My Super Fans Dilemma

Thanks to those who recently subscribed to my blog. It has baeen a while since I posted. So, here is a little rant I recently published on Medium. Enjoy! I’m shit when it comes to math and I’m too lazy to do the proper research for this one, but I just had a terrible thought.I’m remembering something about how the door to door salesmen used to say to get one sale you had to get 1000 doors slammed in your face first.If you take this and apply it to followers on social media, marry it with the “1000 Super Fans” concept you will probably find yourself in a similar deep dark funk like the one I find myself in now.If you aren’t familiar with the “1000 Super Fans” idea it basically says if you can find 1000 super fans that will buy anything you produce and each of them spends at least $7-$10 a month on your work then you can make a pretty damn good living from your super friends ($80-$100k a year potentially). Sounds great, again, until I do the math. I’m active on about five different social media sites. Like everyday active. For my efforts I gain about 3500 new followers a year. I’ve been at for about four years now. Which means I have about 85,000 more followers to go before I hit the “magic” 100k. Or 24 years!!!! That’s right, 24 more freaking years. And that makes the huge assumption that I’ll keep all those followers and all of these social media platforms will still even be around then.I’d settle for half that honestly, but it will still take me 12 years. Not bad, but I was hoping to write for a living before I retire. I’ll be 62 in twelve years, so maybe assuming the retirement age gets bumped up to 70 I might get eight years of my working life as a writer.Maybe I’ve got it all wrong though. To be honest I’m not expert when it comes to social media. Mainly what I do is interact with others, read and share their work, share my work, follow them and that is about it. I’m sure if I understood SEO, social media promotions and marketing, and internet sales tactics better I could probably be a lot more effective in building a better and bigger following. The one strategy that I’ve seen a lot of Indie Novelists like myself keep mentioning is to build an email list. But for the past two years that I’ve been trying to the results have been pretty dismal.But I’m sure a few minutes after I post this someone will be along to tell me exactly how it is done as long as I subscribe to their newsletter, sign up for their $500 webinar, and buy their book for $30.