AntiFool with Norman Chella

Russell Nohelty on Building a Creative Career and Writing

Norman Chella Season 1 Episode 15
Russell Nohelty, as the Complete Creative, the Fiction Writer on a mission to help you build your Creative Career. He is the AntiFool.

In this episode, we're going to talk about building worlds in fiction writing.

If you are an aspiring writer, you've had a lot of thoughts about all the worlds you want to build, the characters you want to write about and more. But starting can be overwhelming. Writing a novel can be intimidating. Where do we start?

Who best to hear about having a successful creative career than Russel Nohelty!

Russell is a USA today, bestselling author, publisher, and consultant. He runs the small press publisher, Wannabe Press as well as the Complete Creative, which helps creatives build better businesses.

As a prolific writer, he's run successful Kickstarter campaigns for a lot of books like Katrina hates the Dead, My Father didn't Kill Himself, Cthulu is hard to Spell, the Godsverse Chronicles, and many more raising over six figures until now.

In this episode, we talked about:
  • Russell's origin story, from failed entrepreneur to known comic book writer
  • The struggles of becoming a prolific writer, building an audience from scratch while jumping from medium to medium
  • Writing tips for first time writers, and whether or not you sohuld write in your favorite genre
  • Phase two: Transitioning from writer to having a business mindset, and creating a sustainable career
Enjoy!

Timestamps
  • 4:25 Writing 20 novels in 20 months, and the business reason why
  • 5:50 Larger boxset launches vs. multiple smaller launches
  • 8:21 "I had 4 companies that blew up in my face" Russell's origin story
  • 10:43 How writing comics led Russell Nohelty to novels
  • 13:17 Producing multiple projects, and the purpose of his anthologies
  • 15:53 In movies, "You spend 80% of your time hiring and your job's pretty much done as a director"
  • 19:10 "Every person who reads them creates the world in their brain" The relationship between novels and readers
  • 21:08 Co-creating creative projects and stepping back to let them thrive
  • 22:15 I want to write a book. What should I know first? What should I do?
  • 24:33 Don't write in your favorite genre when learning to write
  • 27:12 The work isn't in the writing
  • 30:03 What is a Russell Nohelty book?
  • 33:26 Russell Nohelty's policy in his twenties
  • 34:58 Comparing aspiring writers to successful ones, Amanda Hawking
  • 37:50 The secret behind successful writers is they've done a lot of prior writing
  • 42:05 JK Rowling's secret to writing success: Her circles
  • 44:22 The hard work of transferring readers to a new medium
  • 46:53 The secret to trans-media: worlds have to be successful first
  • 49:55 The mediums Russell Nohelty is focusing on now
  • 55:08 Russell Nohelty's Memento
  • 57:49 Russell Nohelty's Walkaway Wisdom

Links