Episode 239 - Moving the Needle to a Different Track with Johnny B. Truant
May 21, 2024
"I used to have a business that in some way, shape, or form, I was offering some form of services. I don't have that anymore, and I don't want it anymore. But the reason that I'm still in this space, talking to authors, is because the trends that I'm seeing in the space I feel are discouraging to a lot of new authors. And that bugs me." —Johnny B. Truant
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Johnny B. Truant discusses MOVING THE NEEDLE TO A DIFFERENT TRACK, including the impetus for him starting his podcast, "The Art of Noticing" and what drove his creative pivot; the importance of not missing the magic that's happening around you; supporting the artisan writer; the age of the iconoclast writer; the power of being authentically you; the necessity to segregate your audiences; and the power of stepping back.
If one of those topics piques your interest, you can easily jump to that section on YouTube by clicking on the flagged timestamps in the description.
If one of those topics piques your interest, you can easily jump to that section on YouTube by clicking on the flagged timestamps in the description.
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Johnny B. Truant is the bestselling author of Fat Vampire, adapted by SyFy as "Reginald the Vampire" starring Spider-Man's Jacob Batalon. His other books include PRETTY KILLER, PATTERN BLACK, INVASION, THE BEAM, DEAD CITY, and over 100 other titles across many genres. Originally from Ohio, Johnny and his family now live in Austin, Texas, where he’s finally surrounded by creative types as weird as he is.
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AI-generated Summary
This episode of "The Indy Author Podcast" featuring Johnny B. Truant covers a wide range of topics, focusing primarily on Truant's career, his perspective on writing and creativity, and the concept of "The Art of Noticing." Truant, a bestselling author known for "Fat Vampire" and other titles, discusses his journey in the writing world, his move to a more artisan, true fan-oriented approach, and his latest project, a podcast about noticing the unnoticed in our daily lives.
Truant's conversation starts with the background of his name, inspired by "House of Leaves," and his venture into writing across various genres. He talks about his transition from a public to a more private figure in the writing community, motivated by the desire to focus on his craft rather than the business side of writing. This shift led to the creation of his podcast, "The Art of Noticing," where he shares weekly (now daily) insights drawn from everyday observations, aiming to inspire and inform the creative community.
The podcast is a reaction to the changing landscape of the writing industry, where the pressure to rapidly produce content can overshadow the artistry and personal connection to writing. Truant emphasizes the importance of authenticity and connection with a dedicated readership over mass appeal. He advocates for an artisanal approach to writing, producing content that is true to the author's vision and resonates with a core audience, even if it means deviating from mainstream expectations.
Throughout the conversation, Truant stresses the value of noticing—the act of observing and finding inspiration in the mundane or overlooked aspects of daily life. This process not only serves as a creative exercise but also as a means to remain grounded and present in a fast-paced world. He shares anecdotes and examples from his podcast, illustrating how simple observations can lead to profound insights and reflections on personal and artistic life.
Truant's dialogue with the host, Matty Dalrymple, also touches on the challenges and rewards of maintaining a distinct voice and vision in the writing industry. He discusses the balance between producing content that satisfies creative aspirations and meeting the expectations and demands of the market. Truant's approach is characterized by a focus on depth and quality, fostering a close-knit community of readers who appreciate his unique style and perspective.
The episode encapsulates Truant's journey from a prolific author to a thoughtful observer and commentator on the creative process. It highlights his commitment to authenticity, the joy of discovery through noticing, and the importance of nurturing a genuine connection with one's audience. The discussion concludes with Truant encouraging writers to find their own path, prioritize meaningful engagement over quantity, and embrace the nuances of their creative journey.
In essence, the conversation with Johnny B. Truant on "The Indy Author Podcast" provides valuable insights into the evolving landscape of writing and publishing, underscoring the significance of authenticity, observation, and personal connection in the creative endeavor.
Truant's conversation starts with the background of his name, inspired by "House of Leaves," and his venture into writing across various genres. He talks about his transition from a public to a more private figure in the writing community, motivated by the desire to focus on his craft rather than the business side of writing. This shift led to the creation of his podcast, "The Art of Noticing," where he shares weekly (now daily) insights drawn from everyday observations, aiming to inspire and inform the creative community.
The podcast is a reaction to the changing landscape of the writing industry, where the pressure to rapidly produce content can overshadow the artistry and personal connection to writing. Truant emphasizes the importance of authenticity and connection with a dedicated readership over mass appeal. He advocates for an artisanal approach to writing, producing content that is true to the author's vision and resonates with a core audience, even if it means deviating from mainstream expectations.
Throughout the conversation, Truant stresses the value of noticing—the act of observing and finding inspiration in the mundane or overlooked aspects of daily life. This process not only serves as a creative exercise but also as a means to remain grounded and present in a fast-paced world. He shares anecdotes and examples from his podcast, illustrating how simple observations can lead to profound insights and reflections on personal and artistic life.
Truant's dialogue with the host, Matty Dalrymple, also touches on the challenges and rewards of maintaining a distinct voice and vision in the writing industry. He discusses the balance between producing content that satisfies creative aspirations and meeting the expectations and demands of the market. Truant's approach is characterized by a focus on depth and quality, fostering a close-knit community of readers who appreciate his unique style and perspective.
The episode encapsulates Truant's journey from a prolific author to a thoughtful observer and commentator on the creative process. It highlights his commitment to authenticity, the joy of discovery through noticing, and the importance of nurturing a genuine connection with one's audience. The discussion concludes with Truant encouraging writers to find their own path, prioritize meaningful engagement over quantity, and embrace the nuances of their creative journey.
In essence, the conversation with Johnny B. Truant on "The Indy Author Podcast" provides valuable insights into the evolving landscape of writing and publishing, underscoring the significance of authenticity, observation, and personal connection in the creative endeavor.
Transcript
Matty: Hello, and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Johnny B. Truant. Hey, Johnny, how are you doing?
Johnny: Hey, thanks for having me!
Matty: I am pleased to have you here.
Meet Johnny B. Truant
Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Johnny B. Truant is the bestselling author of "Fat Vampire," adapted by Sci-Fi as an original movie, starring Spider-Man's Jacob Batalon. His other books include "Pretty Killer," "Pattern Johnny," "Invasion," "The Beam," "Dead City," and over 100 other titles across many genres. Originally from Ohio, Johnny and his family now live in Austin, Texas, where he's finally surrounded by the creative types as weird as he is. And, Johnny, you can tell me if I'm the last person to figure this out, but I think I now know where you got the inspiration for your public-facing name because I've been reading “House of Leaves.”
Johnny: Boom. Yeah, you are not the first person to figure that out, but you are the first person to directly figure it out and bring it to me. So, there are people who've kind of asked, or there are people I've mentioned it to, or there are people who've been like, "Do you know that there's also a Johnny Truant in 'House of Leaves'?" But you're the first person to nail it like that.
Matty: Oh, good! Do you want to talk a little bit about who Johnny Truant is for people who maybe aren't familiar with "House of Leaves," and why you chose that name?
Johnny: Oh, there's no grand thought behind it. I was reading it at the time, and I liked it as a name, I guess. And it turns out that there's a UK metal band called Johnny Truant, which is a direct homage, I suppose. And so that's where the B came from because I was like, well, I'll look for a Twitter handle. At the time, this was back when Twitter was Twitter, and it was back when Twitter didn't make me want to kill myself. So, I was on Twitter, and I needed a name and I said, "Let me stick a B in there." So yeah, that's the story, for what it's worth.
Matty: Yeah, well, I enjoyed having known that name first through your author-related appearances and then seeing it in "House of Leaves" was great.
Johnny: That's hilarious.
Matty: So, I invited you on the podcast to talk about "The Art of Noticing," which I believe is a fairly recent podcast you're working on. We’ll discuss the podcast itself in a little bit, but I love the idea of you framing a whole set of messages around the art of noticing. So why did you decide to do that? What were you seeing in the creative community that led you to feel an emphasis on the art of noticing was important?
Johnny: Well, I enjoy doing podcasts. Since I'm talking to you, I assume you do too. It's a form of communication I like. Obviously, I enjoy writing as well, but I prefer to talk when discussing my work rather than writing it out. That's where it started: "What if I did something new?" Just a bit of background, this is after a self-imposed—well, I don't want to use terms that are too strong—it's not a hiatus or isolation, but I was much less public-facing because we used to do the Self-Publishing Podcast, our Smarter Artist Summit, Masterminds. I decided to just be an author. Then, due to certain events that are too extensive to get into, I decided to re-engage publicly. So what to do? A podcast seemed right. I tossed around a few ideas that didn't stick because they were overcomplicated. I needed something bite-sized, interesting, that would help the community, and that writers struggle with, where I would have a never-ending source of topics. Having done many podcasts and blog post series, you can run out of ideas. So originally, it was about sharing something I learned weekly—it's practically daily now. I’m a curious person, and I love to learn. One of the first ideas before it was about noticing, and more about learning, was inspired by "A Quiet Place." Do you remember seeing that?
Matty: Yes, I did see that.
Johnny: So, the character has a hearing aid that, where it attaches, there's a thing attached to her head, her skull. And I saw someone in real life with a similar one, and I thought, I knew it was a hearing aid, but I didn't know what it was. So I decided to look it up.
It turns out it's called a bone-anchored hearing system. It's for a certain kind of hearing loss where sound can telegraph through bone, and they can enhance it. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. I like learning little tidbits.
But the problem is, do people want to know about random things that are unassociated with one another? My mother had a branding firm, so I understand the importance of having a coherent theme and a container for everything. It just slowly evolved into, well, what if I noticed something that is inconsequential?
Not that the hearing aid thing is inconsequential—that's more trivia. But if I could notice something that just feels like I've never thought about that before, it's right there, but I just never noticed it before. And some of them are learnings. I asked myself, what creative lessons can I take from this? And that's kind of how it was born.
Matty: So did you land on the noticing aspect because you felt it was something that other creative people were not paying sufficient attention to?
Johnny: No, it's really more because I wanted more inspiration for myself. And this is maybe a little bit more global, but I think there's a lot of magic that happens around us that we're blind to because we get into our own little silos of attention and we're just aware that like somebody hasn't liked our post on Instagram enough.
I'm not on Instagram, so that might not be the right term. But you know, you obsess about something and you're unaware of all the amazing things that are going on. So that's less about artistic inspiration. It's less about a particular thing that you would notice, but it's more about, let's get out of our usual entrenched ways of being and take the blinders off.
So it was about me at first. I wanted a way to keep coming up with ideas for myself, especially since I don't—I'm a good articulator, I'm not always a great imaginer. Like, it's difficult for me to come up with something out of the blue. I tend to be like, give me an idea and then I can run with it, and I can find new aspects of it.
But as far as starting fresh, so that to me was like, this can also be a wellspring of inspiration. And hey, if I can do a short-form podcast—cause just to be clear, these are nine minutes of content and then I got a bumper that's like, you know, makes it ten minutes—that's sustainable for me. I can just make a quick note and then I can just, I ramble, you know, for ten minutes in a way that is hopefully coherent.
And so it hit that perfect Venn diagram circle intersection of something I wanted to do, something I felt I could do well, something that would be useful to me, and hopefully something that would be useful to other creatives as well.
Matty: That's really interesting because it was not the answer I was expecting. I was expecting the answer to be that you saw creatives were getting too deep in their Instagram post likes or whatever, and that was the driver rather than the desire to spin up a podcast. But I think I thought that because I definitely saw myself in that pool of people who I imagined you were targeting, suffering as a result of not noticing.
And I really like the aspect of the podcast where you make these tie-ins from the thing you're noticing to the creative life. It's less about the trivia that might be shared; it's more the exercise of, "Oh, I can be doing that too." And I find it very refreshing. Unlike other writing and creative-related podcasts I listen to, where I always leave with an action item, this one feels like a mindset change because it encourages me to pay attention to things I would otherwise overlook. So I find it very valuable, like a mental palate cleanser for me.
Like, you know, I'll be taking a break from writing or my Instagram posts, and it's just a nice little shot of, "Let's just step back for a minute and think about this or look around us."
Johnny: Yeah, well thank you for bringing that up because the intro does say something about how I take something mundane and how you can do the same, and it was meant to be sort of like a word of the day calendar approach. It is daily now, and so every single day if somebody has a 10-minute commute or they go on a walk, they can get that quick hit.
And that was important, but I also wanted to train people. For those who aren't looking for ideas from me, maybe they're looking for that mindset shift.
Johnny: And just if I could go on just a small diversion that's kind of related to this whole thing is that I used to sell to authors. Like, I used to have a business that in some way, shape, or form, I was offering some form of services. Either we had our events, or we had the self-publishing podcast — really just wanted people, but it did feed that business. Like, there was a business aim. And I don't have that anymore.
And I don't want it anymore. So the only thing that I have for sale for authors right now is a 7-month sub stack membership. Right? So it's just like, it's just barely there. And, but the reason that I'm still in this space, like talking to authors, is because, and I've written some really long posts on this, is that the way, the trends that I'm seeing in the space, I feel are discouraging to a lot of new authors and that bugs me.
And what I'm referring to is, you know, our book, "Write, Publish, Repeat," helped to extort some of this, but that rapid release churn and burn, nothing against it. Like, I just want to be clear, the people that it works for, wonderful, but I think of this new person coming in and saying, okay, I just attended my first writer's conference.
You're telling me I need to write a book every two weeks to survive, and I just want to tell my story. Or, you know, I just heard about this author over here who's using AI to, you know, throw in, like, plot lines, and they're generating whole books, and they're going to do a thousand books this year.
Like, you hear those stories. Now, again, that's them. It's not me. I'm more of an artisan approach. And so, I have this global feeling of wanting to intercede on behalf of that author who either is established and still figuring things out, is established and feels run over by that, and just wants to kind of slow down and make their art and tell their story, or especially the new person who's like, I got into this because this was my dream.
Like, I wanted to share my story, I wanted to live an artistic life, and crap, right? This isn't what I signed up for. So "The Art of Noticing" and the whole, like when I write for authors now, that is the main goal, is I just, there's not a lot in it for me anymore, monetarily speaking. So that's part of what this is an attempt to say, look, if I can inspire you in any way, that's what I want to do.
Matty: I really like that idea of sending out a message that's different than the churn and burn message, because I've mentioned this a couple of times on the podcast—my author friends are going to laugh that I'm saying it again—but I'm trying to banish the word "just" in the context of, you know, "I just have four books" or "I just have 50 people on my email list" and whenever that happens it makes me sad because I think somebody who's written four books, four freaking books, they're saying "just four books," like, it just makes me sad, and if you have 50 people on your email list, it doesn't mean you don't want 5,000, but let's celebrate the 50, while we still have the goal of getting to 500, and I think that kind of thing is really what you're saying is very supportive of that.
Johnny: Yeah. I mean, it's a whole rabbit hole, but I'm a "thousand true fans" guy. I don't necessarily want to chart on Amazon through that anymore. I want my thousand true fans and I think that's the way the smaller author who prefers to take their time and wants to really put craftsmanship into their work, I think that's the way to go.
What drove Johnny's pivot?
Matty: Well, there, I'm going to take this conversation a little bit in a different direction than I originally thought. But you said a couple of things that I think are very interesting. One is that you started the podcast and you said, "It was about me at first," and also the fact that you weren't going into this as another stream of income in your author business.
Can you just talk about that? And you're also talking about ways that your approach has changed, maybe from the churn and burn to the more artisan approach, and things like that. Can you just describe a little bit about how your general gestalt about the creative process has changed and in what ways it's stayed the same?
Johnny: Yeah. Again, I'd like to repeat at the top of this—this soapbox sermon, which I hope it isn't—is that I am in no way disparaging anybody who chooses to do things differently than me because that's the way it can sound. So even the thing, the words that I used, and you just repeated them, churn and burn.
I'm sorry to those of you who are Rapid Release authors; I don't mean that to be pejorative. That's what it feels like to me because I am the kind of person—and this despite getting a reputation as a person who produced a lot of books, and that's what "Write, Publish, Repeat," our book... So I get it. But I also believe that you can pivot as a creative person.
And I think that you should. I think that you should look at the world around you, your current situation, where you want to go. And that's not flip-flopping; that's changing your mind and being a creative person who is doing it.
I've never been able to do anything that felt mercenary. It's kind of a shame because I think I would have been good at it. At mercenary. I have that mind, but I just can't do it. I can't do something that doesn't really speak to me.
Matty: I can imagine there are many people who are listening to this, and they're seeing their own experience in what you're saying. So that maybe they went into this thinking that rapid release was what they wanted to do and they're feeling angsty about it, but they feel like, well, no, I committed to this direction.
Like, I've got to keep pursuing it because this is the right way. And I'm just wondering, like, what markers did you see in your own life that made you say, now's the time for me to take a step back and look at something different?
Johnny: Yeah. I, the universe seems to need to push me in a new direction. So I am a creature of momentum and habit to some degree. So if things were working, if things about the old way that I was doing things were working, then I think I would probably still be doing it, possibly to my detriment. But the thing is, I write odd books.
And at the beginning, for some reason, I was able to, I don't know, hit certain tropes, or we presented our books in certain ways, or we did hit that algorithmic thing just right. And so I was able to sell a lot of my odd books. So for instance, my most well-known book is "Fat Vampire," which is already weird.
It's not really a vampire book. It's like this, it's maybe like a "Shaun of the Dead" sort of thing. But anyway, that's "Fat Vampire." Compare that to "Twilight," "Interview with a Vampire," or "Vampire Diaries" like these mainstream vampire things that stick with just vampirism do much better than these little cult things.
So I've always had these niches, even our big series "Invasion," which is this alien invasion action epic. The first book is very much two tropes. It, you know, they're fleeing an invasion, but then not to spoil it, but the ending was unsatisfying to some people because we took it in a really different direction.
And then the rest of the series gets all weird and philosophical. So those are the kind of books that I write. And I'm not able to not do that. I mean, I have tried. I've tried to say, "I'm going to write this book that will do really well." And it's not going to happen. So somehow the market... You know, I had to figure something out, and I just, I mentioned that five-year quiet time.
And what happened during that was I was working with some friends at Sterling and Stone Story Studio, and they're the ones who did the Smarter Artist Summit and all that. So that's Sean Platt, my co-writer and everything. And they were handling everything for me. So I didn't have to do anything other than write.
And so it was really easy to say, I'm just going to keep writing. Well, fast forward. It's a long string of events and it doesn't matter, but I ended up negotiating with them to get back the rights to most of my books because I just, I don't know, I wanted to try it on my own. I went to the last 20 Books, and I said, boy, I could be doing this cool stuff, but only if I have all the control.
And when I got out there, I very quickly realized that, kind of KDP Select whale readers, rapid release, all the stuff that we helped roll the ball forward in terms of talking about that had gotten so much farther down the pipe because again, I was out of that for five years I didn't pay attention and it I was my weird books were no longer tenable and they hadn't really been all the while either, like for the people who were doing it, it wasn't.
So this was a move of necessity, but it was also a heart space move because I've always wanted to make the books, stories, however I wanted to tell them, not what was tropey or not what was successful right now. I just wanted to do that. And it was just a move of necessity where I realized that I was not, if I wanted to sell any books, I was going to have to find my true fans.
Johnny: Now, I will give you some further reading on this for your listeners. So I wrote two posts on Russell Nolte’s Substack called "The Author Stack," and it's at authorstack.substack.com. I wrote a guest post called "We're Entering the Age of the Iconoclast Writer," which I said the author of.
And then the second one is called "Exposing Yourself for Fun and Profit." And the first one is about the shift that I'm talking about where if you want to go down what I'm calling this artisan author path—because there's a fork in the road. So as things get more systematized, more rapid release, more conforming to a genre, and more fast books, there's a contingent of authors and writers who are like, "Whoa, I was okay when it was in the middle, but look at how far it's gone. I want to be over here." So writers and authors, and I talked to a bunch of them at 20 books, and they're like, "I'm not playing that game anymore. I was willing to play it for a while, but now it's become so incredibly not me that I need to do something else." And luckily the readers, there are a contingent of readers who feel the same way, that they're like, "I don't want to read the KDP Select books. I want to read something that's unique and interesting." And so if you go all-in on this kind of artisan thing where I'm making beautiful physical editions of my books as much as I can now. I'm leaning fully and completely into the weirdness and the weird types of books that I'm, that are me. And I launched my web store, and it very much is me and my weirdness.
And so that's what that first post is about, is about this option for another way of doing things, which I would call the artist and author approach.
Being authentically you
Johnny: And that's the post called "We're Entering the Age of the Iconoclast Writer." The other one, which is called "Exposing Yourself for Fun and Profit," is kind of a sequel to it.
And exposing yourself, in this case, is obviously tongue-in-cheek. It's the idea that, in order to attract true fans, you need to expose who you are. You need to be yourself. You need to take personal and emotional risks because that is how true fans connect with you. They don't connect with you if you're bland and "let me be professional and let me show you my professional author headshot.
And so those two posts together kind of sum up everything that I think. I think that if you're going to be the artist and author, that means you're no longer playing the "as cheap as possible but as many books as possible" game, and you're stepping over here into like, if you go into a really nice coffee shop, you're paying a lot more for coffee.
But it's made with care and artistry and the best ingredients. And that's the way I see this book thing is, and again, I have to watch because I don't want to speak ill of the competition, but it is an artisan approach. I mean, I'm making hardbacks. Who makes hardbacks? But the people who want that artisan thing want hardbacks.
I'm putting more care into my internal formatting. I'm putting more, I'm not backing off the intricacies in my stories that tend to drive people away, but that works best if you get your thousand true fans rather than as many sales as possible on Amazon or Kobo or Barnes & Noble. And so that's what the second post is about—how to fully attract those fans by being the most authentically you because only you can be you.
Matty: I can imagine a nice simpatico relationship, and I'm not sure if I'm seeing it, what you're describing, but you can tell me if this is playing out for you, but that someone who had decided to follow that path of, "I want a small, deep pool of fans, not a broad, shallow pool of fans," and that the idea of putting something out there frequently, like a daily 10-minute podcast, could be very appealing, both to telegraph the kind of persona that you want to telegraph to and to find the people that you want to find.
Now I'm saying, I'm not sure I'm seeing it play out because there's a weirdness aspect of the Art of Noticing, but it's not deeply weird. But, if you were doing a 10-minute video on something related to the offshoot of vampires that you're following in your own work, then I could see a direct correlation there of sort of like, market research and reader outreach, but are you finding a connection there between building that pool of readers you through the podcast?
Johnny: No, not at all. Thank you for bringing that back around though, because I was thinking like, wow, we're really not talking about the Art of Noticing.
The necessity of segregating your audiences
Johnny: No, I used to throw everybody into one pool, and I think that a lot of authors do this. I think that a lot of authors have a tendency to write their books, and then to, I mean, you're doing it, right?
And then speak to authors about what they're doing, right? So you write your books, and then you talk to other authors, and a lot of people kind of throw that together. As did I. It's not a great idea, in my opinion, so I now keep the hot side hot and the cool side cool, like the old McB.L.T. So I have "The Art of Noticing" which is very much for authors, and I've made sure that the authors know that I have this reader side over here because some of them are dual allegiance.
But plenty are not. And the authors just want author stuff, and the readers just want reader stuff, and they don't want to hear the author stuff. So I basically kept that author side alive with this podcast. It really is close to, I don't know, giving back in a weird way? Like, I hate to sound overly noble, that's not really the intention.
But I can't think of another reason to do it because with like 20 or 30 people paying me on Substack, there's not... I have no desire or intention to ever offer any other author-facing stuff or charge for a course. Like, I'm not doing that anymore. So the only thing I can think is, I don't know, I guess I just must like helping authors.
But you're right because they're different audiences. So, and weird is probably overstating it, I would say just quirky. And if you were to be on my reader list, then I think you would probably see that I just kind of let me be me. But it's not weird, but it is, it's not censored.
I'm not trying to be anything I'm not.
Matty: Well, I'm seeing all sorts of lessons for myself from the podcast point of view because I do sometimes, for example, at the beginning of a podcast episode, if I have a book that's on sale, I will mention it. Although as you're saying, probably the people who are listening to my podcast are not necessarily the people who are reading my books.
I'm doing it almost as a way to prove that I'm in the trenches with you. You know, I'm just not talking about this stuff. I'm also experiencing it, which I think has some value, but maybe not as much value as I had hoped. But the other thing that I really like is you had said early on about offering something that was very simple.
And it is a very simple podcast. It's you, as you had said, you talking for like minutes and 30 seconds and then a very brief intro and outro. And I can imagine that, to generalize this beyond just a selfish question for my own podcast, it's sort of like the minimum viable product of a podcast, not content-wise, but format-wise.
So how did you decide what you wanted to include there and not include there?
Like, did it start out bigger and you thought, no, no, that's not really necessary? Or did it start out longer and you decided that 10 minutes was sufficient?
Johnny: Yeah. I mean, I have a philosophy degree and so I tend to think too much. And so I had, I don't even remember what it was, but there was something that I tried out and I recorded a test episode of some big question that I had about life or existence. I don't even know.
But like, I don't know how you work, but for me, if I record something and then I can't make myself listen back to it, I'm like, oh, that's a problem. Like, I know that is not good and nobody's going to care. So it did take me time to winnow down to this idea of something that was hopefully just really consumable, and I like the ubiquity of it.
The idea is, and it's funny that we haven't actually talked about any of the specific noticings, I'm realizing this now, is, you know, people think, well, I need to go to a scenic overlook to be inspired, or I need to go out in the ocean or something like that. And the idea is not really, it's all around you.
We're just blind to what's around us. And I don't know, I mean, I think that felt to me very accessible because anybody can do that. Any creative can do that. Anybody who's sit, even if you're like a shut in, if you're an author who doesn't want to leave at all, then there's things around that you can notice the, you know, the wood grain in your table.
You can notice the way that the clock ticks very loudly and you hadn't noticed it before. Those are all things that can be drawn, that inspiration can be drawn from,
Matty: There was, there was one other thing I wanted to talk about, and then I'm going to mention a couple of, art of noticing titles, because I do want to give people a little flavor for the kinds of things that you share there.
The Power of Stepping Back
Matty: But one of the things you had mentioned was this idea that you had taken a sabbatical, or whatever the non-dramatic term is that, one would want to use to that for, you know, five years, and it sounds as if by doing that you were able to step back and get that, a different perspective on your career that maybe took you in a different direction.
And there may be people who say, I'm sorry, I'm not going to be able to take five years off, but do you feel like there's a way that people can experience the benefit of what you learned in your sabbatical, in a way that's practical for, maybe a greater majority of writers?
Johnny: Yeah, sure. I mean, if, let me first just knock down the, I realized that I didn't give you much to work with, but let me just knock down sabbatical because it sounds like I, it sounds like a rich person thing to like, I'm going to go travel the world. It was just that I didn't want to do anything involved with writing other than writing.
And I stopped doing all the public-facing stuff. So I was still writing books, but I was, that was all I was doing. And I think that when I came up out of that and I said, okay, now I need to, now I want to. Sell these books because by the way, and don't let me lose the track here, is I realized that for me, the art is not just storytelling for me. The art is everything around it. It's communicating with people It's building kind of a world and curiosity. It's building a brand a visual and spoken and articulated brand is very interesting to me. That's part of my art.
Moving the needle to a different track
Johnny: But for me, this process, hey, I'm going to give you, I'm going to give you an odd answer, so let's see what you think about this. Is, I think I've grown very introspective. I don't know that I always was, but I think I'm very curious about why I think the ways that I do and why I'm doing what I'm doing.
And I've got this metaphor that I've kind of developed for those of you who are into vinyl or have, you know, are old enough to remember when records were all there was, the idea of, if you wanted to skip to a different song, you picked up the needle and you put it down in a new place.
And I think that so many of us go through life just playing the same track and you're just letting it play forward and I think every once in a while I think of that as a reset. It might not be a perfect metaphor. So I see this with my kids. So my kids are almost 16 and 19 and they're changing so fast that the only way that I can kind of like stay current with them in terms of this is the person I'm relating with now, rather than this is the person that I used to be relating with, and I'm still hanging on to that old image, is that metaphor of like, I'm going to disconnect from where I am right now, scramble, scratch everything, and I think of this as like lifting up the needle and putting it back down to where they actually are today.
So with my kids, it's like, Oh! Okay, I shouldn't be treating my daughter like she's 12 anymore because now she's almost 16 and I get to know that new person and I think I do that with a lot. I think I've developed a habit of trying to pick up the needle, trying to disconnect from what is currently happening, and then question my own assumptions.
And when I do that, then I find, oh, there's no reason to do what I'm doing. Or, why am I doing that? That used to be something that I did back when this was true, but that's no longer true, but out of momentum, I did that. So, my actual specific advice, which I think is a little weird for this, is, I meditate, and I spend a lot of time trying to be quiet. I take a lot of walks, I do spend a lot of time thinking, it's metacognition, it's thinking about thinking, I want to understand the ways that I think, the reasons that I do what I do, and not just do anything just because it's always been done, and I think if you do that, then you start to say, so I'll give you an example.
So I was doing a lot of stuff that was author-facing once I got back into this, in addition to the "Art of Noticing" podcast, and it's a lot of work, and that's fine, but there was this moment where I said, "Wait a minute. I'm not going to do another seminar. I'm not going to hold a boot camp. I'm not going to sell. I'm not going to write more nonfiction books for authors. Why do I feel that this is something I need to do?" Because by the way, the parts that I let go of, I wasn't enjoying doing. So why would I do that? But it was a genuine epiphany. It was like, "Oh my god, how did I not notice that there's no purpose to this?"
Oh, by the way, it also wasn't effective. So it also wasn't growing. So why was I doing it? But I think that we have all sorts of things like that in our creative careers, where we're either doing something because somebody told us once, or because we did it yesterday, or because we don't want to do it again.
We think that it looks like quitting if we stop it, or we think we'll be criticized if we do something weird. And I think if you try to just wipe the slate clean as much as you can and think about your own thought process from as objective a standpoint as you can, I think that's the key.
Matty: I love that. And it's a message that I love hearing myself because I'm a very organized person. I spent many, many years in the corporate world as a project manager. And so I have everything in a list and I try to be very intentional about, you know, when I get up, I get my tea, I sit down at the computer, I open up my list and I try to be very intentional about saying, "Okay, what has bubbled to the top of the list is, update my BookBub ads. Do I really want to be doing that? Is that how I want to be spending my time? Hey, do I even want to be selling BookBub ads?" And so my attempt to be very intentional about it, but it's very difficult because it's super easy to just get sucked into that, "BookBub ads has bubbled to the top of the list, that's what I'm going to be doing this morning."
And I really like that idea of stepping back and noticing other things, as a way of not letting yourself get sucked into that rut. Yeah, please.
Johnny: I think that we tend to have a to-do list mentality that says, this is on my list, so I'm going to do it. And what I kind of like to do, and I learned this mentality from some Tony Robbins thing that I listened to years and years ago, and it was the idea of starting with your outcome. So for instance, BookBub ads.
So by the way, a lot of times for me, that sort of thing is procrastination. I'm like, well, this, I can just do this, and I don't have to come up with a story. Right. Which is way harder, but sometimes it's like, you genuinely want to do it, but what you're trying to do is, I guess, sell more books, but I would really say just grow.
Like, get it as vague as you can. What do I want to do? I want to grow. I want to, in whatever way that means to you. And then once you know where you're trying to go with a given set of to-dos, to then go back and say, okay, what's the best way to grow? And sometimes it's, do your BookBub ads.
But sometimes you might go, well, wait a minute. No, there's a much better way to do it that I've completely forgotten about. So I kind of like that thinking as well.
Matty: Yeah, absolutely.
The art of noticing
Matty: And I'm glad we had that conversation because I was thinking, I really can't call this episode "The Art of Noticing" anymore. And when you said, moving the needle to a different track,
Johnny: There you go. Okay. Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. I was like, you had me on to talk about the art of noticing and look where I'm going.
Matty: Oh, I think this is great, not getting stuck in the rut of what the assigned topic was, I think is perfect. So I do want to give you a chance to just share an example of the kind of things you talk about on the podcast. And I came up with some topics.
So, one that I really enjoyed was the "sticks and vines are good enough." Do you remember what the background of that one was?
Johnny: Yeah, I do. So, this was during a sequence where we went for Thanksgiving break. We usually take just a small local car trip with another family and we were out in South Texas. And, I was just driving down the road and there were, and we've all seen this, by the way. If somebody's listening to this and is like, well, that's obvious, that's the point.
The point is that they're obvious. So I noticed that instead of fence posts, that a lot of the people that had long fence runs just used random hunks of wood or big thick vines. And to me, that lesson spoke of—so that's the noticing. The noticing is, oh, they're not fence posts, they're whatever. Which functionally, like, who cares?
Because when you have that big of a fence front, unless you have really aggressive animals, they just need a barrier. So who cares? And the idea, if I remember right, the episode, I tried to draw two to three creative lessons that could apply directly to writing. And they're probably things like, consider options you haven't considered before, in terms of your creativity.
Don't feel that you need to do things because they're the quote unquote right way to do them. So, it's kind of the picking up the needle thing. Like, why are you, why do you think you need to use fence posts? Why do you think, so, not to pick on you because I don't think there's anything wrong with it, but why do you think you need to use BookBub ads?
You know, there may be other more creative ways to do it. There may be ways that would work better there may be ways that save you money or require less management, but also having unconventional characters.
I know that I did one on when it was Halloween and I noticed that. So the last Halloween was 2023. And if you go back, you know, just three years from that, it was 2020. And our neighborhood did do Halloween, but they did 'em at a distance. They were throwing candy to the kids or something like that. And there weren't a lot of people. And so by 2023 I know it was like, oh, I just noticed Halloween is back.
I'm in one of those neighborhoods where like, everybody drives to, so it's like Mardi Gras, and you can't get through the crowds, but I noticed that it had diminished quite a bit because of COVID, and I noticed that this year it's back, and so the lesson there was the resilience of traditions and routines that give people a sense of comfort, and I believe that one of the lessons that I pulled out of that one was about imbuing that, imbuing characters with that attribute, because you'll see a lot of times people who are in dire straits, either financially or socially or whatever, they have strong community ties or family ties or spiritual beliefs or rituals that they do.
And they cling maybe a little more tightly to those things than people who don't have to worry about anything. And so taking characters and saying, well, what if you gave them, there was another one about superstitions and those sorts of things, I think, make characters pop in a way that we don't normally think of.
Matty: Well, this was so much fun. This is one of the most wide-ranging conversations I've had, and certainly one of the most inspirational, so thank you for being willing to entertain my wide-ranging questions.
Johnny: Well, the readers didn't hear our preamble, which was, I don't prepare, I just talk off the cuff. So this is what happens when I talk off the cuff.
Matty: I count on that, I count on that. So, Johnny, thank you so much. This has been so much fun, and please let everyone know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you are doing online.
Johnny: I have finally gotten my head together and just put it all in one place. And it's just johnnybtruant.com. Everything you would care about is there.
Matty: Cool. Thank you so much.
Johnny: Thanks.
Johnny: Hey, thanks for having me!
Matty: I am pleased to have you here.
Meet Johnny B. Truant
Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Johnny B. Truant is the bestselling author of "Fat Vampire," adapted by Sci-Fi as an original movie, starring Spider-Man's Jacob Batalon. His other books include "Pretty Killer," "Pattern Johnny," "Invasion," "The Beam," "Dead City," and over 100 other titles across many genres. Originally from Ohio, Johnny and his family now live in Austin, Texas, where he's finally surrounded by the creative types as weird as he is. And, Johnny, you can tell me if I'm the last person to figure this out, but I think I now know where you got the inspiration for your public-facing name because I've been reading “House of Leaves.”
Johnny: Boom. Yeah, you are not the first person to figure that out, but you are the first person to directly figure it out and bring it to me. So, there are people who've kind of asked, or there are people I've mentioned it to, or there are people who've been like, "Do you know that there's also a Johnny Truant in 'House of Leaves'?" But you're the first person to nail it like that.
Matty: Oh, good! Do you want to talk a little bit about who Johnny Truant is for people who maybe aren't familiar with "House of Leaves," and why you chose that name?
Johnny: Oh, there's no grand thought behind it. I was reading it at the time, and I liked it as a name, I guess. And it turns out that there's a UK metal band called Johnny Truant, which is a direct homage, I suppose. And so that's where the B came from because I was like, well, I'll look for a Twitter handle. At the time, this was back when Twitter was Twitter, and it was back when Twitter didn't make me want to kill myself. So, I was on Twitter, and I needed a name and I said, "Let me stick a B in there." So yeah, that's the story, for what it's worth.
Matty: Yeah, well, I enjoyed having known that name first through your author-related appearances and then seeing it in "House of Leaves" was great.
Johnny: That's hilarious.
Matty: So, I invited you on the podcast to talk about "The Art of Noticing," which I believe is a fairly recent podcast you're working on. We’ll discuss the podcast itself in a little bit, but I love the idea of you framing a whole set of messages around the art of noticing. So why did you decide to do that? What were you seeing in the creative community that led you to feel an emphasis on the art of noticing was important?
Johnny: Well, I enjoy doing podcasts. Since I'm talking to you, I assume you do too. It's a form of communication I like. Obviously, I enjoy writing as well, but I prefer to talk when discussing my work rather than writing it out. That's where it started: "What if I did something new?" Just a bit of background, this is after a self-imposed—well, I don't want to use terms that are too strong—it's not a hiatus or isolation, but I was much less public-facing because we used to do the Self-Publishing Podcast, our Smarter Artist Summit, Masterminds. I decided to just be an author. Then, due to certain events that are too extensive to get into, I decided to re-engage publicly. So what to do? A podcast seemed right. I tossed around a few ideas that didn't stick because they were overcomplicated. I needed something bite-sized, interesting, that would help the community, and that writers struggle with, where I would have a never-ending source of topics. Having done many podcasts and blog post series, you can run out of ideas. So originally, it was about sharing something I learned weekly—it's practically daily now. I’m a curious person, and I love to learn. One of the first ideas before it was about noticing, and more about learning, was inspired by "A Quiet Place." Do you remember seeing that?
Matty: Yes, I did see that.
Johnny: So, the character has a hearing aid that, where it attaches, there's a thing attached to her head, her skull. And I saw someone in real life with a similar one, and I thought, I knew it was a hearing aid, but I didn't know what it was. So I decided to look it up.
It turns out it's called a bone-anchored hearing system. It's for a certain kind of hearing loss where sound can telegraph through bone, and they can enhance it. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. I like learning little tidbits.
But the problem is, do people want to know about random things that are unassociated with one another? My mother had a branding firm, so I understand the importance of having a coherent theme and a container for everything. It just slowly evolved into, well, what if I noticed something that is inconsequential?
Not that the hearing aid thing is inconsequential—that's more trivia. But if I could notice something that just feels like I've never thought about that before, it's right there, but I just never noticed it before. And some of them are learnings. I asked myself, what creative lessons can I take from this? And that's kind of how it was born.
Matty: So did you land on the noticing aspect because you felt it was something that other creative people were not paying sufficient attention to?
Johnny: No, it's really more because I wanted more inspiration for myself. And this is maybe a little bit more global, but I think there's a lot of magic that happens around us that we're blind to because we get into our own little silos of attention and we're just aware that like somebody hasn't liked our post on Instagram enough.
I'm not on Instagram, so that might not be the right term. But you know, you obsess about something and you're unaware of all the amazing things that are going on. So that's less about artistic inspiration. It's less about a particular thing that you would notice, but it's more about, let's get out of our usual entrenched ways of being and take the blinders off.
So it was about me at first. I wanted a way to keep coming up with ideas for myself, especially since I don't—I'm a good articulator, I'm not always a great imaginer. Like, it's difficult for me to come up with something out of the blue. I tend to be like, give me an idea and then I can run with it, and I can find new aspects of it.
But as far as starting fresh, so that to me was like, this can also be a wellspring of inspiration. And hey, if I can do a short-form podcast—cause just to be clear, these are nine minutes of content and then I got a bumper that's like, you know, makes it ten minutes—that's sustainable for me. I can just make a quick note and then I can just, I ramble, you know, for ten minutes in a way that is hopefully coherent.
And so it hit that perfect Venn diagram circle intersection of something I wanted to do, something I felt I could do well, something that would be useful to me, and hopefully something that would be useful to other creatives as well.
Matty: That's really interesting because it was not the answer I was expecting. I was expecting the answer to be that you saw creatives were getting too deep in their Instagram post likes or whatever, and that was the driver rather than the desire to spin up a podcast. But I think I thought that because I definitely saw myself in that pool of people who I imagined you were targeting, suffering as a result of not noticing.
And I really like the aspect of the podcast where you make these tie-ins from the thing you're noticing to the creative life. It's less about the trivia that might be shared; it's more the exercise of, "Oh, I can be doing that too." And I find it very refreshing. Unlike other writing and creative-related podcasts I listen to, where I always leave with an action item, this one feels like a mindset change because it encourages me to pay attention to things I would otherwise overlook. So I find it very valuable, like a mental palate cleanser for me.
Like, you know, I'll be taking a break from writing or my Instagram posts, and it's just a nice little shot of, "Let's just step back for a minute and think about this or look around us."
Johnny: Yeah, well thank you for bringing that up because the intro does say something about how I take something mundane and how you can do the same, and it was meant to be sort of like a word of the day calendar approach. It is daily now, and so every single day if somebody has a 10-minute commute or they go on a walk, they can get that quick hit.
And that was important, but I also wanted to train people. For those who aren't looking for ideas from me, maybe they're looking for that mindset shift.
Johnny: And just if I could go on just a small diversion that's kind of related to this whole thing is that I used to sell to authors. Like, I used to have a business that in some way, shape, or form, I was offering some form of services. Either we had our events, or we had the self-publishing podcast — really just wanted people, but it did feed that business. Like, there was a business aim. And I don't have that anymore.
And I don't want it anymore. So the only thing that I have for sale for authors right now is a 7-month sub stack membership. Right? So it's just like, it's just barely there. And, but the reason that I'm still in this space, like talking to authors, is because, and I've written some really long posts on this, is that the way, the trends that I'm seeing in the space, I feel are discouraging to a lot of new authors and that bugs me.
And what I'm referring to is, you know, our book, "Write, Publish, Repeat," helped to extort some of this, but that rapid release churn and burn, nothing against it. Like, I just want to be clear, the people that it works for, wonderful, but I think of this new person coming in and saying, okay, I just attended my first writer's conference.
You're telling me I need to write a book every two weeks to survive, and I just want to tell my story. Or, you know, I just heard about this author over here who's using AI to, you know, throw in, like, plot lines, and they're generating whole books, and they're going to do a thousand books this year.
Like, you hear those stories. Now, again, that's them. It's not me. I'm more of an artisan approach. And so, I have this global feeling of wanting to intercede on behalf of that author who either is established and still figuring things out, is established and feels run over by that, and just wants to kind of slow down and make their art and tell their story, or especially the new person who's like, I got into this because this was my dream.
Like, I wanted to share my story, I wanted to live an artistic life, and crap, right? This isn't what I signed up for. So "The Art of Noticing" and the whole, like when I write for authors now, that is the main goal, is I just, there's not a lot in it for me anymore, monetarily speaking. So that's part of what this is an attempt to say, look, if I can inspire you in any way, that's what I want to do.
Matty: I really like that idea of sending out a message that's different than the churn and burn message, because I've mentioned this a couple of times on the podcast—my author friends are going to laugh that I'm saying it again—but I'm trying to banish the word "just" in the context of, you know, "I just have four books" or "I just have 50 people on my email list" and whenever that happens it makes me sad because I think somebody who's written four books, four freaking books, they're saying "just four books," like, it just makes me sad, and if you have 50 people on your email list, it doesn't mean you don't want 5,000, but let's celebrate the 50, while we still have the goal of getting to 500, and I think that kind of thing is really what you're saying is very supportive of that.
Johnny: Yeah. I mean, it's a whole rabbit hole, but I'm a "thousand true fans" guy. I don't necessarily want to chart on Amazon through that anymore. I want my thousand true fans and I think that's the way the smaller author who prefers to take their time and wants to really put craftsmanship into their work, I think that's the way to go.
What drove Johnny's pivot?
Matty: Well, there, I'm going to take this conversation a little bit in a different direction than I originally thought. But you said a couple of things that I think are very interesting. One is that you started the podcast and you said, "It was about me at first," and also the fact that you weren't going into this as another stream of income in your author business.
Can you just talk about that? And you're also talking about ways that your approach has changed, maybe from the churn and burn to the more artisan approach, and things like that. Can you just describe a little bit about how your general gestalt about the creative process has changed and in what ways it's stayed the same?
Johnny: Yeah. Again, I'd like to repeat at the top of this—this soapbox sermon, which I hope it isn't—is that I am in no way disparaging anybody who chooses to do things differently than me because that's the way it can sound. So even the thing, the words that I used, and you just repeated them, churn and burn.
I'm sorry to those of you who are Rapid Release authors; I don't mean that to be pejorative. That's what it feels like to me because I am the kind of person—and this despite getting a reputation as a person who produced a lot of books, and that's what "Write, Publish, Repeat," our book... So I get it. But I also believe that you can pivot as a creative person.
And I think that you should. I think that you should look at the world around you, your current situation, where you want to go. And that's not flip-flopping; that's changing your mind and being a creative person who is doing it.
I've never been able to do anything that felt mercenary. It's kind of a shame because I think I would have been good at it. At mercenary. I have that mind, but I just can't do it. I can't do something that doesn't really speak to me.
Matty: I can imagine there are many people who are listening to this, and they're seeing their own experience in what you're saying. So that maybe they went into this thinking that rapid release was what they wanted to do and they're feeling angsty about it, but they feel like, well, no, I committed to this direction.
Like, I've got to keep pursuing it because this is the right way. And I'm just wondering, like, what markers did you see in your own life that made you say, now's the time for me to take a step back and look at something different?
Johnny: Yeah. I, the universe seems to need to push me in a new direction. So I am a creature of momentum and habit to some degree. So if things were working, if things about the old way that I was doing things were working, then I think I would probably still be doing it, possibly to my detriment. But the thing is, I write odd books.
And at the beginning, for some reason, I was able to, I don't know, hit certain tropes, or we presented our books in certain ways, or we did hit that algorithmic thing just right. And so I was able to sell a lot of my odd books. So for instance, my most well-known book is "Fat Vampire," which is already weird.
It's not really a vampire book. It's like this, it's maybe like a "Shaun of the Dead" sort of thing. But anyway, that's "Fat Vampire." Compare that to "Twilight," "Interview with a Vampire," or "Vampire Diaries" like these mainstream vampire things that stick with just vampirism do much better than these little cult things.
So I've always had these niches, even our big series "Invasion," which is this alien invasion action epic. The first book is very much two tropes. It, you know, they're fleeing an invasion, but then not to spoil it, but the ending was unsatisfying to some people because we took it in a really different direction.
And then the rest of the series gets all weird and philosophical. So those are the kind of books that I write. And I'm not able to not do that. I mean, I have tried. I've tried to say, "I'm going to write this book that will do really well." And it's not going to happen. So somehow the market... You know, I had to figure something out, and I just, I mentioned that five-year quiet time.
And what happened during that was I was working with some friends at Sterling and Stone Story Studio, and they're the ones who did the Smarter Artist Summit and all that. So that's Sean Platt, my co-writer and everything. And they were handling everything for me. So I didn't have to do anything other than write.
And so it was really easy to say, I'm just going to keep writing. Well, fast forward. It's a long string of events and it doesn't matter, but I ended up negotiating with them to get back the rights to most of my books because I just, I don't know, I wanted to try it on my own. I went to the last 20 Books, and I said, boy, I could be doing this cool stuff, but only if I have all the control.
And when I got out there, I very quickly realized that, kind of KDP Select whale readers, rapid release, all the stuff that we helped roll the ball forward in terms of talking about that had gotten so much farther down the pipe because again, I was out of that for five years I didn't pay attention and it I was my weird books were no longer tenable and they hadn't really been all the while either, like for the people who were doing it, it wasn't.
So this was a move of necessity, but it was also a heart space move because I've always wanted to make the books, stories, however I wanted to tell them, not what was tropey or not what was successful right now. I just wanted to do that. And it was just a move of necessity where I realized that I was not, if I wanted to sell any books, I was going to have to find my true fans.
Johnny: Now, I will give you some further reading on this for your listeners. So I wrote two posts on Russell Nolte’s Substack called "The Author Stack," and it's at authorstack.substack.com. I wrote a guest post called "We're Entering the Age of the Iconoclast Writer," which I said the author of.
And then the second one is called "Exposing Yourself for Fun and Profit." And the first one is about the shift that I'm talking about where if you want to go down what I'm calling this artisan author path—because there's a fork in the road. So as things get more systematized, more rapid release, more conforming to a genre, and more fast books, there's a contingent of authors and writers who are like, "Whoa, I was okay when it was in the middle, but look at how far it's gone. I want to be over here." So writers and authors, and I talked to a bunch of them at 20 books, and they're like, "I'm not playing that game anymore. I was willing to play it for a while, but now it's become so incredibly not me that I need to do something else." And luckily the readers, there are a contingent of readers who feel the same way, that they're like, "I don't want to read the KDP Select books. I want to read something that's unique and interesting." And so if you go all-in on this kind of artisan thing where I'm making beautiful physical editions of my books as much as I can now. I'm leaning fully and completely into the weirdness and the weird types of books that I'm, that are me. And I launched my web store, and it very much is me and my weirdness.
And so that's what that first post is about, is about this option for another way of doing things, which I would call the artist and author approach.
Being authentically you
Johnny: And that's the post called "We're Entering the Age of the Iconoclast Writer." The other one, which is called "Exposing Yourself for Fun and Profit," is kind of a sequel to it.
And exposing yourself, in this case, is obviously tongue-in-cheek. It's the idea that, in order to attract true fans, you need to expose who you are. You need to be yourself. You need to take personal and emotional risks because that is how true fans connect with you. They don't connect with you if you're bland and "let me be professional and let me show you my professional author headshot.
And so those two posts together kind of sum up everything that I think. I think that if you're going to be the artist and author, that means you're no longer playing the "as cheap as possible but as many books as possible" game, and you're stepping over here into like, if you go into a really nice coffee shop, you're paying a lot more for coffee.
But it's made with care and artistry and the best ingredients. And that's the way I see this book thing is, and again, I have to watch because I don't want to speak ill of the competition, but it is an artisan approach. I mean, I'm making hardbacks. Who makes hardbacks? But the people who want that artisan thing want hardbacks.
I'm putting more care into my internal formatting. I'm putting more, I'm not backing off the intricacies in my stories that tend to drive people away, but that works best if you get your thousand true fans rather than as many sales as possible on Amazon or Kobo or Barnes & Noble. And so that's what the second post is about—how to fully attract those fans by being the most authentically you because only you can be you.
Matty: I can imagine a nice simpatico relationship, and I'm not sure if I'm seeing it, what you're describing, but you can tell me if this is playing out for you, but that someone who had decided to follow that path of, "I want a small, deep pool of fans, not a broad, shallow pool of fans," and that the idea of putting something out there frequently, like a daily 10-minute podcast, could be very appealing, both to telegraph the kind of persona that you want to telegraph to and to find the people that you want to find.
Now I'm saying, I'm not sure I'm seeing it play out because there's a weirdness aspect of the Art of Noticing, but it's not deeply weird. But, if you were doing a 10-minute video on something related to the offshoot of vampires that you're following in your own work, then I could see a direct correlation there of sort of like, market research and reader outreach, but are you finding a connection there between building that pool of readers you through the podcast?
Johnny: No, not at all. Thank you for bringing that back around though, because I was thinking like, wow, we're really not talking about the Art of Noticing.
The necessity of segregating your audiences
Johnny: No, I used to throw everybody into one pool, and I think that a lot of authors do this. I think that a lot of authors have a tendency to write their books, and then to, I mean, you're doing it, right?
And then speak to authors about what they're doing, right? So you write your books, and then you talk to other authors, and a lot of people kind of throw that together. As did I. It's not a great idea, in my opinion, so I now keep the hot side hot and the cool side cool, like the old McB.L.T. So I have "The Art of Noticing" which is very much for authors, and I've made sure that the authors know that I have this reader side over here because some of them are dual allegiance.
But plenty are not. And the authors just want author stuff, and the readers just want reader stuff, and they don't want to hear the author stuff. So I basically kept that author side alive with this podcast. It really is close to, I don't know, giving back in a weird way? Like, I hate to sound overly noble, that's not really the intention.
But I can't think of another reason to do it because with like 20 or 30 people paying me on Substack, there's not... I have no desire or intention to ever offer any other author-facing stuff or charge for a course. Like, I'm not doing that anymore. So the only thing I can think is, I don't know, I guess I just must like helping authors.
But you're right because they're different audiences. So, and weird is probably overstating it, I would say just quirky. And if you were to be on my reader list, then I think you would probably see that I just kind of let me be me. But it's not weird, but it is, it's not censored.
I'm not trying to be anything I'm not.
Matty: Well, I'm seeing all sorts of lessons for myself from the podcast point of view because I do sometimes, for example, at the beginning of a podcast episode, if I have a book that's on sale, I will mention it. Although as you're saying, probably the people who are listening to my podcast are not necessarily the people who are reading my books.
I'm doing it almost as a way to prove that I'm in the trenches with you. You know, I'm just not talking about this stuff. I'm also experiencing it, which I think has some value, but maybe not as much value as I had hoped. But the other thing that I really like is you had said early on about offering something that was very simple.
And it is a very simple podcast. It's you, as you had said, you talking for like minutes and 30 seconds and then a very brief intro and outro. And I can imagine that, to generalize this beyond just a selfish question for my own podcast, it's sort of like the minimum viable product of a podcast, not content-wise, but format-wise.
So how did you decide what you wanted to include there and not include there?
Like, did it start out bigger and you thought, no, no, that's not really necessary? Or did it start out longer and you decided that 10 minutes was sufficient?
Johnny: Yeah. I mean, I have a philosophy degree and so I tend to think too much. And so I had, I don't even remember what it was, but there was something that I tried out and I recorded a test episode of some big question that I had about life or existence. I don't even know.
But like, I don't know how you work, but for me, if I record something and then I can't make myself listen back to it, I'm like, oh, that's a problem. Like, I know that is not good and nobody's going to care. So it did take me time to winnow down to this idea of something that was hopefully just really consumable, and I like the ubiquity of it.
The idea is, and it's funny that we haven't actually talked about any of the specific noticings, I'm realizing this now, is, you know, people think, well, I need to go to a scenic overlook to be inspired, or I need to go out in the ocean or something like that. And the idea is not really, it's all around you.
We're just blind to what's around us. And I don't know, I mean, I think that felt to me very accessible because anybody can do that. Any creative can do that. Anybody who's sit, even if you're like a shut in, if you're an author who doesn't want to leave at all, then there's things around that you can notice the, you know, the wood grain in your table.
You can notice the way that the clock ticks very loudly and you hadn't noticed it before. Those are all things that can be drawn, that inspiration can be drawn from,
Matty: There was, there was one other thing I wanted to talk about, and then I'm going to mention a couple of, art of noticing titles, because I do want to give people a little flavor for the kinds of things that you share there.
The Power of Stepping Back
Matty: But one of the things you had mentioned was this idea that you had taken a sabbatical, or whatever the non-dramatic term is that, one would want to use to that for, you know, five years, and it sounds as if by doing that you were able to step back and get that, a different perspective on your career that maybe took you in a different direction.
And there may be people who say, I'm sorry, I'm not going to be able to take five years off, but do you feel like there's a way that people can experience the benefit of what you learned in your sabbatical, in a way that's practical for, maybe a greater majority of writers?
Johnny: Yeah, sure. I mean, if, let me first just knock down the, I realized that I didn't give you much to work with, but let me just knock down sabbatical because it sounds like I, it sounds like a rich person thing to like, I'm going to go travel the world. It was just that I didn't want to do anything involved with writing other than writing.
And I stopped doing all the public-facing stuff. So I was still writing books, but I was, that was all I was doing. And I think that when I came up out of that and I said, okay, now I need to, now I want to. Sell these books because by the way, and don't let me lose the track here, is I realized that for me, the art is not just storytelling for me. The art is everything around it. It's communicating with people It's building kind of a world and curiosity. It's building a brand a visual and spoken and articulated brand is very interesting to me. That's part of my art.
Moving the needle to a different track
Johnny: But for me, this process, hey, I'm going to give you, I'm going to give you an odd answer, so let's see what you think about this. Is, I think I've grown very introspective. I don't know that I always was, but I think I'm very curious about why I think the ways that I do and why I'm doing what I'm doing.
And I've got this metaphor that I've kind of developed for those of you who are into vinyl or have, you know, are old enough to remember when records were all there was, the idea of, if you wanted to skip to a different song, you picked up the needle and you put it down in a new place.
And I think that so many of us go through life just playing the same track and you're just letting it play forward and I think every once in a while I think of that as a reset. It might not be a perfect metaphor. So I see this with my kids. So my kids are almost 16 and 19 and they're changing so fast that the only way that I can kind of like stay current with them in terms of this is the person I'm relating with now, rather than this is the person that I used to be relating with, and I'm still hanging on to that old image, is that metaphor of like, I'm going to disconnect from where I am right now, scramble, scratch everything, and I think of this as like lifting up the needle and putting it back down to where they actually are today.
So with my kids, it's like, Oh! Okay, I shouldn't be treating my daughter like she's 12 anymore because now she's almost 16 and I get to know that new person and I think I do that with a lot. I think I've developed a habit of trying to pick up the needle, trying to disconnect from what is currently happening, and then question my own assumptions.
And when I do that, then I find, oh, there's no reason to do what I'm doing. Or, why am I doing that? That used to be something that I did back when this was true, but that's no longer true, but out of momentum, I did that. So, my actual specific advice, which I think is a little weird for this, is, I meditate, and I spend a lot of time trying to be quiet. I take a lot of walks, I do spend a lot of time thinking, it's metacognition, it's thinking about thinking, I want to understand the ways that I think, the reasons that I do what I do, and not just do anything just because it's always been done, and I think if you do that, then you start to say, so I'll give you an example.
So I was doing a lot of stuff that was author-facing once I got back into this, in addition to the "Art of Noticing" podcast, and it's a lot of work, and that's fine, but there was this moment where I said, "Wait a minute. I'm not going to do another seminar. I'm not going to hold a boot camp. I'm not going to sell. I'm not going to write more nonfiction books for authors. Why do I feel that this is something I need to do?" Because by the way, the parts that I let go of, I wasn't enjoying doing. So why would I do that? But it was a genuine epiphany. It was like, "Oh my god, how did I not notice that there's no purpose to this?"
Oh, by the way, it also wasn't effective. So it also wasn't growing. So why was I doing it? But I think that we have all sorts of things like that in our creative careers, where we're either doing something because somebody told us once, or because we did it yesterday, or because we don't want to do it again.
We think that it looks like quitting if we stop it, or we think we'll be criticized if we do something weird. And I think if you try to just wipe the slate clean as much as you can and think about your own thought process from as objective a standpoint as you can, I think that's the key.
Matty: I love that. And it's a message that I love hearing myself because I'm a very organized person. I spent many, many years in the corporate world as a project manager. And so I have everything in a list and I try to be very intentional about, you know, when I get up, I get my tea, I sit down at the computer, I open up my list and I try to be very intentional about saying, "Okay, what has bubbled to the top of the list is, update my BookBub ads. Do I really want to be doing that? Is that how I want to be spending my time? Hey, do I even want to be selling BookBub ads?" And so my attempt to be very intentional about it, but it's very difficult because it's super easy to just get sucked into that, "BookBub ads has bubbled to the top of the list, that's what I'm going to be doing this morning."
And I really like that idea of stepping back and noticing other things, as a way of not letting yourself get sucked into that rut. Yeah, please.
Johnny: I think that we tend to have a to-do list mentality that says, this is on my list, so I'm going to do it. And what I kind of like to do, and I learned this mentality from some Tony Robbins thing that I listened to years and years ago, and it was the idea of starting with your outcome. So for instance, BookBub ads.
So by the way, a lot of times for me, that sort of thing is procrastination. I'm like, well, this, I can just do this, and I don't have to come up with a story. Right. Which is way harder, but sometimes it's like, you genuinely want to do it, but what you're trying to do is, I guess, sell more books, but I would really say just grow.
Like, get it as vague as you can. What do I want to do? I want to grow. I want to, in whatever way that means to you. And then once you know where you're trying to go with a given set of to-dos, to then go back and say, okay, what's the best way to grow? And sometimes it's, do your BookBub ads.
But sometimes you might go, well, wait a minute. No, there's a much better way to do it that I've completely forgotten about. So I kind of like that thinking as well.
Matty: Yeah, absolutely.
The art of noticing
Matty: And I'm glad we had that conversation because I was thinking, I really can't call this episode "The Art of Noticing" anymore. And when you said, moving the needle to a different track,
Johnny: There you go. Okay. Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. I was like, you had me on to talk about the art of noticing and look where I'm going.
Matty: Oh, I think this is great, not getting stuck in the rut of what the assigned topic was, I think is perfect. So I do want to give you a chance to just share an example of the kind of things you talk about on the podcast. And I came up with some topics.
So, one that I really enjoyed was the "sticks and vines are good enough." Do you remember what the background of that one was?
Johnny: Yeah, I do. So, this was during a sequence where we went for Thanksgiving break. We usually take just a small local car trip with another family and we were out in South Texas. And, I was just driving down the road and there were, and we've all seen this, by the way. If somebody's listening to this and is like, well, that's obvious, that's the point.
The point is that they're obvious. So I noticed that instead of fence posts, that a lot of the people that had long fence runs just used random hunks of wood or big thick vines. And to me, that lesson spoke of—so that's the noticing. The noticing is, oh, they're not fence posts, they're whatever. Which functionally, like, who cares?
Because when you have that big of a fence front, unless you have really aggressive animals, they just need a barrier. So who cares? And the idea, if I remember right, the episode, I tried to draw two to three creative lessons that could apply directly to writing. And they're probably things like, consider options you haven't considered before, in terms of your creativity.
Don't feel that you need to do things because they're the quote unquote right way to do them. So, it's kind of the picking up the needle thing. Like, why are you, why do you think you need to use fence posts? Why do you think, so, not to pick on you because I don't think there's anything wrong with it, but why do you think you need to use BookBub ads?
You know, there may be other more creative ways to do it. There may be ways that would work better there may be ways that save you money or require less management, but also having unconventional characters.
I know that I did one on when it was Halloween and I noticed that. So the last Halloween was 2023. And if you go back, you know, just three years from that, it was 2020. And our neighborhood did do Halloween, but they did 'em at a distance. They were throwing candy to the kids or something like that. And there weren't a lot of people. And so by 2023 I know it was like, oh, I just noticed Halloween is back.
I'm in one of those neighborhoods where like, everybody drives to, so it's like Mardi Gras, and you can't get through the crowds, but I noticed that it had diminished quite a bit because of COVID, and I noticed that this year it's back, and so the lesson there was the resilience of traditions and routines that give people a sense of comfort, and I believe that one of the lessons that I pulled out of that one was about imbuing that, imbuing characters with that attribute, because you'll see a lot of times people who are in dire straits, either financially or socially or whatever, they have strong community ties or family ties or spiritual beliefs or rituals that they do.
And they cling maybe a little more tightly to those things than people who don't have to worry about anything. And so taking characters and saying, well, what if you gave them, there was another one about superstitions and those sorts of things, I think, make characters pop in a way that we don't normally think of.
Matty: Well, this was so much fun. This is one of the most wide-ranging conversations I've had, and certainly one of the most inspirational, so thank you for being willing to entertain my wide-ranging questions.
Johnny: Well, the readers didn't hear our preamble, which was, I don't prepare, I just talk off the cuff. So this is what happens when I talk off the cuff.
Matty: I count on that, I count on that. So, Johnny, thank you so much. This has been so much fun, and please let everyone know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you are doing online.
Johnny: I have finally gotten my head together and just put it all in one place. And it's just johnnybtruant.com. Everything you would care about is there.
Matty: Cool. Thank you so much.
Johnny: Thanks.
