[DIGEST] My bet...

Your weekly stackable roundup

May 04, 2024

Hi friends,

My bet as a creative has always been pretty simple:

I am not lucky enough to make one thing and make it blow up and become massively successful. I am good enough, though, to make many different things and have a few of them make a splash based on the sheer volume of my material alone.

I know other creatives who have doubled down on one single project, or universe, and ridden it until the project paid off. In some cases, it has, but in many more cases, well, they end up working for years on a project that didn't move their career forward.

My bet is the opposite of theirs. I believe that with enough projects out in the public zeitgeist, some are bound to catch fire. Even if I don't know which ones will ignite, I know the odds are on my side if I keep making new things. 

Additionally, I am smart enough to figure out how to bring people to my work and determined enough to keep at it even when everybody else gives up.

My job, then, has always been to make the most high-quality things possible in as short an amount of time as I could reasonably do so to see which ones resonate while not spending too much time or resources on any one project, knowing that it will likely not catch fire.

By assuming nothing will catch fire, I try to spend the least amount of time and resources on anything, making it easier to break even if something fizzles.

This does not mean I cheap out on projects. It means that I focus on creating the best product possible on a fixed budget.

This might be writing a 30,000-word novel instead of a 90,000-word one because it can be written in a third of the time and cost significantly less to edit, or it might mean building a website on the back of another site until it shows revenue.

The goal is always, "how do I create a great product with limited time and resources?"

When a project becomes a success, I focus more attention and resources on it moving forward.

Otherwise, my job has always been to put as many projects into the world as possible without risking too much on any one bet until they start paying off.

Where I end up spending money is on improving the overall chances of all my projects instead of any single one in particular.

I’ve made 30 “publishing bets” in my career, not counting blogs, the best of which were condensed into my non-fiction books.

Of those bets, only seven have survived beyond one book (Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter, The Godsverse Chronicles, Cthulhu is Hard to Spell, The Obsidian Spindle Saga, The Complete Creative, Book Sales Supercharged Dragon Strife).

Aside from Dragon Strife, which I ended after two launches and five books, the other six have kept me in business for over a decade.

They all taught me something, but few have been financially beneficial in any meaningful way beyond getting me to the next launch (which isn’t nothing, by any means).

So, that’s dozens of publishing bets, accounting for 3.38 million words and over 1,000 pages of comics, to find a handful that have kept me going for all this time.

The others did enough work to keep me going, break even, and maybe even make a little profit, but only a handful have been able to sustain me.

20% of my catalog has accounted for 80%+ of my earnings.

This is why the whole debate about “Do people buy books” is nonsense.

Even in an author’s personal catalog, only about 20% of the books are doing work for them. How can we expect more from publishers?

We make bets and hope enough of them pay off.

Publishing is a war of attrition. Breaking even and living to fight another day is a good outcome.

Usually it’s all we can hope for from a project.

I’ve made over a million dollars in my entrepreneurial pursuits since I went into business for myself in 2015, and most of it came from very few avenues. In the end, if nothing else, I have a career full of projects to look back on with pride.

It's not sexy or glamorous.

However, a career full of projects that break even, punctuated once in a while with hits, isn't a bad way to build a career.

If you want to share how you are doing this week, then there are two ways to interact with this post.

1 - If you don’t want to say anything, or bristle at identifying yourself, then you can reply with this nifty poll.

2 - If you’re feeling very brave, then reply below and tell us how you are doing right now on a scale from 1-5.

Plus, delivered part two of their two part Substack growth breakdown.

The stench of charred flesh filled my nostrils as we made our way down the dirt roads of Hell. Even with my nose plugs, it permeated my mouth and spread deep into my lungs. Coal miners often got black lung from breathing coal dust. I wondered if there was an equivalent for demons working the ambered fires.

Even without the stench, Hell was a bleak place. I thought the stacks of souls were depressing when I first saw them from the streets of Dis, but it was nothing compared to seeing them close up. Thousands of souls layered one on top of each other like a shawarma spit, each crushing the one below it, which was, in kind, flattened by the one above it. On and on like that for hundreds of feet into the air, a wobbling skyscraper of pain and misery.

As we passed, the demons stopped their work to eye our caravan. The dead-eyed souls inside the towers reached out their arms and moaned at us, but there would be no help for them—not today.

“This is miserable,” I said.

“You get used to it,” Charlie said finally. Even though I never asked him a question, he must have seen the pained look on my face.

“How?” I asked, catching the face of a child, no older than twelve, screaming for help, reaching out with its stubby arm, the only appendage not crushed into submission by the souls above it, hoping against hope that maybe I would take pity.

“I mean, what are you going to do? Complain to management?”

“Yeah, man,” Aimee said. “Maybe bring it up with Lucifer. It couldn’t be any worse than this depressing stuff.”

“That’s funny, coming from a human.”

“What does that mean?” she asked, insulted.

“It means you acclimate to terrible situations better than any other being. That’s probably why you’ve survived as a species as long as you have. Think about it. You guys went through two world wars, and now you’re stuck in a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. That is crazy. Any single second you could be blown to oblivion by a thousand nuclear warheads, and yet you still go to school, go to work, eat, screw, and complain, like it’s not bonkers that you live in a world that could be annihilated any second. How is this any different?”

“Because you can see it,” Bob said. “Everywhere.”

All chapters of The Godsverse Chronicles are now free for all subscribers. You can read the whole series from the beginning right here.

You still only get access to a bunch of free books and stories from my back catalog by becoming a paid member. You can start your membership with a 7-day free trial.

JOIN US FOR A FREE VIRTUAL CONFERENCE: Do you have FOMO from missing our Future of Publishing Mastermind? Then I have good news. You can join us virtually from May 22-24 for free and relive the experience with us.

We’ll have tons of speakers talking about how to take advantage of the future of publishing…starting now.

If you want to know where the publishing industry is going in the next 3-5 years, and how to take advantage of it NOW, then The Future of Publishing Virtual Summit is perfect for you.

This is an event curated for forward-thinking, self-starters who want to be at the leading edge of the publishing industry for years to come. Publishing is shifting faster than ever. Do you want to help chart where it's going? 

UPCOMING ARTICLE: Next week, I show you how to comp subscribers from your previous newsletter to your Substack publication.

This is how I got 25,000+ paid subscribers to my Substack in under two weeks. The secret? I comped my whole email list with a free 3-month trial.

I know that’s a sneaky trick to get you to read this far, but I also know there are people writers there with big email lists and have never even thought about bringing them over. So, this is how I did it and why.

I have 20,000 people on my fiction email list, and close to 5,000 on our Writer MBA list. Both those mailing lists had become hyper-focused on promotions and launches, without offering that much value-based content. I wanted to change that and make more posts like these.

Except I was making them…I was just making them here on Substack. On top of that, I was writing specifically for the exact kind of people who were already on our mailing lists. Our best stuff is behind a paywall in our membership, but the next best is made right here.

It made complete sense to bring all of them to Substack (I can’t overstress that these were people who had already opted-in to our lists). Once we made that decision, the question became how could I shower them with love and attention so they got excited to get more emails from me. If you haven’t guessed, I’m a Tundra, so excitement is my superpower.

Here were some things I considered, and how I thought through them.

ROUNDUP: Here are some of my favorite articles of the week.

Business-y:

Publishing-like:

Substack-esque:

Culture-ish:

Lifestyle-oid:

Find anything you loved enough to swoon over or hated enough to make your blood boil? Let me know.

If you like what I’m doing around here and want to check out the archives, you can do that with a 7-day free trial, or simply go straight to being a paid subscriber. You also get access to my YA mystery novel, My Father Didn’t Kill Himself.

They say my father killed himself. I don't think so. He was my best friend. He was my rock. He would never take his own life.No. Somebody killed him. I'm sure of it. I just have to prove it. If I don't, we can't collect on his life insurance. We're already in too much debt. Without that money, we'll lose everything.He would never do that to us. I just know it, and I'll prove it, too, even if I lose everything in the process.

Paid members can access the entire archive of this series from the beginning, along with 650+ exclusive interviews, courses, articles, and more.

If you are not a paid member, you can read everything with a 7-day free trial, or give us a one-time tip.