This is a lie you keep buying into. That you “need” something first before you can create the thing, write the book or record the song.

I didn’t have a single sub when I launched my Substack ten months ago. The first two months I didn’t make enough to pay the electric bill, but I treated it like a job anyway.

Slowly things started to move. I think it was article 12 and video 15 on YouTube that resulted in that spike of growth you see in October.

Does any of that equal income?

Fuck no. There is very little correlation between audience size and income.

I coach YouTubers who are 10x my size because they aren’t making any money and I am. And the reason is because I have things to sell and they just have an audience.

Audience does not equal income, it’s just a vanity metric that doesn’t pay the rent.

Audience growth is a side effect of showing up, creating assets and being a real human in a sea of AI output. Your readers/viewers/listeners WILL find you.

What about the people who write and write and never get anywhere?

They’re lying. To themselves and you. I see their Notes too, but when you go look at their Substack they have 4 articles about completely unrelated topics and very little to offer a reader.

The internet is not stacked against us, you and I both know it’s never been easier to go your own way than it is today.

All the tools the big publishers have are available to us now. We can literally stream documentaries directly into people’s living rooms, self-publish books that get sold in little bookstores around the world and drop ship our art prints to Bora Bora.

Our starving artist ancestors are rolling over in their graves.

We’ve got tools at our fingertips they couldn’t even imagine. Direct sales & publishing like this has never been possible before and yet the excuse makers are still wringing their hands in the corner complaining about not being able to make it without an audience.

Audience Not Required

You’ve probably heard about J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter) and Stephanie Meyer (Twilight), neither had an audience before publishing. They both went the traditional route, seeking a publisher to give their work legs. Their audience came from the long-form storytelling asset.

Then there’s Delia Owens, a retired zoologist in her late 60s who had never written anything. I not sure she even had a Facebook page when she published Where the Crawdads Sing. And the publisher did not care because the long-form storytelling was that good.

I saved the best example for last.

Hugh Howey was a 36-year old bookstore clerk when he wrote the short story, Wool. He published it on Amazon through KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) as a Kindle eBook only. He had no established audience or publisher backing. Just a story he turned into an asset.

Wool began getting dozens of downloads per day, and it inspired him to keep writing. Wool became a multi-book series that got picked up by a traditional publisher for physical book distribution while Howey retained eBook rights. Fast forward ten years and Howey has dozens of books, a TV series (Silo) on AppleTV and more streams of income than he can count.

Howey’s media empire started from one short story and Hollywood has been using this trick for over a hundred years.

What if I told you that there’s a top secret formula every Hollywood studio uses to maximize profit?

Except it’s not top secret, they do it out in the open and it’s more of a step-by-step than a formula but, I digress.

The Marvel Method for Midlife Creatives

Derivatives drive the media industry and the fuel in every tank is a story. Every movie, series, soundtrack, song and merch product begins with writing. Long-form storytelling gets refined, like crude oil, into dozens of income streams.

Marvel shows us step-by-step how to make money from long-form storytelling.

Step 1. Write a story.

Step 2. Write another story.

Step 3. Combine the stories into a book series.

Step 4. Combine the stories into a video/film series.

Step 5. Spin off the soundtrack into a product. Create audiobooks from the book series. Start a podcast based on the story, writing the story or a character from the story.

Step 6. Sell merchandise, artwork, posters, t-shirts from the story.

Step 7. Sell premium experiences based on the story. Heck, they’ve even got rides in themes parks for heaven’s sake.

Marvel takes a single idea (Text/Comic) and immediately designs an ecosystem around it: Audio (soundtracks, podcasts, audiobooks), Video (movies, TV series, documentary behind the scenes), Art (merchandise), and Premium Experiences (birthday party kits, Halloween costumes, cruises, theme parks). They treat creativity as an interconnected web of assets.

“But, Shannon, I’m just a solo creator. . . how in the world is it possible for one person to do this much?”

I’m so glad you asked! I’ve recorded a behind the scenes answer + a tour of my Second Act Studio. Grab your coffee, tea or a bowl of chowder and let’s dig in.

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My junk drawer is a terrifying tangle of charging cables, crumbs, leaky pens and dust bunnies. Not exactly a place to keep your best ideas. But that’s exactly where I kept sticking them.

Inspiration seems to strike at the most inopportune times, for me its the shower, while I’m cooking or taking a walk. And fuck all those people who tell us to walk around with a notepad in our pocket. I can’t find my ass half the time, but let me whip a notepad out of it and write that down.

I’ve often wondered how many great ideas disappeared into the bottomless pit of my brain never to be heard from again. That’s a real bummer when you’re trying to turn your lived experience into income. Here’s how I improved it by 80%ish and started organizing my ideas.

I found what works for me - I turned it into a game.

I’m easily rewarded. Checking things off a list is a huge dopamine hit for me. I keep my completed lists to remind myself that I can do incredibly large projects without stress when I break them down into snack size portions.

I stumbled over the solution for my lost notions by noticing how satisfying it was to review my completed checklists. What if I could do the same with my ideas?

Idea Cards

I keep a stack of index cards on my desk that I tried using to plot story arcs. That’s why the stack is still there, because I hated plotting — it ruined the entire writing experience for me, why in the world would I want to know how the story turns out before I write it?

Anywho, I grabbed a pink card from the top of the stack and wrote down a story idea that popped into my noggin uninvited while I was editing a video. A few minutes later I grabbed another and jotted down a note to check the status of the FOIA request I sent 6 weeks ago for a book I’m working on. By the end of the day I had a stack of 15 cards.

It was at that moment that I realized how many ideas run through my head on any given day. Many of them will never “become” anything, but every single day has yielded ideas that get moved from the junk drawer to my asset vault. Those ideas become the long-form stories that become hard assets that earn income.

A Home for Your Ideas

I’m not saying you need to keep every idea you have and I’m not telling you to walk around with a pocket full of index cards. I only use them at my desk. If I have an idea outside of my studio, I say, “if this is important, it will come up again at my desk.”

At the end of my work day I sift through my idea cards and decide what to do with them. Action items go on my bulletin board until done — call the dentist, pick up the dry cleaning, etc. Ideas with creative potential go in the vault.

Our ideas are the raw material for everything we create and it’s time we treated them that way.

My idea cards go into a vintage card catalog box I picked up for $20 at a yard sale. It desperately needs to be sanded and repainted but I’ve been on the fence about what color. Any thoughts?

This humble box has silenced the never ending question, “what should I write about today?” It’s also what started the whole concept of keeping everything in a vault.

Your Asset Vault — Analog & Digital

Let’s face it, most of what we create is digital first. We write on a device and save things to the cloud, even if they become a physical item later. Every book printed starts with a digital file, audiobooks aren’t on tape anymore and videos stream on screens as small as the face of a watch.

Analog Assets

Your idea cards, physical copies of books and other media are your analog assets. Notice that your idea cards are first. This is your secret weapon, those ideas are the raw material that will convert lived experience to income. Guard that box like Fort Knox, baby.

Your hard drive, flash drives and physical data storage is also an analog asset. It’s a physical item in your possession. Back up everything to a drive you keep in a safe place. I keep a copy in our fireproof lockbox right next to our other important documents.

Digital Assets

You should build your asset vault in the cloud so it will sync between your devices (with a physical backup on your hard drive + one other backup device). I use Google Drive because I use Google Workspace to manage my overall internet security. There are lots of cloud storage options — iCloud, Dropbox, Proton Drive, etc.

File Structure

I use a simple hierarchy structure for my asset vault.

1. Notes & Raw Material

2. Assets

3. Final Products & Bundles

Notes & Raw Material

I put research notes, data reports, newspaper clippings — anything digital that I want to save for future use to create an asset. Sometimes I put photos of my idea cards in here too so I have access to them during a project. When I’m actively working on creating assets from a story I create a folder with the project name to store the relevant notes. After a project is finished I archive that folder.

Assets

The asset folder has 5 sub folders.

1. Writing

2. Audio

3. Video

4. Art/Photography

5. Premium Experience

An asset is not an asset until it is complete. I don’t move it here until it’s ready to sell.

Final Products & Bundles

Final products are typically multiple assets assembled together. For instance, the writing folder holds 25 essays about herbal remedies, 10 on gardening and 12 tincture recipes. You pull from these assets to create a collection, “Tinctured Remedies - a colorful collection of old fashioned advice.”

Tinctured Remedies would get its own folder. Inside that folder you will have multiple final products — a book, audiobook, maybe a podcast, a planner and a recipe card collection. Then you offer the book, audiobook, planner and recipe card collection as a bundle.

Here’s what it looks like all set up & I’ve created a drive you can copy over to yours.

If you’d like to join us in the Second Act Studio, it’s a work at your own pace guided workshop designed to help you turn your lived experience into income.

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That’s the reason I selected it as my first essay for this new adventure. It represents the past I’ve struggled to let go of & the pain I just can’t seem to fully heal. It almost feels like before I can walk fully thru the door of using my lived experience to support my life, I have a few ghosts to lay to rest first.

I keep opening it and peeking inside, but I never go in and close the door behind me. The unfinished projects, half-baked ideas and failures of the past tether me to the door frame painted with my shame. Second Act Studio is built to help us alchemize that pain into gold.

This story takes place during a period of intense self-doubt, fresh betrayal and the trauma of losing the fantasy of what I thought my life would look like after the kids left home. It represents everything I worked towards as an adult — a loving family, great career and economic stability. The things we all know can vanish in an instant.

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