DAY 5: Q&A (plus your next Breakthrough announced)

Starting a Bestselling Substack

If you’ve been with me for the past 4 days you now have a framework to building bestselling substack.

One reader said:

“ … these insights are incredibly valuable (you're not kidding about offering outsized value) and I wish I found you before burning money on a coach.”

During the live kick off session and over the past 4 days there have been some questions. I’m going to answer them here, and then I’ll tell you about the next breakthrough!

Q&A

You’re suggesting to charge $20 a month that’s the price of a book, how can I write a book each month?

There is no reson to price anchor what you do to the price of a book. People pay for all kinds of things, mainly solutions to problems. If you can deliver outcomes to bigger problems, you can price anchor to other solutions for the same problem.

Attending a conference might cost you hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Coaching and mentoring costs hundreds of dollars a month.

An agent costs thousands of dollars

Art school cost thousands of dollars

Courses cost hundreds of dollars

If you can deliver a similar outcome to any of the above, you can charge $20

How do I pick my audience?

Think of someone you help in real life.

Your audience is basically that person at scale.

Do you need a posting schedule?

The advise here is to post your main paid value once a month, this is the asset and $20 offer that you accumulate as your library. Everything else are gifts of knowledge and you can post that as often as you like, if you have no audience, post this on notes to build audience.

Unlike social media, you’re not posting for an algorithm, you’re sharing gifts that help people, and people are selfish they can consume that all day long.

Still need a schedule: Share your main value once a month, then build up to it a few days before with a combination of notes, posts and emails.

What if my specific knowledge is in a field I’m trying to get out of?

Specific knowledge might not be categorised in the typical packages you might expect, you might have gained education in specific fields, but within that you also gained skills, writing a spreadsheet organising your time, managing resources, creating presentations, writing reports etc.

You can leave your old fields comfortably behind if that is your choice, but you can extract your knowledge and repackage them for the field you are moving into.

Keep asking questions, and keep helping each other in the comments!

What’s Next?

In the next Creative Breakthrough we will explore a process that will help you discover the intersection between what publishers are looking for and what you uniquely have to offer. This will serve as a compass to determine the kind of subject matter to put in your portfolio and how to position yourself as an illustrator to take advantage of this opportunity — by claiming you niche.

I’ll guide you to reverse engineer your own: Illustrator’s: Publishing Industry Job Board.

By the end of it you will have.

1. A map of where your interest overlaps with what publishers want !

2. A list of projects you are uniquely suited to create that don’t yet exist !!

3. A collection of portfolio projects designed to get the right jobs for you !!!

PS: Tomorrow we start a new series of daily prompts it’s fun and it’s funny! (Hint: we’re drawing birds)