What people expect

I was in a discussion on in a Facebook group the other day, and this exchange came up, that I thought could benefit you about my latest Kickstarter for The Godsverse Chronicles novels.

I have been a comic creator for years, and while I have found a lot of success there, I have been having a lot of trouble breaking into novels. I spend over $17,000 producing novels, and I was losing my shirt on them. Nobody cared. Nobody listened.

Then, I ran a campaign to try and recover $5,500 I was in the whole on my biggest series, and ended up making over $8,000, which after expenses led me back to even, and when I posted about it in the group, this is what happened.

Me: I feel like all I did was reset to even, but with how this past year has gone, even feels pretty good.

Creator: It’s disappointing (for you of course but the rest of us as well) that you’re at such a point, you seem like one of the most successful creators in this group. I guess bigger success sometimes does mean bigger problems.

This is what I responded.

There’s a thing you will notice as you grow, and that is people want to put you in ONE box, know you for ONE project, and see you as ONE thing. If you do things in THAT box, things work for you, but if you do OTHER things, it becomes a real nightmare.

Kind of like how an actor gets typecast. So, if you go off on your own, you basically have to start AGAIN from scratch. Nobody will know you, few will care, and you have to decide if you want to continue on or go back to the old standards.

I just did Ichabod because I needed some stability, and next I will do an anthology for Cthulhu is HArd to Spell 2, which should bring in good money. Those are my two most popular things historically, Cthulhu being my most popular singular book and Ichabod being the one that endures the best with fans.

But I want to do a lot of things, and that means taking a lot of hits, and then understanding that people just want you to do the same thing.

That’s why I tell people if they have a hit, double down, triple down on that and then spider out from there once you break through and have your Hellboy.

I DID not do that and spent ten years wandering before I figured that part out. Luckily, I had several things to test at the beginning, Ichabod, Katrina, MFDKH, and others, to try and figure out what I did wrong, but if I knew Ichabod would be the hit, I would have 100 issues by now.

Of course, it wasn’t a hit until recently, and it never would have got there if I had this mentality in the beginning.