Quarterly Author Update: October 2024

Book sales, next projects, and a blog update

This is the first in a series I’m starting where I share updates on how my career as an author is going. Maybe at some point I’ll make this more frequent, but for now, quarterly seems like a good cadence.

In it I’ll cover how my existing book(s) are selling, what new book projects I’m working on, and anything else that seems relevant.

Agenda for today:

1. Crypto Confidential Update

2. Sci-Fi Novel Update

3. Nonfiction Book 2 Update

4. Other book projects

5. Blog update

Crypto Confidential Update

Launch Recap

Crypto Confidential launched on July 9th, almost exactly three months ago.

This was honestly an incredibly surreal experience. Aside from seeing the flood of people sharing it on social media, I also got to go on ABC News, Bloomberg, Motley Fool, got a glowing review in Forbes, and it even got a Kirkus Star.

The launch was exhausting. I started planning parts of it last year, but it really ramped up in the three months leading up to publication. I was doing podcast interviews almost every day, I sent out nearly 200 advance copies to people I knew who I thought might enjoy it, I was writing the launch posts, I knew it was going to be a lot of work but I didn’t expect just how much or how draining it would be.

While I’m not uncomfortable with marketing, it’s less energizing of work for me than writing, and throughout the launch period I had a pretty overwhelming desire to get back to writing. But, you obviously can’t just write. You gotta get these things out there too.

Books Sales

So how have sales been?

Direct US Sales: 2,303
Copies sent to retailers: 10,678
UK & Commonwealth Sales: Unknown

This is an “okay” result so far. It’s not as high as I had hoped, but it’s also not bad. It’s better than probably 90% of nonfiction books, but also feels low given my audience size.

Scribe has some great data on this, where they say the average nonfiction book sells 3,000 copies in its lifetime, and they aim to sell 1,000 in the first three months. So I’m well ahead of that! But, again, I was still aiming to have sold more by now.

I think the sales are slower because people aren’t very interested in a crypto-mania book right now. Crypto still feels dead to most outsiders, we’re not in a fervor where people are gambling on NFTs and shitcoins, and when so few people are trying to understand what’s going on in a crypto bubble there just isn’t that compelling of a reason to pick the book up.

Which is fine! I very intentionally wrote it so that it could be relevant in a few years, or even a decade, by focusing on the core aspects that wouldn’t change and by telling more of a human psychology story than a “what is crypto” story.

So I’m perfectly happy to wait until there is more general interest in the topic, and expect the sales to move somewhat cyclically with the crypto market. If this book existed in late 2020 or early 2021 when I and my friends were trying to figure this world out, we would have devoured it.

Earnings

When Portfolio purchased the book, they gave me a $275,000 advance. That advance gets split into four equal checks that get sent at certain checkpoints:

1. When we signed the deal (October 2022)

2. When I turned in the final manuscript (October 2023)

3. When the book published (July 2024)

4. A year after publication (July 2025)

So since I’ve received three of the checks I’ve earned about $175,000 from the book so far.

My agent’s cut was my only meaningful cost. I didn’t hire anyone to help with marketing the launch, didn’t hire extra editing help, didn’t spend anything on advertising, so there are really no other costs to include here.

I’ll start getting royalty checks when (and if) the book sells enough copies to “earn out” that advance. I earn 15-25% of each sale depending on whether it’s hardcover, kindle, or audiobook, and obviously those are all priced differently, so I need to sell somewhere around 70,000 to 80,000 copies before my advance is paid off and I start earning royalty checks.

What’s Next

One challenge we ran into with marketing was how little interest there was from podcasts and news outlets to touch this topic. I think crypto still has a bad taste in many people’s mouths, so I’m happy to wait until the sentiment has changed a little bit to try pitching those outlets again.

When the next mania happens, I plan to do another round of outreach to podcasts and media and another round of promotion and I think it will be a much easier sell at that point because so many more people will be interested in this kind of story.

Plus, it will have all the existing reviews and coverage to support it.

In the meantime I’m letting it spread organically, and it’s been fun to see it pop up around the world, so please keep sending me pictures of it in book stores or your reactions after reading it.

Aside from that, if you are a podcaster, influencer, blogger, have a newsletter, anything else, and want to chat about the book, shoot me an email (nateliason@gmail.com)! I’m still doing a podcast or two per week and would love to talk.

I should also mention before I move on that I learned a TON about writing while working on Crypto Confidential and put it all into this post, which I highly recommend reading.

And if you haven’t picked up the book yet, grab a copy! The audiobook is particularly good.

Sci-Fi Novel Update

Current Status: First Draft Done, Editing Second Draft

Some of you know that I started working on a sci-fi novel last year. Two things came together in a somewhat unexpected way that inspired me to take it on:

First, I want to do some kind of book based on this idea of “Leaving the Church of Science” and “A Map is Not a Blueprint.” But as I started working on a nonfiction book based on it, I felt like it was a little too nerdy and philosophical to have widespread appeal. Authors like Wendell Berry and John Gray who touch on similar themes are phenomenal and I love their work, but they’re not exactly household names.

Second, I realized while writing Crypto Confidential just how much fun writing a narrative could be. I had to study fiction writing extensively to learn how to make the book exciting, and in the process, decided it might be fun to try to write a novel.

So I hustled through a first draft last December and January, then worked on it on and off through the first half of this year while finishing and launching Crypto Confidential.

By August I had a draft I was pretty happy with, and I sent it to my agent to see if he thought we could shop it to publishers… and he basically said no. Not necessarily because of the writing, but moreso because the story wasn’t differentiated enough to be a compelling pitch.

So the options were to self-publish it, or start over and try again. I decided to try again because I felt like his feedback was valid, and I already knew a more interesting story I could tell drawing on some of the main themes. I’ve also gotten much better at fiction writing in the last year, so it’s not a complete waste to scrap the first draft.

Anyway, all that inspired the One Month Draft challenge, which I finished a few weeks ago.

Now I’m working through a second draft, and sharing pieces of it with some close friends for initial feedback as I go. I hope to have the second draft done by the end of October, at which point the story should be mostly set. Then I’ll do a prose draft, then I’ll send it to my agent again, hopefully by Thanksgiving.

This is roughly how I think about book drafts to make sure I don’t waste time on lower-level details before higher-level pieces have been worked out:

• Draft 1: Get it out of your head

• Draft 2: Nail the Story / Information

• Draft 3: Enhance the prose

• Draft 4: Final polish

If he likes it and we can shop it, then I suspect we’ll send it to publishers sometime in January. If he doesn’t like it, or if publishers aren’t interested, or if publishers are interested but the offers are for less than $100k (more on why that number here), I’ll self publish it.

From drafting two novels now, though, I’m certain I want fiction and nonfiction to be parts of my author career. It’s extremely fun to get to play and learn in both worlds.

Nonfiction Book 2 Update

Current Status: Outlining & Pitching

The next nonfiction book is going to be about learning, specifically teaching yourself new skills in a quick but rigorous way as I alluded to last week.

It’s a topic I’m extremely passionate about, and maybe this should have been my first book given the past topics on this blog. I’ve talked about it a ton over the years and I think I’m somewhat known for diving into new things and figuring them out quickly (for better or worse).

I’ve been fortunate to get to teach myself marketing, sales, programming, writing, and bits of entrepreneurship, so I’ll draw on those experiences and stories for the book, along with stories from other people in disciplines I’m less familiar with as appropriate.

It’ll be research supported, but certainly not a “studies say that blah blah blah” kind of book. The tone & style will be closer to a book like Antifragile, but 50% less douchey.

I have an outline done for it that I’m very excited about, and I sent it to my agent last week. He really liked it and had a few suggestions, so I’m implementing those tweaks this week, sending it back to him, and then we’ll present it to Portfolio.

Ideally I’d like to work with Portfolio again. They were phenomenal, an absolutely world class team who knows this space well (also talked about that here). But if they aren’t interested or if their offer is too low then we’ll shop it around to other publishers or I’ll self-pub it.

Other Book Projects

I also have a number of other ideas waiting in the wings.

I’m 90% sure I know what novel I’ll do after the sci-fi one, though it’s not a sequel and it’s not sci-fi so if I happen to get a juicy multi-book deal from a sci-fi publisher I might have to shelve it for a bit.

I’m about equally confident I know what the next nonfiction book would be too, and it would be a direct sequel to this learning one, focused on getting even better at the skills you’ve already committed to. I wanted to pack it all into one book but the outline ended up being 50+ chapters long and would have ended up being a Robert Greene length tome so splitting it in two just made more sense.

But I’m obviously not putting more than passing thoughts into them for now. Plenty of book work on my plate as it is.

The Blog

Over the last two years while I was working on Crypto Confidential I dramatically de-prioritized the blog.

I don’t entirely regret it. I needed the space to learn this completely new style of writing, and I needed to learn how to write at this volume and cadence on a weekly basis.

But now that I’m fully on this writing career train, and I have much more of a grasp on “how to write a book,” I’m back. I’m recommitting to my weekly posts, I want to get my book notes running again, and I plan to find other ways to enhance what I’m doing here and on my original site.

No other meaningful details there yet, but, it feels good to be writing posts again. I missed you. Thanks for joining for the ride.