worldwide readers? I mean, it’s gotta be tiny.
Jane: I do see smart and strategic authors who’ve decided, “I don’t like playing the game that Amazon has laid out for me, and I’m going to self-select out now.” I’m seeing increased use of Kickstarter or crowdfunding, like what you’re doing with The Artisan Author, or using Shopify or Beventi, selling direct at events. That to me seems pretty positive.
Johnny: It is so simple. We’re going full circle when we were talking about when it was super fun. We were figuring it all out together. There was this community aspect. It was almost like an Amish barn raising or something. … We were cobbling it together. And then once people started to figure out something that worked, it became dogmatic but also kinda protective. Or “Hold on, this is my turf.”
People weren’t as willing to share, including us, on the podcast, because what happened was two things: People would either follow things that we were doing, even though they weren’t meant as advice, like, “Oh, you guys are writing serials. How many words should be in a serial? Tell me exactly the formula.” Then also things stopped working. [laughs] And I think that led to a more competitive culture. That’s when a lot of the fun and community and camaraderie went away.
I feel like we deserve better, because people got into writing—most of us, I think, because we loved writing, we loved storytelling. And people have burned out and they’re angry about it.
Jane: It probably doesn’t help that authors share screenshots of their sales [in online groups] and say, “Look at how amazing I’m doing.” It’s such a culture difference from traditional publishing groups, where no one shares anything about their sales.
Johnny: We’ve gotten this culture where it feels like if you’re not full-time or if you’re not six or seven figures, that clearly you’re just not trying hard enough or you’re a failure or something like that. And that’s not normal. It was never normal that all authors succeed to the tune of seven figures. That’s just not a thing. But it’s become a little perceived that way.
I think it’s because we either came into this as entrepreneurs or came into it as people hopping on a goldrush bandwagon, like, “I’m gonna go make my fortune.”
I don’t know a ton of traditionally published authors, but I don’t think they all said, “Okay, I’m starting a book. I’m gonna make a million dollars.”
Jane: [laughs] No, no one was saying that. At least no one who understands how the industry works.
Johnny: I do think there are people—now, this is not everybody by any means, so don’t get all mad at me—but there are self-published authors for whom it might as well be brooms they’re selling. It doesn’t really matter that it’s books. It’s that they’ve found a way to game a particular thing. And, you know, hey, good on them. But a lot of people got into this for the love of writing and wanting to communicate with people and wanting to connect with readers. And what’s weird and kinda scary is that I’m rediscovering that. And when I say scary, it’s because how did I forget it?
Jane: You mentioned you were selling books at a market. You’re doing that often now?
Johnny: I do a lot of live selling. Now, I’m not advocating for live selling—I know it gives a lot of people hives. I happen to love it. It’s kind of a microcosm of book selling in general, at least in my experience, which means there are slow times and there are good times. I will sit around a busy event sometimes for half an hour and nobody even looks in my direction. You start to get a little mad, a little bit like, “Oh, why am I here? Why am I doing this with my life?” But then somebody comes over and they’re so excited, and it changes everything back. Somebody will say, “Oh, this is exactly the book I’ve been looking for.” And they walk away saying, “I’m so excited.” You know, I’ve seen people walk away and start reading as they’re walking around an event. That’s what I forgot. That’s what I got into this for. It’s like every individual reader has the power to make you feel good about the story that you created.
But with the algorithms between us and this kind of depersonalization, it’s like, “Yes, I have 10 people who love me right now, but why isn’t it a thousand?” Then you’re discounting the love and the connection that came with those 10.
Jane: Yes, I see those elements of depersonalization. Not long after KU switched to page-based payments, I saw where authors would stuff the books with extra … whatever … for the payouts.
Johnny: Or they’d put a link at the beginning that linked to something at the back so they’d get a full book’s worth of page reads in one click.
Jane: Right. I don’t think that’s for the love of connecting with the reader. [laughs]
Johnny: The tough thing for me is that there’s a fine line between maximizing what you’re doing, like putting a call to action at the back of a book to the next one. That’s an optimization that makes sense. There’s a fine line between that level of optimization and something that’s gaming the system. And that’s where I feel some of the confusion is.
When I talked about The Artisan Author at Author Nation last year, I got so many people, it was like they’d been in chains and they realize, “Oh, these chains aren’t attached to the wall.” The reaction was, “Thank you for letting me know that this was something that is still possible.” It’s still possible to write the books that you love, to not play all those shenanigans. I make a full-time living from my books, but my Amazon sales right now are probably about $200 for the month, and I have like 150 books or something. I mean, that’s ridiculous. That’s pathetic. But that’s because I’m making all my money in other places. I’m just not playing those reindeer games.
Jane: I want to go back to Author Nation for a second. Let’s say I were attending Author Nation, but I didn’t attend your session about The Artisan Author. What do you think the average person would take away from that event if they didn’t yet know a thing about self-publishing or the self-publishing community?
Johnny: I have nothing but love for Author Nation. I think that they’re really presenting a diverse approach to publishing, and I would approve of all of it. So I don’t think there’s nearly as much danger of one single approach or viewpoint coming out of that conference, just because of how deliberate they are about it.
But I do think that author education as a whole has the rapid-release mentality. And I want to be careful how broad of a brush that I paint [with], because one of the biggest voices is Joanna Penn’s podcast, and she does not preach rapid release at all. She’s been preaching artisan and all that stuff.
The reason that I gave that talk about the artisan author was because I went to a conference the year before, and I had had five years away from conferences. I had been in my little writer’s cave, blissfully ignoring the world. And when I came back, it was like, if you see a kid every day and then you’re gone for six months and you come back and you’re like, “Oh, my God, the kid has gotten so huge.” When I came back I thought, “Boy, you know, this rapid-release thing was just starting, but now it is faster, it is more hard core.” AI had started to enter the mix, and I was running into people who were like, “You know, man, I figured out how to push a button and produce a novel in a day.”
And I walked around thinking two things. Number one: I don’t want any part of this anymore. I’m old guard here, and I don’t know, like, let me just write my books and I’ll ignore all of this. But even more pernicious was [how this influenced] new authors. It’s the first time they’ve come out, they’ve started looking around, and people are telling them to throw it into Kindle Unlimited, make it free for page reads, and hope. Or, write the next book within three weeks that’s exactly like that one, and then do it forever.
And that’s not the way that most new writers come in. You know, they take months and months or years and years to write a book. It matters to them. When they finish one book, they don’t want to write the same book again necessarily. And I just imagine them like deer in the headlights, coming into this and going, “Oh, so you’re telling me I need to place all the ads, I need to figure out all the AI, I need to figure out all the ninja tricks and subscribe to all the software, and then I need to write as fast as I possibly can, much faster than I wrote this first book, and grind myself down, hating what I came into this for.”
That’s what made me go, “Man, I should see if I could talk about this.” … So that was the need behind it. I imagined that new person and felt so bad for them.
Jane: So, you brought up AI. I have to ask about it. Do you imagine that the people who are already playing the rapid-release game, this is just going to accelerate that?
Johnny: I think it’s gonna grind them into the ground. I think it’s a bubble that’s gonna pop. I have a hard time imagining that rapid release as we understand it is going to continue to exist.
When people first started talking about it, it was like every six-ish weeks, and then it became, you know, if you could do it in five, if you could do it in four. And now people say one book a month, but really it’s every three weeks–ish. That’s kind of what it’s become. And so if you can push a button and produce a book with AI in a day or a few hours, and if it’s passable and it hits the tropes, do we really not see the future on that one?
For the readers who [say], “Give me the same thing over and over again,” those books, it’s entertainment and they want to be entertained. But I do think that we’re gonna get a fork in the road. I want nuanced books, I want layered books. I want books that are a portal into the author. I want the author to be an integral part of it. The readers who are on the fence and could go either way, I think they’re moving to Camp Artisan. It’s going to be, “Well, do you want something written by ChatGPT or do you not?”
I don’t use AI in my writing. I like writing. I’ll use it to help me analyze or read my last book and remind me who the characters are because I forgot because it’s been forever ago. But as far as writing, I don’t like to do that, and I do think that we’re going to end up with two pools of books. Places like Amazon will have to figure out how to present them that way. It’s almost like the old pulp racks versus high-concept literature, and you have to pick one or the other. And I feel like pulp is what is going to happen with that. Because how can it not? The rapid-release human author, they’ll have a hard time surviving going forward.
Jane: Last month I excerpted your book at my site. I don’t typically get a lot of pushback in the comments from people—maybe I don’t run enough people with strong opinions—but you certainly received more lengthy pushback than I’m accustomed to. Why do you think that is?
Johnny: If you’re used to doing things a certain way, and that is what you’ve built your career around, there’s a knee-jerk reaction to be defensive if it’s threatened. I tried very hard with the context of the full book to make it clear that I am not knocking anyone. … I want people to know that there’s an alternate path. But I can’t do that without kind of knocking the other side just a little bit. [My approach is] not for everybody. It’s not better. It’s not worse. It’s just another approach. I knew I would rustle some feathers, though.
Jane: In my own work, I try to counsel that the business is no more formulaic than writing the book itself. It requires your own imagination and critical thinking and an idea of where you want to end up. Many paths, no right path.
Johnny: The truth that nobody wants to hear is that there is no easy button. There is no one size fits all. And you should not take anything that I do or that anybody does as something that you should cut and paste into your life. You are unique, your readers are unique, and everything about you is unique. And unless you’re starting in exactly the same place, then their tactics are not going to get you to the same destination.
I’ve been using the metaphor of “Don’t ask for a map; learn how to use a compass.” … If you’re a self-publishing author, you’re an entrepreneur on top of everything else. The skill that seems to be the most useful is to know how to look at where you are, look at the world around you, look at the signs, the moss on the trees, the position of the sun figuratively, and then to know what to do next rather than to say, “Oh, I should always turn left, take 10 paces.”
I’m tired of the BS. I’m kinda tired of everybody, of people who profess to know everything. I’m tired of people feeling that they need to follow some prescriptive path. If I say those things and people don’t like it, then that’s okay with me.
Jane: I want to point out, for those reading, that I don’t see much of you on social media, if at all.
Johnny: You see none of me on social media.
Jane: So many authors, regardless of how they publish, seem to think if they’re not on social media, their career is doomed. And I’ve never believed that. I mean, it might make things more difficult, depending on what you’re trying to achieve, but, as you’ve discussed, there are lots of ways to find your readers or get people on your [newsletter] list that don’t involve posting on TikTok.
Johnny: Yeah, I don’t like social media, so I don’t do it. And again, that’s a choose your own future. If you do like social media, then by all means do it. If you just love being on TikTok, then yes, do TikTok.
I was on Twitter when it was fun, and then Twitter got super toxic and it became X. And Facebook used to be fun, but then Facebook was just barfing out everybody’s political opinions, and it just made me sad every time I went on social media, so I stopped. But I think that you can have great success with it if you’re actually trying to connect with people. And I also think you can get away without it.
When I was at a market selling books in person, the guy next to me was so enamored of my book display. I do put out a pretty good book display, and I do have pretty good covers. And he was just like, “Oh, you need to be on social media. You need to be on Instagram. You need to be on whatever.” And he wouldn’t let it go. I kept saying, “I’m not interested. I do a lot and I don’t wanna do that.” Like, I gave up my Saturday to go and set up a tent and drag cinder blocks from my car, and it was 93 degrees that day, and there was a storm that whipped up later and blew tents around.
That’s what I chose to do with my Saturday. The people who are on social media are probably not doing that. So we’re all supposed to do everything? “Oh, there’s a new tactic. Oh, there’s a new thing. You need to do it all. Make sure you launch your direct store, launch your Kickstarter, get on all the new social medias. Get …” No. [laughs] Like, it’s fine. I can find my people in different ways. It feels a little conceited to say I’m giving people permission to do anything, because who am I? But it does feel that way. Please just do what works for you.
Jane: I hope people really take that message to heart.
Johnny: I hope so too. It’s not a sexy message. If it were like, “Do this one weird trick and you will sell a million books,” everybody would jump on it.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
