We recently connected with Ben Wolf and have shared our conversation below.

Ben, appreciate you joining us today. Have you been able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen? Was it like that from day one? If not, what were some of the major steps and milestones and do you think you could have sped up the process somehow knowing what you know now?

Success doesn’t happen overnight. Or in my case, “success” didn’t happen for the first eleven years of my career.

Right now, I’ve got 27 books published. I’m incredibly proud of that, just like I was proud of my first published book, but none of them have been a breakout success.

In fact, even with 27 books published, I still struggle to sell books online. It just doesn’t happen that way for me, no matter what I’ve tried.

Instead, I sell books in person at live events like comic conventions, craft fairs, and conferences.

It wasn’t until the last two years or so that I’ve been making enough to even call it “full-time” income. I went from scraping by with freelance editing and book formatting gigs and snatching time to write on the side to earning consistent income from my book sales efforts in a span of about two years.

Since January of 2021, I’ve pulled in over $100k in book sales, with over 95% of my revenue coming from live sales. I’m on track to bring in over $60k in revenue from live events sales this year.

Here’s my takeaway from this: play to your strengths. Unlike a lot of other authors, I’m extroverted. I enjoy talking to people. I’m a sales-y type guy, so pitching my books to potential readers comes naturally to me.

All in all, I enjoy what I do, and it has proven successful for me. If you’re trying to do more, maybe focus on doing less and doing it really well instead. You might just make a career out of your creative pursuits that way.

Ben, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My name is Ben Wolf. I’m the author of 27 books across the genres of science fiction, fantasy, horror, children’s, young adult, historical fiction, and nonfiction (and probably others, too). If you’re a reader of any or all of those genres, you can count on my books to deliver high-quality action and adventure, relatable and interesting characters, and stories that you’ll remember long after you’ve read the last page.

I’m one of those authors who started writing based on the compulsion to write. I had story ideas in my head that wouldn’t leave me alone, so I wrote them down. I honed my craft for almost a decade before seriously pursuing indie publishing, so I always emphasize the importance of mastering the craft of writing, or mastering whatever your particular craft is.

At the end of the day, your projects need to be able to stand on their own, and that is solely determined by whether or not you’ve done the work to get really, really good at your craft. That’s what I’m proudest of–every single thing I’ve published is high-quality workmanship. Anyone who reads a Ben Wolf book can expect a certain level of polish and powerful storytelling in all of my books and stories.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

My entire career has been one sequence of failures after another.

In 2009, I went to my first writers conference, and while I learned a lot, I failed to get a publisher.

I got my first agent a few months after that writers conference, but for the next few years, we failed to get a publishing contract.

In 2010, I was a finalist for an unpublished writers award, and I lost.

In 2011, I founded a flash fiction magazine called Splickety. We launched, sold very few issues, and achieved very little from 2011-2013

In 2014, I gave up on trying to finish the fantasy trilogy I’d been working on since 2009. Something was wrong with it, and I didn’t know what it was.

We launched two more flash fiction magazines, and we published one issue a month across all three imprints. We lost money every month, and I subsidized each issue with revenue from my freelance editing career.

I also self-published my first novel, Blood for Blood, on Halloween of that year. Sales were profoundly disappointing.

In early 2015, I hit a bright spot–I successfully funded a Kickstarter campaign for my debut children’s picture book, I’d Punch a Lion in His Eye for You. I ordered 1,000 copies and had them delivered to my house. I wouldn’t sell out of that initial 1,000-copy print run until 2022.

From 2016-2017 onward, I got a new agent, pitched a thousand times, got close three times to landing that ever-elusive publishing contract, but got rejected more or less at the finish line all three times. The last time it happened was in the fall of 2017.

I was heartbroken. But I decided then and there that I was done with that route, and I plunged headfirst into the world of self-publishing from then on.

Also, my agent fired me.

In 2018, I published The Ghost Mine, my first real foray into self-publishing. I paid for a professional cover design, got high-quality editorial feedback, and published it. I failed to bring in much by way of sales online. I had a little success with selling it at a local comic convention along with my aforementioned children’s book, but nothing dramatic.

I also shuttered Splickety and spun off the two other magazines to former employees, pronouncing the flash fiction experiment as a verifiable failure.

In 2019, I launched my Blood Mercenaries fantasy series with minimal online sales. I did a couple more shows, all of which went well, so I started doing more of them.

In 2020, right when I was getting really good at doing live events, COVID shut them all down for several months. I released a few more books, but none of them took off online. I did, however, sign a three-book contract with a publisher (Aethon Books) to expand The Ghost Mine into a trilogy.

In 2021, I released 11 books. None of them were a commercial success, but the live events picked back up, and I made some good money from going around and selling my catalogue at events.

In 2022, I realized I wasn’t scraping by with money anymore. In fact, I had somehow spent an exorbitant amount of money on my business credit card that year and managed to pay it all off. I did 30-something events that year with my books.

Now in 2023, I’m doing more than 40 shows, and I’m on pace to bring in $60k of revenue from book sales, all at live events. My online sales still suck, but I’m out there making my own way.

If that’s not resilience, I don’t know what is. Don’t give up, folks. Carve your way into the success that you know is ahead of you. Find it, and take it.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

For years, I thought I was a great writer. I thought I had natural talent, thought I had a solid grasp on how to write great stories with vivid characters and awesome plot lines, etc.

I was wrong.

I realized, specifically, that my characterization needed work. I had to figure out how to write better characters.

After getting some feedback from some trusted friends and successful authors (especially Will Wight), I revamped my approach to writing, starting with the characters first. I did this with my Blood Mercenaries series by writing origin stories for my four main characters. I wanted to get to know them individually before I brought them together as a team.

It worked. As a result of that rework, the characters are fleshed out, unique, interesting, and colorful. I routinely get compliments on the characters from that series especially, and I’ve taken what I’ve learned from that process and applied it to my other projects going forward.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.benwolf.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/1benwolf
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/1benwolf
• Other: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Ben-Wolf/author/B00P7PG97G