True Fan

If you can get 1000 fans to pay you $100/yr, then you make $100k/yr doing your art. The new Brand You?

But what if you're only Famous For Fifteen People?

Maybe 1 super-fan: Patronage

key essay: 2008-03-17-Kelly1000Fans

• Mar'2011 update - though I Commented that these indie authors may not really fit the original model if their fans aren't paying them $100/yr (Life Time Value). And I also asked for some examples from genres/media where artifact-production is more expensive than books/music - e.g. live-performance recorded as Video.
• Brian Clark connects this to the Teaching Sells model and gives a 20-step process to follow.

Cory Doctorow experiment - 2009-10-21-DoctorowHelpBookModelExperiment

Can allow super Price Discrimination - provide Artificial Scarcity for people willing to pay for it.

• Cory Doctorow: 2008-08-01-DoctorowAuthorPriceDiscrimination

Dec'2010 Hugh MacLeod example - Thank God the internet came along and changed everything. Suddenly I found myself making a damn good living, without having all those mainstream hoops to jump through first. Just by doodling wee, non-mainstream cartoons all day, to what by old mainstream standards would be a TINY audience that I reach via this blog, Twitter and my newsletter.

This is made possible because the web, as we all know, is a SUPERB way to sell relatively high-end products. In my case, private, client-based commissions are worth THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of times more than the advertising eyeballs that ultimately pay for the newspaper cartoonist’s mortgage. Of course they are. Not to mention, the commissions are fun and intellectually interesting to work on.

Which is why my advice for anyone trying to succeed on the web is, make the highest-end product you can, and then target the tiny handful of people- the microaudience- who are likely to buy it.

Apr'2012 interview with Kim Boekbinder

Jonathan Mead: http://paidtoexist.com/the-secret-to-attracting-1000-true-fans/

Ariel Hyatt has an ongoing series of posts around it.

Some examples, many from the article at 2010-12-22-KulashOkgoMakeMoneyMusic.

For whom am I a True Fan? Who Am I A True Fan Of?