Blessings for You

THE ENTREPRENEUR AND I

While I was at the Burning Man festival, an entrepreneur approached me with a proposal:

“Your work should be getting out to a bigger audience. People are starving for the message you’re putting out. That’s why you need me. With my marketing machine, your name could become as recognizable as Deepak Chopra’s. Let’s build an entertainment conglomerate and hawk a hundred Rob Brezsny-style products.”

“Nah,” I said. “People come to me seeking sanctuary from hype. They know I won’t smack them upside the imagination with relentless sales pitches.”

I turned him down. He was puzzled.

Meanwhile, for many years I have gotten regular inquiries from marketers who want to pay me money for putting advertisements in my Substack newsletter, on my other social media sites, and on my website. I always say no. I have turned down well over $500,000 in ad revenue.

I launched my website in 1995 and have never had a paid ad on it. I’ve offered over 1,500 of my weekly Free Will Astrology columns for free on that site.

The weekly newsletter I offer is free if you want it to be, though I love it if you are a paying subscriber. I have never put ads in it, as many Substack writers do.

I freely give away two hours’ worth of my music on SoundCloud. I don’t make any money from my YouTube videos. I give away large sections of my books Astrology Is Real, The Televisionary Oracle, and Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia.

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Have I been naïve? Overly idealistic? Too pure? Maybe, but what’s more important is that I have long been ecstatic that people are interested in my work and that I have the means to provide it to them.

I also offer my Expanded Audio Horoscopes and Daily Text-Message Horoscopes, which cost money. Some people who draw inspiration from my free written horoscopes choose to pay for these two other services. Hooray!


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Then there are my books.




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Of course I’d like to earn more money than I do. The number one reason is that I self-publish my books and music, and that’s expensive. For my books, the costs of editing, design, artwork, and the logistics of publishing are substantial. It can take years before sales are sufficient to recoup my investment.

I currently have 17 future books in the pipeline, due to be published in the next two to three years. Twelve are astrology books, one for each sign. Four are novels, and one is poetry.

I might have wished that my muses had figured out a way for me to produce one book at a time over the past decade, but instead they have chosen to have me work on all of them at once!

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As a younger adult, I lived below the poverty line for many years. I was chronically unemployed and earned an average annual salary of less than $7,000. On the bright side, I had abundant free time to develop my skills as an astrologer, poet, novelist, musician, essayist, activist, and dreamer.

Ultimately, my well-honed aptitude for going constructively out of my mind catapulted me free of destitution. Learning the fine art of being an unruly artist turned out to be a wise career choice.

But I must also express deep gratitude for the social safety net. During my long stint as a pauper, the government graciously helped keep me alive by giving me food stamps and Medi-Cal, California's version of Medicaid health insurance.





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