Lindsay - December 30, 2021For this week’s show, the hosts discuss the 1,000 True Fans concept that Kevin Kelly first wrote about in 2008. You can find his original essay here, as well as a more recent update that he did.
The gist is that if you’re a creative in this day and age, you don’t need to be a blockbuster bestseller to make a good living (he says that if you have 1,000 true fans who buy everything you put out, you can make $100,000 a year based on that alone). He talks about creating higher end products and selling direct to these true fans.
News:
R. A. Nargi, who writes the Star Rim Empire Adventures, shared a couple of software tools that writers might find useful:
Obsidian – this is free “connected notes” software that makes it really easy to create your own mini Wikipedia for your series. You write plain text (Markdown) notes and you can easily add links to other notes and tags. It makes it easy to keep track of characters and locations.
Online Glossary Maker – an author who is also a coder (James Murdo) made this free tool to extract a list of all the proper nouns from your manuscript… You upload a Word doc and the software then generates a list of all unique names. The glossary is great because it also catches if you spelled a name inconsistently.
Main discussion points:
- Kevin Kelly’s theory explained (we shamelessly read direct from his essay).
- Does 1,000 true fans still apply today?
- Does 1,000 true fans work for authors, given how inexpensive our products such as ebooks are? Or would we be better served searching for 10,000 true fans?
- Amanda Palmer’s video The Art of Asking.
- How do we personally gain true fans?
- What are things we’ve done in the past that lost us fans?
- What are things we’ve seen other authors do to gain or lose fans?
- How does 1,000 true fans apply when you write in different genres? (What have you done or not done to get readers to follow you to other genres?)
- How do we encourage casual fans to become true fans?
- How do you find these people to start with? People don’t just show up on Patreon, right?
Thank you for listening, and thank you to Joshua Pearson for producing the show.
