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
More episodes of How to Write for a Living
- 408: She drew cartoons through medical school - now she has over 90,000 Substack subscribers (with Laurie Marbas)
- 407: He wanted to be an author at eight - now he writes for Penguin (with Kern Carter)
- 405: He deleted every social media account and built a thriving community anyway (with Seth Werkheiser)
- 403: How to access your main character energy (with Olivia Wickstrom)
- 402: Things that passed me by (and why you shouldn't let my next event pass YOU by)
- 401: Welcome to Season Four (let's build it together)!
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