Stuffed Sloths, Substack, Book Sales and Taking My Wins Where I Can Get Them
A few weeks back I went with my two boys to Dave & Busters for a Purim party. It was entirely too much for my autistic four year old, who went home with his grandmother, but my eight year old and myself fixated on a roulette wheel style attraction with 1000 tickets as its highest score.
We spun that mighty wheel and were shocked and overjoyed when we scored 1000 tickets in one of our first spins. It was a far more amazing feeling than it really should have been considering that I am a forty-six year old adult (ostensibly) and those 1000 tickets are good only for a series of objectively useless tchotchkes.
But it felt good. It felt damn good. Me and my boy had triumphed! We hadn’t just done REALLY good at a meaningless game of chance; we’d done as good as we possibly could.
It’s a little like how many people do really well within their first hour in Vegas, and become convinced that the odds are in their favor but leave Sin City thousands of dollars poorer a week later.
That exhilarating high gets you hooked, and then you can’t help but chase it. It’s easy to see how people can get instantly addicted to gambling.
We kept chasing that high and ten or fifteen minutes later we scored again when that magical, miraculous, infinitely lucky wheel of joy gave us 1000 tickets all over again.
Forty minutes into our Dave & Busters adventure we were able to trade n our 2700 tickets or so for a nifty plush sloth in a hoodie.
The experience made an indelible impression on me because, as a rule, I don’t win and I’m not lucky.
It hasn’t always been that way. There was a time when I was successful and things seemed to go my way. Hell, I even wrote a memoir (The Big Rewind) about how I overcome a childhood and adolescence rife with hilarious and dramatic trauma to become a successful writer.
I was only thirty-one years old when I got my contract to write a memoir for Scribner, a prestigious literary division of Simon & Schuster that has published authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Don DeLillo, Stephen King and Nitro from American Gladiators.
At the time I realized that my big first book could be both the beginning of my career as an author as well as an apex I could never hope to reach again. That turned out to be true.
Scribner published three more of my books, and my final book for them, 2013’s You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me, turned out to be, in my mind at least, a creative and commercial success even if it seemingly marked the end of my life as an author for a major publishing house and I will never see a dime in royalties from a book that has sold close to ten thousand copies, got four stars in Rolling Stone and made a real difference in the way Juggalos and Insane Clown Posse are perceived in the culture.
I don’t think of myself as a winner or a success anymore. I don’t even dream about winning anymore. These days I just want to not fail. It’s enough to just do okay.
So when I hopped onboard the Substack bandwagon with my newsletter Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas my first goal was to get 100 paid subscribers for a newsletter that honestly involves only moderately less work than this website, which takes up the vast majority of professional energies.
I think five dollars is the perfect amount for a monthly pledge for Substack and Patreon so that’s the monthly paid subscription rate for Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas.
I hit that goal about a week and a half ago. Once Substack fees and declined charges are factored in, that’s about four hundred dollars of monthly income in exchange for a LOT of work so not only am I not going to get rich off Substack; I’m not even going to be able to make a tiny dent in my massive debt.
I’d love to think that 100 paid subscribers is just the beginning and that 500 or 1000 paid subscribers is the next peak I’ll climb but if my experiences with Patreon are any indication, there’s a pretty good chance that I’ve already hit my peak and that three years or four years from now I’ll have 60 or 70 paid Substack subscribers and the momentum will forever be headed in the wrong direction.
Also, when I hit one hundred paid subscribers, I got a congratulatory email from Substack telling me that I was now a Substack best-seller and that my account would reflect that I now have HUNDREDS of paid subscribers.
That made me feel weird because I am a fundamentally honest person as well as a Juggalo so I don’t like the idea of people thinking that I’m doing substantially better than I actually am. I do not have hundreds of paid subscribers and I don’t want people to think I’m thriving or killing it when I’m just barely getting by.
I don’t even have a hundred subscribers anymore at this point. It’s dipped back down to 99.
On a similar note, when I launched the Flaming Garbage Fire extended edition of The Joy of Trash I very much wanted it to do better than the original version, because I genuinely think it’s the best and most entertaining book I’ve ever written and sales for that topped out at about 300, or about a thirtieth of the sales of You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me.
To help sell books I introduced a promotion called The Joy of Positivity where, for twenty-five dollars, you get a numbered (to 100) hardcover copy of The Joy of Trash: Flaming Garbage Fire Extended Edition signed by me and my brilliant illustrator Felipe Sobreiro and a free signed copy of our “Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book The Weird A-Coloring to Al: Flaming Garbage Fire Extended Edition AND I will hand-write a recommendation for something good in every book I sell through my store.
As I had hoped, the personal touch made a huge difference. This version did quite well during its first week in sales. I literally sold about five copies of The Joy of Trash in the first two and a half months of 2023 but I sold about fifty Joy of Positivity hardcovers in its first week of release.
If I’m lucky, and we have already established that I am not, then I stand an okay chance of selling out the entire batch before the end of the month or my birthday on April 24th.
That made me very happy but I also felt frustrated because I feel like I need to go above and beyond and make deals so extravagant and involved that at the end of the day I’m barely turning a modest profit on a book it took me years to write.
I wish that I could just ask people to buy my books and pledge my Patreon and subscribe to my Substack and listen to my podcasts and they’d happily do so but twenty-six years into my career I still feel like I need to go above and beyond to get people interested in my work. I feel like I need to arduously crank out book sales and pledges and paid subscriptions one at a time and most days, honestly, I score nothing on any of those fronts.
Life has humbled me. Oh sweet blessed Lord has it ever humbled me. I’m almost obscenely appreciative for every win these days, no matter how modest or hard-won.
I’ve got an attitude of gratitude and savor every win, no matter how minor or silly because I am all too familiar with losing.
Buy a signed copy of The Joy of Trash: Flaming Garbage Fire Extended Edition, the brand spanking new version of a book that compiles all of the best pieces from this wonderful website over at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop and get a free, signed "Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book for free! Just 18.75, shipping and taxes included! Or you could buy it from Amazon at https://tinyurl.com/2p8t9wua but real talk, I need this sale a LOT more than they do.
Check out my new Substack at https://nathanrabin.substack.com/
And we would love it if you would pledge to the site’s Patreon as well. https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace