Most of your best readers haven't even been born yet

A seeming contradiction about marketing, sales, and finding your people.

Hi friends,

I’m currently 41 and hope to have at least 30, if not 40, years left in my career as a writer. If that’s true, then most of my fans haven’t been born yet.

How can I make such a bold statement? Well, the math is on my side, for one.

A whopping 385,000 babies are born every day, which leads to a staggering 140 million new births every year. In 20 years, some portion of those babies will probably grow up to be my readers. Even if that’s just 2,000 of them every year who will grow up to like my work, that means in the next 20 year, 40,000 of my potential new readers will be brought into the world.

It also means all those people who are 20 year olds right now will become 40 year olds with tremendous buying power, some of which could be used to buy my books.

This was a huge realization to me, and brought a big smile to my face because it meant that even if everyone on Earth disliked my work, then there will be millions more who might like it being born all the time.

How do we find those readers, though?

That is the question, right?

They have to know we exist, first, which is where marketing comes into the picture. After all, if you make a cool thing and nobody is around to read it, does it resonate with anyone?

No, it doesn’t, at least not with enough people to build a sustainable career…

…but finding enough readers to build momentum isn’t easy, either.

Good news, though. If every year 140 million new adults are entering the market, and at least 50% read at least one book a year, then you have a constantly replenishing readership of 70 million readers every single year, for the rest of your life.

Even if you need to reach 10 million readers to bring in those 1,000 true fans, you could theoretically do that seven times every year for the rest of your life and never talk to the same person twice.

Once you have a toehold into the market, it gets easier and easier every single time you try to do it again.

After you get started, it’s easier to keep going, too. Humans quickly acclimate to their surroundings, so even if you just fake being somebody that likes talking about your work, it can quickly become your norm. I didn’t much like it at the beginning, but after years and years of doing this work, I found the ways that work for me to talk about my work with joy.

As I grew accustomed to talking about my work, I ratcheted it up more and more over time until even a lot of marketing felt normal. Now, I ebb and flow a bit depending on the season, but there’s never a time I stop marketing completely.

It’s important to keep going, even slowly, because the actions you take today are predictive of sales weeks or even months down the road. If you want to have good sales this month, you should have started two months ago. It’s not that you can’t press and make it work right now, but it’s not going to feel very good to push that hard. If you want to have effortless sales, you need to be doing this stuff consistently over time.

I once talked to the marketing director of a Mercedez-Benz dealership who told me they were working today to influence buyer decisions 30 years down the road! I still think about that at least a couple times a month when I’m in a slump and feel like nothing is working.

While this sounds daunting to start, if you keep going then the impact of your marketing also builds over time, with cumulative effects that compound gradually. Somebody might need to be exposed to multiple advertisements before deciding to buy, or they might only buy after discussing it with others or only after seeing a bunch of additional marketing touchpoints. Since people usually need to see something 7-14 times before they make the decision to buy, the true effect of marketing actions on sales might not be fully observable until weeks or even months later.

Even looking at how somebody purchased doesn’t tell the whole story. Yes, you can see what caused them to make that final decision, but you have no idea the journey that specific customer went on that led them to buy. Heck, they probably don’t even know since a lot of marketing is making subtle nudges that customers barely notice.

So often creators stop marketing after a couple days, or weeks, before they can reasonably expect any results. A myriad of things need to happen before somebody buys and most creators don’t perform nearly enough marketing actions to reliably make sales.

In that scenario, where we are pushing hard because we need sales now, and then stopping before we get results, is it any surprise creators hate marketing?

If you want to judge your own marketing efforts, then you have to ask yourself what actions were you taking two months ago because those are the results you’re seeing right now. Did past you do enough to set current you up for success? How are you being kind to future you by setting them up for success? Being kind to future Russell has become my motto as of late.

People wrongly think sales is about finding brand new people and pushing them to buy, but a marketing push is really about exposing yourself to new people and only monetizing people who you’ve already spent time convincing you have the right product to suit their fancy.

The new people you find during a campaign probably aren’t going to buy in the moment, but you could pique their interest to learn more about you, and through your future actions they might be prepared to buy during your next sales event.

So, if you don’t have a lot of people in your audience now, you probably aren’t going to make a lot of money on your next sales event, even if you bring a lot of new people into your audience with it.

In fact, it could take 1-2 years for somebody to buy from you. Even people who came into your ecosystem 3-6+ months ago might be years from deciding whether to buy from you or not. So, how are you set up to deal with the trailing effects of your marketing over the next months and years? Are you thinking long term enough?

The good news

This might seem daunting, but once you have this system set up, it keeps paying off down the road, and amplifying your efforts over time. Project yourself forward to being the type of person who can take advantage of these factors instead of being held back from it. What would you have to do today to take advantage of these effects by this time next year? This is what marketing is all about at its core.

The longer you can wait, the better your chances of success.

The best thing about having a marketing practice is that the more people who know you, the more people want to know you, meaning the more marketing you do, the easier it gets to see the results of your actions, making finding new people easier and easier over time.

If you can make marketing a practice in your business, then not only will you gather more people over time, but you’ll be able to gather them more quickly over time as well, due to the experience curve effect. As you repeat a task, you become more familiar with it, improve your skills, and develop strategies to complete it more efficiently. Your brain and muscles adapt to the task, leading to increased speed and efficiency.

One of my favorite quotes from The Matrix is from The Architect at the end of the second movie talking to Neo about destroying Zion.

“Rest assured, this will be the sixth time we have destroyed marketed it, and we have become exceedingly efficient at it.”

When it comes to business, the more times you do something, the more efficient you get at it, whether that is writing or sales. While it might take you five years to get your first thousand true fans, the second thousand could take half that time.

If you can keep halving that time with each iteration, then in just over 10 years you could have 7,000 true fans making you $700,000 per year, each taking progressively less time.

• 1st 1,000 true fans - 5 years

• 2nd 1,000 true fans - 2.5 years

• 3rd 1,000 true fans - 1.25 years

• 4th 1,000 true fans - 9 months

• 5th 1,000 true fans - 4.5 months

• 6th 1,000 true fans - 2.25 months

• 7th 1,000 true fans - 1.125 months

I’m not saying this timeline is normal, common, or even achievable. This model is certainly achievable, though, as your effort and skill compound over time, making each iteration move more quickly than the last.

I’ve been doing this over 10 years and I’m only making a fraction of that number, but I've still made between $100,000-$180,000 in revenue for myself every year since 2017, and I’m only doing a small fraction of the marketing that I should do.

Even without growing my fanbase much in the past half decade, I can attest to the fact that it gets easier every year to find new readers because more people have heard of me. This is because I moved from creating a pump to a flywheel in my business.

In business, the "pump" and "flywheel" models represent two distinct approaches to growth and operations. The pump model requires continuous and often significant input or effort to produce results, similar to a manual pump needing constant operation to move water. It's characterized by direct actions like aggressive sales, and the outcomes cease as soon as the effort stops. For instance, a business relying heavily on continuous aggressive marketing or sales efforts to drive revenue follows the pump model.

In contrast, the flywheel model is akin to a heavy wheel that's tough to start but, once spinning, maintains momentum with minimal additional effort. This approach in business is about creating a self-sustaining system that becomes more efficient over time. Initially, it requires significant investment and effort, but as the system gains momentum, it requires less effort to maintain or grow. An example is a company investing in customer satisfaction, which eventually leads to word-of-mouth referrals, reducing the need for direct marketing efforts. The flywheel model thus symbolizes a cycle where initial hard work leads to easier, ongoing success.

The problem with a flywheel is that it takes a long time to set up and get going, so most people bail on it before they see results in favor of the more exhausting pump because it works faster and more consistently at the beginning.

Over time though, people burn out because a pump never gets easier.

Conversely, once you have the system set up, the flywheel operates more smoothly with every passing rotation as people start talking about your work and you keep showing it to more and more people.

I get asked all the time how I can keep doing this work, but it’s so easy for me to push forward my flywheel now that it would be ludicrous for me to stop and start again with something else, especially because I know how hard it is to build a new one from scratch.

Every promotion lowers the cost of finding the next person who loves your work, and the more promotions we do the more we lower the time for our flywheel to work effectively.

I was in a meeting recently with somebody, complaining how sales on Amazon were seemingly impossible, and they said “Well, you’re trying to get that first push on the flywheel going, and that’s the hardest one, right?”

And, yes, of course that’s right. I still needed to hear it, though, and I’ve been doing this a long time.

But I’m chronically ill/on disability/working paycheck to paycheck/have no time

One bit of pushback I get to this is from people who have no time, no energy, or in some way are short of spoons. So, I wanted to address those for a minute, because, shocker of shockers, me too.

I’ve had chronic illnesses since I was a child. I didn’t know I had major depression back then. It wasn’t until I was almost 40 and started meds that I realized everyone didn’t hear a little voice in their head telling them to kill themselves at all times.

Even before then I had Lyme Disease at 5 years old. Then, I was diagnosed with mono at 20, Graves Disease at 28, and Long COVID at 40. Plus I was in a wicked car accident that left me couch-ridden for the first half of 2008. Each time I was knocked back until I could barely function and had to claw my life back little by little.

I get it, I guess is what I’m saying. I don’t think I’m very warm and cuddly, but I am very empathetic because I have been, and am, there, too.

I have very few spoons a day and have to use them wisely, which is why I love this mindset so much because you build little by little over time and have all the time in the world to do it. If you’re struggling, though, here are some things that have helped me.

1. I am a cyborg. I use the Visible app to track my spoons and pace points that syncs with a Polar strap I wear all the time. I also wear a Garmin watch that syncs with my Polar strap for sleep and other metrics. I also use technology however I can to help me get things done quicker.

2. I have a “Suck List”. Whenever I do something I don’t like I add to it and it either gets automated away through Zapier or through Convertkit. What remains is either delegated, hired out, or done by me using an Eisenhower Matrix. We now even have a maid and a gardener and meal kits even but it built slowly.

3. I only do one new thing a quarter. Last year it was Substack for three quarters. This year it was ads for two quarters and a daily for this last one. I still do leveraged activities like releasing books and such but so only try one new thing a quarter.

4. I only do things I can leverage. I focused exclusively on Substack growth for a whole year, and then everything else was built on my mailing list which gets more leveraged over time. Every Substackarticle has to at least be able to be used in a book in the future. If not a course. I cannot tell you how much time people waste doing things they can’t use a second or tenth time. For chronic illness sufferers, this is gold. If you aren’t getting leverage from it, cut it.

5. I do a lot of collaborative work because then I am doing a smaller percentage of the work. I’m constantly working with other people that can help me carry the load. Then, when I get leverage on something I bring in collaborators that way, too. When I can’t collaborate, I hire away things.

6. I pay for advertising. Running ads lets me be places that I can’t physically be when I can’t mentally get there. I know ads cost money, but they have helped me leverage myself better.

I have had literal years where I could barely leave the couch and so I understand what you are going through. The best piece of advice I can give people like me is to build leverage. Spend all your time building leverage into your business. Find ways to do one action and get 10x back from it. Now, with one email I can reach over 40,000 people, but it wasn’t always that way. The more leverage you have, the fewer things you have to do.

Most people are simply doing too many things in their business. They should instead find one single path to revenue and 100x it until it is so leveraged they barely have to touch it. This is the whole ethos behind our Author Ecosystems framework.

Final thought

At the end of the day, the biggest predictor of success is effort over time, and time is the one thing you can’t force. In the long run, though, time can be our greatest asset, as we build up our business and our efforts compound on themselves.

This is why I’ve been pushing so hard on Substack for the past year, giving it everything, so that I show up at the top of those leaderboards and in the minds of people on the platform, so that when new people join the platform, they are encouraged to seek me out. Now, I’m amplifying that with advertising, but only now that the effort has brought me as far as I can go alone.

It’s the same strategy I used with Kickstarter years ago and I’m still reaping the rewards from writers and creators sending people my way every single day.

There are strategies to make it go faster and to skip to the front of the line, but once you’re there, you benefit from the fact that every year 70 million readers grow up and might just fall in love with your books.

If you are at the front of the line, then they’ll get exposed to your work first and that will keep building more and more every year you can maintain that momentum.

Every book you write and article you put out is another chance to break through to the next level, and you have literally endless time to do so. Ursula Le Guin has been dead since 2018 and she’s more relevant now than ever.

Even if you think you are a miserable failure right now, you have the rest of your life to turn it around. You can start today, right now, and completely change your whole life.

After all, there are 70 million new opportunities to turn it around every year.

What do you think?

• What is your marketing practice?

• Do you find it impossible right now?

• Have you given up on marketing? How many times?

Let us know in the comments.

If you saw value here, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid member to help foster more of this type of thing. As a member, you’ll get access to over 850 exclusive posts, including books, courses, lessons, lectures, fiction books, and more, or you can give us a one-time tip to show your support.

What to read next:

How to fall in love with book marketing

Objectively good and subjectively your jam...

Is it even possible to be a writer AND happy at the same time?

Are you finding arbitrage or building arbitrage?

Setting up your direct sales environment

Photo by Maël BALLAND on Unsplash