Talking to Tom was incredible. He’s by far my favorite comic writer because his work ethic is unsurpassed, plus he’s got that pulp-style aesthetic to his books which couples positive heroism with the great soap opera drama that Stan Lee brought to his audience and changed the comic landscape forever.

If anything, the takeaway is to redouble my efforts to get more out.

On a comic level, there’s not much more I can do. I’m already extended as far as I can go with the resource I can’t do much about — money — to pay artists to draw my stories every month. Unless we can really find a way to get this movement jumpstarted to where there’s a greater group who really is here for comics, I’m not sure what I can do.

On the novel level, I have been slacking. Definitely not outputting at Tom DeFalco levels and this is where I’m going to be able to push harder. I’ll redouble my efforts to get more of this content out as I’ve stalled a little bit the last couple months. I’m getting very close to the end of my Sword and Sorcery, The Demon’s Eye and need to just get that done!

I think I’m also going to refocus marketing on Patreon. The comic crowdfund craze has died down a little, and Amazon is due for an e-book market crash which everyone’s getting a bit panicked about (plus Amazon’s pay-to-play nowadays for exposure). Getting Patreon to higher levels means steady income which makes comic and book production a lot easier.

A comic issue costs me just for art about $2,000 before I even see anything for my work.

A novel costs me about $1600 between cover and editing.

If Patreon subs can get up to the point of dialing that in per month it allows me to do more, take more risks with out-there projects and random things I want to write but probably shouldn’t spend time on from a commercial perspective, which will allow me to really flex as an artist/creator.

That’s gonna be the goal this year as industry is changing.

I just put out a samurai short comic 8-pages to my patreon subscribers yesterday, The Duel, which is a lot of fun and satisfies my inner weeb. This is the type of story I can do but probably won’t be something I can run a crowdfund for a general audience. It’s fun and awesome and different — and that’s going to be how to transform culture, not playing by corporate rules.

Check out The Duel and tons of other great pieces of content here.

Disney just announced yesterday that Bob Iger is no longer going to be CEO in a carefully worded statement. Their stocks fell pretty hard after the announcement.

This fresh off the heels of Dan DiDio’s removal as Co-Publisher at AT&T-owned DC Comics.

The latter was easy to see coming, as DC desperately needs a shakeup and to go into survival mode so they can keep their properties there for movies (and probably refocus toward movies).

The former is strange. Iger has one major failure for the Disney empire — which is Star Wars, and specifically the theme park iteration at Disneyland which has been a massive failure.

The theme parks are the only area of Disney which really has remained stable and up through the course of their IP-buying spree of the last decade. Now they own everything, so what?

My gut instinct is that Disney didn’t fire Iger, but he’s clashing with other people perhaps at the top of the Star Wars chain and doesn’t want to deal with it any longer.

But it’s all speculation. Either way, huge shakeups as we’re having major global economic warning signs with Corona-Chan. Get yourself prepared.

You don’t need to support corporate comics when there’s an awesome Golden Age character revived in Dynamite Thor. A brand new story by me which brings this character into modern times, plus a great restoration of classic comics. This is making comics great again. Back Dynamite Thor today. 

Contrary to the way it’s presented by President Trump, failure happens to everyone at some point. There are always high points and low points in anyone’s lives or careers. Everyone takes an L at some point and it can seem really hard to get back up from.

But the mindset that helps people through it to become winners isn’t emotional reactions brininging oneself into despair. It’s the opposite.

Even Trump has faced losing properties, bankruptcy, having to retool everything he had when a lot of his real estate game went belly up. There was a really tough time for the real estate market that a lot of people forget, but it knocked a lot of people out of the game.

I knew folk personally who lost EVERYTHING in the financial crisis of 2008. It seems like a long time ago now, but everyone had a lot of trouble then.

The people who win, however, don’t just give up, don’t check out when they get a failure.

They look at it, analyze it, and ask themselves “where’s the opportunity?”

Sometimes it’s hard to see. Sometimes the opportunity takes time. Sometimes you have to move in a different direction but it’s there.

The important part is to not quit.

My own first failure in writing came with a project near and dear to me — The Stars Entwined. I’d been high off the successes of my books Star Realms: Rescue Run and For Steam and Country — both of which had marketing problems in my mind. The first being a game tie-in so non-gammers would be tough getting into it, and the second is Steampunk is a niche genre, so a lot of people voiced they really didn’t want to read a steampunk book.

I thought i had a surefire win with The Stars Entwined. It’s space opera just like my fans like to read, I got a traditional publicist (paid a ton for it!) to promote the book to magazines and the like, and I was gonna rock with it.

Even with the paid publicist, because of my situation, no establishment reviewers or mags would pick it up. I’ve been blacklisted from the mainstream industry so that campaign tanked and did nothing for me. I ended up with very little exposure, and because it was in a crowded scifi genre it didn’t rise to the top and get seen by a lot of random people.

I became stuck. The Stars Entwined only moved a few hundred copies.

I was devastated, but I didn’t show it anywhere. I just kept writing, put my head down, worked hard, and refocused my energies to my steampunk series — several #1 Bestsellers later, and I have a series that’s hugely profitable. It’s still bringing me in great revenue.

I just had to keep moving. And over the course of the time, The Stars Entwined has trickled its way up to over 1,000 sales. I can return to the universe now knowing there’s an audience for it, and people are asking for it. A lot of people just never saw it release!

The lesson is to keep going, keep moving, keep working. You can never win if you quit.

My Dynamite Thor Kickstarter has defied the odds — it’s completely unsearchable on kickstarter, google, no one can find it unless they have my direct link. And I’m FUNDED anyway! We won with the odds stacked against us, and it’s a testament to our mindsets and our great books. Back it here today and enjoy a great superhero read.