Playing the long game is tough… but it’s the only way to win
Note: This post was originally written in April, 2020.
Entrepreneurship has always been at the core of my being. And I’m a creative too, a storyteller specifically. For years I found myself too scared to dive into any of these pursuits until a knee injury sidelined my middle school sports career and gave me extra free time in the evenings. I used this free time to build the foundations of a storytelling empire.
That sounds like I created a multimillion-dollar start-up. Instead, I founded a small indie press that publishes and markets my science fiction thriller novels. That process has taught me more than I could have ever imagined, and the path to making a living doing what I love is one I am still soldiering ahead on today. It has been filled with many more failures and tribulations than successes.
So here’s what I’ve learned from three years of working in digital publishing, penning and self-publishing ten novels, along with investing over thousands of dollars out of pocket in getting my business going all while studying as a high school student, who will be attending Harvard University in the fall of 2020.
1. Age is just a number
I know that’s a cliche by now, but boy is it true.
Whether you are 12 years old reading this, or 100 years old, you are likely capable of much more than you give yourself credit for. If you had asked me three years ago when I was 15 years old if I would be able to regularly write novels in thirty days, learn Facebook and Amazon Ads at a relatively high level, and intricately understand what readers want in specific sub-genres of the fiction book market, I wouldn’t have believed you.
As much bad as the internet has brought to the world, it has democratized many avenues of disseminating and consuming information, all of which makes it possible for practically anyone to learn a new way to achieve their dreams and go for it at any age.
Note: Above is a picture of me holding my first three published books… back when I was 13 and struggling to write my first book ever I would have never believed this picture was real.
2. Balance is crucial
I have fallen victim to the toxic hustle culture that plagues many entrepreneurs on more than one occasion. I have pushed myself to the brink of burnout and even gone weeks at a time without taking even an hour to take a breath and relax.
I do not recommend this.
As humans, we are all built to want to achieve more and constantly do better. Oftentimes, this can lead to our goals consuming our lives—at least it did for me. There have been dozens of nights that I have stayed up till 5 am reading about a specific topic, editing my latest novel, or outlining a new book.
Although, much of those moments I genuinely love, it is without question that I perform best when I am taking care of both my physical and mental health. This means getting at least 7 hours of sleep each night, exercising each day, eating healthy and regularly, and taking breaks to socialize, decompress in nature, and just go for nice walks in the woods.
I’m not a health expert, so I’m not going to make any specific prescriptions for your situation. All I know is that I write better stories, am way more productive, and generally a happier person when I force myself to keep wellness as my top priority.
3. Slowing down is the key to preventing costly financial and creative mistakes:
If you’re anything like me when you want something you do everything you can to get it as fast as possible.
Although pushing onward efficiently and effectively is always to be celebrated, rushing things is not.
Just a few months ago, after taking a few courses on Facebook Ads, I was seeing some success with one of my product lines. Within only three days of testing, I scaled up to nearly $100 a day. Within a couple of weeks, I realized that I wasn’t getting the series read-through I needed to be profitable due to a few simple changes I needed to make to the manuscript.
If I had waited to scale I would have recognized the mistake and saved myself a little over two-thousand dollars. Instead, I got caught up in making as much money as fast as possible and ended up losing in the end.
4. Use the stories of others as fuel
I hate comparing myself to other people—we all know it’s bad for our mental health. Yet, like most entrepreneurs, I am intensely competitive.
I used to let the stories of others weigh me down. I got caught up in trying to achieve more objective success than them and I would break my back just trying to beat them, whether that was getting better grades than my peers or writing more books than an author friend thirty years older than me.
Although this kind of healthy competition isn’t bad on the surface, underneath it was much more dangerous.
I found that I was beginning to tie my self-worth to how I compared myself based on objective measurements with other people. If I had a bad writing day, I felt bad that day. If I got a bad grade, I felt that I was less until I got a better grade that validated the view I wanted to have of myself.
This was a toxic, draining cycle that nearly drained me of all happiness in my life.
If you find you are slipping into something similar, just remember that as humans we can’t stop comparing ourselves to other people. But it’s important to let the stories of others fuel and inspire us instead of burning ourselves down.
5. Learn from mentors and become one yourself
I’ll be the last person to say you need a mentor to start any particular business, however, learning from more experienced people in your field has tons of value.
I’ve had the fortune of interning for best-selling authors, speaking with professional ghostwriters, and freelancing for creative entrepreneurs. These experiences were all worth their weight in gold and gave me a window into the history and perspective of creatives in similar fields to my own who are a few steps ahead of me.
But what this also taught me was the importance of sharing my knowledge.
It’s why I have sought to become a mentor and leader in the young writing community through my service for the Young Eager Writers Association. I have volunteered my time running a podcast, spoken at multiple conferences, and even have met with teenage writers in my town, all with the mission of helping them climb the same ladder I have been clawing away at for years.
It’s an immensely fulfilling experience, and joining mentorship networks is something I recommend not only to every entrepreneur and creative but every human being.
6. Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty
I mentioned, in the beginning, I’ve invested thousands of dollars into my business out of pocket. That’s a lot of money, and most of it has gone to the production costs of publishing 10 novels and 5 novellas, many different advertising experiments, traveling to conferences in Las Vegas, Rochester, and Charlotte, as well as paying for print runs, website, and the list goes on (luckily, the business is well on its way to reaching profitability in Q3 of 2020).
Some of you may balk at all of those expenses, and I won’t lie getting my hands on that kind of money while in high school wasn’t easy.
Most of it was made doing hard labor.
I worked at a hotel and resort near my house and worked jobs that ranged from banquet servers, to pool towel boy, to ice cream shop attendant. I have worked plenty of 18 hour days on the clock, and often sacrificed my weekends and school nights to be working instead of hanging with friends and relaxing (don’t worry school always came first).
Note: Above is a picture of me at my first book signing back in 2017.
There have been many days that I have been sweating in 100-degree heat wishing I could be at home working on my first passion: writing books.
But I realized from day one that if I was going to make a living at this, I’d need to have enough cash coming in to relieve any of the short-term pressure of making money off my shoulders so I could focus solely on the long term (more on that later).
That’s why I’ve worked jobs and shifts that were absurd at times and worked my butt off to the point that my eyes were bloodshot at the end of the day.
Am I recommending my model?
I’m not sure. There are likely easier ways to succeed. And if I had rich parents (unfortunately a gambling addiction knocked any chances of that out the window) funding would likely be less of a problem, but at the end of the day there only a small percentage of people who make a living writing fiction.
And I will be the last to say that I am the best writer, the smartest, or a polished enough marketer to beat out my competition.
But you bet I will work as hard as possible. And in this new world of democratized digital publishing and online entrepreneurship, hard work beats talent any day.
7. Set realistic expectations
Success doesn’t happen overnight.
That is old news, but I find that most people think they are different.
From my experience, most of my writer friends believe they will have one book that makes it big and makes them a NYT Bestseller and Youtubers who think that one viral video will generate thousands of subscribers.
The thing is they are probably right. One book will likely catapult their career to new heights and one video will likely catch fire in the algorithm and give them loads of new viewers.
But we often think it will happen sooner than it will, and often put our hope and energy into things that are out of our control.
When I published my first novel (income pictured below), I was convinced that it would sell thousands of copies because I was fifteen years old and people would find that cool. Instead, I made around $150 my first month from family and friends buying my book and my income sputtered to nothing afterward.
At first, I was upset.
Then I realized that I was being totally unrealistic.
Things take time… years to grow.
So I kept writing and publishing, investing in the creation of IP, and working on becoming the best writer I could. I didn’t even try marketing my books until Feb. 1 of 2020, nearly 30 months after I published my first novel.
With patience, came dividends. Below you can see my income exploding in February until it really grew in March and April. In March alone I had made 50% more than I did in my entire career before that combined.
Is that a lot of money?
It’s not terrible, and it’s explosive growth compared to my previous income level. But advertising costs cut into that, and with production costs eating the end of that chunk, no profit was made during those months. You will see my income decreased in April and May is shaping up to be worse.
That’s for a very specific reason, which happens to be my next lesson…
8. Make the consumer your religion
I won’t get into the weeds here of writing fiction to market as that won’t apply to many of the entrepreneurs and creatives reading this article.
But what is applicable is that for creatives especially, we often create stories and content without any built-in marketing plan from the get-go. I know this was true for me, and my first 9 books were effectively written as passion projects that I tried to package and sell later.
Predictably, when not creating something that has proven demand it becomes much tougher to market it effectively and thus make any income from it.
That’s why my income has decreased.
I stopped all marketing efforts on my current product lines to start work on a new series written to a specific sub-genre of the market. The first book releases on May 31, and from early tests I have run, it has the potential to give me an ROI at least 2.5x greater than the ROI I got from my previous two series.
That’s huge and is something that I am reasonably confident will propel me in Q3 to the next level of making a modest income as a writer (a huge milestone for me!).
And that is all because I kept my consumer in mind and created something that I knew a specific target audience would like based on market research.
It seems pretty simple, and for many entrepreneurs, this is ingrained into your process already. But I find for many who lean more to the creative side, we lose this crucial step in our process. However, this one step is often the difference between making a living from your business and burning through a mountain of cash like me.
And if there’s anything I hope this helps you with, it’s burning through less cash and stress than I have burned through to get to this stage of my storytelling journey.
9. Ask others for help
This one was the hardest lesson of all for me to learn.
I thought that asking other people for help would make me look weak and sour my reputation. I thought that everyone would look at me and say no.
I was wrong.
I finally came out of my shell as an entrepreneur and sought to meet other people like me at a writing conference in Las Vegas last fall. I knew it was a big investment to pay for hotels, food, and plane flights from the East Coast out there, but I was ready to take the risk and meet some people whom I could develop mutually beneficial relationships with.
My only regret was not doing it sooner.
Las Vegas was life-changing for me.
I met unbelievable entrepreneurs, talented writers, and uncovered opportunities that I wasn’t even aware existed. By the end of that trip, the plane flights had paid for themselves three times over in the value I garnered. I was able to connect with a seven-figure author in Mark Dawson and audit his fantastic Self Publishing Formula Courses. I met other great nonfiction and fiction writers alike that led to weeks of follow-up calls with email marketers, mindset coaches from the Navy SEALs, and other fascinating connections I wouldn’t have been able to make if I didn’t put myself out there and ask for help.
Yep, I asked a million-selling author for an internship on stage after his keynote.
It was pretty ballsy, but it worked.
And it might work for you too, because at the end of the day, what do you have to lose in just asking?
10. Obsess about the future when everyone else is stuck in the present
All people, especially young entrepreneurs, are often obsessed with achieving a desired level of objective success as fast as possible.
These are great goals, but decisions that are made to increase short-term cash flow should rarely sacrifice long term revenue growth potential.
Since the day I dedicated my life to becoming an author, I decided that I would be building something that would take years and possibly decades to reach the scale that I wanted.
I knew that by creating intellectual property, I was creating products that could be marketed and generate a profit decades after I published them.
That’s what makes books awesome, and it’s just one reason I kept the long term picture in mind.
Is it worth increasing profit margins in the short term by delivering a product of lower quality to consumers? Is it worth it to veer from your company’s mission to increase short-term revenue, only to sacrifice your brand in the long term? And is it worth it to engage in cheap marketing tactics that work in the present, but are likely to go out of style and out of favor as quickly as they came in?
My answer to all these questions is an emphatic no.
My life has always been focused on the future (I write sci-fi after all). And I’d much rather make nothing for the next ten years and ten million dollars when I’m thirty than make one-hundred-thousand dollars today.
It’s been tough to keep focusing on the long-term, especially when things like the current world situation put more pressure on my revenue streams (AKA my job working as a server). I know many of you are currently in similar positions.
But during these tough times and the tough times that are inevitably going to come, it is important to keep in mind that those who weather the storm will be those building boats to last decades, not months.
Remember that.
One last thought…
After sharing the ten lessons I’ve learned from bootstrapping my own publishing company during my teenage years, I hope you have gleaned some insight from this that will benefit your business and your life.
All of these lessons are solely based on my personal experience and are no way indicative of what you will find works best for you. At the end of the day, life and entrepreneurship are all about adapting, experimentation, and a relentless pursuit of our higher calling whether that be SAS, indie-publishing, or curating pictures of dogs on Instagram (if anyone makes money off that you are living the dream!).
I hope you all have an unbelievable rest of your day and don’t forget…
~Together we are boundless~