How to Write for a Living

406: Becoming a world builder (with Nathan Baugh)


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Season 4, episode 6 is here!

Nathan Baugh has wanted to write fantasy his whole life. He just needed a bank account crisis in Spain to finally make him do something about it. These days he has over 100k Substack subscribers, a successful ghostwriting agency, and a novel coming out in a couple of months. We talked about all of it.

What we covered:

- The moment in Spain when the bank account started going in the wrong direction and writing went from something Nathan loved to something he urgently needed to figure out.

- Why fiction writing and newsletter writing share a flaw that almost nobody talks about, and how cutting the beginning of your work tends to fix both.

- Nathan’s take on where self-publishing is headed now that anyone can produce eight books a month with an AI tool.

- What querying agents actually taught him about his first book that he couldn’t have learned any other way.

- The world building advice his editor gave him that sounds almost too simple, but saved him a serious amount of pain.

- Why the most attractive ways to make money from writing are often not the fastest, and what he’d tell someone starting from zero right now.

- What his close rate on new clients tells him about whether his prices are set correctly.

You can find Nathan and his newsletter World Builders on Substack.



This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thedavidmcilroy.substack.com/subscribe
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How to Write for a LivingBy David McIlroy

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