Sunk cost of breaking in

How much are you willing to pay to break in?

That is a very important question because there is always a cost to break into a new market.

I was willing to blow every dollar I spent on Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter in order to break into comics. Was that a good idea? It turned out alright, but in the moment it felt huge. It was huge. Ichabod costs me $8500 to create without any printing or marketing. At the time I was making $20,000 a year without a stable job.

When I started doing book marketing, I blew through $4,000 learning what ended up being a $40,000+ business last year. I didn’t even know I wanted to do that business, but I knew that I wanted to be a successful author, and was willing to spend money to do it.

I made that money back ten fold, but I still had to spend it with no guarantee of success. On top of learning book marketing, I built up 21 books and spent almost $8,000 before I started launching books, willing to blow that money in order to break in as a novelist.

I did it because I knew that once I broke in, it would more than recoup my investment. I’ve never shied away from sunk costs spent breaking in, but I never shied away from them either. How did those first costs work out?

To date, Ichabod had made me almost $60,000. Katrina Hates the Dead, my second comic book, cost me another $15,000, and it made me even more than $60,000.

Since then I’ve been able to launch many more comics which became profitable at launch. However, the sunk costs to break in were huge. The could have bankrupted me if I wasn’t prepared for them.

What are you willing to pay in order to break in? Because you need to know before you start. There needs to be a number, and you need to be comfortable with it.