With respect, I hear excuses here. "It's a lot more difficult," "It's hard to do that,"

I'm a big fan of publishing in big publications, but I also know that you CAN do it on your own, too, with a little hard work and dedication. It ain't impossible. It's hard, sure, but I built my publication's audience from nothing and now I get to enjoy the spoils of my hard work (control over when I publish, a big audience to publish directly to), because I worked extremely hard to build this over the last five years.

Show me the part in this article where I said it was easy to grow a publication? I've invested some $30K+ into making my publication run by hiring an Editor. It's just hilarious that your comment boils down to "It's easy for you to say this when you have 50,000 followers" but all the while you completely gloss over the fact that I built my audience from zero.

It actually wasn’t “easy for me” to say that. It was ridiculously difficult to get to 50,000 followers. See what I mean?