People often ask me about non-fiction, and how to become an expert in a subject that people quote and seek out.
This is a heavy question for me because I don’t think this about myself, but I do have an answer feom my own life, and I think in the past year it’s borne out in the success of the Kickstarter book + Accelerator.
It’s a pretty simple philosophy that I’ve cultivated since I started teaching back in 2010:
LIve in the community you want to serve, stake out a position that is both underserved, or unknown, and complementary to the industry at large, and then keep having success with that position until you’re so successful people have to take notice.
The main problem with most people trying to be an “expert” is that they trash the industry they are in and the thought leaders currently doing the work.
I have been that person in the past, but in all honesty, you need those experts to validate you to the audience at large.
I’ve been screaming about Kickstarter for almost a decade, but it wasn’t until I started playing the game a bit better and an expert took me under her wing and told others to pay attention that they started to do so.
And the reason she did that was because I kept having success in this very weird thing called Kickstarter that very few people were talking about except for me and DWS.
And the way we broke through the noise was by showing people how it could complement their existing systems and revolutionize them.
So many “experts” want to blow up the game, but the game has been working for a long time, and there is simply too much inertia to break people from it completely.
The truth is people ARE having success with every strategy out there right now, but it’s not working for everyone, and those people are the ones you can help, along with those very successful authors who want to have even more success.
Instead of trashing everything, stake out a position that is underutilized or antithetical to what other people are doing, and prove that it can COMPLEMENT their current process, not destroy it completely.
Kickstarter is something you can put at the front end of ANY launch and add hundreds of thousands of dollars to inject straight into your retailer launch.
The retailer launch, AMS ads, Facebook ads, etc, is a process people already know, and the problem with most launches is that they don’t have the capital to properly promote most launches.
Kickstarter completely revolutionizes that ONE problem and complements the rest of a book launch in a natural way.
It solves a MASSIVE problem in the publishing community, and I happened to have success in it for long enough that I had a system to share, and Monica Leonelle knew how to bring that to authors in a way that made sense to them.
If we came with a brand new system that made people blow up everything and start from scratch, we would have met with lots of friction, not just from authors but from the established providers already making money from the way the system works.
Both Monica and I lived in the publishing community for over a decade each, and so we knew how to position it. Younger me did not know how to position it.
If you’re having problems with breaking through one or more of the following is true.
- You haven’t done it long enough.
- You haven’t had enough success with it.
- You don’t live in the community you want to serve.
- You don’t know how to position your offer.
- Your offer isn’t something people want.
- You are trying to be a thorn in the side of the industry instead of a complement to it, alienating the people who need to hype your system.
I’ve been a thorn before, and it got me nowhere. I’ve had every one of the problems listed above, and it wasn’t until I found alignment with all of them that I started to have success.
