Why I Don’t Respond to My Haters

Why don’t you respond to your haters? I get asked constantly, usually by people who remember the Monetize Your Haters segments, and I want to take my time answering it properly.

The short version is that I’m the same guy with different priorities. When you’re the owner and the face of a company, engaging with people who dislike you doesn’t serve anything you’re actually trying to build. That wasn’t obvious to me immediately. It’s something I had to grow into professionally, and going to cons and interacting with real customers is what put the rest of it in perspective.

There’s also the part people miss about social media. If you live in one corner of it, you’ll mistake that corner for the whole world. My friends are on social media and completely detached from all of it. Since the distribution deal, we meet people constantly who found our books with zero knowledge of any of this and no interest in it. That’s who my bandwidth belongs to.

I have no enemies. And I don’t knock anybody who preferred what I was doing five years ago.

00:00 The question, and why people ask it
01:03 What changed when I started the business
02:23 Learning not to engage as a professional
02:49 What real fans put in perspective
04:18 What clarified my priorities
05:16 How social media conditions you
06:05 Social media is not the whole world
07:42 The customers who never saw any of it
09:02 Growth, and what owning a company means
10:25 Where I’m at now