Exposing Yourself For Fun and Profit
There's a trick to gaining True Fans ... but it'll scare you to death.
JOHNNY’S NOTE: As with my last post, I wrote this one a while ago but it hasn’t been on my Substack until now. It’s the logical follow-up, making this post and the last a matching set.
In my last post, I said that if you’re tired of rapid-release publishing, the good news is there’s another way. The upshot was that if you’re more “artisan author” than “tireless content machine,” you’re better off courting True Fans than relying only on algorithms to sell your books — especially in exclusive programs like Kindle Unlimited.
True Fans are the best of the best. If you have enough True Fans, you never have to worry about flops. Releasing a new book begins to feel like a for-sure thing, like writing yourself a check. You don’t have to wonder if anyone will buy what you make, because your True Fans absolutely will.
The downside, though, is that True Fans are very hard to get. You have to sift through a ton of everyday readers, casual fans, and even good fans to find the True ones. So what’s the secret? My own True Fans have just sort of shown up over time. It’s very hit or miss. Now that I knew how important it was to find more of them, how exactly was I supposed to go about it?
It was a question I’d never asked before. I racked my brain, but the issue is slippery; it’s hard enough to define “fandom,” let alone create a strategy to separate it from “interest.” I didn’t know where to begin so I turned inward, trying to understand my own fandom. Why do I like the things I like? What did my favorite creators do to earn my loyalty … and what could the creators I “sort of like” do if they wanted to hook me forever?
Then it hit me. “What should we DO to find True Fans?” is the wrong question.
Instead, we should be asking ourselves, “Who do we need to BE?”
Let’s talk about Bob.
Forgive me while I delay closing the loop I just opened and tell a not-actually-sideways anecdote instead. If you’re going to read what I write, you might as well get used to the fact that I talk in circles.
Anyway: I mentioned last time that I’m a True Fan of singer/songwriter Bob Schneider. I try to share Bob with anyone who will listen, but almost everyone just patronizes me; almost nobody actually cares. At first I chalked it up to the fact that everyone has different tastes. People have certainly told me about their favorite musicians (and TV shows, and movies, and books) and I didn’t end up caring, so it made sense that the inverse would be true as well.
It was true with my kids, of course. They’re 19 and 15, and teenagers never like their parents’ music. But then one day, genuinely curious, my daughter asked me, “Why do you like Bob so much, after all?” It wasn’t a knock or an eye-roll aimed in my direction. She really wanted to know.
I couldn’t answer. “I just do,” was the best I could come up with.
But the question stuck with me. Why do I like Bob so much? It feels like I have no concrete reason at all. His songs aren’t usually hooky or commercial. He seldom does anything terribly tricky with his instruments, meaning it’s not his technical acumen I’m into. His arrangements and overall musical talents are great, but I’m not sure why they strikes me more than the work of other artists. I love his lyrics, but what makes the lyrics I think are great any better than all the other lyrics out there? Again I could only come up with lame answers: I like these lyrics better than those lyrics … but the why of it is ultimately just because. Honestly, I don’t usually hear lyrics anyway. Songs are Gestalt to me: They either appeal as a whole or they don’t appeal at all.
I could have given up on answering my daughter’s question at that point. It would have made sense. Taste is impossible to quantify. We simply like different things, and that’s all there is to it.
But I didn’t want to give up, because the answer as to why I’m a True Fan of Bob Schneider might help me attract more True Fans of Johnny B. Truant … if I could only figure it out.
I decided my best bet was to rewind the clock on my Bob time, and start from the beginning.
Fandom begins with an experience, then becomes aspiration.
I was introduced to Bob’s music by some friends who’ve lived in Austin most of their lives. We saw him at a free outdoor show like the one I got all existential about in this post, but there was nothing special about going. We’ve seen a lot of shows in that venue: some good, some great, some not really my jam.
With Bob Schneider, though, it was love at first sight.
I have to look back with a naive lens to understand why that was. In the moment, I just enjoyed and laughed a lot more than usual, moved by forces in my brain that usually run on autopilot. I knew “I like this,” but nothing more. Thinking now, I can see that it wasn’t just his songs, which were good, nor his jokes, which were irreverent, funny, and exactly my speed. It wasn’t his affability, though that was part of it, too.
It was the experience of it all. But not just any experience.
Most good concerts will give you a feeling: excitement, joy, energy, the desire to get out of your seat and dance … or to fold into it, overcome with beautiful melancholy. This was different. This was more. This was me seeing someone up there onstage, being exactly who I wished I could be.
I don’t mean I want to be a performer. I mean I want to be real. I want to be authentic. Bob was both from Go: completely himself, completely free of what the crowd may have wanted him to be. In a way that’s impossible to convey in words, that first concert somehow gave me permission to be as genuine as I wanted to be — something, by the way, that I still hold back from. Even my best fans still only get 80 percent or so of the full Truant Experience … but here Bob was, psychically telling me it was okay to go all the way.
Most songwriters have a genre. Bob doesn’t. He has sad songs, ridiculous songs, melodic songs, rap songs. “2002” is about despondency and heroin addiction, but “Thor” is about the God of Thunder trying to settle into a normal life in Green Bay, trying not to destroy people with his road rage. “Goddess” gave me new perspective when the world seemed to be going to crap, but “Mudhouse” makes me want to jam like I’m at a frat party.
Bob Schneider’s only true genre is “Bob Schneider.” Maybe that sounds familiar, substituting my name instead.
So if you’re following along, let me summarize what happened here: An artist-minded author who doesn’t fit into a single genre and is reluctant to be fully himself attended a concert given by an artist-minded singer who doesn’t fit into a single genre and is always completely himself.
In other words, Bob stood on that stage and showed me exactly the person I’m supposed to be.
They love you because you’re brave.
All art and entertainment is ultimately about giving an experience to the person consuming it. Good books, movies, paintings, photographs, and more change the internal state of readers and viewers in ways those people enjoy — or at least appreciate and want to feel. Nobody reads your books to watch a protagonist take a set of actions. They read because they want to feel something, and they’ll enjoy your work to exactly the degree that it provides the feeling they’re after.
Thriller readers want to experience thrills they’d never seek in real life.
Horror readers want to experience catharsis that’s not possible in their day-to-day.
Romance readers want to feel the ups and downs of relationships without danger of heartbreak, confident that everything always turns out happily in the end.
Some readers want to feel uplifted. Others want to be crushed, because pathos validates their experience or because witnessing someone else’s tragedy makes their life seem better by comparison. Others want to safely experience something that would normally be unwise: an adventure, a crime spree, revenge, a torrid affair that can only burn for so long, doomed to end in tragedy.
That’s true for all entertainment. If your books don’t provide an emotional experience that someone wants, you’ll never sell a copy. If they do, you’ve got a chance … but even then it’s on a book-by-book, experience-by-experience basis.
I didn’t hear one Bob Schneider song, jam along happily to it, and then go home. I didn’t even hear an entire concert’s worth of songs and do the same thing. Nope. For me, it wasn’t about experiencing the songs. Instead, it was about the person who’d made those songs in the first place.
See, readers love your stories. Fans, on the other hand, love you.
That’s not just semantics. When I say they love you, “you” isn’t just shorthand for “a way to group your stories together.” I’m not saying that they love Book A and Book B and Book C, so therefore they love YOU as a category that contains A, B, and C.
No. I’m saying that they love you. YOU. Yes, you wrote books A, B, and C, and they love those books … but above and beyond that, they love you because you were brave enough to write them. And don’t kid yourself; it is brave to write: to put yourself out there, to attempt to connect with others, to put your heart on the page. It’s far more brave than most people could ever be.
I said above that Bob represents a lot of what I want to be, and that he gives me permission to be the things I usually hesitate from allowing myself to be. He’s a trailblazer: out in front of me testing the waters, cutting a path so that people like me can more easily follow. I look at Bob and I think, “He’s doing X, so I can do X.” I think, “I’m a little afraid to do Y … but Bob’s doing it, so that encourages me to join him and do it, too.”
When we’re the fan (and especially when we’re the True Fan, completely bought-in), it’s because we see someone as braver than us, and we gravitate toward that bravery.
Simply put, True Fans are people who love what you represent so much, they’ll take any opportunity to have more “you” — and your energy — in their life.
Readers are drawn to what you do. True Fans, by contrast, are drawn to who you are.
It’s about energy.
Readers want stories.
Fans want your stories.
True Fans want the energy you wear around yourself like an aura.
Maybe you’re funny and they want more humor in their lives. Or maybe they wish they could be funny, too, but are too timid to try.
Maybe you’re able to reach deep into your soul and put what you find on display for the world to read, and they wish they could do the same … but usually they can’t, because most people hide their emotions. Most people flinch from truly connecting. The delving you’re doing, they’d never have the guts to do.
Whatever it is, your Truest Fans stick around because there’s an emotional experience that they want but aren’t brave enough to create for themselves, so they let you create it for them. That thing you create matters, but it doesn’t matter nearly as much as the fact that you created it in the first place. What you do matters, but the fact that you were brave enough to do it matters most of all.
I thought this the other day when I found myself alone in the house and said, “Awesome. Now I can play my guitar and sing with nobody around to hear it.”
Right. Me. Singing. I know.
We’ve all seen it: Someone becomes well-known in one arena, then decides to branch into another arena and everyone laughs at them. To stick with music, I remember hearing about Russell Crowe’s band back in the 90s, when he was at the height of his acting fame. Same for Keanu Reeves. I remember both bands being a joke, even if we never even heard their music. We just collectively urged talented people to stop branching out and stay in their lane.
I don’t want to play my guitar and sing for anyone. I don’t plan on sharing it with the internet or writing an album. If I did, I feel like I’d be laughed at just like Keanu and Russell. But that was a strange realization, wasn’t it? Why would I expect laughs? Why would I expect anyone to even care? Other people play guitar. Others sing. I wanted to be alone to do it, but why was it so repugnant to do in front of people? Was it fear? Was I failing to be brave?
I decided that it didn’t matter, because I wouldn’t be doing it for anyone else. If I did it, I’d be doing it for me.
Around the same time, my boy Bob announced he was selling “wave form art” of his songs. Interestingly, I didn’t suggest he stay in his lane in the way I expected others to tell me to stay in mine. Nope. Instead, I wanted to buy one. Not a print, either. I wanted an original. I can’t afford one right now, but I wanted it … and I’ve never bought visual art before.
So why did I want it? Because Bob made it.
I wanted that art because someone I like chose to step out of his lane instead of staying obediently in it, and I wanted to own something that reminded me of that choice. Every time I looked at the waveform of “40 Dogs,” I wouldn’t see art. Instead, I’d see creative bravery — bravery, by the way, that I wanted in myself.
I have no intentions to play and sing publicly, but if I did, it dawned on me that my True Fans would love it. Even if the music was bad, chances are they’d still love it … because it’s not the music they want; it’s the choice to make music at all. What they want is the emotion. What they want, in the end, is to feel my courage as if it was their own.
That’s the secret to gaining True Fans, I think: Being bold. Being brave. No matter what happens or what comes from it, you earn True Fans by embodying the attributes they wish they had in themselves … but because they don’t have it, they buy it — by proxy — from you.
And that’s the crux of it, my fellow creators: The secret to attracting True Fans is to be fully, completely, and boldly yourself.
A portal into you
That’s all honest art is, at the end of the day. It’s a portal into the deepest and most authentic parts of yourself.
If you’re more of an algorithmic thinker, you don’t need to delve so completely … but if you’re an artisan like me, your best bet is to drop all pretense and just be you.
Be as much yourself as possible. Be yourself beyond the limits of reasonability. Be yourself so completely, you’re embarrassed by it. You are ideal for someone — someone who’s searched forever and never found anyone they resonate with quite as well. You embody everything that someone else wishes they could be. If you create, and if you create without limits, it won’t just be your creations that the world sees. In addition, they will see the real you … and the bravery it took for you to open up and show it.
I’m increasingly convinced that the job of the artist is to use creative expression to open a portal into their innermost selves: an extremely vulnerable window that lets the whole world look into their hopes and dreams and fears. Yes, it’s terrifying. It’s so terrifying that nobody ever does it … which is exactly why when someone does dare to do it, it’s so powerful.
A word of warning, though:
The path of the iconoclast writer is a long and slow one. It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme. To be honest, it’s usually get-rich-never. If you’re lucky, you’ll scrape by … but it’s entirely possible you’ll open up and not find any True Fans. It’s entirely possible you’ll fail, and feel like a fool.
That’s what makes it so exciting.
It’s not a strategy for the timid. I opened this article by saying how hard True Fans are to find, and I wasn’t kidding. You’re asking people to fall in love with you, and we all know love doesn’t come easy. True Fans are beyond gold. They’re diamonds. They’re people you should cherish and spoil. You might have to cull through a million readers to find one True Fan, so thank your lucky stars if you manage to find any at all
Am I discouraging enough yet? Good. Nobody should take this path because they’re seeking riches. You should only follow it because you want to create no matter what else happens. So ask yourself: Why do you do what you do? Is it for the world, or is it for you?
I know my own answers. If I play, it’s not for you. It’s for me. I don’t care if nobody likes it. I don’t care if everyone tells me to stop. Same goes for my books: Of course I hope people will buy them because that gives me more time to write more books, but if nobody buys them, the deep-down truth is that I’d write them anyway. I’m my ideal reader. In the end, I am all I need.
It’s kind of a paradox: The attitude I just described? It’s the kind of attitude that can fall horribly flat, but it’s also the kind that might gain you a fiercely loyal following — one that will consume every little thing you create just because it carries energy they wish they had. It’s a small way of bringing more of “the bold and brave energy of you” into their lives.
You could play it safe and do fine. Plenty of people do that. Most people do it, actually. In my mind, though, playing it safe is, ironically, akin to rolling dice. If you offer nothing that’s truly YOU, you’re offering the same thing as everyone else. Hoping to win by offering the same-old sounds like the ultimate crapshoot to me. Why not take a risk and offer something different instead?
There’s only one point of differentiation — one truly Unique Selling Point — that you and only you can offer … and that’s to BE YOU. To be brave, let it all hang out, and see what happens.
It might go horribly, or it might go wonderfully. It might, in fact, end up being the most liberating, most fulfilling, and most meaningful thing you’ve ever done.
The choice is yours. What’s your gut say?
I’m writing a complete book for authors about this, called The Artisan Author. If you’d like to get that book when it launches, go here to follow its Kickstarter campaign and read more about it. The campaign launches on July 15 and will offer a ton of cool shit beyond just the book for those who want it.
It's where I am, too. It's all the "you" as brand stuff that kicks me. I don't always want to share deep personal parts of myself. Actors bear their souls onstage through a fictional medium without giving away all the personal details of where they mined the nuances of their performance. As soon as they try a new medium, tomatoes fly. Be spry enough to dodge them.
You are what they want.
This is very freeing.
And actually the authentic you is utterly unique, constantly changing, a true gem.