The universe is dumb and capitalism is nonsense
Five reasons why it's very hard to start a creative writing business that might make you feel better or worse depending on your comfort level with embracing nonsense.
Sometimes, you need to understand the scope of the problem you are trying to solve, and this article is about showing you the scope of the problem faced by authors and creative writers in the current climate. I have written extensively about how to gain an advantage over capitalism and grow your business in a sustainable manner even in a hypercapitalist nightmare that helps you thrive, but that is not this article. I also wrote a 50,000-word guide on how to begin, grow, and monetize your Substack that is completely free.
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Do you ever find yourself saying “I understand this is how it works, but it’s just so dumb?”
I literally find myself doing this all the time. My wife and I often turn to each other and say “I get it, but it’s just dumb.”
We had a dishwasher repairman talk to us about how new dishwashers are way worse than they used to be, even as they get more energy efficient. He told us how to keep ours from stinking like it has since we got it.
When he left I said, “I get it, but it’s just very dumb.”
When I teach people how to succeed at this work, I often tell them “It is very dumb that the world works this way, but putting that aside, it is how it works, even though it makes no sense”.
In fact, I am starting to think that a lot of why people fail to succeed is that they can’t rationalize how dumb it all is and how stupid most of the things that work really are when you get down to it.
Even the things that make sense are usually pretty dumb. The same is true with entrepreneurship. If I’m not saying how dumb something is, then I’m wondering why everything is so hard all the time.
I’ve been thinking a lot about why it’s so hard to build a creative writing business. So today, let’s talk about five reasons why it’s so hard to do this work.
*** 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 7,500-word article, then go to this website.***
The margins are low and the competition is high
If you look at the overall entrepreneurial space, the low-end products tend to be something like either pocket courses or monthly memberships that range from $27-$47.
Then, on top of that people sell courses or other products that range from $99-$999+.
Most businesses make their living selling these higher-end products and use the lower-end products to pay for ad spend.
Meanwhile, a writer generally has either a membership for $5-$10/mo or a book for $5-$40 depending on the format.
So, the high-end offer a writer offers is not even as expensive as the low-end offer most businesses use to generate interest in their higher-end offers.
calls this The Novelist’s Dilemma. Even if you have 50 books, you are probably only able to charge at most $250-$500 for an ebook collection of what must have been years, or decades, of your work.Meanwhile, I could, and have, recorded a course in 2 days and charged $1000 for it. I can make more selling one course than I do from over 100 ebook sales.
Fiction authors just can’t do the same type of thing, which puts them at a structural disadvantage.
Additionally, the competition for books is astronomically high, driving down pricing.
I’ve talked about Blue Ocean Strategy before, which is the ability of a business to find new markets without much competition.
BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY is the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost to open up a new market space and create new demand. It is about creating and capturing uncontested market space, thereby making the competition irrelevant. It is based on the view that market boundaries and industry structure are not a given and can be reconstructed by the actions and beliefs of industry players. -Blue Ocean
Books, and writing in general, is a red ocean. It is filled with millions of people vying for the same pool of readers. There are basically unlimited books right now and not unlimited humans to read them.
No books could ever be written again and we would have enough knowledge to last us a hundred years.
Every year we add more information than we did for the first several thousand years of written history combined.
So, when you’re thinking about why this is so hard…it’s because this is really hard. Like, very, very, very hard. It’s harder than most other businesses out there.
You have chosen to play the game in hard mode by doing this work, and your frustration is, frankly, warranted.
In fact, I always tell people that if publishing didn’t exist and I went into business school to ask if I should start a company where the margins are low, the profits are low, the competition is fierce, and there’s a race to the bottom in pricing, everyone would tell me no.
And yet, we persevere.
This is the secret advantage here because, in general, most people fall away. There is so little money in publishing that most entrepreneurs run away for greener opportunities.
There is just not enough money opportunity to stick around for the long haul. Publishing is at best a weigh station for most people.
However, it gives people who do stick around a real advantage because it shows they are cut from the same kind of crazy to want to do this work, and simply by doing it for long enough, you set yourself apart.
All the institutional knowledge you gain becomes your advantage as others abandon it all for new opportunities.
It’s not a great silver lining, but it is one that doesn’t exist in many other industries.
There are no pain points
Almost all successful businesses sell on a pain point. Whether it’s “lose 30 lbs in 30 days”, “get out of debt”, “save money by shopping here”, or something else, they can pull out a pain point to convince people to act.
Pain points are persistent problems with a product or service that can inconvenience customers and their businesses. Or to simply put it, they’re unmet needs waiting to be satisfied.
Customer pain can be related to their personal or professional lives and can be physical, emotional, or logistical.
Some prospects may not even be aware of the pain points they are experiencing. You must convince them they have a problem and that your company has the solution to fix it. -Dan Tyre
Selling fiction is really hard because there is no clearly defined pain point, aside from “I want a new book and you have one.”
Instead, we have to form a bond with our audience on a deeper level to connect their need to belong and feel seen with our work.
I call this “soul resonance selling”, which is about finding people who resonate on the same frequency of weirdness as you, and it’s much, much harder than pain point selling.
Imagine a book vibrating with the same frequency as your body, and simply touching it sends a jolt through you. That’s what I’m talking about with soul resonance selling.
We have to bake that resonance deep into our work so that it calls out to the right people.
There are lots of people I don’t like, but I listen to them because they are geniuses at solving certain problems.
I do not follow any fiction writers, memoirists, or creative non-fiction writers that I don’t resonate with, because why would I?
There are infinite books out there, and I don’t need yours…except that I do need to feel seen, and soul resonance selling is about showing people they are seen in a deep and meaningful way.
This creates much more loyal fans of your work, but it’s also a higher-order need.
Love and belonging sit above physiological needs and safety and security in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and the minute one of those other needs presents itself, the need to belong becomes secondary, or tertiary.
In the same way, “nice-to-haves” are the first to be cut in a recession, people will put their own safety and security above their need to belong when the bills come due.
It’s very easy to say “Well, I love their work, but I have to eat” with creative writing because there is no clearly defined pain point.
However, in every household, there are a couple of pleasures that people take even in the worst of times. I would contend that the need to belong and feel seen is the most important in the darkest days.
We must, then, try to find ways to deepen the connection with the reader so that even in the dark of the night they still feel most seen when they read our work.
If we can do that, we can still become an integral part of their lived experience, and have a chance to stay a part of their lives in those dark times, and to make things a little better for them.
We must be the singular subject matter experts they rely on even when they turn everything else off. We must be the series they reread every year because it speaks to them on a primal level.
We can do this by turning more deeply into our universal fantasies, our shared language, and our subject matter expertise. We must dig deeper if we want to build those deeper connections.
And we must do them before the bad times come because in the darkness we usually don’t have the energy to make those new connections.
The deeper we can forge those connections, the more people will resonate with our message, and the deeper they will resonate.
If we can get really good at soul resonance selling, then it makes everything else so much easier.
However, it also means thinking about sales in a different way. It means being more empathetic and giving much more than you ask.
For instance, if somebody emails me they are in a struggle, I will always send them some of my books to help them through a tough time.
Often, I get emails from people in hospice care and I’ll just give them access to everything I do, even though I get zero benefit from it except connecting with a human in their darkest hour.
It’s these things where we live our truth that help deepen that connection even more.
You see, selling isn’t really about sales. It’s about how we craft things with care and move through the world.
If we can do that, then when we launch something people will want to support it, and it won’t feel like sales at all.
The power law curve is ruthless
If you are the 10th best (or 100th best, depending on the size) plumber in your city, you are probably making a pretty decent living. If you’re the 50th best accountant in your area, you probably have a pretty good job.
Yes, the absolute best accountants are doing better than you, probably even significantly better than you, but you can still make a decent living, even if you are in the middle of the curve.
That’s not true in creative businesses, which have the most brutal power law curve of any other industry.
A power law is a functional relationship between two quantities, where a relative change in one quantity results in a proportional relative change in the other quantity, independent of the initial size of those quantities. -J.M. Sallan
I really tried to find a quote that wasn’t nonsense mathematics speak, and that was my best option.
For our purposes, I’m talking about how the authors at the top make exponentially more than the people at the bottom, or even in the middle.
You can think of this as the Pareto Principle on steroids.
The Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule) is a phenomenon that states that roughly 80% of outcomes come from 20% of causes. -Sarah Laoyan
Most people understand the Pareto principle, but did you know that it repeats on itself?
Inside that initial 20% that drives 80% of the outcomes, for instance, just 20% of those actions result in 80% of those results, and it repeats from there.
When I work with authors, I often tell them that while they are doing a good job on the surface-level Pareto Principle, they need to dig deeper to find the 20% of those actions that are driving growth and continue drilling down until they find the true core of their business.
But let’s get back to the power law curve. You see this curve everywhere in every industry, especially with investing.
However, in creative industries, the power law curve is the most skewed I have ever seen.
The people at the top of the curve don’t just make exponentially more than the people in the middle…they make ALL the money.
90% of the money in writing is earned by only 10% of the authors, and do you want to guess as to how that distribution goes when you dig in deeper?
If you guessed that 90% of that income is distributed to 10% of that original 10%, you would be just about right.
The global book market was recently estimated to be worth around $90 billion dollars, which means that $81 billion was distributed to the top 10% of authors, leaving $9 billion for the remaining 90% of authors.
That’s pretty brutal, but there is a supercharged version of the Pareto Principle at work here as well.
This means of that $81 billion, roughly $72 billion was distributed to the top 1% of people, leaving $19 billion dollars to be distributed to 99% of authors.
It sounds like a lot, but Wal-Mart made $611 billion last year by itself.
This is why you’re likely not seeing monetary gains even as your audience grows. It’s not a function of you not being good enough.
It’s that all the cards are stacked against you, even if you’ve been doing this a long time.
It’s relatively easy to get into the top 10% of the publishing industry, but there’s not a ton of money at that level. You need to go higher than the 90th percentile to start seeing significant monetary gains.
If you’re in the top 10% of just about any other industry, you’re killing it financially, but not in creative industries.
The power law curve works against you when it comes to growth, too.
If you’re in the top 10%, then you’re in the 90th percentile of earners. If you want to grow beyond that, then you have to expend as much energy to get from the 90th percentile to the 91st percentile as you did to get from 1st-90th percentile, and the energy expenditure gets harder from there.
You then have to spend as much energy to get from the 91st to the 92nd percentile as you did to get from the 1st-91st percentile, and it keeps going on like that until you reach the top.
The energy is not arithmetic, it’s exponential, and it becomes harder with each percentage gained.
Why?
Because the people at the top are staying there and they are committed to not losing relevancy. In order to rise up, you have to wedge your way inside between increasingly smaller and smaller gaps.
It becomes much more relational at the upper end of the power law curve. At the bottom of the curve, you could break through barriers with sheer force, but that’s absolutely not the case at the upper end.
For the first several years of my career, I could go out on my own and get there, but with every year that passes, positioning has become more important as I try to work my way up to the top of the power law curve.
I spend most of my year lining up my dominos in order to knock one down. It takes much more patience. I usually take two to three big swings a year and hope to connect and spend the rest of my year building up to those moments.
What is the hope here?
People really do want you to succeed. One of the ways those at the top stay relevant is to find fresh new voices.
However, those at the top are often wary of newcomers. They have worked so hard to build their reputation and know it can be taken away in an instant.
Moreso, they know that for every rung they drop in relevancy, the power law curve works harder against them.
Another hope came with the foundation of platforms like Kickstarter and Substack that allow creators in the middle of the power law curve access to funds that they never had until the last few years.
Platforms like this one help writers build sustainable businesses, but there is a power law curve even here. There’s a power law working at conventions, Kickstarter, and retailers, too.
People often ask me why it seems like they are working really hard and not getting anywhere, and it’s probably because they’ve reached the point in the power law curve where they have to do different things to succeed, and it just takes longer to do so.
It’s a feature, not a flaw, in the system.
Gary Vee used to say that you should get in at the beginning of every new platform you can and I didn’t understand why, but now I know it’s because if you hit the right platform then the power law curve will help you grow fast and get outsized attention, and that attention helps feed your growth to keep you at the top over time.
On some level, I think it’s kind of comforting to know the power law curve exists because it means in some way growth is predictable and measurable. I know when I hit a cap on what I can do on a platform, I have to probably diversify or double down to get to the next level, or I have to be happy with the level I am at.
I also know that everything is relational so if I want to affect change I need buy-in from people who already have gathered exponential support over the mean creator on a platform. I get that showing I am an asset rather than a liability, and showing that so can help them grow as well.
I also know that by helping everyone, eventually some of those people will rise to the next level and become powerful assets in my own network.
Yes, that’s a bit Machiavellian, but I am only cryptic and Machiavellian because I care, as Taylor Swift says.
The scale you need to hit is absurd
Writers generally charge somewhere between $5-$10 for an ebook, and $15-$20 for a print book. If you’re looking at a subscription, the most common subscription is $5/mo or $50/yr across subscription platforms.
If you use the old Kevin Kelly 1,000 True Fans example, you’re going to need close to 2,000 people willing to pay you $50/yr in order to make $100,000 in revenue, not profit.
The 1,000 true fans concept is an idea originally shared by Kevin Kelly in 2008. His essay predicted that there would be an industry made up entirely of creators with successful careers in the creative industry by having just 1,000 true fans -Paul Hamm
Let’s talk about that number for a minute, though, because in order to find 2,000 people willing to pay you $50/yr, you need to “kiss a lot of frogs”, as they say.
I talked to a creator recently who related a story from a company he worked with that they gathered 4,000,000 in order to find 100,000 engaged fans, and for 1,000 of them to become buyers.
They were obviously selling a wildly expensive enterprise product of some type, but even as an extreme example, it’s instructive.
The fallacy inherent inside the 1,000 True Fans parable is that you are going to need to talk to a lot more than 1,000 people to find enough people who resonate with your message to financially back you.
I should mention right here that if you’re running a client-based business, this is completely different. If you’re a coach or editor, you write for companies, or have set up a business where you only need a few clients in order to make your year, then you can probably get by with word of mouth alone.
wrote a great article about the difference between building an audience and finding clients.If you need to find 100 or 1,000 people to make your business model work, hopefully, you already have an audience to sell to. Or, have plenty of time to build one. But what you can't count on is 15% or 25% of your audience buying. If you want to sell to 100 people, you probably need to make an offer to at least 1000 people. If you want to sell to 1,000 people, you probably need an audience of more than 100,000. -Tara Mcmullin
I know lots of authors that get by very nicely with a few clients at a time. However, we’re not talking about that type of business. We’re talking about building an audience that will support your creative writing.
In my own experience, I needed to gather roughly 200,000 emails to find 20,000 engaged readers and 2,000 buyers who financially support my career. Every time I’ve tried to scale above 20,000 my open rates have dropped precipitously, but I’ve been able to maintain 20,000 pretty easily once I got there.
I’ve been able to support myself as a six-figure creator since 2017 with an audience that has mostly stayed loyal during that time. Yes, people leave, but new people come as well.
Now, a lot of people on Substack say that up to 10% of readers will pay for your content, and I’ve just never found that to be true in all my work.
I find it closer to the 1-2% across all my platforms, including Substack, which I wrote about here.
and I were talking recently and she said that in order to sell something like 20,000 copies of a book on retailers you need to give away close to a million copies of your book.If you’re selling those books for $5, then 20,000 copies is $100,000. She’s been working with retailers a lot longer than me and I trust her data.
When you’re working in non-fiction, you can offer things like coaching, courses, or any number of things to help generate more money from fewer people or to fuel faster growth.
When you’re building a creative writing business though, all you have is a $5 book, so growth is just much, much harder.
This is why so many authors write in long series. If you have 10 books, that’s $50 you’re making on the same series.
Businesses usually die when they try to scale because their open rates go down and they don’t have a strong enough funnel to turn those readers into buyers.
Companies raise millions in funding in order to scale because the marketing costs are astronomical.
As you scale you start to find more and more people who have already tried your work and made a decision about it, so finding new readers becomes increasingly harder over time.
On top of that, we have to be constantly worried about churn, which is the amount of people who leave our audience. The average churn rate is between 2-8%, and it looks like on Substack the churn rate of paid users might be as high as 15%-20% after six months.
That means every year as much as 30%-40% of paid members will stop their membership. At that rate, if we don’t keep growing, then we’ll have zero members after three or fewer years.
There is an opportunity here, though, because scaling is much cheaper for a creative fiction writer than for any other type of business.
Why?
Because it’s so hard to do that almost nobody even tries it. Many businesses see trial costs as much as $150, but we can probably find people to try our Substack for $1-$2 or maybe even less.
We can probably get people to download our books for even cheaper, as long as we’re focused on finding the 1% out of those who will buy our book for the long haul.
Additionally, if we start to use platforms like Kickstarter and focus on more pillars of direct sales we can monetize our audience even more effectively.
I do find that people who resonate with creative fiction are often more loyal than other readers because it’s so hard to find people who resonate on the same frequency of weirdness as them.
I’m not saying any of this to freak you out, but I’m sure it isn’t helping. I’m telling you because this is just math, and simple math at that.
If you can see the scale of the problem and the opportunity it presents, it becomes manageable, though hard.
Most things are not a failure of a writer, but a failure to understand the problem and make decisions that solve it.
For instance, if you want to take advantage of Substack’s recommendation engine, then it behooves you to make a publication that is most tailored to utilizing that engine.
It also hopefully makes you stop beating yourself up if you don’t want to do this stuff.
Most authors don’t want to do any of this stuff, but they beat themselves up all the same. If you don’t want to do any of this stuff, it’s okay, but please stop berating yourself.
Companies scale by putting an absurd amount of money into growth. Authors scale because they hit the right trope at the right time and doubled down on it.
Even if you don’t hit the tropes and get organic growth, you can still scale by doing the same things that big companies do, but on a smaller scale.
We can have very nice little lifestyle businesses that support us creatively without doing a lot of this stuff, but this is why it’s so hard.
It’s so hard because it’s so hard for everyone. Some people make it look easy, but they are also kicking and screaming to keep it all going before the house of cards comes tumbling down.
There is always opportunity in doing hard things though. If you take nothing else away, at least take that one piece of wisdom and carry it with you.
The universe is dumb and capitalism is nonsense
I learned recently about Gödel's incompleteness theorems and it really helped me click a lot of things into place about how the universe operates.
Gödel's incompleteness theorems are two theorems of mathematical logic that are concerned with the limits of provability in formal axiomatic theories. These results, published by Kurt Gödel in 1931, are important both in mathematical logic and in the philosophy of mathematics.
The theorems are widely, but not universally, interpreted as showing that Hilbert's program to find a complete and consistent set of axioms for all mathematics is impossible.
The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an effective procedure (i.e., an algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the arithmetic of natural numbers. For any such consistent formal system, there will always be statements about natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system. The second incompleteness theorem, an extension of the first, shows that the system cannot demonstrate its own consistency. -Wikipedia
This is a lot of big words to say that every provable math theory has elements that are unprovable inside of it.
That’s nonsense.
So, in order to prove anything in the universe, you have to use elements that you are unable to prove?
That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard, and yet it is true, or at least as true as anything can be in a dumb universe.
When you add that to the fact that the entire fabric of the universe breaks apart when you dig down to the quantum level and realize that quarks just…don’t do anything we think they will do, then you come away with one conclusion.
The universe is dumb and unknowable.
That doesn’t really work to comfort most humans, though, because we are “rational creatures”. We must impose order on chaos.
Enter capitalism, which is very dumb, but it is at least dumb in predictable ways.
And that is the beauty in all of this idiocy. The whole universe, all of existence, is dumb, but it is at least dumb in predictable ways.
While it is infuriating to know that the universe defaults to idiocy, at least if it consistently defaults to idiocy in the same ways, then we can make some predictions about how certain things will operate.
Those predictions, while very dumb, create patterns that come to fruition repeatedly. We can model that to have our own success if we have robust data sets.
Our whole economic system is built upon this very shaky belief that we can impose order on chaos. It’s nonsense that goes all the way down to the money we use every day.
The paper in our pockets and the digits in our bank accounts are not tied to anything tangible. They used to be tied to gold, but those days are gone.
Globally, we are in debt 235 trillion dollars. To who? If we’re in debt to each other, then shouldn’t that at least even out to zero?
Nonsense.
The only thing that keeps our entire economic system afloat is the belief that our money has value.
It is hope that binds us, but we pretend it is more than that in order to get from the beginning of the day to the end of the day without freaking completely out every minute of it.
The only reason we can exchange currency between countries is because we have all agreed X dollars is equivalent to Y euros.
That is nonsense.
Runaway inflation is just a bunch of people imposing their will that the paradigm has changed, but nothing really changed but our beliefs.
Nonsense.
When you examine this with any level of rigor, it falls apart.
Why does an ebook cost the same as a cup of coffee, even though it takes exponentially longer to make and read a book?
Nonsense.
But predictable nonsense.
People hold themselves back because they feel the need to understand the nonsense in a deep, unknowable way, but that is madness. You cannot answer why a raven is like a writing desk because there are no answers.
It is nonsense.
This pissed me off for years, and it will probably piss you off, too, if it’s the first, or even 100th, time you have encountered it, but it is the truest thing I have ever said in my whole life.
You cannot understand why nonsense works. You can only hope to perform an action and understand what happens as a result.
We can understand the cause and effect, but why does a red button lead to a higher click-through than a blue one on your homepage?
No idea. It’s nonsense. Experts try to tell you they can make the unknowable knowable, but they cannot. They can tell you the result of an intended action, and how to achieve that result predictably, but that is not the same thing.
I really started to have sustained success when I became comfortable understanding that something happened and how to repeat it without diving down into the why behind every little thing that prevented me from moving forward.
This is not going to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside because we are logical creatures. We want answers, but the opportunity here is in falling backward and embracing the nonsense.
We are held back by our need to know. I see it all the time. People have to know what’s on the other end of taking action, even though it’s impossible to know. They leave career-changing money on the table because they think if they research a little more or find just the right data it will give them the answer.
There are no answers. There is only nonsense. The nonsense is your friend, as long as that nonsense is predictable.
I have no idea who will resonate with this post, but I know that if I disseminate it widely I can touch at least one person with it.
I have no idea who will buy a book I release, but I know if I do the same marketing actions I’ve done for years, then a critical mass of people will buy it.
That’s the crux of being in business, but creatives make it much harder than it needs to be.
That coffee is $5 because it is the price at which the shop can sell it to maximize its profit and remain in business.
It’s nonsense, but it’s at least predictable. That’s all we can ask because it’s all we will get.
This is why you are freaking out all the time. You are fighting against the chaos instead of letting it envelop you.
If you join the madness, and let it wash over you, then you can learn to laugh at the nonsense instead of being petrified of it.
It’s hard to allow that level of unpredictability into your life, but if you can plan for the unknowable by relying on the predictable, then it becomes much more fun.
I freak out a lot too, but at least when I catch myself I know it’s all a big cosmic joke in the end, and that makes it bearable.
One of the problems with growing a creative business is that if you keep doing what you’re doing people might get bored and tune out. If you change something, anything, people might get bored and tune out.
But you have no idea which is which or when to do either. People like new things when they want new things and want old things when they want old things.
Even more, people change on a whim, often within hours, or minutes from each other. They will be mad at you if you evolve and mad at you if you keep doing the same thing. They will love you if you do a new thing and love you if you do an old thing.
All I know is whatever you do, people want you to do the other thing and also do the same thing. You just have to hope you make good choices on aggregate that people resonate with more than they don’t. Tim Ferris likes to say that he hopes each episode of his podcast resonates with 25% of his audience so that every month 100% of his listeners are happy with at least one of his episodes.
It’s helpful to think about, but it’s also nonsense to implement. In order to do the work of marketing and sales, it helps to understand that all of it…well, it’s really all a bit silly, really.
You are spending time trying to find new readers by doing things that have nothing to do with producing work for those readers to enjoy.
It’s really quite a lot of nonsense. It’s very hard to break your brain enough to fall in love with this kind of work.
It almost requires you to cleave your brain in two and reconstruct it in ways that don’t make a whole lot of sense.
It helps to read Camus and fall in love with Dali. Dadaism and Absurdism are necessary requirements for any creative to learn marketing and sales.
Once you understand that it’s all a bit of nonsense, and that in truth the universe is just a bunch of bits of nonsense stacked on top of each other, then it all becomes easier.
I am sympathetic if you think it’s dumb nonsense. I agree with you. I just also believe there is value in that dumb nonsense, and sometimes there is joy in it, especially if you embrace the absurdity of it.
It’s really hard to do this work, but it’s not impossible.
There are headwinds going against you, but in those situations, we lower the sail and start to row.
If we don’t have oars, then we turn the sails against the headwind and find another path. If we’re really smart, we have a motor that can propel us forward with minimal effort until we get through the storm.
I really don’t think it’s impossible to build an audience on Substack. I don’t think you need an audience from another platform to have success.
It helps.
I brought over 25,000 subscribers to Substack, and that definitely helped…
…but I built those subscribers from zero. I started from scratch building my list back in 2014, and we all start from scratch somewhere.
(Also, when you think about it 20,000 subscribers over 10 years is 2,000 people a year or 200 a month. That actually seems pretty doable for most humans, especially since success compounds over time. I also lay out lots of ways to grow substantially in the annuls of my archives.)
People like to say “Oh, it’s easy for them because they had an audience”, but every one of us built from nothing somewhere.
Also, having a social media platform really doesn’t help all that much in building a mailing list. Pulling people from a platform to your mailing list is an incredibly hard and frustrating task. I’ve seen countless creators fail at it.
Still, it does help, but it is not required.
I’ve watched hundreds of my friends and thousands of creators dial their businesses in and break through to the other side of success, growing from an audience of one.
On Substack specifically? Not necessarily, but Substack is just a fancy email list with a social media component, and I have watched a ton of creators build successful mailing lists in my life. Heck, I’ve helped a ton of them build one and monetize it.
It’s just not true that you can’t build from nothing. You might have to sit at a convention all day to find your people, but they are findable.
Is it hard? Yes.
Are there strategies you need to employ if you want to succeed quickly? Absolutely.
Are you a bad creator if you don’t want to do any of them, though? No.
Is it okay to never grow? Yes.
You can never do anything I talk about and be perfectly happy, but I still think it’s important to know the full scope of what you face out there.
Most creators are headed straight into a headwind and don’t even know it. At least if you know the problem, you can make intelligent decisions about what to do about it, and a valid decision is to drop anchor or let the current sweep you away.
The system is stacked against you, but there are ways to hack the system. Every system has backdoors, and because the universe is so dumb they are relatively easy to exploit if you know where to look.
I didn’t know where to look for a long time. I fought the headwinds and lost a decade of my life doing it.
It took me from 2004-2014 to figure out how to make any money doing this work, and then three more years before I was able to make a career out of it.
Still, it wasn’t until 2020 that I really felt comfortable with the uncertainty and confident in my ability to make money doing this work repeatedly for the long term.
That’s over 15 years from starting this work to being able to find some stability under me.
Do I think it will take you that long? Gods, I hope not, but that depends on how stubborn you are about fighting a headwind that only gets stronger over time.
I was unsuccessful for so long because I thought I knew better than everyone else. It wasn’t until I swallowed my pride and got a job in sales to learn what I didn’t know that things turned around.
I got an education on that sales floor and rose to sales manager of the department in under a year. How? I swallowed my pride and learned from other people.
Taking those strategies and modifying them for my own business was the first time I had success.
Not everything I tried worked, but for every 10 things I tried, one stuck with me. Over time, I started building a stack of skills that worked for me and platforms that consistently brought me money.
If you can find 1-2 strategies a year that really work for you, then in a couple of years you’ll have a pretty successful business.
The reason I’m so bullish on learning sales and marketing is because they literally changed my career. I couldn’t sell anything before I learned this stuff. Now, I can sell even my weirdest books because I know how to speak the language of readers.
The books didn’t get any better. I just got better at talking about them in a way that resonated with readers.
Back then, no legitimate publisher was willing to give me a shot. I had to create my own shot, and the tactics I have learned along the way are the only reason I’m still able to do this work.
Make no mistake, it’s still very hard, even now. An audience does not suddenly make things magically perfect. It helps, though.
One of the big fallacies about success is that once you have a list, or you make good money, you have it made in the shade, but that’s not true, either. Most successful creators are only successful for a short time and then they lose relevancy.
If you look at a creator’s revenue after they had a massive hit, they almost always have a huge drop in sales within the first two years after it.
Sustained success is very rare in this business. The ones that maintain keep learning what works and how to grow with each passing year.
It is much harder to keep an audience than to grow one in the first place.
When you are just starting out, nobody has made their mind up about you. As you grow, more people choose they love your work, but others also decide that you’re not for them, which makes it harder. It makes it more expensive. It makes things much more exhausting.
When I was starting out, I thought that if I hit 10,000 people on my email list, my life would be made in the shade, but it’s not like that for 99.99999% of us.
Once I had an audience, the even harder work began because I had to keep those people interested and engaged while also finding new people who resonated with my message.
Every year I lose 5-10% of my audience, which means I have to replace it with new people, and there are fewer new people with every passing year because I have already met so many of them.
This is not a complaint, but I see a lot of people who have a misunderstanding of success, and the truth is that it gets harder over time, not easier. If you find a creator who can have success year after year, they are a true wizard.
Not that new creators aren’t also great to learn from, but you should be open to learning from everyone and not discount a successful creator for being “out of touch”.
I thought at some point I would be able to rest on my laurels, but I’m busier now than at any other time in my life trying to keep up with new projects and still keep the creative spark alive while continuing to satisfy my audience.
Not everything you learn will resonate and that’s okay. Growth is mainly testing a lot of things and finding the ones that resonate with you. I’ve tried a million things in my career and found a few that work for me.
Heck, I’ve tried a half dozen subscription platforms that didn’t work before landing on Substack. I’ve been trying to build a subscription audience for a decade and, even though I had an audience, it didn’t work until I came here.
Because of that, I really appreciate that so many people are so open about their growth. I read every growth post I can find on any platform. I know that I still learn a lot from them, whether they are from long-time creators or new ones. I learn from the 100 subscriber success stories and the 500,000 ones, too.
It’s all data and it all helps. I don’t know what will click, but if I keep inputting data, eventually wisdom will emerge.
You have to act as a filter, but the data is not good or bad. It is just input for your brain to process to make better decisions.
Can it bum you out? Sure.
Is it exhausting to think about growth when all you have to do is write? Yes.
Is that all part of it? Yup.
For the first time in recorded history, regular people from all over the world have a real shot of making a living from our creative work and that’s incredible.
It’s hard though and there are headwinds working against you. You should know those headwinds exist, so you don’t beat yourself up when you run into them.
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Dear Mr. Nohelty,
Thank you. I have read this post twice and have greatly enjoyed it both times.
I hugely enjoy and appreciate your writing on the ridiculous work of being financially successful in a creative business. Your clarity and willingness to share is a pleasure. Commerce is never sentimental, billions will never care what it is you are selling. Success is fickle and fleeting. You have articulated something important, while all the preceding is true, so what? You can till succeed if you choose to do the work.
My employed life was spent in Supply Chain Management and your breakdown of the 80/20 rule is the fundamental engine of profitable success within SCM. Find and concentrate on profitable customers, manage the rest by good process.
Mostly I greatly resonated with the post because you make plain that all options are good options for someone. No one solution for all. My measure of success as a writers is that a non-zero number of people read my stories. I am lucky enough to work with a publisher who takes a supermarket approach, loads of writers in different genres, success and profit coming from aggerate sales. I have no expectation of being a financial success from writing, I cherish and hold onto the hope of being a creative success.
Thank you.
Thank you for this! I figure the only thing I have complete control over in this business is if I quit or keep going, so I'm going to keep going.