How to survive as a writer in a capitalist dystopia

This article deals with how to live as a writer in a hypercapitalist society. It discusses why late-stage capitalism is particularly tough for creators, how to commodify your work without selling your soul, and presents a possible path forward for creatives to exist in the world. If you are a paid subscriber, I suggest you also read my mindset articles on neutral thinking, balancing art with commerce, and chronic illness to help support the arguments put forth in this article.

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

I have a secret. It is a deep-seated shame in my life.

I desperately want to be one of the cool kids. I want to want to want to be okay with my status in the world, but I can’t stop myself from looking at every cool Substack and saying “I wonder if they would like me”.

No matter the space, whenever I enter somewhere new, I end up desperately seeking the validation of the cool kids.

This is even more shameful because I have spent a big part of my life telling people to go their own way and follow the beat of their own drum.

I try to follow my own advice, but no matter how much I tamp down my imposter syndrome, I can’t stop that 16-year-old “mean girl” in my head telling me that Becky doesn’t like me and Georgie thinks I’m fat.

I am a rebel, dang it. It’s right there in our mission statement at Wannabe Press. The first line is We write for the rebels, and yet, every act of rebellion I make is followed by a deep-seated hope that the cool kids will validate my existence.

I don’t even care if they like me. I just want them to say that I was useful. Even if they used me and spit me out, it would probably be okay. I just want to sit at the end of their table, even if they don’t talk to me.

It is deeply toxic.

So, when took my work and incorporated it into her Book Sales Supercharged series, I found myself saying “Wait, the cool kids want to sit with me? Have I finally made it?”

Even before we became business partners, I knew Monica as one of the foremost thinkers in the publishing industry, and nearly everyone I talk to agrees with that sentiment. I get people all the time who say “You work with Monica? I love her!”

Well, that’s not true. Usually, when I say she’s my partner the reaction I get is “You’re married to Monica Leonelle? I love her!”

And no, we are not married. Monica has a very lovely family. I have a wonderful wife whom I love very much. We live thousands of miles apart from each other. We do work together, though, trying to build Writer MBA into a juggernaut in the indie publishing space.

I can’t lie, though. A lot of that drive to lead the space fulfills that deep-seated need to be a cool kid myself. That desire is so bad that my first instinct is to do work for free if I think somebody is cool just so they’ll like me.

I’m 40 years old and I constantly have to keep my 12-year-old fat kid outcast self in check.

*** Please note that if you are reading this via email, Substack only sent out a partial version and the article will eventually stop without notice. If you want to read the whole 7,000-word article, then go to this website.***

Being in meetings with the top executives in the publishing space and having high-level meetings about how we can work together to move the industry into the future is wild to me after a career spent on the outside desperately seeking enough validation from my peers to be taken seriously.

I feel like I am, for the first time in my life, at the “cool kids” table. I thought it would somehow validate my existence when I was finally taken seriously, but what I’ve learned, above anything else, is that the people I was sitting across from in those meetings were as interested in having their own ideas validated as I was in having mine taken seriously.

It turns out that almost everybody is looking to be validated by somebody, no matter how successful they look from the outside. Realizing that kind of destroyed any notions I ever had that some people just naturally have it together. 

I watch a lot of teen movies because I’m perpetually trapped in 1998, trying desperately to understand my high school self. One of the most interesting shifts in the past 20+ years is watching how the “cool kids” have moved from being portrayed almost exclusively as perfect villains and unsympathetic bullies to often being seen as victims in their own right, forced to put on armor to protect themselves from the same worries that everyone else has in their school.

All they want, at the end of the movie, is for somebody to let them take off the heavy armor and simply exist in the world as a “good” person…but they don’t know how to shed the constant need for their own twisted form of validation.

That is a cold truth of it for the rest of us, too. I don’t think people would give a flying fart about whether the “cool kids” thought their ideas were good if they had some other way to get objective validation that they were, somehow, intrinsically and without question, a good person that deserved to exist.

And that is bonkers because, and if you ignore everything else I ever write please internalize this, you deserve to exist as much as any single human on this planet simply by being born.

Our modern society tries very hard to strip you of that simple fact, but that doesn’t make it any less true. You have as much right to take up space and live a life without fear as any human who has or will ever exist.

Unfortunately, the capitalist nightmare we currently find ourselves caught up in works every moment to convince us that isn’t true. It equates being “good” with having money. The more money a launch makes, the more copies a book sells, and even the more paid subscribers you have on Substack are constantly used by society to judge whether somebody is “good”, and this broken system of judging moral worth dates back to antiquity.

literally uses a checkmark to show who is "verified" by a system that is tied directly to how many paid subscribers you have at any one time. It's a perfect depiction of how capitalism uses money to validate people's existence.

So, in order to prove we are “good”, society tells us that not only do we need to have a good idea and convince people our ideas are good enough to earn their attention, but that we can’t truly be a morally good person unless people spend money on what we have to offer.

Without that commodification of attention, you are judged as lacking true moral worth or, worse in the eyes of society, wasting your time. There is no greater sin in the eyes of today’s society than failing to operate at peak productivity. After all, time is money, right?

If you can sell your idea to people, then then you are good…at least for as long as people keep buying that thing. If not, then you are discarded as irrelevant until you can come up with something that does commodify attention properly.

The problem is that almost no idea is ever “good” for long, and even if it were an unquestionable truth of the universe, a good idea has no bearing on whether you are a good person or deserve to exist (because you do).

That was a crushing thing for me to learn. I always thought that if I just thought about a solution with enough rigor for long enough and could prove my ideas were objectively helpful to people, then maybe I would finally be a good person. When that bubble popped for me, it sent me into a dark place.

It turns out, even if an idea is “good” because it is both objectively and momentarily correct (which how even could you judge whether something is correct when advice needs to be individualized for each person), then it probably won’t be correct for very long.

It may be a week, a month, a year, or even longer, but eventually, market conditions will change as people evolve their habits to incorporate your ideas into their workflow, and your idea’s worth will erode to virtually nothing in the eyes of society at large…

…which forces you back into the grind to create a new idea that people will think is good enough so that society will pay to adopt it and validate that you are still a good person…

…until they deem it worthless and spit you out back into the trauma cycle once again. It’s planned obsolescence on a societal scale.

Still, this is the society we were given, which begs the question of whether it is even possible to put something creative into a world as messed up as the one we’ve built without constantly succumbing to a crippling degree of depression, anxiety, and despair every waking minute of the day? To that, I answer with a resounding maybe.

I started Wannabe Press after my first Kickstarter campaign raised over $5,000. I was not successful as a creative human at the time. That money was easily the most I had ever made on any creative project I had ever launched. Before then, the only money I ever made as a creative came from working on somebody else’s vision.

It didn’t fundamentally change my money situation at that moment, but it absolutely changed my relationship with it for the rest of my career. That one single glimmer of hope that I might not be wasting my life and our money on a fevered dream was everything to me. It showed me I wasn’t an abject failure.

After sending money to the printer and settling all the bills from the campaign, I had just enough seed money to start a new company.

Wannabe Press wasn’t my first company, mind you. I had launched three failed companies before that moment; [Insert Name Here] Productions, RPN Photography, and BNS Media Group.

All miserable failures, every one of them, for different reasons.

[Insert Name Here] Productions failed because my partner and I were at different stages of our lives and could not see eye to eye. RPN Photography failed because I got into a bad car accident and could no longer handle the long, grueling hours on set shooting photos for clients. BNS Media Group failed because I moved across the country, and again my business partners were all on different pages about how much we could devote to the company.

So, this was my fourth creative business venture, and I really needed it to stick. I had already started working in B2B sales and was getting pretty good at slinging phones to corporate clients, but I didn’t want it to be the rest of my life.

Some creatives are great employees. They love working a stable job and then use that stability to make whatever they want. T.S. Eliot was one of those types.

I am not. I barely like taking orders from myself, let alone a boss.

So, I founded Wannabe Press in October 2014 based on a logo I had from a failed comic project I really loved but ended up never getting off the ground beyond an ashcan.

We launched officially in February 2015 when I released My Father Didn’t Kill Himself, The Little Bird and the Little Worm, and Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter on the convention circuit.

I didn’t even have the official Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter print run from China yet. I was still printing books in short runs of 25-50 for shows because I couldn’t wait to get started on building my business.

I figured that after the success of the campaign, it would be smooth sailing for me.

This is when expectations smashed headfirst into reality. It was harder than I ever thought possible, and worse than that, for every dollar I made, I was spending two dollars keeping the company running.

Worse, in June of that year, a couple of weeks after receiving a palette of books and shipping them off to backers, I left my job as a sales manager (making very good money for doing very little) due to irreconcilable differences with my bosses. I always planned on leaving my job, but not for at least another year.

Still, necessity is the mother of invention, so I dove headfirst into building a company from scratch without having a single clue what I was doing.

I had a bit of a runway, but not enough to last more than a couple of months, and I was spending roughly twice what I was making in order to stay in business. In those days, I would joke with my wife that my success was destroying my company.

When you spend $200 to only make $100, you can eat that loss, especially when you have a job. However, when you’re spending $20,000 to make $10,000, especially without a job to supplement those losses, it becomes harder and harder to exist with every sale you make.

Back in those days, I was mostly kept in business because Ingram would constantly mess up my orders and have to send me replacements. So, I would keep getting hundreds of free books to make up for all the mistakes in my orders. I knew that couldn’t last forever, though.

I had completed production on several projects while I was working which kept me in business for the next year, but that backlog was dwindling. I needed something to change quickly to stay in business…

…which was when I met Mike Kennedy from Magnetic Press. He was a friend of my then-agent. He used to be the publisher of Archaia and had just gone out on his own, well before his company was bought by Lion’s Forge, or his massive success with Kickstarter.

Back then, he was just a guy with a brand-new company trying to make it work. We met at San Diego Comic-Con in 2016 to exchange notes, and that is where I saw something that changed my whole life.

You see, Mike printed all of his books exclusively in hardcover. He wasn’t a big publisher like Humanoids, either. He was just a guy who loved books and yet was printing the most beautiful books I had ever seen.

Then, he blew my mind when he said something along the lines of “you know, people think hardcover is way more expensive to produce, but from the right printer it’s really only about $.80 more a book and you can sell it for $10-$15 more.”

My jaw fell to the floor like in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. If I could spend $.80 more and can make $10 more every book, then my spending $1 to make $2 deficit would immediately flip into a profit.

In my life, I am always looking for leveraged opportunities like this, where one well-placed bet can completely change the whole trajectory of your existence.

When I got home from the show I did many hours of research to make sure everything Mike said was correct and would work for my business. I ran all the numbers and poured over spreadsheets to make sure the math worked. I studied data for longer than I ever thought my patience would allow.

I can’t overstate that this was a measured and calculated decision. 

I didn’t just decide to spend a large portion of our life savings without looking at it from every angle. I had been selling both of them for years at that point. They each had their own publishing deals (which fell apart but proved other people saw something in the work they could make money on) and had sold hundreds of copies each. The only problem was they were costing me too much to print to make a profit. If I fixed that one issue, it became very clear that everything else would fall into place.

When I was certain, I went about convincing my wife that we should risk most of our savings on hardcover books for Katrina Hates the Dead and Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter. Eventually, she agreed to support my decision, even though it was a monumental risk since nobody else was doing it.

This one decision changed the entire arc of my life. Having those hardcover books allowed me to stay in business while so many people around me flamed out…

…and everybody told me it was a terrible idea when I went to them for what I thought was near-certain validation that I had finally proven my quality as a good human with good ideas.

After I ran the numbers a dozen ways and convinced my wife that printing in hardcover was the only way to save the business, I figured I should ask some other comic book people if they thought making indie comics in hardcover was a good idea.

Now, mind you, these were professional comic people, launching indie comic books regularly, and they all told me I was an idiot for even considering hardcover.

Even after I showed them the data, they shook me off and told me it would never work. They said things like “People don’t want hardcover comics”, “Nobody would pay $30 for a graphic novel”, and “The industry isn’t ready”.

These were very smart people who looked at the same data I poured over and gave me the 100% wrong advice for me.

Maybe keeping the status quo was the right decision for them, but it was terrible advice for me. These were the “cool kids” of indie comic publishing, and they were simply wrong. If I listened to them, I would have been out of business in six months.

Even all these years later, I still can barely believe the transition to hardcover actually worked to save my business. My gut was right. 

It should have been a great moment of clarity that proved seeking validation from other people was a fool’s errand. Instead, I became even more desperate to get the “cool kids” to admit that my ideas were good and that I was a truly good person worthy of existing.

So, I became the test dummy for the publishing industry.

I told other creators that I didn’t care if I was a shining example or a terrible warning, as long as other people learned something from me that helped them succeed. I was willing to completely destroy my own business just so that people could step over me to get ahead, even if I went broke or died in the process.

I turned myself into a guinea pig for all the wrong reasons. Whenever somebody told me something was a bad idea, or wouldn’t work, or couldn’t work, I almost always decided to give it a try, often at my own expense.

Plenty of times they were right to be skeptical. Often, I even knew it was a terrible idea, yet I tried it anyway. More than once I ran at full speed straight into a brick wall because I desperately wanted people to like me.

I needed their validation, and I suffered for it.

Through that desperation, though, something wonderful happened. I learned what worked for my business faster than the other authors around me. With every successive test, regardless of whether it was a success or a failure, I moved forward faster than before. Over time, I leaped ahead further and quicker than almost anyone around me.

I realized that running tests on my own business gave me more clarity than waiting for somebody else to validate me ever could.

My tests only bore fruit a very small percentage of the time, but even the failures told me what not to do, which ended up being just as important as the ones that worked out.

It turns out you don’t need that many tests to work out in order to become wildly successful. If even one out of every hundred works out, you can stack those positive outcomes on top of each other and turn that little pile into a business that works for you.

I built a successful company despite myself. 

If my constant need for validation didn’t force me to take action, I would have spent years listening to people tell me what didn’t work instead of trying it for myself. By (accidentally) taking my career into my own hands, I learned not only what doesn’t work for me, but why it doesn’t work, which is more precious than gold.

After over a decade in this business I know, at my core, what serves me, whether people validate me or not. Don’t get me wrong, I still want their validation rather desperately, but I now know how to survive without it.

So, if the “cool kids” can’t validate our existence, who can validate us, then?

It’s us.

We have to validate and motivate ourselves. In my book, How to Build Your Creative Career, I wrote this about the dangers of external motivation:

I’ve always believed I would die young. That has always motivated me to create a body of work before I died. I was fueled by anxiety for years because I didn’t think I would be able to create a large enough body of work to matter in the grand scheme of things before I kicked the bucket.

However, in the last year that changed when I completed what I consider a substantial body of work. I finished four enormous series (The Godsverse Chronicles, Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter, Cthulhu is Hard to Spell, and The Obsidian Spindle Saga) that I had been working on for more than a decade. On top of that, I just released my third solo non-fiction work that compiles the remainder of my thoughts on building a business up until this point in my life.

I’m not stopping there, but now that I’ve built a body of work, there is a stillness inside my soul that I’ve only ever seen in older creatives. I’ve always envied the effortless confidence I saw in them and wondered how they were able to take even the worst moments with a grain of salt.

Recently, I realized they were able to weather their storms with grace because they are rooted to the ground by the work they had created. They don’t get swept up into the hurricanes of anxiety whipping around because they have a body of work that anchors them.

It took me 20+ years to build a body of work, but I now believe the secret to creating that stillness in your creative life is to focus on crafting that anchor. Once you are supremely confident in the body of work on which you stand, nothing can unmoor you.

If somebody wants to understand me, they only need to pick up my work and read my thoughts right there on the page. The slings and arrows society throws at me, even when it tries its hardest to knock me down, don’t phase me nearly as much as they once did, because I can always return to the work.

When I have imposter syndrome, I can pull up hundreds of reviews that show I deserve to be here. When I think nobody cares, I open a folder on my desk filled with letters I’ve received over the years telling me how much my work has meant to people. When I need a boost of confidence, I simply turn around and see all the books I’ve created over the years, and it soothes me.

If you want stillness in your own creative life, then find a way to anchor yourself positively to the body of work you have created. If you don’t have a body of work yet, then let that goal be your guiding light.

The beauty of internal motivation is that it is focused on the work itself. I’ve been a nervous ball of anxiety for years, but this past year the anxiety that fueled me for so long has dimmed considerably.

So, if you want to improve your mental health, ground yourself in the work you create. That’s great, but it’s only half the equation. We still need to engage in commerce to acquire a desirable enough resource to exchange for goods and services.

Maybe your solution to the money situation is to get a job that allows you to separate your work from commerce altogether. That’s fine. I know a lot of people who work that way.

The problem is that even if you can make that work for your creative process, I’ve never met an author that didn’t want more people to read their work. If you want more people to read your work, then you have to get the word out to lots of people.

Unfortunately, that means doing a significant amount of marketing, and marketing is (often) fueled by money. You can definitely get some readers by focusing solely on free, organic marketing, but more and more the indie publishing industry is pay-to-play these days. If you’re not spending money, then you’re going to get drowned out, and not enough people will read your work to satisfy you. Without those readers, most authors will eventually get disillusioned and give up. Looking back at my career, at least 80% of the authors I’ve ever met have given up eventually because they couldn’t find a critical mass of readers, and that’s being generous.

So, even if you don’t care about making money on your work, in order to gather a critical mass of readers to appreciate your work, you’ll need to make enough sales to drive your marketing. Sales don’t have to be the main goal of your writing, but money is a byproduct of creating value in the world.

On top of that, book design costs money. Covers cost money. Editing costs money. Proofreaders cost money. Websites cost money. How long can you spend money on these things without making anything back before the investment stops being worth it? It’s not fair, but neither is capitalism.

There is good news, though. You can still make money without succumbing to the capitalist meat grinder. The exchange of money for goods and services is not the problem most people have with capitalism. This exchange isn’t even capitalism, it’s commerce, and there is a big difference between the two.

Capitalism is a form of commerce that emphasizes profit and consolidated wealth built around private, free markets. It is generally categorized by the gluttonous and ceaseless need for endless growth to feed the need for line to go up. Plenty of scholarship exists which shows that capitalism does not require constant growth to exist…

…but there is no doubt that the nightmarish situation we find currently find ourselves in does require perpetual growth. It will, given enough time, devour itself, all the while knowing it is dying by its own hand and being unable to stop consuming anyway. The feeling you have deep inside your gut that the entire financial system is imploding on itself is a feature, not a bug, of the dominant economic paradigm we find ourselves in…

…but we don’t have to design our creative lives around that system to make money. Yes, we have to live in a capitalist system, but we can create an ecosystem more aligned with the values we hold dear inside our own businesses. All capitalists conduct commerce, but not all people who conduct commerce are capitalists.

While it is debatable whether capitalism can be ethical, there are ways to conduct ethical commerce within the systems forced upon us.

Where is the healthy line between commerce and capitalism? Therein lies the rub, because that line is a moving target, and it’s very personal for each of us.

Some people will be more comfortable further on the capitalist side of the spectrum and others would prefer to be further on the socialist side of the commerce spectrum. Some might even choose to extricate themselves from the system altogether and rely solely on bartering.

Each of these decisions comes with different constraints and strings attached to them which will influence how you move forward.

You can make more money as a hyper-capitalist, but the pressure to always perform for the approval of strangers and constantly prove yourself becomes harder to bear as the years wear on you. A system of bartering is a lovely thought, but it’s hard to exchange a goat for seven pairs of Levi’s unless you find the right trade partners, which is why currency is fungible in the first place.

There is no wrong answer, just what is right for you at this moment. Maybe in your early twenties, you are happy to delve deep into the seedy belly of capitalism to extract maximum value for yourself to live on later in life. Then, in your thirties, you decide that you would rather slow down and take your foot off the gas to preserve your mental health, and in your forties, you move to Peru and live in a yurt, knitting and bartering alpaca sweaters.

These decisions don’t define our lives, just phases of our lives. I’ve listened to the Tim Ferris Show for years, and hearing him grapple with the hyper-productivity he became a poster child for in his 20s, even though it no longer serves him in his 40s, is fascinating. If even he can shift his perspective on what serves him over time, then so can each of us do the same.

You can change your mind at any time and work toward a different equilibrium, but it starts with realizing that commerce can exist without capitalism, even in a capitalist economy. It takes self-reflection to start the ball rolling, and it takes work to maintain a healthy, balanced mindset once you find it.

One of the ways you can tell we are at peak hypercapitalism is because there is oversaturation in just about every market. 

If you follow these things closely, two really interesting examples of oversaturation are happening in front of our faces right now.

1. Movies. It’s hard to believe, but 20 years ago there was a thing called the mid-budget movie. These are movies made for roughly $10-$30 million dollars, and they were the workhorse of the film industry. When private equity came to film in a big way, they realized the movies that made the most money were the blockbusters. So, every studio went all-in on them, doubling budgets, and creating the crowded summer slate that we all see today. When one company does it, it works out fabulously for them, but when one company finds success, others quickly follow. When every company ratchets up the budget on every movie, and then releases it at the same time to a finite audience, they start to mostly, or all, fail. The box office makes more money now than any time in history, but the fact that every company is oversaturating it with huge movies means studios are falling behind.

2. Artifical intelligence. We aren’t at peak AI yet, but recently nearly every company I use for my business has made a big announcement about how they integrated AI into their service. It was interesting at first, but now I’m getting 2-3 a day that don’t actually add any functionality I care about to their site. Six months ago AI was the hot button issue and just having it was a big deal. However, can we really say that when every website has AI integrated in the same way? Not really.

In both cases, what’s interesting is that there is a flattening out of quality. People expect that just having a summer movie or AI is enough to draw a crowd. While that is true when there are a couple competitors, it’s death when everyone is competing with the same tools.

There is a great opportunity for writers here, though, because while everyone is competing for the home run, blockbuster, there are few people services niche markets.

In order to compete in an oversaturated market, you either have to "be so great that you stand out over everything else” or “be so niche that you serve a market of underserved fans”.

Substack, for instance, is a great way to build a niche audience around a specific topic or interest. Products aimed at the mass market must be easy to consume in order to attract the most people to them. but you aren’t bound by those same constraints. This is a huge opportunity for you to stand out and make a name for yourself. by being different, unique, and catering to a small audience.

One of the side effects of blockbusters is that they create a market filled with people interested a specific topic, but want to explore parts of it that aren’t in the mainstream conversation. This sends them to find different voices that resonate with them, and gives you an opportunity to shine.

Mostly, I think we as authors need to get a lot better at being scientists. I was really terrible at science in school, but then again the American education system is absolutely terrible about teaching science.

I find that science is a wonderful counterbalance to capitalism. It deals, at its core, with objective truth, which ironically is the exact thing most art grapples with, too. They are widely considered to be diametrically opposed, but I find the opposite closer to the truth.

I’m not saying authors should be making baking soda volcanos (though I would totally go to that chaos-fueled science fair), but I am saying we should apply the scientific method to our own author businesses to find the style of commerce that’s right for us. Will Kickstarter work for your ethics? Should you try direct sales so you’re not promoting Jeff Bezos? Will your audience support audiobooks on CD if they were shipped right to them? Should you start serializing your fiction for free and ask for donations?

These are questions literally nobody can answer about your business because your relationship with your readers is unique to you. I can say that a lot of authors do well on Kickstarter, but some hate it. I’ve watched 7-figure authors completely give up halfway through a campaign and I’ve watched 3-figure authors absolutely take to it like a fish to water.

Same thing with subscriptions. I’ve seen people make $20k a month on Patreon with their serial fiction and swear it saved their mental health. I’ve also seen authors in the same genre make $20 a month and have subscriptions destroy their confidence.

There are no hard and fast rules anymore. All of this is possible, and none of it is possible unless you try it for yourself.

How do we test? Again, carefully and deliberately.

At Wannabe Press, we tend to break up our year into quarters, which isn’t some revolutionary thing or anything since most businesses do it, and plan one new initiative for each quarter so we don’t overwhelm ourselves. By spending so much time on one thing it gives us a lot of time to sit with how it feels for us. I refuse to go very fast with these initiatives. That is a line I’m unwilling to cross for my own mental health.

In the first quarter of 2023, we tested a Circle community for fiction. Monica and I have one for Writer MBA which is great, but I wanted to try it with fiction. We gave 100% to it and it ended up being a complete and utter failure. We had over 1600 people in our community and less than 1% were engaged, so we decided it wasn’t worth pursuing for the second quarter. We shut it down late last month.

It felt terrible to close the community down so fast, but that is what testing is all about, and I find the process we’ve created to be immensely fun and fulfilling, both as an artist and an entrepreneur.

For the second quarter, I’m spending a whole lot of time on writing articles and interacting on Notes. Already, I can tell this is more my speed than running a community. I can be a very good member of a community, but I should not be the head of one.

I’m not talking about going fast and breaking things. I hate that philosophy, and it was never a very good one to begin with anyway. The way we test is about going all-in for a limited amount of time to see if we love something, if our audience loves it, and if it fits within the boundaries we’ve set for ourselves. We still usually fail, but I enjoy trying anyway.

Where will you set your boundaries? Where are you at your best? What makes you comfortable? How will you know if you like something unless you test it against your previous assumptions?

I tend to be at my best during launches. I’ve tested that assumption 30+ times now, and I’m very confident that Kickstarter is perfect for me. I do not like to think about money constantly throughout the year. I would rather confine conducting commerce to certain times of the year, and spend the rest of it freely giving my work away.

However, if that ever changes, so will my relationship with it. Regardless of how I feel about Kickstarter, it definitely doesn’t mean you will have the same relationship with it as I do. We have worked with hundreds of authors to help them launch their projects, and can unequivocally say that Kickstarter is not for everyone.

As somebody that built his name teaching people to use Kickstarter, admitting that feels like a moral failing, but why? Nothing is for everything. We live in a world of individualized medicine and individualized education, and that’s wonderful. Why shouldn’t book marketing be individualized, too?

It clearly should be, which means that if something doesn’t work, then it’s not some great moral failure. It doesn’t determine your self-worth or your value. It’s just another failed test on your journey to find what works for you. You will mostly fail in life if you try to do hard things.

Then, you have to decide whether you want to improve at those things or give up on them. People say that winners never quit, but that’s patently false. Winners almost always quit.

I read an article a long time ago about the joy of receiving 100 rejections in a year because it meant you were trying. If you tried and failed enough times, then you are bound to succeed some of those times. In service of trying, you get better.

The key is to be in the arena enough times for success to find you.

Those people who don’t do well on Kickstarter often think there is something wrong with them, but selling things does not determine your worth. In fact, they should commend themselves for even trying anything new. Most people do not try to improve themselves at all. It’s hard, and you’re fighting against the entropy of the universe itself every time you do it.

In order for any of this to work, you have to try different things until you find the ones that match your goals and then carefully monitor them. If they ever stop aligning with where you are headed, quit them with reckless abandon.

If this sounds hard, then you’re right, it is really hard. It takes an enormous amount of work to exist as a creative human in the capitalist hellscape we find ourselves living in, which is why I gave such a resounding maybe to the whole idea in the first place.

Over time, though, I believe finding equilibrium in your relationship with commerce is possible if you work at it. If nothing else, allowing yourself to understand that this is a long-term process and the odds are stacked against you will hopefully help you stop beating yourself up for not being where you want to be right now.

Now, I’m going to sit back and see if , , or any of the myriad other creators living rent-free in my headcanon as the "cool kids" of Substack validate my existence by liking this post.

If you found this post enlightening, then I hope you’ll like it, restack it, and consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the publication of more articles about how to build a sustainable author business. If you want to dive deeper into this topic, I highly recommend my articles on neutral thinking and how to go paid on Substack without losing your soul. 

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