Business expert Joe Solari has been a boon to countless indie authors, applying business-first advice to help skyrocket careers long before he was named managing director of Author Nation. His stout guidance can be found on podcasts, in his course on author careers and business, and in published articles. Now, he’s head of the organization that, later this month, will host the answer to the 20Books Vegas conference, which held its final event in 2023. Author Nation, like 20Books Vegas, is set to be the largest indie author conference in the world—but it shouldn’t be the only lens through which Joe is viewed. His expertise is business, and his venue is the author sphere.
Open for Business
Joe, surprisingly, didn’t come up in the world of indie authors. He started his career in industrial water treatment, a family business. “If you went back in time to 2006 and asked me what I’d be doing in 2024, I would have said, ‘Selling industrial water equipment,’” he says. He sold the business in 2008, but he credits it with getting him into the entrepreneur mindset.
Around that time, Joe went to business school, which opened up his mind to opportunity, and ventured into an analytics start-up company around 2014. There, he raised nearly $21 million from investors in eighteen months. Meanwhile, Joe’s wife, Suze, had written and self-published her first book.
Her venture into the world of publishing kick-started another time of transformation. When Joe noticed Suze was having trouble selling her books, he logged into her KDP account and saw she’d made nearly $4,000 on a nonfiction book about jeans and T-shirts. The realization sparked his interest in the author world and in the business side of publishing and selling books. He decided to write his own book, on business—yet when it hit shelves, only twelve people bought it. This, again, only deepened his interest in entrepreneurship and creativity. Around this time, Craig Martelle, one of the founding members of the writing community 20BooksTo50K®, asked him to attend 20Books Vegas.
Lasting a week in November, 20Books Vegas brought nearly two thousand indie authors to Las Vegas and offered hundreds of hours of lessons and presentations designed to take their writing to the next level. What Joe found there was magic: a group of people coming together with the same vision to write good books and sell them as a career. Joe saw what was happening with content creators and fiction writers, and despite believing they were operating in lateral spheres, he realized authors were creating iconic pop culture.
“People at the show would go on to create Marvel-level stuff,” he says.
Joe wanted a part of that, and he made it his purpose to turn his business acumen into actionable advice for authors. At first, he started teaching authors about running a business, and as time went on, he went beyond the basics and crafted an entire business empire around writing and creating. The more he became involved in the publishing community, the more Joe saw the work as not just important but vital. He realized indie authors were content creators, and they were setting the tone of the industry, getting closer to their fans in a way never done before.
Models for Success
Joe saw eliminating friction as the one thing that would help craft a successful indie author business. “I want to get rid of all the friction and get as close to the customer as possible,” he says.
He hopes Author Nation will be the answer to that—and help him continue to craft his legacy within the industry.
When asked about what he hopes to bring to authors, Joe answers, “Inspiration in the face of uncertainty.” He continues, “With collaboration and [by] working together, we can define the future. As a community, we can build a group around the show [Author Nation], where we don’t care what people think because we’re working with the customer.”
Asked about things indie authors need to consider in order to grow, Joe says the answer has been built into Author Nation as a model for success. Author Nation should teach authors about building business systems, he says. The Signing Store, a direct-sales store that allows authors to collect their customers’ information and streamline the delivery of print books to the show, is one example. The business model creates more qualified readers who are willing to spend more money; thus the authors make more money, and the show makes more money.
In order to fundamentally change the industry, he believes you must build with the big picture in mind and for the long haul. As a result, Joe has built several systems into Author Nation from its inception. Suze runs the sponsorship for Author Nation, which helps fund it and contributes to its success. Chelle Honiker, as the head of programming for Author Nation, built out a team to vet and select speakers from nearly four hundred-plus submissions, with a vision to create robust programming and deviate from the usual names and faces speaking to the industry. Chelle Honiker is also the publisher of IAM. Joe crafted a professional conduct committee, led by Shannon Humphrey, to foster a safe environment where people can represent their brand and community. And Mandy Stephens heads the Readers and Authors Vegas Event (RAVE), an event for authors to sell their books to readers, which started at 20Books Vegas but will be directly integrated with the show for the first time at Author Nation.
With the new event, Joe also saw opportunities for authors to earn their way to the show based on their merits and creativity by partnering with Story Wars, and to build a community outside of major platforms like Facebook. “The long-term is better than the short term—and having some barriers to entry is a good thing,” he says. “We should be trying to eat our own cooking.”
Joe’s experience and influence is evident from the changes made to 20Books Vegas, and even before it has opened its doors for the first time, Author Nation seems to allow the spirit of the original show to live on in a new skin, with a newer, fuller focus.
A Solid Foundation
Whether the conversation is a groundbreaking author conference with thousands of attendees or a one-on-one business strategy session with an author, Joe’s business know-how and love for the industry shines through in spades. “One of my favorite interactions with authors is when they realize it’s not about the money. Sure, we achieved our financial goals, but that doesn’t necessarily fill the holes. It’s about doing what nobody else has done before,” he says.
And for both ends of the spectrum, Joe believes the focus should be the same: on the foundation of success for an author and the value proposition of the reader-writer relationship. It's a keystone, and all money is derived from the relationship.
“If we always keep this in mind, you can identify friction and remove it,” he says. “That relationship can move, and it can survive in a changing ecosystem. Are your decisions supporting that relationship?”
Joe’s vision for Author Nation not only combines his love for good business and his willingness to adapt but also his inquisitive nature about what could be. He believes authors can be movers and shakers in a rapidly growing industry, pivoting as necessary to shape the landscape entirely—just as Author Nation hopes to do.
