Making a Living as an Artist (and Staying Inspired) in a Jaded World with Johnny B. Truant

0:02Who's ready to rock today, Fire Nation? JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought Brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Science of Scaling. Today, we'll be breaking down how to make a living as an artist and staying inspired in a jaded world. To drop these value bombs, I brought Johnny B. Truant into EO Fire Studios. Johnny has written over 100 books, one of which, Fat Vampire, became a sci-fi network TV show. He also writes in podcasts about creative inspiration at johnnybtruant.com. In today's foundation, we'll talk about making a full-time living as a fiction author.

0:39We'll talk about not being on Instagram or really social media in general. We'll share some advice for a creative person looking to make their start, the best reason to write, and how to find inspiration, and Fire Nation so much more. As soon as we get back from thanking our sponsors. Marketing Made Simple, hosted by my friend, Dr. JJ Peterson, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Marketing Made Simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy and more importantly, make it work. A recent episode on whether vulnerability is a superpower in business is a must listen.

1:14Listen to Marketing Made Simple wherever you get your podcasts. The new year is here and that means it's time to check out NetSuite, the number one cloud financial system, streamlining accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, and more. Right now, download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist designed to give you consistently excellent performance absolutely free at nestwheats.com slash fire. Johnny, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Well, what's up, Fire Nation? And the thing, honestly, I think that people tend to always default to wanting to go bigger and better with success.

1:56That's usually the way that we define it. And a lot of times that means money, it means growth. growth and what I have found at least for my life is that it's not always about that at all. It's about being content and being happy and my success, my happiness actually came from a reduction in size from going smaller and more pure with what I do and I don't think a lot of people think that. I love that way of thinking. In fact, how I kind of phrase it because this is something that we've been doing in our business for the last six years is finding your enough. Like what's just enough and you don't have to keep adding things to your plate.

2:33In fact, like you mentioned, you can subtract things from your plate. And Fire Nation, what are you really trying to create in this world? It's happiness, it's freedom. And those things can happen, not when you just keep adding, adding, adding, growing, growing, growing, scaling, scaling, scaling, but finding out, hey, what is enough? And then how do I create my life around that for happiness, for freedom? And that's why we're talking today about making a living as an artist and staying inspired in a jaded world. And it's been over 11 years, Johnny, since you were first on Entrepreneurs on Fire back in 2012.

3:08And your focus was in a different place than it is now. I mean, not a big surprise. I mean, over a decade has passed. I mean, these days you're a full-time author and you always wanted to write, but you couldn't quite figure out how until the digital self-publishing world became viable and you abandoned internet sales and became a novelist. So talk to us about that transition. Yeah, it was fun because when we arranged this, I thought, boy, I wonder if they even know that they wouldn't be interviewing me about the same things as before. I mean, what you said was true. I always did want to be an author from when I was very young.

3:41I remember like typing on my grandmother's old manual typewriter. But it wasn't until kind of the Kindle came around that it became something that jibed with kind of the speed and efficiency that I needed. The idea of publishing books in the old way. I tried it, but it's slow and it's arduous and it's a crapshoot. But this was something where we could manufacture in a very entrepreneurial way, honestly. We could manufacture, we as artists could manufacture our success in a way that we couldn't before and just have a lot more control over it. So it was something that I moved into not long after we talked.

4:17And I've spent the last 10 years writing over 100 books and just moving fully into that field. And Fire Nation, this is where we're going to spend the rest of our time today talking about being a full-time creator, being an artist, staying inspired. So, Johnny, how realistic is it to make a full-time living as a fiction author in this day and age? Well, I think that first of all, it's important to know that being any artist in the modern age – well, okay, not any artist, but I would say a lot of people who are doing things the way that I would recommend, you have to be an entrepreneur as well.

4:56So this is an entrepreneur show and I'm an artist and my mother is an artist and she's where I learned all of this entrepreneur stuff. So that's foundational and it does take all the things that we associate with entrepreneurship. It's hustle. It's thinking outside the box. It's learning to find unconventional ways to make things work. So the short answer is it's hard. I'm not going to lie. It used to be a lot easier, but it was easier because of arbitrage in the system and because it hadn't settled. and now the marketplace is a little bit more mature. But for somebody who's number one, very dedicated to it, I mean, don't get into arts if you don't really wanna do arts, there's better ways to make money.

5:43But if you have the hustle and if you can go after your thousand true fans, that's the way that I look at all of this. It's not for me a vast spraying of the marketplace and attempting to just get as much as I can. I wanna find the people I can truly connect with. And any way you can find to do that, you can do it. So back in 2012, you were doing different things like we already mentioned, internet sales, marketing, more of that kind of stuff. But since then, I mean, you've written over a hundred books and one of which, which I mentioned in the intro, Fat Vampire became a sci-fi network TV show.

6:17So a hundred books. I mean, think about that number, Fire Nation. We often talk on this show about putting in the reps. Why have I become a decent interviewer? Because I've done it over 4 ,000 times, 4 ,384 to be exact. I mean, I've put in the reps. Johnny's put in the reps. But even with that, Johnny, I'd like to get more detailed and specific about how when you made the shift into becoming this full-time fiction author, where did you see the money come from? Where did you first say, okay, there's enough dollars and cents coming in the door that I can do this full time. Back in those early days, it was something that one of the things that attracted me most as somebody who came out of entrepreneurism and somebody who is mathematically minded and scientifically minded was that you could manufacture your own success dollar by dollar.

7:13And what that means is you may have put out, you know, I may have put out early books and they might not have earned a whole lot, but I knew that if I did that enough times, you talk about putting in the reps, that those would add up. And that was what made it achievable because I was working from a non-zero number. So that was the mentality I went in beginning with, was no matter how small, no matter if I could sell one book, if I just made another book, then on average I'd sell two books, one of each, and on and on. And the time when I actually was able to make that transition where I had enough critical mass was with the launch of the fourth book in the Fat Vampire series.

7:51For some reason, that fourth book in a series, at least back when I hit my first fourth book, was the moment where you tended to hit critical mass if you were going to hit it. And that came, I want to say, around 2015. And I was able to move full time into creating books. But again, I didn't have a real job before. I had my own job and it was a bunch of little hustles that I'd put together. And so everything since then has become about trying to optimize that system and find the way that it worked best for me long term. Fire Nation, sometimes you just don't know what's going to be that domino, but that domino will start the chain reaction.

8:29Like for some reason, that fat vampire, the fourth book was Johnny's domino and they are like, wow, I like this. What else has this person done? I mean, that's the way that I felt about Ready Player One the first time I read it. I'm like, I will read every book this author has ever created because I love this book so much. I've done the exact same thing with Bernard Cromwell. I just love his historical fiction books. I go back and I read every single one that he's ever written because I love it. So sometimes you see that one breakthrough, Fire Nation. You see this on YouTube a lot actually too, where people will create videos for years and they're all great or they're all good and getting better.

9:08But then one, for some reason, just really hits. And then people are like, oh, I like this person's style. And they go back and their back catalog just goes through the roof because now they have an audience wants to go back and listen to all of them. So putting in these reps, Fire Nation, this is what matters. So what specific advice, Johnny, would you give a creative person looking to make their start in the world? Well, so the overlap that the answer to this question overlaps with a clarification, like an additional tidbit I would have added to what you just said. And that is that the, A lot of people have asked me, how did I get that TV deal?

9:45And the answer is it just kind of fell in my lap, which is the simple version and the unsatisfying one because there's nothing to copy there, that somebody just contacted me out of the blue. But the deeper answer is that, again, putting in the reps, I didn't know – I mean I had produced many books by then. But meanwhile, Fat Vampire had been trickling along and making its way into many people's libraries just because they ran across it. and you don't know the life of your book. So all you can do is just put stuff out there and hope that something catches exactly like you were describing. And what I found out after the fact is that that book is in a lot of people's libraries, either literally on the shelf or they've read it.

10:23And so there's a zeitgeist thing that just kind of happens. And if it's gonna happen, you can't always determine that. You can just put your best stuff out there, which is half of the answer that I would give. Like what advice would I give is you have to keep doing it. you have to keep producing. And the fuller answer is you have to produce something that's genuine and that's, in my mind, personal if you want it to stand out. Because there are two people, two kinds of people who are able to make this work. And one is a very almost left-brained or very, let's say, pure entrepreneur person who can produce, produce, produce very, very fast, especially in the age of AI.

11:03But for people who take my path, where you're trying to get smaller and more thousand true fans, you have to be as much yourself as you personally can. You are the one thing that AI can't replicate. Your way of thinking, your way of twisting a story, and your connection. Because my writing, at least, is an art as much as it's just written words on a page. And art is a vehicle for showing the world who you truly are and making a connection with people who might resonate with pieces of who you are, like, because they have it in themselves. And so to not hold back and put as much as you can into your books, but also into your marketing, and be fully and completely yourself, and don't try to be like anybody else because you are your only differentiating factor.

11:50Art is a vehicle for showing the world who you truly are. I mean, Fire Nation, if that one sentence could just be tattooed on your heart as you're creating, believe me, you'll create better stuff. And we have a lot more to talk about when we get back from thinking our sponsors. Starting your year off strong and accomplishing goals like increasing revenue and faster growth starts with the right selling tools. And for that, there's the all new sales hub from HubSpot. Sales hub is an all in one platform thoughtfully built with the tools and insights you need to communicate on a personal level with every lead prospect and customer.

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14:59Everything you need to grow all in one place and having everything all in one place is priceless. Right now, download NestSuite's popular KPI checklist designed to give you consistently excellent performance, absolutely free at nestweet.com slash fire. That's nestweet.com slash fire to get your own KPI checklist, nestweet.com slash fire. Johnny, the world is pretty obsessed with social media and I'm not going to lie. I have a 14 day old child, my first child, my son. Oh, congratulations. Thank you so much. It's amazing. Little bow. and now I find myself on Instagram doing the doom scroll more and more because why all of the things that are being served to me is how to better burp your baby, how to get your baby to sleep, how to identify what cries they have, how to swaddle correctly.

15:46I could go on and on and on. I won't because that's boring, but that's why I'm on Instagram right now because otherwise I don't really like to go down that social media doom scroll. You aren't even on Instagram. Tell us why. I'm not on any social media. And it's funny because people just kind of assume it. I mean, your intake survey kind of indicated as well. And I was like, well, I don't have Instagram. It's interesting because I think that social media, first of all, I don't, let me just get this out there. I don't like social media at all. I like it in that Facebook allows me to kind of have a filing cabinet of people that I might need to get in touch with at some point and that will keep them contained for me.

16:27but with no disrespect intended to people who are way into social media. I have some friends who are very into it. I just don't like it at all because I think that it gives us an artificial way to compare ourselves that isn't natural to human beings. And I think that there's a way that people's behavior changes on social media that you get a little bit more aggressive and a little bit more inclined to fight. And on top of all of that is the algorithms designed to maximize profit for the company, not increase our enjoyment, which was the original intent. And so that doom scrolling sort of thing, if I go on Facebook, I'm just like immediately I need to leave.

17:05I need to go take a shower. So I made a personal decision that I just don't want to be involved with it. And without getting on a soapbox, I mean, you just mentioned you just had your first child. I see it reflected in my kids and you hear stories about, you know, teen girls comparing themselves to all the videos on Instagram and then thinking that they're ugly and then it leads to depression and suicide. So that's a really dire way to look at it. But having kids did kind of filter that for me. So there is this perception that everybody needs to be on social media. And I've just kind of defiantly crossed my arms and said, no, I'm just not going to do it.

17:43And for a long time, people, it was seen as really ridiculous. But now we're actually seeing creatives say, you know what, you don't need to be on social media. You can connect with people via email, which is more organic. It's not something that's dictated by an algorithm. And if you're looking for your thousand true fans, you're going to make those connections in that way better. And I might be missing out on more broadcast, more ways to bring people into my net through social media, but you're always going to miss something. There's always some optimization that you aren't going to make. And this is the one I've chosen not to make.

18:18You believe that the best reason to write, or to make any art for that matter, is for free. So should creators not charge for their work? Yeah, you're referring to a post that I wrote on my substack called the best reason to write is for free. What that means is not in any way that people should not charge for their work or that their work is worth nothing being free. What it means is it's an allusion to what I said at the beginning where if you just want to make money and there's no problem with that of course but do something else. Like if that's your goal and you don't actually care about making any sort of art or writing then you shouldn't go into the arts because the only reason to do that is because you need to get it out there.

19:00And what that means about the best reason to write is for free is do the thought experiment of what if nobody ever bought your book or viewed your art or had anything good to say, would you still create it? And the more I go and I see – I live in Austin, so I see a lot of live music and the musicians that I see are their own kind of artists. And watching them and there's this thought process change where I've gone, I'm just witnessing them doing their thing. I mean, I paid money for a ticket, but that's not really the reason this is happening. It's happening because they're out there expressing themselves.

19:37They're there making their art, and I'm here to witness it. But they would make it anyway. And that's kind of the way I try to approach my writing and the way that I would advise other people to do it as well who are anything like me. Let's call a spade a spade, Johnny. Finding inspiration can be tough. I mean, it's hard to wake up every single day and just find inspiration. I mean, especially if you don't know how to look for it. So what's your best tip for finding inspiration? And why does it even matter to be inspired? The world's supposed to be a magical place. I think that it is a magical place.

20:11And I think that there's a lot of just trying to get through the day that has gotten in the way of that. And we start to feel, well, my grass isn't short enough and my neighbors are going to yell at me or I don't drive a nice enough car. I need to get this done. And that gets in the way of the magic of just being. And I get that this is kind of an airy thing, but hey, I'm an artist. So the idea of inspiration is – I mean I actually – so I have a podcast called The Art of Noticing, which is all about this. And my site is a lot about this. And it was because I wanted to find inspiration for my story rather than waiting for the muse for any stories that I was writing.

20:46And I started to say, well, if you look around you, there's all sorts of things that really feel mundane, but that are inspiring if you allow them to be mundane. So just as one very quick example, I like I'll pull something that I notice every day. And that's the source of the podcast. And so one day I was going to this pub that I go to all the time. And I have a there's a server who serves me all the time. And I didn't know her name. And so I noticed it on her tag. and I thought wow okay that's a really mundane thing to notice but it changed something inside me and made me think about okay obviously she's a real person with a real family and friends she does her own thing she doesn't just exist in this pub where I am and that made me think about all the background characters that exist in the store in my stories where they're just serving a function they're just an extra in the story but they have their whole life and if you can start to think about the backgrounds of your stories or your art is if all of those characters have stories and you haven't, you just haven't fleshed them out, but they're there, it makes the world feel more real.

21:55And so that sort of thing, like looking around and saying, well, look, there's a red lining on the crowds or boy, I never noticed the way that they divide traffic this way or the one of my shoes went missing. You can find inspiration in all of that. And once I started to do that, it's like life got more magical. Fire Nation, life is magical. And that's actually one reason why I'm really enjoying this experience with Bo, my newborn, because it's magical for him every day. Like just everything that happens, it's in the moment, it's present for him. And you can kind of live through that and kind of bring you back to what's important and what's reality.

22:30So So Johnny, give us one key takeaway from our entire conversation today. Give us the best way for Fire Nation to connect with you, and we'll say goodbye. On key takeaway, I'm going to seize on what you just said. And that's that we think that children are somehow special in that way. It's almost like they're too naive to know how jaded the world is so that they can be properly bothered by it. But we can do that too if we just drop a lot of the artificial stuff that we have piled on top of ourselves. So that's my key takeaway, I think, is that we can all have that childlike wonder for the world and appreciation of art.

23:09As far as how people can connect with me, I have a substack at johnnybtruant.com. If you don't know substack, it's always a gauntlet trying to get in. But I write about inspiration and my podcast is there. Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with JBT and JLD today, so keep up the heat. For links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com. Type Johnny, J-O-H-N-N-Y in the search bar. The show notes page will pop right up. And by the way, the show notes page for Johnny's first episode back in 2012 will also pop up. So if you want to go ahead and listen to that one, Johnny, you should actually go back and listen to that one.

23:48I should. I was thinking that just now. It would be very interesting because Fire Nation, life is ever evolving. It is going forward. It's a journey. We're all living it. And I want to thank you, Johnny, for sharing your story, your journey with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thank you. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Johnny for sponsoring today's episode. And Fire Nation, over the last decade, I've interviewed more than 4 ,000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, and I've created a revolutionary 17-step roadmap to your financial freedom and fulfillment.

24:26I put it all into my first traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, personally endorsed by Seth Godin and Gary Vaynerchuk. The Common Path to Uncommon Success is the step-by-step guidance that you need to achieve the lifestyle of your dreams. Visit UncommonSuccessBook.com. I'll catch you there. Or on the flip side. Marketing Made Simple, hosted by my friend, Dr. JJ Peterson, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Marketing Made Simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy, and more importantly, make it work.

25:03A recent episode on whether vulnerability is a superpower in business is a must listen. Listen to Marketing Made Simple wherever you get your podcasts. The new year is here, and that means it's time to check out NetSuite, the number one cloud financial system streamlining accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, and more. Right now, download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist designed to give you consistently excellent performance, absolutely free at netsuite.com slash fire.