This morning as I was scrolling through Kickstarter, I wondered what percentage of projects accounted for different funding and backing levels, so I spent a while figuring it out. Here is a spreadsheet of my findings.

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I try to cull my list every three months, ESPECIALLY when I'm doing a lot of email growth activities, because you will get LOTS of new people on your list quickly and then many of them will be duds.

So many people I talk to are scared to cull their list for fear of losing good subscribers.

Are they "good subscribers" t…

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I have done a lot of anthologies, and here is my quick and dirty theory on running them.

They are hard. They are complicated. They are pains in the butt and you will make no money on them.

Even my best selling anthologies barely made me any money.

The most important reason to put together an anthology, aside from working wit…

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This is a story about money, and how to find it. It starts with a story set in my lean years when I just went to press on a new print run for Wannabe Press’s two most popular books.

We spent $8,500 to get 3,000 copies total: 2,000 copies of Katrina Hates Dead Shit and 1,000 copies of Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter. This is no…

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• (Insert Name Here Productions) - 2004-2006 - $0

• RPN Photography - 2004-2008 - $1000

• BNS Media Group - 2007-2013 - $0

• 3Line Communications - 2015 - $12,000

• Wavelength, LLC - 2015-2018 - $75,000

That's not per year. That's total revenue. I was negative if you inc…

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It's hard to change a plan, but it's very easy to change a hypothesis.

In fact, that's the whole post of hypotheses, to be tested. Even things I've done 1,000 t…

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Human: IDK why you do thi…

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I am not too proud to admit that I buy friendships.

If you have ever gotten something from me for free...it's probably because I think you are cool and want to be friends with you, but lack the ability to verbalize it.

Or I have not seen you in a long time, and I want to reinitiate our friendship.

There are other reasons, but I …

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The only thing that you can control is what you put out into the world. That is your karma. Everything else is out of your control. You cannot control other people. You cannot control how situations play out. You can put yourself in a position to win, but sometimes, even then, you will lose.

You can control yourself, and…

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Did you know the average business in this country makes $40,000 in annual revenue? Not profit. Revenue.

While it’s great to look at Jay-Z, Stephen King, and hundreds of other successful people, the average person in business for themselves is gonna make an average amount of money.

90% of the money in any given industry is…

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In November of 2017, I started a journey of scaling my writing business. I had been doing alright before then, but I wanted to have a base of readers which could withstand a $2.99 price point instead of a $40 price point.

That takes a lot more people.

I ran my first real giveaway (I had one small one before) on 11/6/17, and …

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I talk about this article often, but I forgot where it was from that I got some of my average publishing numbers, which is then backed by the Publisher's Weekly report cited. 

The Cold Publishing Equations: Books Sold + Marketability + Love

The average book sells 3,000 units over its lifetime. If you assume an av…

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It's hard to envision how important testing ads is to success, so I wanted to show you an example.

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There is an interesting phenomenon that happens right before you break through to the next level of success.

Your body and your mind start to fight you. They actively try to stop you from moving forward.

They claw, scratch, and play dirty. They will do anything short of killing you to stop your success dead in…

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One thing that is common among every successful person I know. They want it more than anybody else. Most people want it...up to a point...up until the point that it really starts to hurt. The ones who are successful-- they just want it so much they seem to will success into existence.

That doesn't mean they work 24 hours a da…

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I wish more people turned into the skid of their talent level.

Most people aren’t talented enough to draw for Marvel or write for Random House. That doesn’t mean they’ll never be talented enough. It just means they aren’t talented enough right now.

However, they still try to keep trying to draw like a Marvel artist or wr…

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To which he and so…

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What you do today is predictive of your sales six weeks from now. This is an old adage from my sales days, but I think about it all of the time. Every time I'm having a bad day, or I feel sick to my stomach, or I just don't have the will to go on, I think about it.

What you do today is predictive of your future sales. When…

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In order to understand how it works, you need to think of your brain like a computer that only has so much RAM, except, unlike other compute…

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I'm going to try to explain in a couple of steps, how I get so much done in a day. It's a process I call stacking. It involves focusing on one skill until you can do it proficiently before you develop another skill.

In order to understand how it works, you need to think of your brain like a computer that only has so much…

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What is the one thing you can accomplish in the next twelve months to leap forward in your career by 10 years and change your life forever?

That sounds crazy right?

I mean doing 10 years of work in one year seems impossible. I know I thought it was impossible. I heard that question on a podcast in December of 2017, an…

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My wife and I are good little suburbanite humans. We max out our her 401k every year, along with my SEP IRA. We don't go nuts with stocks, but sometimes I'll dabble in them, too.

I don't look at it often, because they say you shouldn't, but sometimes I look at our investments and wonder why none of them seem to go up unles…

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Numbers time!

Let's talk about funnels, human, and how you can use them to drive sales and build your business. This example is based around my Ichabod Jones Monster Hunter #5 campaign, which ran from September 3rd to October 3rd, 2019.

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It's very easy to focus yourself on one piece of the puzzle, instead of seeing the whole picture.

An example, related to ads. When most people run ads, there is one metric they focus on, cost per click (CPC). They assume, wrongly, that if an ad has a low CPC, all their problems will be solved. However, they do not take t…

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There are three chasms you must cross in your career.

The first is the chasm of talent. When you begin, you will suck, and your goal is to create enough that you become good. The second is the chasm of popularity, where you attempt to build an audience of loyal fans who support and buy from you. The third is the chasm of se…

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A cough could be the result of a cold, the flu, emphysema, tuberculosis, cancer, or any number of things. Taking cough medicine to abate the cough symptom does nothing to abate the underlying disease which is afflicting your body.

Sure, it will make you feel better in the moment, but the disease will still be festering aw…

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Not all time is created equal. 

• Some time is used on useless tasks.

• Some time is used for rest.

• Some time is used for making money. 

• Some time is used for chores. 

We make the mistake of equating time equally, but it is decidedly NOT EQUAL. 

The minute you start getting that through your head, and planning accordingly, the bet…

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Here is an example on turning a negative into a positive.

It turns out I am pretty good at breaking down complex topics in a way that creatives can understand and grasp them easily.

This is partially because I write so many books I have become an effective communicator.

However, more so it came from being very bad at busines…

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I have pretty severe anxiety. Most days I have it under some sort of control, but only because I plan so far ahead that it is stupid to plan as far ahead as I do.

For instance, I had 21 books before I started releasing novels in earnest.

21 books is too many books. Except that for some reason, having that many made me feel …

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You don't have to like the person you were last week, last year, last decade, or even yesterday.

In fact, one of the keys to my growth has been my hatred for the person I used to be, and working every day to become a person I can stand to look in the mirror every day.

I am often riddled with disgust for my former self. …

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Almost all big audiences are built with advertising of some kind. I'm talking about big, engaged audiences here. If you are waiting for somebody else to bless you with virality, then you'll probably be waiting forever.

Honestly, the number of people who have grown a huge fanbase organically might as well be zero. I know…

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During the course of your career, you will have to raise your rates several times. This is never an easy thing to do, especially if you have a steady stream of customers at your current price tier. If you want to maximize your revenue, however, you will need to make your prices higher eventually.

When looking at raising …

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Everybody is a fan of something already Your goal is to take somebody from being a fan of something else into a fan of your work. One of the most common methods to make this happen is something I call "The Switch", and it's remarkably effective if you do it the right way.

The idea is simple.

If somebody likes X and your work…

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I know it is tempting to work harder, or longer, to finish a project.

That's great in theory, but the problem is that projects never end, and when you push yourself once, it's easier to push even harder on the next project, and even harder on the next project still.

That kind of pace is unsustainable.

You will, hopefully, h…

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Steven Universe and Game of Thrones are two amazing shows with very different budgets. Game of Thrones costs exponentially more than Steven Universe.

Steven Universe is 11 minutes and animated. Game of Thrones is 50 minutes and live action.

Steven Universe is created in a studio, while Game of Thrones has dozens of locati…

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It's hard to find new, interesting things to talk about in the data once you've run 11 Kickstarter campaigns, but Backerkit has been the one consistent about all my campaigns since 2014, which means they have new data for me to plum.

Before I go on, I should note that for some reason Backerkit did not pull all my data s…

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I was just talking with somebody in a thread who was complaining about how nobody wants to help promote their stuff, even though they promote other people.

Meanwhile, they were defensive to everybody in the thread, and their grammar was horrible. Like so bad that you could barely understand what they were saying.

So, I'm g…

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Somebody asked me on a podcast recently what the difference was between marketing and sales.

I have always had a hard time explaining it quickly, but this time I had an answer I didn't want to forget.

Sales generates immediate revenue, whether that's Kickstarter, or book sales, or launching a course through a sales page…

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I had my first unpleasant experience as a podcast guest recently. I've done over 75 so far this year, and it took that long to get one that I really didn't gel with...which I guess is actually a really good success rate. I have changed the names and altered the text of the conversation so that it's not apparent if it …

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There seem to confusion about how tech companies have been screwing over content creators since the 90s. So, here's a quick play by play through our fraught relationship.

1. A new hot tech company comes on the scene. They immediately turn to creators and publishers asking them to join their platform, saying they are "differ…

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Everyone always says “I want to post X times, but I don’t want to be a bother/think it’s too much” to which I always want to ask…has anyone ever told you it was too much? Not a random person, but somebody in your audience who actively subscribed to your work. Have they ever said you email too much, please stop? Or are you assuming people are on your lis…

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I spent the morning updating all my articles with a “Leave us a tip” option, and I already got one!

This is a “one-time payment” option that doesn’t force people to buy a subscription and then cancel it immediately afterward.

Technically, it’s a gray area in the Substack TOS whether you can have a payment processor off Substack.

I think it’s on the “okay” …

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Getting Your Nonfiction Business To Six Figures

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Fund Your Book With Kickstarter

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How To Create A Rock Solid Foundational Structure For Your Book

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Turn Your Script Into A Novel

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So You Have A Book Now What V4

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How To Dominate Social Media V5

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How To Create A World Class Substack

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So You Have A Book Now What V4

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How To Build A Mailing List

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How To Have A Successful Book Event

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Creating A Vivid World Readers Want To Live In

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How To Build An Audience From Scratch

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How To Run A Successful Viral Giveaway

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How To Create A Great Podcast V8

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Introduction To Direct Selling For Authors V3

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How To Be More Productive As A Writer

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I used to train clients on the nuts and bolts of the sales process on my first call with them. When I did that they would inevitably fail and fail hard. It’s not because they are bad sellers or because they have a bad product. It’s because I trained them how to sell before I got them comfortable with why we sell. 

The biggest issue I face with creators i…

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I had a great month, why am I bleeding money?!

If you are like me, this situation has happened to you at least once before. 

You are rocking and rolling along. You just had a great month. You sold a lot of merchandise. You got a lot of new followers and people subscribed to your mailing list. You feel pretty good about yourself.

Then you check your bank ac…

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Let’s be fair. You read a lot of business articles. Too many business articles. Seriously, how do you have so much time to read business articles. Shouldn’t you be business-ing?

That’s a story for another day.

I’m going to get down to brass tacks. You’re going to screw up your first business. It’s going to happen. You’re going to overspend on things that …

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We just went to press on a new print run for Wannabe Press’s two most popular books. We spent $8,500 to get 3,000 copies total: 2,000 copies of Katrina Hates Dead Shit and 1,000 copies of Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter.

This is not something we did lightly. We agonized over buying more books, but the truth is that we were spending too much and needed to r…

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We can't look back. We have to be sharks, who can't look back because they have no necks. Trust me on this. I did the research. I actually love where I sit right now, minus a few hundred thousand page views a day. We have a great audience, amazing comics, and a real community feel. But it took a long time for this to …

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