Adventures in Content Creation - Almost Christmas Edition

'Twas two nights before Christmas, and all through the house, not a payout was stirring, no matter how viral the post...

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Being a professional writer is a weird thing sometimes.

It’s a skillset I’ve worked on my whole life, but with a particular intensity for the past 20 years or so. It has not always been the kind of thing that could pay the bills.

Until it was.

And it was right up until it wasn’t again.

Mine is a dynamic and evolving industry, filled with competition — now including the contributions of AI — but also myriad opportunities for real success if you can hit your stride.

Frankly, it’s the only thing I know how to do well, one of a few things I’m not an abject failure at, and it comes to me so naturally that it’s hard to imagine doing anything else. It’s still work — sometimes quite a lot of it — but it’s also my passion. When I’m writing, the whole world disappears. It’s just me, my typing fingers, and the words that pour out of me.

I’ve been talking a lot lately about consciousness and protocols and “downloads.”

When I sit here, typing like I am right now, I don’t hear the words in my head first. I don’t usually even have a plan, outside a general topical outline. I put my hands on the keyboard and my fingers begin an intricate dance like they are possessed. Words I don’t even know I’m thinking start appearing before me on the screen.

It’s not entirely unlike a Ouija Board, except the spirit being channeled isn’t some third-rate demon, it’s just…me. The version of me that is locked inside behind walls of insecurity and doubt and negative self-talk. The part of my brain I can’t simply access when I’m up and walking around. Writing is almost like a bypass for the subconscious mind, mainlining ideas and concepts you don’t even realize you have inside you until you watch them spilling out across the page.

It’s a borderline transcendent experience.

Of course, for it to work well, I need to be in a good place mentally. If I’m overly stressed about money or kids or life in general, emotionally dysregulated because I just had an argument with my wife, depressed because of familial discord or personal failings I don’t know how to repair, or anything of the like, the well gets tainted. Wherever the writing demiurge lives within me, he is chained to my sense of emotional wellbeing. When that gets thrown off, so does he. If I’m not careful, he’ll regurgitate every raw emotion I’m feeling, every gripe and grievance, and convince me that it’s all bread and circuses.

It can be very challenging to navigate.

It makes me laugh when people call me a “grifter,” or tell me to “get a real job.” I’ve had plenty of real jobs, and none of them quite compare to the difficulty of tearing open a vein and bleeding out in the public eye for free, in the hopes a few people might hit subscribe so you can afford to do it again two days later.

Somehow I have to keep things separate. The writing is always just the writing. Themes, topics, ideas, reflections, they just kind of come to me, and I do my best to get them down and make them the best they can be. But it’s also a job, and right now, for me, chasing money is the most important game. Not because I love money, or want anything particularly fancy, but because I love not being homeless, or seeing my kids go without, or not having to worry about how many months behind I am on X or Y. Money is about freedom from worry. It’s knowing those new tires you need are not going to be a problem, or that unexpected urgent care visit when your poor 11 year-old wipes out on a slip of tissue paper on the hardwood floor and splits his jaw open and cracks a molar in half isn’t going to bankrupt you. (Yes, this happened a few days ago, poor kid!)

It’s because I need to be able to afford car insurance and health insurance and to make payments on cars and loans that get a little further out of reach each month while I send the collection calls straight to voicemail, because what the hell am I going to tell them anyway?

It’s because I’m still wrestling with complex trauma issues and need therapy I can’t pay for. And time to exercise my aging, expanding body instead of sitting here like a toad on a log pounding on a keyboard day and night, hoping to find the thing that’s going to give me some breathing room.

It’s because while I’m unspeakably grateful, I don’t want an old friend to feel like he has to send us a thousand dollars so we can buy Christmas presents for the kids. I want to be the guy who is in the position where I can help other people in need, like I used to, instead of being that guy myself. I am at a stage of life where I know that’s who I should be…and yet I’m not.

All of this helps explain why this is my first post here in a week, and I didn’t even realize it.

I was channeling pure momentum there for a while, posting daily, and then, something unusual happened.

I accidentally stumbled on the formula for how to make a Twitter/X thread go viral.

If it had only happened once, I would have assumed it was a fluke. But every time I applied it, it worked again.

More Viral Than a Pandemic

My first thread on the New Jersey drones got 22 million views on just the first tweet in the series. Many of the subsequent tweets got 1-2 million views a piece. My next thread got 1.6 million on the first tweet. My next one got 2.2 million. My next one got 1.6 million.

I just looked at my numbers, and in the past 2 weeks, I’ve had 11 posts with 2 million or more views, and another 16 with 500K-1 million views.

A stupid video I made standing outside my shower after a late night delivering food somehow got 1.6 million views. (The humorous follow-up video, however, did not.)

This has never happened to me before, and I’ve been doing this a long time. I have never had a run this good.

And since I’m part of the X revenue sharing program, I was extremely hopeful that all these views — over 70 million total in the past two weeks, last time I checked — would translate into some actual rent money. Maybe all the work I’d been putting in would finally pay off a little!

My X stats for the past 14 days, as of this writing

With numbers like this, I decided to go all in. I put most of my waking effort into threads on X to try to boost the last payout of the month before another round of bills was due.

When something is working well, I tend to double down on it.

And I had reason to hope. I’ve been watching other creators making 5 figures a month and gleefully posting their payouts, and I thought, “You know, if I could even get $1-2K for all this traffic I’ve been generating, that would be a big help.”

I told myself to lower my expectations. I shouldn’t plan on getting more than about $500, even with tens of millions of views, just in case. Catastrophizing is one of my innate skills. Helps to soften the blow if things go sideways. I was going into this with maximum effort, but expecting very little.

On Friday, while I was out Christmas shopping with my wife and oldest son, the suspense was terrible. I knew it was payout day. I kept checking to see if anything had come in. Jamie started getting irritated with me for constantly checking my phone instead of just having fun with them — which is fair — so I finally put it away.

Until I got a call from

Kale Zelden

.

“Check to see what you got,” he said. He’d just gotten paid. He knew my stuff was blowing up. He was dying to know.

I looked.

And I was not prepared for what I was about to see:

I felt like I was standing on a trap door, and the bottom fell out.

$194.20???

I’d been working on content for about 12 hours a day the past week and a half. I’d amassed stats I’d never seen in 16 years on the website. Or on any website, anywhere, ever. My videos alone had over 3 million views. My engagements were up 9,000%. My shares were up 105,000%. How is that even a real number? A hundred and five thousand percent???

And all it translated to in Elon bucks was less than I need to pay my electric bill.

I had put all my eggs in that basket for over a week, because nobody knows the metrics for making money on X, and no estimates are given until the money hits your account. I’d skipped a whole week of going out hustling food deliveries for $60-100 a night. I’d avoided working on the eBooks and courses on effective online writing I’ve been developing. I was living for each moment of what I believed to be monetized engagement. If that made a grifter, I didn’t care - I wanted to take a damn break for Christmas and not have to worry, so I was going to drink this chalice to the dregs. I was at bat, down by one score in the 9th inning, with several homeruns under my belt for the game and I could just feel that I was going to hit one out of the park.

And I struck. the hell. out.

I couldn’t even talk for the first 10-15 minutes after I saw that number. I kept checking it to make sure I was right. It just didn’t make any damn sense.

I had generated 25% of the ENTIRE POPULATION OF AMERICA worth of impressions, and I’d done most of it in under a week.

What more did I have to do?

I think I was kind of in shock. My expectations were really low, but they were still not low enough.

I’d seen what appeared to be a clear indication of success and bet everything I had on black.

And it came up obstinately, undeniably red.

The Hidden Upside

It took a while, but I gradually began to recover.

I thought more carefully about the situation. Broke it down. Once I re-framed, I found the silver lining that was hiding in plain sight. I realized that despite my disappointment, I actually did have a big win on my hands, and it was multifaceted:

• I figured out a formula to make tweet threads go viral, and applied it successfully about half a dozen times. Even when it underperformed, it performed better than anything else I’d ever tried. It was repeatable. It was teachable. It was marketable.

• I’ve gained over 23,000 followers in a little over a week. On Monday, December 9, I had 14.7K followers on X. As of this writing, I’ve got 38.1K and that number grows every day. My new followers are WAY more engaged, which means many of my old followers were probably abandoned accounts or bots. And since the currency of note for writers and content creators is eyeballs, I can use this to get my content in front of more people, who will hopefully subscribe, pushing me closer to making a living from doing what I do best.

• I’ve picked up over 500 free subscribers and 15 paid subscribers to The Skojec File in the past 30 days. We’ve got 25K more views here this month than last - on a publication with only 2,600 subscribers. I’ve added a little over $2,000 in annualized revenue in that same period. And I barely advertised my Substack in the viral threads.

• I made appearances on two podcasts in two days and was invited on two others plus a radio show that I didn’t get to do. I’m being exposed to new audiences with an interest in my work. And I’m having fun doing it.

• I was invited to write a guest post on a much larger Substack that I haven’t even gotten around to yet. More opportunities like this will surely follow.

• I’ve brought in close to $1,000 in income from my Paypal and Buy Me a Coffee pages since this all started, and though I need about 10X that to get on top of all my past due accounts, every dollar helps.

• I’ve discovered that people have a real interest in stories about UAPs and other mysterious topics, despite my reticence to focus on them here because this Substack started out with a very different focus and audience — and that I’m actually very good at writing about this topic in an engaging way.

These are all very positive developments. And they are useful for any future efforts to make my writing sufficiently profitable that I can stop it with the time-sucking side gigs.

These days, that’s what it takes to be a writer. As nice as it would be, you don’t get to just sit down and write what you want and have a two-negroni lunch before falling asleep with a good book in your lap. Writing is just step one. You’ve got to market it, push it on social, tie it in to a podcast, go on other people’s podcasts, sell an eBook or three, sell an online course or two, make videos, sell brand-appropriate merch, etc., etc., & c.

You have to be a freaking content machine.

So if that’s the game I’ve got to play, I’ll play it. I’ve got to work on my funnels. I’ve got to dial in my products. I’ve got to put out more videos. And ideally, I should have done all this before Christmas, but alas, I ran out the clock.

But things will take a turn for the better. Because I have endless things to write about, and a full head of steam.

I came across a great quote on expectations today while…looking for a great quote about expectations:

The more work you put in, and the more you constantly and consistently give good performances against good opponents and constantly exceed people's expectations, the more you really endear yourself to the crowd. That's how your career takes off - it's just consistency and time.

Sami Zayn

Consistency and time. When you’re impatient, when life is urgently pressing you to level up and win the game, these constraints feel like shackles.

But they aren’t. They’re game changers.

Productive effort is a slow burn. If you want to win, you’ve got to be in it for the long haul. Even when that’s agonizing.

You can’t afford to burn out on high-G maneuvers. You can’t dump all your fuel in one boost. You can’t use up all your acceleration-themed metaphors in one paragraph.

I’ve got more ideas than I have opportunities to execute them. That’s a good problem to have.

And I now know something extremely valuable about content marketing I didn’t know before. I’ve grown my audience significantly, and have more people to share my my big ideas with than ever.

I’m excited for the possibilities. I feel like I’m on the cusp of something big. 2025 is going to be a wild, weird year — I can feel it — but I’m also about to break through to the next level, and I cannot wait.

Until then, I’m still going to try to sell you some stuff so I can pay some things down!

Let me put on my announcer voice:

Let’s start with this Substack. If you’re not a paid subscriber yet, please consider doing so. I’ve kept a lot of posts free the past couple weeks because we’ve had a lot of new visitors, but the majority of posts here are typically paywalled. It’s just $8/month, and I try to write here 2-3 times a week. If every free subscriber did this, I wouldn’t have to worry about money at all.

If half of the free subscribers did this, I’d still be doing pretty OK. Remember, you can cancel at any time!

Next are my products. As I said, I’m working on a book and some courses and maybe a weekly newsletter to help folks become better writers — because hey, teach what you know! — but these probably won’t come out until next year. Hopefully I’ll have a place for you to sign up for more info soon.

Until then, I’ve got a couple of kid-related items that are actually published (because my house is still full of wee ones, and I make stuff with them in mind) that you can still grab before Christmas:

First is my Atomic Robot coloring book, which was only available in hard copy on Amazon (but we’re past the shipping window for Christmas) until today. This morning, I re-formatted and re-released it as a downloadable, printable eBook - and for a little over half the price of the hard copy. Just $4.99. That means you can just keep printing out the pages and you don’t have to worry about buying a new book every time it gets used up. You can grab a copy from my Stan Store by clicking right here or on the image below:

I also have a children’s book edition of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star with the verses from Jane Taylor’s original 1806 poem. I made this so I could teach my youngest son the song with images. I have the paperback ready to go as one of his Christmas presents, but again, shipping window has closed. You can, however, get a Kindle version right here, or by clicking the image below:

Finally, if you’d like to help out by going the direct patron route, I am happy to accept your support! Some of you have already been a huge help in keeping us afloat as I continue looking for work, or better yet, get more subscriptions and add ons to my new content business off the ground so that can generate more revenue. I can’t thank you enough!

If you would like to join my other patrons in supporting my work, you can do so at one of the following:

• My Paypal Page

• My Buy Me a Coffee Page

• My Venmo Page

(I’m open to suggestions for other/better platforms if you have them.)

That’s all for now. I’m not sure if I’ll have a chance to squeeze in another post before Christmas, but if not, I wish you all the Merriest of Christmases, and I hope you get to spend the quality time you need with the people you love!