How I "evolved" beyond my natural author ecosystem

Even though I'm a nature tundra, I have incorportated strengths from every ecosystem into my business over the years...

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This article is all about scaling your author career beyond your natural ecosystem by walking through a case study analyzing my own evolution. If you are a paid subscriber, I recommend reading Is it even possible to be a writer AND happy at the same time, Spinning a great idea into book marketing gold, and How to find more readers for your books and get stacked with subs on Substack to give context to this article.

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If you’ve taken our Author Ecosystem quiz, or know anything about the Author Ecosystems at all, then it’s not hard to recognize that I’m a natural tundra. I’m a seasonal launcher who took to Kickstarter like a fish to water or a polar bear to hibernation. I’m a world-class hype man who knows how to build excitement around a launch, which has served me well for the last decade.

However, over time I started to cap out on what I could do inside my natural ecosystem. This happens to most authors who have a healthy ecosystem. They find a natural limit to how much growth they can have doing the same thing over and over again.

I could predict a launch down to the dollar, but I didn’t grow substantially between 2017-2020. I was still a six-figure creative during all those years, but just barely.

On top of that, the landscape was constantly changing under me, and it became harder and harder to get people excited about every new project I had coming out. Even though I didn’t know the word back then, it was time for my ecosystem to evolve beyond just my tundra instincts.

Evolving is the process of taking a healthy ecosystem and adding elements of the other ecosystems to help fuel growth. It should only be attempted once you have a stable ecosystem that is rocking and rolling predictably. One of the biggest causes of authors having an unhealthy ecosystem is that they try to evolve too soon.

I’m going to say it again because I know writers are stubborn. Evolution should only be attempted once your ecosystem is healthy and stable. Your ecosystem absolutely must be able to run predictably without much variation because you need that stable income to fuel your growth, and you need the brain space available to start taking on new tasks that are outside of your comfort zone.

Almost all authors that fail at doing this end up evolving too quickly and destroying their ecosystem. This happened to me, as well, and I had to spend years rebuilding my processes after they collapsed. It wasn’t until my ecosystem was stable and predictable that these strategies started to work for me.

If you evolve too quickly, your existing ecosystem will devolve quickly, and you’ll have to abandon your growth plans in order to nurse it back to health, wasting time and effort. Instead, first focus on stabilizing and nurturing your own ecosystem so that it can operate nearly independently from you.

Even though I know for a fact that many people reading this, even with my warnings, will think it’s a good idea to evolve before they are ready, three warnings are all I have time for today. So, I’m going to move on and explain the strategies I used to build out my business beyond my ecosystem.

*** 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.***

How I stabilized my own ecosystem so I could evolve like a tundra

Like many authors, I tried to evolve beyond my ecosystem before it was stable and success kept slipping out from under me. Whether it was writing to market, rapid releasing, expanding beyond books into other formats, building interconnected books, forming communities, or trying to “own a topic”, none of them worked because every time I stepped out of the thing I was good at, everything I had built would crumble under me.

Now I know the reason I failed is because I kept trying to move beyond my natural ecosystem before it was stable and predictable, but back then I just thought I was a failure.

Over time I learned all about the benefit of launching in seasons from JA Huss and Marc Jacobs, with quick bursts of live launching followed by long periods of recovery. This is the natural happy place for a tundra.

I created a system where I would launch four main campaigns a year, with time to recover and rebuild my email list between them. Since I couldn’t hype up Kickstarters for a full month each campaign, I also started to cycle my campaigns at varying lengths from 5 days all the way up to 45 days depending on the marketing demands and budgets of each campaign.

If you’re a paid subscriber, you can read all about it in This is NOT a Book, but here is the relevant section:

I've talked about planning before, but it's fresh on my mind right now, so I wanted to revisit the three steps I use to plan every year and how you can have your most bookish year ever.

Core release schedule

The most important part to get right is your core book release schedule. 

Honestly, I like having my schedule planned a year ahead of time. In fact, I've already finished production on 9 out of my 10 scheduled books for next year, and good publishing companies have their books planned at least 18 months in advance. 

I'm already deep into production on 2022 books, having completed writing my first book for my January 2022 release, and am over 40,000 words into writing the second one, out of four, which will release then. 

Being a year ahead means I never have to freak out about something going wrong. I know it's not something everyone can do, but I do not do well with panic, and the only way I can survive as a writer is by being far ahead of my schedule. 

It started as a necessity when making comics, as I had to build up a buffer with my artist to release anything, but over the years, I've found it lovely to have everything planned and ready months in advance. 

It also makes promotion WAY easier, allowing me to set the pace for the following year without worrying about catching up to meet a rapidly approaching deadline. 

It even allows me to slot new books into my calendar as time permits. My launch for How NOT to Invade Earth in November was a fortuitous happenstance that came about because I had time to plan and capitalize on an opportunity.

Seasons greeting

I try to think of my release calendar in seasons, with every launch being the crescendo of the wave I'm building up to or recovering from. Knowing that, I set my launches based on when I know I can crescendo effectively. 

There are three parts to a launch - Prep, Launch, and Recovery. In prep, I build up to my next launch. Then, there is the launch itself. Finally, in recovery, I give both myself and my fans a chance to relax and catch their breath before we do it again.

For me, that means January, March, June, and September, I launch books. I have always had effective launches in those months for different reasons.

In January and June, there are fewer books launching, so I can capitalize on that with my less popular books. In March and September, there are tons of books launching, so I put out my most popular books then so they get the most eyeballs on them.   

Once that is set, I know I need to spend a month building up to that launch, which means the lowest point on the release wave will occur every year in December, February, May, and August. 

It looks like this when I break it down.

January - Prep (01/01-01/04), Launch (01/05- 01/21)

February - Recover (01/22-02/09), Prep (02/10-02/28)

March - Prep (03/01-03/15), Launch (03/15-03/31)

April - Launch (04/01-04/14), Recover (04/15-04/30)

May - Recover (05/01-05/14) -Prep (05/15-05/31)

June - Prep (06/01-06/14) Launch (06/15-06/30)

July - Launch (07/01) Recover (07/02-07/31)

August - Recover (08/01-08/05), Prep (08/06-08/31)

September - Prep (09/01-09/06) Launch (09/07-09/31)

October - Launch (10/01-10/07) Recover (10/08-10/31)

November - Recover (11/01-11/30)

December - Recover (12/01-12/03), Prep (12/04-12/31)

My biggest book launches last 31 days, and my shortest can be as short as five days. It all depends on the project and how much I think people can stand me talking about it. 

It's important to note that this is my launch schedule for core books ONLY. I lay this out FIRST, before anything else, including experimental projects and other things I'm adding to the mix. 

Then, I plan every other launch around this schedule, as it is my moneymaker. It took me a LONG time to learn this, and it wasn't until I did that I had any consistency in my career.

Once I have planned these core launches, I figure out what else I want to try in the remaining time.

This brings us to the next thing. 

New projects to try

Every year, businesses shed dead weight from projects that aren't working and add new things for the following year.

Sometimes, it's a wild idea that comes out of thin air like a shot in the dark. 

These new projects are CRITICAL to the long-term success of your business, whether they are a new series (I am launching one next year), a new format (audio, mobile game, podcast), or an entirely new line of business (merch, subscription).

This is how you diversify and grow, but it is absolutely CRITICAL that these do not interrupt your company's core business, which is why you need to get your book launches in first. 

They are how you pay the bills and what your existing fans expect, and they take priority. If you aren't making money from your books now, then they are HOW you want to make your money, so they still need to be first on your list of priorities because you will train your readers when to expect new books from you. 

Only after you lay down these launches can you see gaps in your schedule for new projects. 

Those are my ONLY windows for NEW projects and forms of business. Otherwise, I am interrupting core business and my money-makers. I made this mistake for MANY years, and it is always a mistake. 

You deal with your money-makers FIRST, and then work your new ideas AROUND those launches. 

Last year, for instance, I knew that March, September, and January were good times to launch, so I put my biggest-selling products (Cthulhu is Hard to Spell, The Godsverse Chronicles, and Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter) into those spots. 

Last year I had a significant gap in June, and I put a “trial” product, a bunch of stand-alone novels, into that spot. It worked, adding almost $10,000 to my bottom line, and this year I am launching a new series into that spot, trying to firm it up as a consistent moneymaker for me. 

I also had nothing planned in August, and I launched a free book offer that month, adding $2,000+ to my bottom line. Both of those were successful tests, but neither interfered with my core business.

They don't always work out successfully, though. In 2019, I had nothing for November, so I launched my new podcast in that gap. It did NOT work as planned, but at least it didn't affect my other launches. 

New product launches won't always be perfect, but they don't have to be. You are testing to expand your business…which is why they can't interfere with your core book launches. You need to consider those book launches immovable and sacred and then plan around them. 

How do you have time for all these new projects when your schedule is already filled? 

Well, that brings us to the final step. 

Cutting down

Now, if you're anything like me a couple of years ago, you have no time in your schedule for new things because your days are filled to the brim ostly with garbage. 

The only way to fix this is to cut things that don't work to make room in your schedule. 

There's a good case to be made for doing this BEFORE you add things, but I like to do it after because I need to know why I'm giving up something else and that I'm doing it to make room for something significantly better or at least more exciting. 

The more I visualize what I'm adding, the more ruthless I can be with cutting things out that don't service me. 

Last year, I added a podcast back into my schedule, and this year I decided to do 100 podcast guest appearances to see if they serviced me. Neither did, and I had to cut them moving forward to make room for what does work, namely, writing more books and launching more products to my readers. 

However, it didn't affect my schedule because I had huge gaps for this kind of testing written into my calendar. Your goal is to be VASTLY underleveraged time-wise, so you can try new things and see if they work. 

Sometimes, the things you take on means taking on new projects, like the three virtual conferences I ran in 2020 or starting up a book marketing business…but that also means you have to be ruthless with knowing what doesn't work, so you can cut it like I did with almost all my appearances from 2020, my podcast, and most of my conference chairmanships. 

It's only because I had the time that I could take time for those things, and only because I know how valuable that time is to me that I could cut back when they didn't service me. 

Just like your publishing schedule, you need to take on things like the tide coming in and let them go like the tide going out. You'll never know if something works until you try it, no matter how many books you read. However, just because you try something doesn't mean you need to keep doing it. 

Even if you don't do other things like teaching or consulting, you might take on new book series like the tide, trying new genres or conventions to see if they work, but you need to be able to jettison new series just as easily. You cannot get caught up in a series that's not working, especially if it's taking time away from series that might work. 

When you are just getting started, you have NO IDEA what will work, so you're going to be doing a lot of crazy things, doing a bunch of different launches, and trying many things. 

However, when one thing works, you lock it in. Over time you'll be able to say, “okay, I launch this book series in January, and this other one in November, and when I launch in May, it doesn't go well", because you'll have tried it all. 

It's trial and error at first until you have your process. 

I eventually settled on doing a novel launch in January, a graphic novel/anthology launch in March, another novel series launch in June, and a comic book launch in September, with an experimental mini-launch in November for a small fandom-specific project.

Varying up my campaigns and keeping to that schedule stabilized my income and allowed me to start thinking about expanding. It took a couple of years to stabilize, but by 2022 I was ready to expand out from my tundra roots and evolve into something new. Below is the order in which I evolved that worked for me, though every ecosystem has its own evolution path.

I talk about my natural ecosystem's happy place in this article about gaining validation for your work.

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.

I can’t stress enough that this worked for me because I am a tundra. Building out a healthy ecosystem will be different depending on your type. However, once it did work of stabilizing my ecosystem, I was able to move on to evolving beyond my tundra roots.

How I started to think like a brand manager and evolve like an aquatic

The biggest strength of an aquatic ecosystem lies in their ability to develop systems to expand across different formats and involve different partners to grow their entire ecosystem. Unhealthy aquatics expand too quickly before the scaffolding is in place, but a healthy aquatic understands how to build out their brand without collapsing under the weight of it.

This idea is naturally appealing to most ecosystems because they can rely on other people to help them build their brand. Unfortunately, for other ecosystems the books drive everything else, including growth. For aquatics, their growth is fueled by their entire brand, so they should be branching out into other formats well before everyone else.

Meanwhile, tundras like me need to point back to successful books in order to be taken seriously by brand partners. I had been trying to put together brand deals for years, but it wasn’t until I started to focus on launch books continuously that those successful launches started to bear fruit.

In the end, I didn’t need to do much beyond showing my books were popular to open dialog with board game companies, coffee brands, and RPGs. Often, they came to me, even, once I showed my brand had a critical mass of interest on a platform.

The growth of the game and publishing categories on Kickstarter certainly helped other companies take an interest in my brand, but only because I dug in deep on making my books popular on Kickstarter first, drumming up excitement, and using that to catapult my business into its evolution.

The key to my expansion was rooted directly in my tundra ecosystem. The key to evolution isn’t abandoning your ecosystem for another one, it’s in using your natural state to fuel your expansion.

It turns out that even though I didn’t know about it then, I talked about this exact thing in my post about how to land a book publishing deal:

But the real reason you should self-publish is to have some sales numbers to back up your writing ability. If you can sell several thousand copies of a book on your own without the backing of a publisher, then a publisher can extrapolate that you will sell much more will their help. Suddenly, you have hard data that shows you are a successful author and people are willing to pay you money to read your work.

Remember, this is all about giving the publishing house every reason to say yes to your pitch. When the editor goes into that pitch meeting with their bosses to get the green light for your book, you want them armed with every possible quiver in their arsenal.

There is another great reason to self-publish your books, which I touched on at the beginning of this article.

Even if things go perfectly, it’s going to be 2-3 years before your book hits print. In those intervening years, you won’t have anything to promote if you don't self-publish and get something out there for the world to see. Self-publishing allows you to build buzz and hype for your work while making some money in the process.

For me, the first successful expansion of my brand came from Monica incorporating my work into her Book Sales Supercharged series, specifically through the launch of Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter.

Even though this was expansion through book licensing (more of a desert strategy), it still showed me what was possible working with a successful business. Before I licensed my work to Monica, all the deals that I had been part of fell apart. Working with her was my first foray into expanding my brand beyond my own company that worked.

How I started to go deeper with my work and evolve like a grassland

I started my career launching stand-alone books like the first volume of Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter, Katrina Hates the Dead, and My Father Didn’t Kill Himself.

Building excitement for a single book is one of the great skills of tundras, and for the first years of my career, it worked really well. However, it eventually became apparent that the lack of depth in my catalog meant there was nothing to keep people coming back to read more about the universes they loved, which stifled my growth as an author.

It turns out that while people do read cross-genre more than anyone gives them credit for, they didn’t do it enough to make a decent profit on a short fantasy series. For genres outside of romance and thriller, it generally takes four to five books before you can reasonably expect to make a profit on ads, which meant I had to write more books in the same series in order to fuel growth.

Since I didn’t want to write in either of those genres, I decided that I needed to write a 10+ book signature series that could keep finding new fans for the rest of my career. In my article about designing a signature series, I talk about how to go about doing this for your own career:

There are a few types of series that endure.

Serialized series - This is something like Mistborn or Game of Thrones. The books end on cliffhangers and need to be read in order to make sense. The Obsidian Spindle Saga is serialized series.

Episodic series - Mark Dawson and most thriller/crime books are episodic and star the same set of characters, but with different crimes to solve every book.

Anthology series - Christopher Moore makes anthology series, as do most romance writers. An anthology series follows different characters in every book, but in the same world, and often with ancillary characters becoming lead characters, and people showing up in multiple books. The Godsverse Chronicles is an anthology series.

Each of these has its own positives and negatives. Serialized stories are great because they have an immediate hook to read the next book, but people sometimes get pissed about cliffhangers.

Episodic stories are standalone, which people like, but because of that finality, people are less likely to continue to the next book, so you need to give them a reason to keep moving from book to book with an underlying story that bubbles under the surface for several books, or at least an epilogue that tease something to come in the next book.

Anthology series are great because each book is new characters, but because of that people are even less likely to finish than in other types of series, because every book is new characters they have to fall in love with. However, there are many more chances for people to fall in love, too, and get hooked on a series.

There is no doubt that this is a grassland strategy as they are all about going deep on a few topics. However, I used my ability to gather excitement to launch not one but three signature series on Kickstarter (Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter, The Godsverse Chronicles, and The Obsidian Spindle Saga). Instead of launching each book individually, I chose to launch multiple books with each campaign to garner more attention from my audience and direct the narrative.

While you can find Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter on retailers, neither The Godsverse Chronicles nor The Obsidian Spindle Saga have even launched on retailers and yet I’ve already earned back all the money I spent on creating them and built a nest egg for marketing. When they do launch, I can use my skills as a tundra to build excitement again to help that launch succeed far into the future.

How I started to interconnect all my work and evolve like a forest

As a tundra, I’ve developed a whole lot more successful stand-alone books than most other ecosystems, but in order to have long-term reader growth, I needed to connect them all together like a forest.

In order to do this, I first needed to find my “shade trees”. These were the books/series that stand out above all the others and attract readers into your ecosystem and make them fall in love with your work.

Luckily, because of my work building out three deep series like a grassland, (Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter, The Godsverse Chronicles, and The Obsidian Spindle Saga) I had three different shade trees to attract readers. However, they were all pointing to different universes without much interplay between them. In order to get readers excited to read my whole back catalog, I needed to find a way to connect them together.

I found that interconnectivity by creating The Cosmic Weave, a unifying concept I built around my books to connect my three biggest series together with my standalone work in an effort to increase reader retention.

I’ve created the mechanics for nearly all my books to connect together into one singular, satisfying experience for readers. It will take one more book to fully explain the concept, but once that capstone book launches, I’ll have nearly everything interconnected for the rest of my career, building the bonds of my series like a forest.

I talk about bonds in my post about the secret to self-publishing success:

Let’s talk for a second about the mechanics of a bond. A bond is something that connects one book to another book and one series to another. A weak bond might be that your new series takes place on the same planet as your previous series, or in the same town. A strong bond might be that your new protagonist is the brother of the main character in the previous series.

Using these weak bonds and strong bonds help bridge series together, and give readers a reason to keep digging deeper into your universe.

Why is this the case?

Because once somebody finishes one series, then some of them will migrate over to your other series to find more information about the world. The nice thing is that once somebody reads three of your books and loves them, you can almost guarantee they will be a fan for life, or until you piss them off. Therefore, if you get them into one three-book series, they will likely check out another series, and another series, and another series, until they have exhausted your catalog.

Let’s talk about that last point a minute because it’s incredibly important. Readers will keep reading you until there is nothing else to read. Once they have exhausted all your books, they will move on, and it will be incredibly hard to win them back. This is why having many books is so important, because it will keep a reader busy for a long time, and by the time they are done with your backlist, you will have more frontlist books to keep them entertained. Additionally, if you allow them to read twenty books, they will become more devout fans, and the chance of losing them will be greatly diminished. Now, back to why you should have multiple series set in the same universe.

The reason why I like the idea of having four interlocking series is this—you can rotate your promotional calendar every three months, and keep books fresh for people. If your series interlock, then it doesn’t matter where somebody comes into your universe, you will give them at least nine other books to explore, and if you create the correct backmatter to drive them to your new series, readers will follow you.

This interconnectivity is my attempt to evolve like a forest, but it is fueled by my ability to build excitement and launch like a tundra. Being able to launch a book successfully and break even on it allowed time for a lush forest to grow with dozens of entry points that can drive audience growth for years.

How I started to follow the trends and evolve like a desert

Of all the ecosystems, the one I struggle with the most is thinking like a desert. Their superpower is finding attention arbitrage where demand far outstrips supply and delivering experiences readers gobble up with gusto.

Attention arbitrage, while not a new phenomenon, has been thrust into the limelight in the past few months with the success of social media apps such as Snapchat and Instagram.

In essence, your marketing plan should include paying attention to what Gary Vaynerchuk calls white spaces — the areas where things are not yet happening but you think they could be huge.

You can find great results by using a social media platform that is undervalued and underleveraged.

If you are not number one, you need to find a place where others haven’t discovered and pitch your tent there. - Cameron Francis

This ability defined the career of pulp writers for generations, but I struggle with it. I have a deep-seated desire to embed my personality into everything I do and focus solely on the things that catch my interest even if nobody else cares about it.

For deserts, knowing the hot tropes and delivering a satisfying experience that audiences respond to is the goal, even if it means being invisible to the reader. Deserts make great ghostwriters, journalists, and licensed content writers because they can separate themselves from the work and be proud of whatever they are paid to write, even if they have no interest in it. They get excited to write a book optimized to hit as many hot trends, or client requirements, as possible, even if it means their own voice is muted. Getting the story to pop with readers is the most important thing to deserts, not infusing themselves into every page.

I envy that ability. I have no patience for or interest in optimization. I’ve gotten in my own way when it came to money countless times for innumerable reasons. I’ve eschewed big genres with massive paydays because my artistic muse flitted to some obscure topic or another. I’ve turned away from life-changing offers because I didn’t care much about the work. I even blew up successful companies just because I didn’t feel like doing it anymore, even if it meant disappointing lots of people.

My friend told me once “what does it matter if you like it as long as people want to pay you for it”, and I scoffed at them while my bank account withered up.

It literally took 40 years of my life for me to understand that when money comes easily, the rest of your life gets easier. So, I’m trying really hard to embrace my inner desert more these days.

I don’t talk about it much, but I’ve been burnt out on writing fiction for a long time. I haven’t even started a fiction project in almost a year. Every time I do, I suffer debilitating panic attacks.

To help me get back on the horse, I’m working with my agent to identify genres I can write well, that are highly saleable, and don’t take a lot of my emotional labor to finish. Hopefully, divesting the work from my emotional connection to it will allow me to move forward in a way I haven’t been able to in a while.

Let me be clear, I care very deeply about doing a good job with all of this stuff. It’s just that my whole essence isn’t wrapped up in other people liking it or not, and that frees me up to find even bigger and better hits.

In my article Five steps to writing freedom, I talk about finding your hit books.

Just because you know how to write a great book doesn't mean you know how to make a hit. A hit is something that breaks through and is financially profitable and generates marketing without much effort.

While it's tempting to go with your first book as your "hit" every project has a natural ceiling which a project can't get above. It's likely your first book isn't a hit, you've just never made money so you think a little bit of money is a hit, and that skews your perception.

Some books have a low ceiling and others have a high ceiling. You need to find a project that resonates with your audience enough to generate exponential growth with every release, is easy to sell without much effort, and generates reliable income over the long term.

This is usually not your first book which means you need to ping the water with several releases searching for the one people will resonate with quickly and easily, and talk about with other people, because word of mouth advertising is the most valuable form of advertising.

For me, that first hit was Katrina Hates the Dead. It sold on my table without much effort, and it allowed me to build my company and a reputation.

I’m trying to be better about finding hits in top genres now. Even when I’m writing in my favorite genre of portal fantasy, I’m trying to think of ways to optimize my work to find the most readers. These days I’m combining my tundra ability to launch well with a desert’s natural instinct to find large pockets of fans and deliver a satisfying experience to them, amplifying both skills to take my career to a new level.

While everyone has an ecosystem where they feel the most comfortable, most successful authors will eventually reach a point where they must evolve beyond their natural state to achieve the success they crave.

I talked about that much more in my article about Kesha and personalized marketing.

There are countless ways to be successful, and our goal should be to find the things that are uniquely relevant to us. I personally like the idea of a community flywheel, where the community is the center point of our creative livelihood, but the way it’s described in this article would never work for me. I need to adapt it to work for my business and recognize that others might not resonate with it at all.

That might not be your ideal process, and that’s okay because we live in a world where both are equally right, and wrong, depending on how they are deployed in your own business.

This need to evolve also makes it difficult to analyze the ecosystems of very successful authors because they incorporate aspects of different ecosystems into their businesses.

Neil Gaiman is most likely a natural forest. However, he found astronomical success with his long-running comic book Sandman and knows more about mythology than just about anyone on Earth; two traits that are pure grassland.

He’s also turned much of his work into other mediums, including movies and tv shows, which is an aquatic trait.

It’s very hard to be an uber-successful author without evolving beyond your natural ecosystem, but it’s also critical that you know your natural ecosystem, because when all the chips are down, you will revert back to your natural state in order to regroup and regain your balance.

And what if you fail during this evolution? You will, and I talked about that, too.

Being somebody who has failed does not make you a failure, even if all you have known is being unsuccessful.

Screwing up does not mean you are a screw-up, even if you never seem to get it right.

Current states can be changed and often change quickly and without warning.

You are not one thing. You are many things and have the potential to be anything.

I have started so many businesses that eventually failed, or that I shuttered, that it’s staggering. There’s one thing about failure we don’t talk about a lot.

The time you spent doing the thing you failed at has real, tangible value.

I recently shuttered my Verizon dealership after nearly 10 years. It used to account for as much as 80% of my revenue, but those days are long gone.

Those years where it carried my business have value. The relationships I made running it have value. The skills I built running that business have value. Most importantly, the money I made during that time had value.

People often only want to try new things when they are sure they’ll be successful, but some things only serve you for a season.

That season, though, it might save your life. Additionally, the time you spent doing that task might have immense financial value in another season.

I stopped running book marketing in 2021 because it didn’t serve me, but then a year later an opportunity came up I couldn’t deny that fit perfectly. Now, that one client makes me more money per month then my other sources combined.

Twenty years ago, I was a substitute teacher. I hadn’t been in a classroom in over a decade, but last year I brushed off the rust and started substitute teaching to get me through a rough patch. I have no shame about doing any type of work when things get rough or if I think it will serve me, even if it only lasts for a month.

Writer MBA sells courses and non-fiction books, but it’s not my first time doing that work. In fact, I licensed all my work to Monica in 2020 because my previous attempts were miserable failures. I never thought I would do non-fiction again after that.

Look at me now. We’ve made more in the past year than I did in all my previous attempts at this combined. Those years I spent building those old businesses had value, even after I gave it up, and they helped me succeed years later. I made tens of thousands of dollars on those “failed” businesses before I shuttered them.

That Verizon dealership came from a partnership that blew up in my face, but I was left with the means to carry my business for years.

This also happens in fiction. My best-selling series was an abysmal failure when I first launched it, but retooling and relaunching it on Kickstarter brought new life to it. Now, that series is the lynchpin of my whole fiction business.

Somebody once told me that 99/100 businesses won’t make it past 10 years, but 99/100 people make it past 40, which means people had rich lives before that business and after it. That resonates with me deeply.

Just because those businesses failed doesn’t mean the years they spent running them didn’t have value. They served their owner until they didn’t, and that’s okay. You can have a deep, meaningful life even if something fails. It can mean a lot to you even if you decide to give it up.

It’s not that failure is a life lesson. You get more out of even failure than just a lesson. Sometimes, you get a lifeline. Other times you plant the seed for success in the future. Most times, it gives you enough money to survive until the next thing.

Even if all you get is clarity on what you don’t want to do with your life, that time has way more value than we give it credit for, especially financially.

All three of my main sources of income are built upon the burnt ashes of businesses that failed. Even before they failed though, they served me…just for a season, not my whole life.

If any of this sounds interesting, then I invite you to take our quiz and get more involved in our community so that we can help personalize an experience for you.

If not, then at least it’s over.

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