From Blogger to Book Author

How Nat Eliason Honed His Storytelling Skills

I’m going to be brutally honest with you here, because I’ve said this to his face, and he took it for the compliment it was…

When I cracked the spine on my copy of

Nat Eliason

’s debut sci-fi thriller, Husk, I was surprised by how much the storytelling didn’t suck.

“Thank you,” he laughed on our recent Zoom call. “No, that’s a great compliment. That’s… I think that’s one of the hardest walls I’ve had to break through with my existing audience.”

A long-time entrepreneur with more than a decade spent writing about everything from course-creation to crypto, most who knew his name before Husk, would have known him for that.

“They're like, Oh, okay, Nat started writing fiction a year and a half ago,” he grinned. “Like, there's no way this is actually good.”

But it is.

Over the last few years, he’s made the transition from blogger to full-time book author, and he’s an interesting case, because he’s…

• Landed a six-figure advance for his first book

• Published both fiction and non-fiction books

• Done both traditional, and self-publishing

So I caught up with him recently to chat about all of it, and see what other authors can learn.

Books Are A Different Beast

Eliason is one of these entrepreneurs who always seems to be tinkering on the leading edge of what’s popular.

He was early to SEO, and ran a successful agency doing that. He’s sold hundreds of thousands of dollars in courses, traded crypto, and much else. 

There is even talk of a kegel training app that still kicks off a thousand bucks a month or so in passive income.

But in the last few years, his priorities have shifted.

“Internet money can be fast and crazy and come out of nowhere,” he told me. “But then it dies just as quickly.”

Books, he says, are essentially the opposite, if done well.

In a recent interview with Eric Jorgenson, he put it this way:

“There’s almost no other type of entrepreneurship where you can sit alone in a room for six months and build a product that you can then independently sell, without creating any sort of company under you, and you can sell it for the next fifty years with no modifications to the product.”

This is one of the things that intrigues me about him as an author.

He respects the process, yes. But he doesn’t treat books like a sacred cow. He is, first and foremost, a product guy. And that’s something I think aspiring authors need a little bit more of.

“For the most part, if you're writing online, it's to sell something else,” he said to me. “I've written online for a long time and used that to make money doing other things. But I'd never had the writing itself be the main money maker.”

It’s a hard thing to do, he admits. 

There aren’t many career authors out there – certainly not many making enough to support two kids with a third on the way.

“At some point you’ve gotta stop chasing the quick wins,” he said, “[and ask yourself] what’s the thing that can actually keep compounding over the long term?”

Landing A Six-Figure Book Deal

In 2022, some crypto wins left him with the runway he needed to consider that longer term question.

“Not completely life changing money,” he said. “But enough I could really focus on something for a few years and not need it to make money right away.”

Runway that he then extended by landing a $275k advance from Portfolio Books (an imprint of Penguin Random House) for his first-ever title, Crypto Confidential.

Think The Big Short, but for crypto; it was a non-fiction tell-all. “[An] insider's account of the hyperactive, hyper-speculative, hyper-addictive, nearly unregulated, completely insane world being built on the blockchain,” to borrow from Amazon.

The biggest factor in landing that deal?

“Email list,” he said without hesitation. “It's such a boring answer. But it's like, if you have a big enough email list, a book deal will find you.”

How big is big enough?

“Ten thousand is sort of the floor where a publisher will start taking you seriously,” he said. “And then every number above that is better. 

“That's just where they see so many of their nonfiction sales come from. If you have an audience who is already reading your stuff, and who you could sell a book to, then that's good enough – as long as you have a marketable idea to pitch.”

Respect. Months before signing with Penguin, the man called his shot

A Storyteller Takes Shape

That first book is where we start to see the eventual fiction writer emerge. He went in thinking that the hardest part would be explaining crypto markets in a way the average reader could grasp. 

It turned out to be the opposite.

“Explaining the crypto concepts actually ended up being pretty easy,” he said “Telling an exciting story... That was really hard.”

He became obsessed.

As we talked on Zoom, he panned the camera to show me a wall of bookshelves running the length of his office, the top row filled with titles on storytelling and writing.

He mentioned the classics – like Stephen King’s memoir, On Writing – as well as others I hadn’t heard of. Textbooks like Conflict & Suspense, and Characters & Viewpoint (written by Orson Scott Card).

All of them had rows of bright green stickies running up the length of the face.

“Reading tons of books like this,” he said. “And trying to figure out, what parts am I good at? What parts am I bad at? How do I get better? And what types of exercises can I do to try and hone those pieces?”

Honing The Craft

The deeper he got into the storytelling side of things, the more alluring fiction became.

“I'm sort of tired of explaining things,” he said. “And to some extent, I don't think there's that much value in writing an explainer-type book.”

It would also be freeing. 

No need to spend hours hunting down precise quotes or details of what supposedly happened, when.

In a world of his own making, he’d be free to spend more time on the part he found most satisfying.

Husk is his first serious foray in that direction – a post-apocalyptic sci-fi thriller, set in a world where humans have achieved immortality in a digital paradise called Meru. But dangers lurk in the real world, and on the day he’s set to transfer, one of the technicians learns that Meru may not be what it appears.

So what did he actually do to make it such a page-turner?

“It's like anything else,” he said. “You have to do it a lot.” 

There are no shortcuts in the world of storytelling. But a few things stood out as particularly helpful.

Occasional copywork, yes. 

“That can be very helpful,” he said.

“It’s interesting too, because you start picking up the style of the work you're [copying] so quickly that it can really quickly pull your writing in different directions. So you can be strategic about it.”

A morning spent copying a few pages of Red Rising will lead you to very different places in your own writing that day than if you copied, say, a few pages of Steinbeck’s East of Eden.

“But honestly, I didn’t do a ton of it,” he said. “What I consistently find the most helpful is editing other people's writing, and reading okay books.”

The word okay is the key operator there.

“Stephen King actually talks about this in On Writing,” he said. “Read the greats; Read the best books that are coming out. But also read the bad ones, because the bad ones will motivate you.”

He reads and tries to identify what he doesn’t like, or what he thinks isn’t good, then tries to identify those things in his own writing.

“The downside of that is, it's very hard to turn that part of my brain off now,” he laughed. Watching Netflix, he says he’ll constantly catch his internal dialogue commenting on which plot points feel forced, or what dialogue seems unbelievable.

“But it’s super useful because then, when I read my own stuff, I spot it a lot easier.”

Finally, we need to talk about AI. Not so much for writing, but for editing.

“A lot of the writing world just fucking hates that this is true,” he says. “But AI is becoming a really good editor.”

“Not a good implementor. But a good identifier of problems.”

In recent months, he’s started feeding individual chapters, or even whole book drafts into some of the higher-tier models, and asking for feedback.

“It teaches you a lot about your writing,” he said.

Recently, he finished the first draft of a novella that takes place in the same universe as Husk. He dropped it in a markdown file and fed it to Opus via Claude Code’s desktop interface.

“It was like, In these couple of paragraphs, where this one character is talking, the tone changes slightly, and it feels a little bit out of place.” he said “And given the subject matter, it feels like you're inserting your own opinion instead of the character talking.”

He paused for a second.

“I looked at it, and I was like, you're fucking right. That's exactly what I did there.”

This is a relatively new development. Even three to six months ago, the tools weren’t what they are now, and it’s impacting the way he interacts with human editors.

“One of the editors I sent Husk to came back with surprisingly few edits,” he said. “His feedback was helpful, but Claude had captured a lot of it, plus all this other stuff that he didn't catch.”

Does that mean humans are obsolete? Hardly.

“You have to have taste,” he said. “You have to be able to look at it and say, No, that's a stylistic choice, or No, that's just wrong…[But] editors are going to need to augment their workflow with it, because every writer who's technologically inclined is probably going to be doing both.

He’s now using Claude for other book-related tasks

What’s Next

I’m bullish on Nat as a fiction author. 

Not just because he’s a good story-teller, or because of the audience he’s built.

I’m bullish because of the way he approaches the work.

The day after Husk was finished, he started the novella. The day after he turned in the novella, and started Husk 2. That will get turned in later this year, and I have no doubt that the next day, he’ll be working on something else.

He’s focused on the long term, and I think that’s the biggest takeaway for other authors.

“If you think about what fiction series you read. You almost never buy the first book when it comes out,” he said. “You hear about it after book two, three, four, five. And then you're like, Oh, cool. Okay, now, I should check this out. 

“And so that's what I'm expecting to happen here. I'll grow the connections and grow the marketing with each book, so that by book three it can be a much bigger”

“Until then the main focus is like, write some good fucking books.”

---

You can find Husk on Amazon, or order signed copies via Nat’s personal website. You can also follow Nat on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram

Ethan Brooks is the owner of The Austin Business Review. He tells the stories of Austin’s most interesting founders.