406: Becoming a world builder (with Nathan Baugh)

About this episode

Nathan Baugh discusses his journey into fantasy writing and the lessons learned along the way.

Season 4, episode 6 is here! Nathan Baugh has wanted to write fantasy his whole life. He just needed a bank account crisis in Spain to finally make him do something about it. These days he has over 100k Substack subscribers, a successful ghostwriting agency, and a novel coming out in a couple of months. We talked about all of it. What we covered: - The moment in Spain when the bank account started going in the wrong direction and writing went from something Nathan loved to something he urgently needed to figure out. - Why fiction writing and newsletter writing share a flaw that almost nobody talks about, and how cutting the beginning of your work tends to fix both. - Nathan’s take on where self-publishing is headed now that anyone can produce eight books a month with an AI tool. - What querying agents actually taught him about his first book that he couldn’t have learned any other way. - The world building advice his editor gave him that sounds almost too simple, but saved him a serious amount of pain. - Why the most attractive ways to make money from writing are often not the fastest, and what he’d tell someone starting from zero right now. - What his close rate on new clients…

People in this episode

Host: David McIlroy

Guest: Nathan Baugh

Topics covered

• fantasy writing
• self-publishing
• ghostwriting
• newsletter writing
• world building
• writing advice

Keywords

• fantasy
• writing
• Substack
• ghostwriting
• self-publishing
• world building
• newsletter

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Substack

Books & works: World Builders

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