5 Reader Secrets to Transform Your Author Life

I think we're live. Hello, everyone. How's it going? Happy, happy. AuthorTube Writing Conference. Yes. Hello, everyone. So today we're going to be learning the five reader secrets to transform your author career. I am very, very excited for this. Yes. Hello, Carla. Hi. Hello, Lane. Hello. Of course, the wonderful Shannon, who's been running. Well, you have a team as well. Everyone deserves credit. Who's been helping out with author Tube Writing Conference. I'm going to jump right into my slides. Fingers crossed that this works live. It worked when I tested it. So fingers crossed that we don't have any issues here. Maybe someone can let me know in the chat if you can see my slides and if so, we'll just kick it off. This is going to be a lot of fun. We're going to dive deep. But the takeaway here that I want you all to have is that when we understand these five core secrets about readers, we can, first of all, simplify this entire book marketing process and actually have fun with this. Because I think once we understand that how we actually win as authors is by understanding our readers and serving them best, it kind of flips the whole equation around trying to game algorithms and hit bestseller lists. It's really about our readers and understanding them which these secrets will lead us to. The answers. Okay, I'm great. Great. You can see them. That is. That is exciting. So your author business is actually just five questions. The answers to these questions are the reader secrets. And I know you're seeing this card up here and you might be wondering, what is this card has a cute illustration. I'm actually totally free. You can download the link to them if you just on my website somewhere. I'll drop a Google Drive link at some point when I stop sharing. No need to go anywhere now. But that's just what this is. It's just 50 free marketing superpowers I created to help you better market your books. I actually have the card printed out right here, but this card goes over the five essential questions you need to know to market your books. And what I'm not going to give you today is a review of these questions. I know some of you have already read these cards and some of you can just go and read them on your own after this. There's a lot of great stuff in there. I want to dive even deeper and actually talk about how you can answer these questions at each stage of the reader journey. So, in short, with these questions, I think if you can answer them, you'll be very successful as an author. It's who is your story for? How will you start to share your story with those readers? Are those readers interested in your story? How can you find a lot more readers who are interested in your story? And then how can you turn your story into an empire? Like, what can you do to expand beyond just your stories? I mean, if you can answer these questions, you're going to be in wonderful shape. But it would be kind of unhelpful if I just left you there. So today we're actually going to answer these questions. And the answer to those questions are the five reader Secrets, but deeper. I want to give a reminder, actually, I'm going to go back to that slide. Don't worry. This is like a URL that directs you to the Google Drive that was shared with the AWC speaker lineup and all the information. This QR code might not be helpful if y' all are like already on a device. So sorry about that. But if you have another device, like, if you're watching a computer and you have a phone, this will just take you to all the awesome sessions that are happening in awc. You can vote on sess sessions. I'm not going to ask you to vote for me. There's a lot of other amazing people that I'm sure doing a lot better than me. So you can vote for some other sessions. Vote for your favorite ones. There's lots of giveaways going on. Just an incredible, incredible event. So if you type in tinyurl.com awcmichael it'll take you to that main folder where all of the action is. And y' all might already have that link, but I just wanted to remind everyone. So, yeah, thank you for being here at this session. I know there's other like, quote unquote competing sessions, but this is also like recorded and live on YouTube and you can watch it back. So just as a reminder to everyone, you know, we're, we're not alone here. It's all, well, so that now let's now we'll officially dive in. We cleared some admin, painted the picture of what's up now. Now we're gonna start to have some fun. So as I mentioned, right, the answers to these questions are your reader secrets. And the big takeaway, like the mindset shift for you coming out of this, I hope, is that being successful as an author, your author journey should not be thinking about how to hack algorithms. Trends can be important, but that doesn't have to be all you do. And you don't have to copy any playbook from Any other author. And I'll share why and how. Because really, what we want to do is put our readers first and to put the people we care about first. Uncover the secrets. Think about it. When you get to know your best friend, get to know their secrets. Hello, Devin. Great to see you here. And hello, Sam. You know, you get to know the things about them that other people don't. But it's that relationship, that special bond you have, your best friend or maybe a partner that allows you to be there for them and do better for them than other people in their life, right? Like, that's part of what getting to know someone's all about. If you want to do better for your readers and serve them in a way that blows their minds, that's magical, that makes them fall in love with you and be a super fan, we have to. We have to get to the bottom of their secrets. So luckily, I'm not just going to tell you how to do that, but I'm also going to give you some secrets that you should know about raiders right up into Pacific. So again, I'll just say, like, this matters, because if you're losing money on your books, if you don't know where to begin with book marketing, if you're drowning in things to do, if you're not finding readers fast enough, right, it's all ultimately because you don't know these reader secrets. Because if you know these reader secrets, understand your readers. Like, if you knew everything it needed to write the perfect book and you knew exactly how to market it, because you knew exactly where your readers were and exactly, exactly what got them interested, that would be it. And I think that we can again get so caught up in these things that don't matter. The latest trend, the latest technology, the latest platform, the latest this, latest that. Of these secrets that are really everything. So what I'm going to share throughout all of this is a little bit of my story. How I've come to understand these secrets matter so much and how, frankly, I've made a lot of mistakes. I've done a lot of things right. And I've learned throughout all of it that as complicated as we can make this seem, all that matters again, is understanding our readers. So a little bit of my background is that I used to have a mustache. I don't need more. Maybe I'll bring it back if there's like an end we'll have to see. I. I guess when you work for Mr. Beast. This was when I used to work for Mr. Beast. Jimmy. If no one's seen Mr. Beast. He's the most popular creator on this platform. He has a mustache. So I suppose I. I kind of, you know, amount what would it be called? Sort of blended in with my environment and got a mustache there. But a more important and relevant notes I published 12 Sci Fi novels when I was in high school. I guess I didn't have a lot of friends, but I've been doing this for a little while. I'm definitely not 18 anymore. I live streamed IRL playing manhunt and scavenger hunt for 1000 hours. That seems absolutely weird and like it doesn't apply to authorship, but it totally does. And I'll talk about why and where that story comes in. A lot of you probably know me from when I was in school. I started a software platform that helped authors make million plus a year memberships. Done a lot of stuff in the community from there, and so grateful to have met so many of y'. All. I then went to go work for the strategy team for Mr. Beast. And if y' all haven't noticed, he grows 10 million subscribers a month. And my job in the strategy team was to help grow his channel. So I learned a lot about growth there. And now I help authors go beyond the books, turn their stories into an empire. So that's kind of my arc here. But this is the sort of cool like, yay, sounds awesome arc. The truth is that my story is much messier than that. And I was someone who forever chased sales when I published my first books. Oh no, you're losing me in pieces. I'm sorry. Oh no. It could be. Could be WI fi. My wi fi is good though. But it can happen. Hopefully I stick around. If I like out, let me know in the chat or something and I'll. I don't know what I'll do. I'll try and help. I'll try to fix it. It's okay. It's only occasionally. Okay, I apologize. So I used to chase sales. That used to be my mindset. And when I published my books, that's what I was focused on. I was like, I need to get readers. I need to get sales. As we'll understand. I used to not know these reader secrets. And I made some disastrous mistakes in the process. Disastrous mistakes. I'll talk about them. Some of them are funny. One involves pizza, but. And pizza's mostly fun, right? But disastrous, disastrous mistakes. And it took a lot of pain for me to understand that what this really is about, what this business is about, is actually chasing superfans And I didn't get that feeling until I actually interacted with superfans and superfans of me, which sounds so like, oh, my God, I had super fans like that. I'm nothing special. But what happened is when I live streamed, going back to my. My little story arc, right, I, after publishing books, burned out because I got to about $1,000 a month in revenue, but also $1,000 a month in expenses, which is called breaking even. And when you're spending literally all of your time on something, stressing out, if you're just going to be able to have enough money to publish your next book, it is not a fun endeavor, right? And I got burned out and I switched to YouTube and eventually live streaming. And what's really interesting about live streaming is that, like, when you're. When we're authors, right, and we're talking about, like, the relationship we have with readers, it's weird because we have a very deep relationship with our readers. They have a very deep relationship with our stories. But we don't get to necessarily see that, which I think a lot of that's abstracted from us, right? Because we write and we kind of write in our corner, which is fun. That's why I like being an author. You don't necessarily need to. I'm not performing on stage, Right. But then the flip side of it is that the reader reads in the corner, or maybe they read in a coffee shop or they listen to, you know, your audiobook on the way to school or on the way to work, whatever have you, but you're not necessarily seeing or witnessing that experience. And, you know, we all love the book talk viral books we all love. Our books went viral on booktok, but most of us don't even get like that much actual visceral feedback about how readers are experiencing our stories. So it becomes very tough to understand, like, what does an actual reader relationship look like? And what ended up happening for me is when I did all this live streaming, I ended up seeing, like, firsthand. Oh, wow. These people are literally hanging out with me in a chat four hours a day, right. And I was able to make for a period of time, about nine months. I did it full time, living basically just playing scavenger hunt manhunt in different cities. But the app I was on is called Airtime. It's not really around anymore, which is a whole other long story that I won't get into right now. But what made that app special is that people didn't just hang out in a chat with me. They Actually could turn on their camera and come live with me. Which was kind of wild, right? Because you're all of a sudden, like, basically every single day interacting with your fans hours a day, talking to them. It's like, think about a book signing. But every day, for the most part, I would stream normally six days a week. So think about a book signing like that interaction with fans happening six days a week, nine months straight. It was like this incredibly, like, emotionally powerful experience. I remember, like, for months after I stopped, I was like, still thinking about these people. Like, it was this just very, very deep relationship. Right? But it wasn't like a friendship, right, either. Like, it was. It was a. It was a creator. I was creating this storytelling experience, interactive live streams for them and fan relationship. And it completely changed how I think about everything. And the five stages to the reader journey that you need to think through as an author are these. And we're going to basically dive deep into each one and the secret behind each one. Coming up, you can see this little roller coaster, right, where we start off with, you know, trying to find this, you know, find who our readers are who will read this book. And then we end off with, like, this, you know, hopefully, like, you know, people. People falling in love with us and, you know, having those, Those. Those hard emojis, right? But the first stage that we need to discover are what our readers are interested in, right? We're going to dive deep into that. But discover is the first stage. We need to actually approach this from. We don't know our readers. And there's a secret to that that I'll tell you in a second. Each stage is a secret. That's what we're. And we're going to come back to it at the end of this talk, which is great. So five takeaways. Simple. Stage two is analyze, right? We want to understand what our readers are missing. This is what I completely missed. And I'm going to show you why my book sold. Okay, but why another fellow author who's an incredible person and I love her to death. She's awesome. Sold like easily 1000 times more books than I did. And that's not hyperbolic. That's like literally, like, I sold maybe a thousand copies of my book. She sold, like, literally, like, I think a million or very close to it. That's. That's wild, right? How can someone sell a thousand times more when our covers and descriptions aren't that different? That's crazy. That all is about stage two, understanding what our readers are missing. And she understood Something that I didn't. And I'm going to reveal that to you. That's another secret. Okay, so we're going to get there. I have to add some cliffhangers because we're here for the hour. Okay, so I'm going to keep you all. Keep y' all waiting. What's next? So then stage number three is test, right? So it's understand if readers convert to our story and retain. A lot of. Y' all have heard me talk about this. I call it, you know, the reader. Readers first sort of challenge. Readers first process. I'm going to give you the skinny on it and most importantly, share where I, like, royally messed that up. Royally messed it up because I thought I was being smart. You know, I was maybe publishing my 10th book at that point. I thought I'd learned something and was doing the right thing. And in reality, my test was broken. Broken. So that's another secret, is how to test the right way. Because it's one thing to discover readers, it's one thing to analyze and then try and understand. Okay, this is what we think they want. But then we have to really test. Is this something that can connect with their heart? Stage number four is then scaling, which is using a reader growth engine to scale your readership. And as I mentioned two slides ago, there's a lot more to marketing than what you actually need to do. Like. Like, we make it really complicated when you only really need one channel to scale. And it's that radical focus that I think is going to help a lot of you. And if we nail these first three stages, we. We can then actually develop that radical focus. And I think a lot of us, we don't actually nail these first three stages, and we don't understand these first three secrets, and we think about scaling first, and that's the wrong thing. So stage four is scale. Then stage number five is Empire, right? Which we can serve our readers and, you know, go beyond the book more deeply, which I'll talk about. There's some pretty wild stuff that I'll share in the end. So with all this, we have our five stages of how I want you to think about the reader journey. Because I've talked about reader journey before. I've broken it down into stages from, like, the reader perspective. But the more I've thought about it, like, some readers just. You hit the psychology, right? They're like, I need this book. They pick it up, they read it, they love you, and you have a super fan forever. There was like, maybe two stages to that, like, they heard through a friend and then they came in and they. And then they now are, like, reading the book and they love you and they're just there. And I think that's, like, what we want. We want, like, almost the most simplified reader journey. Like, we like to think about reader journeys and funnels, which I'm going to break for you in a moment. We like to think about it, all these steps, automation sequences. And it's not that. It's understanding our readers, testing if we're doing something that actually taps into their desire. And then that's it. We did it. We can now scale. And again, that sounds too basic, but that's the whole point. Like, it. We make it out to be more complicated than it needs to be. But doing that one thing is really hard. I don't want to say it's simple, but we're going to dive into how to. We're here at secret number one. Okay? And these secrets I recommend writing down. You can obviously screenshot this. These are like, man, I wish I knew this. And by the way, I'm not the type of person, I think if y' all have already watch any repeat content. So I've never shared this before. Okay. And if you ever go to any of my other talks or to my YouTube channel, you won't find this. And I'm not going to give this later either. This is just for y', all, a new way of thinking about this that I just have found so incredibly valuable, which is that your reader journey isn't a funnel. It's an hourglass. This is one. This is a big one. Okay. I used to think that getting sales was what mattered, right? And we're just so focused on getting that book sold, so the whole. It became a funnel, right? As we can see, this is half of the funnels before the sale. So, you know, I put some social media, logo platforms, eyeballs, notifications. It's all about grabbing attention. Okay. And I'm like, I know, like, like, yes. Okay, that's the wrong way to put it. Yes, you need attention. Like, yes, we're all attention fiends. But, like, that's not it. Okay. If that's it, we just get attention and get sale. What happens after? Does a sale automatically convert someone into a fan? And the answer is, of course not. Of course not. And I thought this is what it was. And I'll show you on the next slide how I was not, not very correct. I was not very correct. I was mistaken in thinking that marketing is a funnel. And I think a lot of us too, like when we think about marketing as a funnel, a lot of that language has been taken out of the author community because rightfully so, as artists. A lot of us are like, funnels feel slimy, funnels feel formulaic, and you're oftentimes right. But then what's funny is we replace that notion with just a bunch of language that is still a funnel. We just don't call it that. So we're all doing the same thing of trying to just get sales, get sales, get sales. But what if your business isn't about that? What if marketing actually isn't about that? Right? And marketing's actually an hourglass. And this is where we get to the other side. And you could see like again, an hourglass. Think of just sticking two funnels together. But this is actually so important because one, one funnel is about bringing people in and the other funnel is actually about expanding their experience with you. And what I want to talk about is you can get a sale, but what matters is not getting that sale, but actually getting someone to stick with you and spend more money over time. So how can you take someone from reading one book or just downloading a book to then being someone who's going to give you hundreds of dollars? That's how I want you to think about over the lifetime of the customer with you. Because again, I can tell you can go viral and get a million readers in your next book. And then life's good. Like most people can retire if you sell a million books. I mean, hopefully a million books sounds nice, but like, there's a lot of books that will do really well, but there's not enough. And we'll talk about that. It's mathematically impossible for everyone listening to this to just sell a million books. So instead of, you know, talking about that, what if, instead we thought about again, how can we serve people more? And there's the thousand true fans conversation. There's, you know, all these different things we can think about. But how I like to think about is this. An hourglass. Designing a system around this. So this, that's the first secret. And you might be going, okay, this is not enough, Michael, how do we actually do this? And obviously that's the other secrets we're going to build on this. This is secret number one. But for you, so hyper focused on just attention, okay? To a ridiculous level. So this is a screenshot. This is an image. Both are two different stories that have the same fatal character flaw that I don't want you to Have. I would rather you not go through some sort of journey to figure this one out. Just watch five more minutes and you'll figure this one out. I don't have to go through any pain like I did. So I, like all of you, just have wanted to make a living as a storyteller, right? Like that's what I want to do. I wanted to be able to see my stories in the world, be able to be a creative person. I want to work for myself. I've never been one to necessarily want to work for other people. The only real job I've had is working for Mr. Beast. So I hope that stays true. If I'm lucky, it will, right? And in this period of my life, I was in this sort of really tough spot where I thought to validate myself as a creative person, to make a business a creative person, it relied on getting more sales. That's super logical, right? Because if we revisit, if we're thinking about marketing as a funnel, like attention and sales, baby, that's what we need. So I went all. And this right side of the graph, it just, it worked out better for me to put this image on the right side rather than the left side. But I'm starting with the right side image, then we'll get to the left side image. I apologize. So with this right side image, this was me when I was like deep in the throes, like, we're going to make it as an author. I am spending the ad money, I'm doing the Facebook ad thing and I was getting like decent sales on book one like this. You can see this July of 2020, I got $828 in royalties between KU and ebook sales for book one in my post apocalyptic series called Mad World. I was really satisfied with that. And on my current ad spend of about 12 to 1300amonth, I was like, okay, I'm not going to get rich off of making $800 when I'm spending 12 or 1300. Actually, you can do the math there. You're losing money. But there's going to be future books in the series and inquiring Minds. You might already know the second book just from kind of intuiting based on the titles. The second book was Cruel World. We could see my royalties were a lot less for Cruel World. A lot less. Like I made $828 in that month off of book one. I made $215 off of book two. What a red flag, y'. All. I did not need to spend this amount of Money to figure out that my readers weren't reading through. And what ended up happening is I was so obsessed with. Literally, I would get the biggest dopamine rush. Waking up in the morning and seeing my sales ranking to do this on book one, I was maybe around, like, at the time, again, sales rankings and income at different levels changes based on, you know, the store growing over time. But at the time, it was maybe averaging around 8,000 in the store every day. Us and most of slash, all my sales are really in the US And I was in KU at the time, and I was getting, you know, that $828. And I was just so obsessed with that that I wasn't really focusing on the fact that, hey, dude, no one's reading book two. Like, really, like, very few are. I'm making about 25% slightly more of the money that I'm on book one versus book two. So all of a sudden, that 1200 ad spend actually that I thought I was doing really well. I'm like, oh, yeah, I'll sell, you know, $500 a month of book two, $500 on the book three. I'm going to write book four and book five, and all of a sudden I'm going to be able to double my money, right? All of a sudden that was not happening. So my conclusion to this was very simple. I'm just a crappy writer. And then I moved on, right? Like, that was the sort of analysis I did. Crappy writer, move on. So much emotion was in that. So I was like, I. Like, at some point I had to face the reality I've written on my blog, totally free blog post, by the way, about like, a little bit more detail that, like, the moment when I was like, oh, I am like, actually screwed right now. But, like, I won't go into all the details of the exact moment I figured out I was screwed. But again, my issue when I got. When I basically just going, okay, I'm probably not good enough at marketing. Like, I bet authors are actually getting way more sales for the ad dollars and putting in with book one, which is true, but not because I'm not good at marketing, okay? And I'll tell you, I was wrong with that thought. And then the second thought was, I just suck at writing. So, like, that's why they're not reading through. Which was a really convenient truth. Like, that was convenient to tell myself that. It was hard to tell myself, but it was convenient. I was like, cool, I suck at this YouTuber. So now we go to the left Side of this image. This is a fun one. So this is with my friend. He was one of my buddies from school, Elliot. And we, along with another friend, road tripped America school bus, then random Airbnbs. This was like, you know, there was like, times when, like, I don't know if anyone's heard, like a ZURP phenomenon, like a zero interest rate phenomenon. Like, this was totally like, we're just going to road trip the country. Like, Covid's going on. Like, let's have an adventure and like, film it. Right. So I was doing live streaming at this time, but I was actually doing the live streaming. This is classic Michael. Like, I'm actually running one business just to fund another business that I think is going to be bigger. So I'm running a live streaming company going, yeah, this is cool. But I really just want to be super viral on YouTube. So I was pouring, like, you know, a lot of money into, like, real production budget filming ridiculous videos. And one of these involved pizza. Pizza that we gave to the executive assistant of Elon Musk. This was before he went super wild. Okay. In my defense. And he was still like the richest man in the world at the time. So it felt like, we can, like, track her down and do this. That's pretty cool. That's a good video. And we created this. It's boring. You know, he has the boring company, right? Boring. Not. Not a pizza box. And did it. And mind you, this was all to grab attention. Like, I had no strategy around, like, how am I going to retain people who's going to watch this? It was just about, like, shocking people. Like, that's shocking that someone did that. It was a spectacle of like, wow, you were able to get her phone number just as, like, two, like, random teenage guys. And it's like, yeah, we did. We were. And how we did that is a story from day. And we were successful. We were successful. And the story actually ended off in us giving away the pizza because she didn't want to eat all of it. To a bunch of very fun people who live on the beach in Venice. So they're homeless and they drugged it with shrooms, which is just so insane. We got all that on video. So I guess we like, what an arc this took. Which is also so aligned with Elon Musk. Right. To just go from pizza to drugs. Right. But regardless of that and your thoughts on the man, what a wild story. And I remember thinking, after this, I didn't come to the conclusion at this point, marketing is more than just a funnel. There's this back end to it instead what I thought this is so crazy that what we just did that I don't think we can top this. We need to figure something else. I don't think that's sustainable. So I basically went through like viral burnout. Like I don't think we can do weirder stuff than this that can grab more attention. And I was, I kind of knew intuitively that like if we can't grabbing more attention then we don't have a business. And that is such a flawed way of thinking about it because it's not about grabbing attention. It's about grabbing attention and converting that into love. And that was not even on my radar. Learn from me. Just there's another high to this equation that we don't talk a lot about, but it's actually the most important side and changes everything about how you think. Cool reader. Secret number one and a story that hopefully cements it. Now secret number two, the market doesn't exist. Your readers core desires do. Oh my God, did this change everything for me? So I promise to share with you why one story sold 1000x more copies than mine. And I'm going to share with you why what I understand now. I wish I understood when I wrote my book. So we have this book here, Edge of Collapse on the right, Mad World on the left. I encourage you to read Edge of Collapse, not mine, just to prove this is in no way self promotion. I'm doing this for illustrative purposes. There's no reason for you to read my book. But on the left side is is this story right? And we can see the COVID here and then we can see the Edge of Collapse cover. My cover designer, she's great. Awesome. Her name is Domi. She lives in Prague. She's great. She did a fantastic job on the COVID And if you look at it right from Edge of Collapse, I don't think there's. I mean the difference in Edge of Collapse is maybe a dog, a girl and a man, which maybe implies there's a romantic or some sort of other subplot. Mine has, you know, slightly different color scheme, but it's the same vibe. I mean you could even look at like the titles and the author name placement. I mean, do we think USA Today bestseller led to her? That thing on the COVID led to a thousand times more sales. I doubt it. I doubt it was that if we look at our descriptions, not that you can even read text that small. But mine starts with he thought he was saving the world, instead he destroyed it. Meet the man who created the apocalypse, mind you, the market that I was writing to, which again I'm going to share with you why market doesn't exist in a second. But at the time when I thought writing to market was everything, which I'm not telling you not to write to market, I'm telling you something else. I was like, cool, I'm writing post apocalyptic EMP survival thrillers right here. We have tension, like, okay, clearly like this character had a motivation desire that totally went wrong. There's like a crazy conflict in between here and then. Like we have an apocalypse, right? Edge of collapse, first sentence. In the dead of winter, an EMP attack destroys the US power grid. No electricity, no cars or phones. The country's plunged into instant chaos. When okay, so George says went to another comments this week which said covers with two people Stone. I think that's, I think that's true, but I don't think it's a thousand x difference. Like she may have had a bit of a better cover than me, but not like it's not a thousand x better. Like why does something sell a thousand x more? There's a huge thing that she's hitting on here. Now if you go read other books and post apocalyptic fiction, you'll notice that those first two sentences aren't like they're on a market but there's nothing crazy about them. Like if I was to like compare it to like Jack hunt's books or T.L. payne's, these just other authors in this sub genre that sell. Well, I'm not looking at the first two sentences of Kyla's cover and being like, or description and going like, oh my God, like there's something like wildly special here, right? But if you keep reading the description and most importantly if you open the book, you'll find something incredibly special that she did. Incredibly special. I'm going to share with you how you can do the same thing on the next slide. But what I want to share here is something really, really important. Because if I'm telling you that market doesn't exist and the market doesn't explain, at least writing to market doesn't explain. Yeah, yeah, exactly. The COVID itself is not what happened here. There's something else because the market, right? Like if that's not it, but it's our reader's core desires, then what actually matters is something else. What we actually live in is the trust economy, right? And those who win the most trust in anything win. And trust is a weird word. We throw it around all the time. But I have a definition for you which is understanding someone's desires and delivering on them better than anyone else. Trust is understanding someone's desires, delivering on them better than anyone else. So I would posit, and I know this for a fact, that Kyla built more trust in her readers. Not that I'm a poor writer. It's probably not that you're a poor writer either. Kyla is also certainly, I'll give her this, certainly better writer than me too. That's not hard. There's plenty of people who are better writers than me. But it doesn't explain a thousand excavates in copyright. Right. So how did this happen? She clearly understood reader desires and delivered on them better than me and honestly better than anyone else in the subgenre because she's the number one selling book in post apocalyptic EMP survival films ever, as far as I know. I mean maybe William, like for indie authors, I mean day after never like there was one other author Trad 20 years ago that probably maybe has sold more copies over 20 years, but give it another 20 years, she will beat him. She will be the number one best selling title in this sub genre ever. Ever. So we're not looking at like, we're looking at like the outlier of all outliers and then just like average Joe. So what did she do different? Knowing that there's something else going on here because many of you look at outlier. She did, right? And then go okay, just like I did. I'll come up with a similar enough cover. Yeah, maybe Kyle's is better because she probably is a better cover designer and all that stuff. But regardless, like maybe, maybe actually I don't think she does my covers on it was great. So I think maybe she gave her better comp titles or whatever. But regardless, maybe her cover is slightly better, maybe her slightly better. But it doesn't explain it. Trust explains it. How did she build more trust? Well, we're going to walk through the three steps to build more trust and once I walk you through them, I'll share with you what she did that I didn't do at all that I messed up on. So you'll know more colorful cards here. I have a lot of colorful cards and I recommend you download them. They're free. I think one of the moderators can drop a link or already did, but totally get free deck of cards. All of these are kind of outlined in there in detail but I want to give you the three steps to build trust readers right now. So first is go to the Reader Cities. What are Reader Cities? Reader cities are where your readers hang out online. This is not a talk about AI. I'm sure there's other people brought up AI this weekend, but I want to actually mention an important point on AI because there's, don't get me wrong, like hyper use AI. I don't really. That's not my place. But I want to share something really, really important, which is in an age of AI, in an age where everything becomes formulaic, in an age where we can just look at the market and then copy and paste. Yet we know in that same age that people like me who did that did have not done well. Okay, so people like me who did that did not do well. Yet other people win. And why do they win when I'm doing all the right things? When I'm following the playbook, right? And I can tell AI or I can as a human being follow a playbook, right? Cool. Whoever follows it, whether it's automated or human, why are people like me selling a thousand times less than Kylo Stone? And this is just one micro example, right? There's thousands of examples like this. You can probably do the same comparison yourself. Well, a huge part of its context. When we go to the reader Cities, we gain context. What a reader city is, in short, is the places where your readers hang out. And I'm not talking about like, like, you know, bars and things like that. I'm talking more like online places because these are more accessible to get to. So there's a bunch of different Facebook groups that exist for post apocalyptic survival fiction. And before I wrote in this genre, I maybe poked around a little bit. Turns out Kyla was in that group for years, years before she wrote this series. And she'd written two other series in this subgenre. But clearly after years of being in there, she understood a thing or two about her years. This was not some overnight success story. This was hard work, Blood, sweat and tears of understanding her readers that she put into being in a reader city and actually helping lead one of the Facebook groups wasn't her reader group. This was for genre. She was just. And it wasn't that she was promoting her book in here. She was understanding something about her readers. And to do that, she went to the Reader Cities. So I encourage you to go to where your readers are and get to just know them. Not you have to talk to them. You have to be on camera with your fans like I was. But can you read through what they're saying? Can you start to understand and lurk and start to again identify who these people are. And a great thing is if you can't identify where your readers hang out, that's a good sign that we need to get a little bit of a better sense of who our readers are. I'm not telling you to hang out in a bestseller chart. Readers do not hang out on bestseller charts. How could you. That's not a place to live. It's like hanging out on a sidewalk. I mean you could live on a sidewalk but you know, that's not gonna. That's not going to be where you hang out all the time. You're going to be hanging out in a reader city. So next is a story gap. What we want to do with these reader cities is actually now understand, okay, what do our readers want that's being unmet in the current market? What's an unmet reader desire that helps our story stand out? What I call a story gap. Kyla exploited a story gap that was amazing. I tried a story gap that completely failed. And why it failed is because I didn't understand the readers like she did. And she did. She really understood the readers. She combined. And this is beautiful. And a book rec I'll give right now is Anatomy of Genres. Really details. It's a book by John Truby. A lot about genre and different expectations in genre and how to subvert and how to innovate in that. And what she did is brought a lot of tropes and components from psychological thrillers into post apocalyptic survival fiction. She made the main character a female. A female who particularly was held captive for years before the apocalypse. Held captive and was obviously not the best of relationships. One can imagine when you're being held captive and the lock is freed when the electricity goes out. Very interesting story that really gripped people. That really got people like what a story gap. And it isn't even obvious that that's the story gap from the COVID or even the first couple sentence. The description. This is something that readers found deeper in. And what she was able to do that I was. I'm sure she's getting similar ad traffic clicks. I am. Her conversion rate is probably better but it's not remarkably better. What she's doing better is getting people to read through and share with their friends. Like thinking about this part of the funnel. Right. Share. She's crushing the second half. Crushing it. I mean beyond. Right. And deservedly so. I mean what an incredible story gap. I wish I came up with that. I didn't. Kyla did because she knew her readers Better and identified and exploit a story gap. Incredible, incredible thing, because she does exploit a story gap is it brings someone in so quickly because again, it's familiar but a little different and gets them to the retention point faster. And when you're writing just to market and looking at what's there and instead not going to your readers and looking at what's missing, it's very hard to do this. But again, if you go to your readers first, identify what's missing, you can create a story gap and get them to the retention point of your story much, much faster. Yes, exactly. Inca. That's like it, right? Yes. Thank you, reader. You've just told me my next story idea, or at least what I can incorporate into it or influenced it. Right. But we're still not done yet here. We're on secret number two. And I'm also going on longer than I thought I would. Happens every talk I give because it's like the first time I give every talk and it's like, oh, my God. Okay, I've not done this before, so sorry, but we'll go quickly through these because I want to make sure I leave some time for questions and all that towards the end. But secret number three is most readers are likely to know you for just one of your stories. So what is your signature series? Now, your signature series is going to be like, you know, feasibly what sells best. Right. But I think a lot of us are when we're building an author brand, we think about, there's this sort of moment where, like, is it us and how do we interact with it? And, yeah, that matters. But for most authors that I've found time and time again, there's a signature series that's going to carry most of the weight. And Rebecca Yaros is a good example of this. Now, I mean, she's, she has like a few books, not just in the fourth wing, that are like, you know, in that series, they're crushing it in the top 100 in the Kindle store. But if you were to sell the average reader, hey, the name Rebecca Yaros, or better yet, like, you know, hey, like, what do you think about this author? They're going to probably say the fourth wing, right? And the fourth wing leads to a lot of other things, but the fourth wing is her signature series. I think most of the time it's tough for us to know what our signature series is. But I think a lot of times, once we understand the secret, what our action item is, is to actually do everything we can to find a Signature Series double down on it. And then if it changes over time, that's natural. And when we think about creating a signature series, we're really bringing secret number two and secret number three together. So I'm talking about three more cards here. But the first thing I want you to understand is the Power Law. Power Law might be very familiar to a lot of you, and it might not be some others. Power Law, essentially, this sociological rule is rooted in human nature, um, which is that few cop a few pieces of media dominate and sell most and grab most of the attention. Um, typically it's 1% of titles get about 70% of the attention or sales. Um, and to a lot of us, that feels like really defeating. I know for me, that's like. It's not like, oh, my God, this is an inspiring thing. First of all, that should be noted about why this is so hard. It's not because you're a bad author, but this is. There's a sort of human nature thing working against us here. But what if we worked with it? So what causes the Power Law, from a sociological point of view is that as humans, we are a cultural species, right? We grab onto things that we know others are engaging with. Stories that are told and that are believed by others are exponentially more likely to be stories that we also believe and tell ourselves. There's network effects in every aspect of culture. Every aspect of culture, whether it's movies, whether it's music, whether it's games, whether it's even something like religion, there's a network effect there. Because again, as more and more people believe something, we're more likely to believe it. So if more and more people say something's awesome, this is a great story, you should read it. You're exponentially more likely to do that. So that feels really like, thanks, Michael. But that's, like, really defeating advice. But again, if we work with this, what we then can understand is that the Power Law is not, you know, a monolith. There's not just one Power Law, there's thousands of tiny ones. And if we can identify our readers and what they care about and tap into the community and their interests, right? There's a thousand different Power Laws. It might not be the big overall Power Law publishing, just like the titles I mentioned the last time, they dominated the global conversation, at least in the Western world, around books. Right? But. But there's separate power Laws for separate communities, right? That you can still grow and do well. So this is why Signature Series is powerful, because you're going to See a power law in your own catalog, right? And most of this is about understanding what goes into stories that stand out. That's the story gap. And then how can we optimize our process to create more of these stories? So I noticed this, okay? And I realized this after my second series flopped. Long story, short, first series, I accidentally somewhat wrote to somewhat of a market before I even knew what right to market was. I did not fulfill any core readers or story gap, which helps explain why the book did not really take off, but I at least sold a decent amount of it. It was a y dystopian series. My second series was just the most confusing mashup ever between like game lit dystopian and thriller. I could not sell it for the life of me. Like I was giving it away and just still like it was. It was bad, right? So I could not sell the book for life of me. And it was a kind of a scarring experience for me because I did a rapid release for that series, published six books in that series, only to find out that it was like a dud. I could not sell it. And I vowed to never have that happen again. So I started kind of working on this minimum viable story thing where I was like, I'm going to test each part of this process and see if I can actually do this. So one was, can I reach readers with my story? I was like, yep, I know there's a Facebook ad audience for this. I can reach this audience if it's post apoc2 is can I get them to buy, put up the COVID put up the description of the book before I even wrote it, started running ads to it. This was on Amazon and I started getting sales that were like, actually pretty decent. I was like, okay, I can sell book one. Great. Like, I was having a huge problem with my last series. Done right, release wrong. There's number three here, which is we need to understand if we can get our readers to keep coming back. I did not test for that at all. And I ended up in the problem I was in right where I was not seeing read through. So what I want you to do is start to think about your process. You're not optimizing for creating books. You're optimizing for creating a signature series. That's the secret. And to do that, you want to create minimum viable stories that allow you to test if you have the foundations to create a signature series. Does that make sense? So test your book and your readers and then how you actually can get your story out there. Although I'll probably have to. Can't go into too detail into this concept. I wish I could. I'm sorry. But with timing is one time marketing events. You don't need to run like at an early stage, like a huge Facebook ad campaign or, you know, fire up the Amazon ads. It's about going to the same reader cities that you were in, maybe collaborating with them, collaborating with other authors, going to signings and just seeing if you can get that initial interest. Okay. With your story. At that stage, it can get a lot more nuanced. This concept around my own bible story. I apologize. I can't do like a million deep dive into it because we have more secrets to cover. We have more secrets to cover. So with this one's actually a quickie. And then we'll be on our last secret. So if we've answered secrets number one, two and three, we understand these and we now understand our readers better because we dive into these secrets. We're ready to. Right. We've identified, I think the social signature series. We've identified like this is the story gap that's working. And we, we know how important like not thinking about marketing as a funnel is, but thinking about it as an hour class. We're now ready to start supercharging this. We're ready. We're ready to pull some, pour some like fuel. All right. On the fire and that. This is fun, but it can get really, really overwhelming. So I'm not going to give you an ads masterclass in like 10 minutes. That's impossible. I'm not gonna be able to give you a TikTok masterclass in 10 minutes. There's other great speakers here doing that instead. I want to share with you and reinforce how powerful some of these earlier secrets are because, yes, you're going to go to the ads class. They're going to teach you. Here's how to run ads. Here's, you know, your high. Converting headline starters. You know, start with. Finally start with here. There's all these, like, psychological tricks you can use to make your ads perform better. And they're fun, they're cool. A lot of people know them. You might know them, but your ads still might not work. Your content again, you do the TikTok hook, you do the trend. You've got it. You've got the, you got the slideshow behind you. Whatever. You get the song cool still doesn't work. What do I do now? Like, that was right. So the first thing is this one. Don't focus on everything. Like, try one Thing you just need one growth engine which is ads, content or collaboration and one channel to literally get to. I use the number 1 million. Not that I'm promising you this, but you can literally sell 1 million plus of books through any one of these individual channels. Like TikTok alone, Facebook ads alone, Amazon ads alone, like all of this, right? So you don't need a million bazillion channels. And by the time that you get these more channels, you can hire people to do it for you who are experts in it. So you don't need to learn all different TikTok optimization hacks. What you need to learn is your readers. Okay, going back to this ads, it's not about ad set structure. Yes, like you do need a certain ad set structure. Yes, you do need to set up a pixel. All these things, but 90% of the Alpha, right? Or the difference the performance is going to be in your creative. It's going to be in what you're saying in the ad. It's going to be what's grabbing people in. That's not a formula. That is understanding who your readers are and being able to create something that grabs their attention more, hooks them emotionally and makes them desire your story because it hasn't been met before. This is something unique to them. This is something really interesting. That is 90% of the battle. You accomplish that and like the rest of it's not that hard. You are all super smart and very capable of the rest of it. And you're also very capable of coming up with a great story gap. But this is the fun. It becomes an adventure. Now we all get to write our own adventure novels and author story because it's about finding that story gap and being able to optimize our creative based on that. Because once you get to have this really strong, whether you want to think of it as specific combination of tropes or specific universal fantasy great books by Jennifer Hilt, who's talking right now. And then I know Theodore Taylor, great book on universal fantasy. You know, there's a lot of different ways you can approach and get to a story gap but man, when you get it, that's gonna make your ads do a lot better. Man, when you get it, it's gonna make your content do a lot better. Now collaboration is a different beast. And I want to introduce a new point here which is long tail conversions. So many of y' all approach collaborations the wrong way. You do the book funnel, swaps you the story origin things. Love both these companies, love all the people behind it, love that they exist. But let's be real here. For most people who do Book Funnel swaps, it's not like crushing it for you. And it's not because of book funnel, it's because of you. Sorry, but it's not because of you, the writer. No, it's because going back to our first slide, I think the first secret is the most important. Right back to a secret. Number one. What you're doing here is you're thinking, I got people on my list, now they got my freebie. Yay. Got attention. Woohoo. Done. Done. I've got 10,000 people on my list. It's like dog. No, like what? Like we just, we're just beginning. That's not it. Oh, that was smoother than I thought. Cool. Is the long tail conversions, right? So when you get a new person to join your list off a collaboration, the average amount of time that it takes someone to buy your book is oftentimes going to be months before they actually convert. Right? And getting them to convert is not building some crazy automation sequence. All that can help. Getting them to convert is not building the best welcome you'll ever. Although that can help. Getting them to convert is delivering them something that helps them build trust over time and delivers them part of this unmet desire for them. Like you're showing them part of, hey, this is chapter one. Hey, this is more about the story here. This is, this is what's going to grab you in, right? It's tapping into that unmet desire and building trust. You have to build trust with your readers to get them to buy from you. Who would have thought? And your mailing list, you're probably not doing that. So if you're doing a collaboration strategy, I want you just to over index on long tail conversions. Most people don't email their list unless they're asking for them for their money. They don't actually email the list trying to build trust and offer them value. But if you do that, you can do great. And that's what mastering long tail conversions is all about. Okay, secret. And I want to leave again a few minutes for questions. So we're going to zoom. So you've done this. Now you understand all these core insights, but there's one more secret. There's one more secret which is that first of all, other people are going to catch on to your story gap. That just happens, right? It's very, very hard for story gap to explode forever and generate you endless word of mouth. You're going to need to market your books as well. And now Obviously, that great story gap that attracts your readers is leading them to stick with you. Awesome. But if we really look at marketing, going back to our first secret, the foundation of all this, if we really look at marketing as an hourglass, not a funnel, there's something else to this. And if we really are doing this all about meeting our readers unmet core desires, then we realize something is it. It's about their journey, fulfilling this desire and how we can serve them greater on that journey. That sounds super. Maybe. Woo woo. Or not. Very practical. So now if marketing's pay to play, the one who has their customers pay them the most wins tactically from a business standpoint, right? You don't do that by writing more books or better ones. You do that by building a business that allows them to ascend with you over time for them to be able to pay you more. Because you're delivering them experiences and products that literally deliver on that unmet desire more. I'm going to give you a tactical example in a minute, but let's go to where this all comes from, which is the legendary Walt Disney synergy map. Whatever you think about the company, Walt Disney, they really innovated on this business model. What they understood from a pretty early days was that the motion pictures, the storytelling, the IP was the center of it all. But around it, you have Disneyland, you've got, you've got all the TV deals, the music, you got the merchandise, the toys, they built the world around it. Now all of a sudden, when Disney can go make a movie or want to distribute a movie, they can spend bazillions on it, knowing that like, okay, we get a customer in our park, we get a customer to buy the merch, your customer do this and they can just dominate, dominate these attention ecosystems and go to the top of the power law. So what can you do to go beyond the book? Luckily, we have a few steps first. You are a storyteller. Stories can exist in any mediums. Tech can help you create them all, pretty much, which is really, really cool. So you are not in the medium business. You're in the audience business. Okay? An audience is people who trust you. And remember, people who trust you. Let's go back to that definition. Right here is understanding someone's desires and doing them better than anyone else. So that's people trust you when you deliver on their desires better than anyone else. A group of people who trust you is your audience. You're in the audience business, not in the media business, not in the storytelling business. You are in the audience Business fundamentally, when you have an audience, this is the beginning of your empire where you can sell them other things that ascend on their journey. Film's $100 billion plus industry. Advertising is 500 billion plus games 200 billion plus. Not saying you're going to grab all of it. That would be dystopian for one person to do all of it. But there's just so much bigger pies out here to grab. Now you might be going, michael, this is ridiculous. I can't see myself doing this. Well, I won't say her name, but I'll share with her our conversation, which was eye opening for her because we were walking through this process, we're walking through as well how she's trying to scale her business. She's at a thousand dollars a month that she's clearing, she's keeping in her pocket. That's wonderful. But she means when she counts in her family's health care and just being able to be secure, going full time, she needs really 10k a month to be able to know that she can do that comfortably. Okay. And you should be going, you know, I don't want people to stress about being full of mothers. I'm like, yes, so we need to 10x your business and you know, pull up our KD Jazz or we look through everything and something becomes clear to me. There's no way that if we pour ad money into this or UGC content creation on Tick Tock that we're going to be able to like scale this. Like we can't. And she'd have to write like many, many more books. And even then it would be like tough because the CAC payback period would take a while. What I mean by CAC payback is if we put money because I could talk longer because I don't know what all the other talks are about, but I could talk longer in my philosophy on ads and content. But like content's increasingly. Even if you're doing TikTok becoming a UGC game which you pay for and we, I talk about UGC a whole other time but like very, very interesting world that we're moving into. But when, when we talk about this, right? And even if it's your time pouring resources into something, it's like, what is your return on that? Right? What is your return? And it was, it was like, okay, so if you're selling a book on Amazon and they're going to need to read like several to maybe eight or nine books from you because you're writing short read. She was Writing books that are, like, 100 pages long, you're not going to make that back, like, for a really long period of time. And I was just like, oh, okay, yeah. Because she's like, how do I get this business to scale in, like, the next two to three years? And I'm like, I don't think you're coming to me about that. You want to do this faster, and you have strong foundations. How can we do this in the next six months? Right? And I gave her the answer, which is that you need to make money beyond just selling your books. And if we know we can accomplish that, and we know that you can bring readers into this bigger ecosystem, you can spend more to acquire them, make that money back faster, and actually invest in growing your business. And spoiler, we can fund this whole process by first testing if your readers will buy this, who already buy your books. And if they will, we can run a Kickstarter, take some of that money, have it fund your initial ads so you're not spending any money out of pocket on ads to see if a cold audience will convert to this, and you'll make money in the process, too. So we can just make money right now and then use that to scale. Sounds like a dream. But that doesn't go back to, like, the whole question, how do we go beyond the book? And I was like, hey, author name. What's your reader's core desire? Why is your book sell? And she goes, oh, well, it's written to market. Like, okay, what does that mean? Why? Who? It uses these specific tropes. Okay, why. Why do they. Why do people care about those tropes? I have to think about that. Okay, good. That's the question. Why do they care about those trips? And then she said it, and it was very simple. She said the line that blew everything open. My readers just want to feel obsessed over. They want to feel like a man is obsessing over them. They haven't had that before. I was like, oh, that's the experience. That's their core desire. You just said it. Now let's take a step back. How do you build a business around that core desire? My mind's already racing. Already racing. So that's it. That's what you do now? I don't want to share the civic ideas for her because that would. That's her business. I don't want to steal her thunder here, but do you get the process? So I'm running up. I really want to give you time for questions. So we're going to blow through the summary slide, but I have nothing new. Okay, here's the summary as a reminder. Secret number one is build an hourglass, not funnels for your reader journey. Secret number two is we live in the trust economy, context, understanding and delivery on that. Okay. Secret number three is optimize for one winning series to scale your career. Secret number four is nail one marketing engine. There are enough readers there for you. Okay. Abundance. Secret number five is increase your reader ltv, AKA revenue by going beyond the book. That's what I have for you. Some quick things. This has already been shared, but the free decks, if you want these superpower cards, the physical ones are not free. I'm sorry, I wish I could just give away like a bunch of printed things and ship them to your house for free. But the digital is completely free. And then one last thing is if you want to go beyond the book, this is like a wild thing I've been working on. But at MakeYourOwnMovies TV, we're helping people go beyond the book. Totally free book, but how to turn your movies into film. We're building an insane project, but that's not here nor there. I'm sure I'll share about it more later. But you can at least go to that landing page if you're curious. With that said, I'm going to stop sharing my screen, right? Got a lot of other sessions coming up. Actually wait, let me go back to share my screen because I should go back to that aws. This is why I did this. I was like, I had a method to the madness. Here's what's coming up. All there. Does anyone have any questions before we head out? I know that people have been very much doing things. I'll probably maybe go like a minute or two if no one's going to kill me to answer questions. But I don't want to go too far over because I want to respect everyone's time. So please answer any question or ask any questions you have here. I'd love to help you any way I can. I know it's a lot of information. It always is. But yeah, let me know how I can help or just comments if anyone has any comments. No, thank you all. Yeah, I, I, this went a little long. I always, it's literally always happens. Y' all know. This went a little longer than I thought. I was like, I think I'll have like a 10 minute buffer. But that did not happen. Does the hourglass move both ways? Elaine, can you elaborate more on that? Because yes, like, like my instincts yes, but I actually don't fully know if I know what you mean. And then Carla goes, this is helpful. And I'll have to watch at least one more time. Hey, it'll all be here. It'll all be here on YouTube. And then. Yeah, Elaine, I'd love a follow up question. Like a follow up to your question so I make sure I'm answering it right. You need more information about the hourglass. Oh, okay. It seems like the hourglass is what people are dragging on. Yeah, we can talk about the hourglass a little bit. Let me get to it. So, yeah, mind you, this is like I said something. I just came up for this talk. So, like, I'm glad it's helpful, but. Or at least interesting, but let me try and make it more helpful. So the idea behind the hourglass is that when we think about marketing and our job as marketing, as authors, I mean, think about our job even as storytellers, it's often, okay, we have to get them to buy books from us. It's a funnel where we get a lot of attention and then it comes down into one sale. The mindset shift here is that, yes, you still need to do that, but that's not where it starts. It's just the beginning. And there's a whole other end of this, the second half, the hourglass, the right side of this hourglass, that is actually about turning our reader into recurring customer. And that is actually just as important as this other side. So we're all focused on marketing and getting attention when we actually should be focused on marketing in the sense of building trust with our existing readers so they want to keep coming back. And that's this other side of the funnel. And how this funnel works is you take someone at one sale and then ask yourself, how can I make more and more money from them? Now that's the business question. That sounds really evil. So the real question is, how can I serve them better? And then through that money will come because you'll be able to charge these things. So it's how do I take someone who bought one book into someone who buys a whole series? Me, who buys a back catalog, who buys my merch, who then goes on to buy my nail, you know, maybe my nail polish and mascara that my main character wears that then goes on to buy my drink based in my world, or that then goes on to watch my movies, that goes. Then goes on to watch, you know, or play my games. Does that make sense from a sort of perspective here? Any other places to go find readers On Facebook. Oh, yeah, of course, Shannon. I just use Facebook as an example. I mean, you've got Reddit. You've honestly got TikTok. Like, those are good places because readers are talking there. In the comment section on TikTok, you have Discord, which can be harder to find discord groups, but are great. You also have, like, Instagram, right? Like any social platform, you can have readers on BookTube. Any social platform. I just use Facebook as an example. Per the Hourglass, your readers move back and forth between attention and recurring. No, when someone buys from you, I mean, you don't really need to earn their attention again, necessarily. Like, ideally, you're just now turning that sale into a recurring customer. The sad part is that we sometimes have a leaky funnel where we think, oh, we're doing great because we got the sale, but you're not doing great because they're not sticking around with you and buying more from you. So we go, oh, end of funnel, end of journey. When in reality, there's a lot more to it and people can still drop off on the journey, and I suppose they can come back, but that's really hard, Right? Like a maxim of Walt Disney was, it's 10 times harder to get someone to, you know, basically come back to Disney World if they're dissatisfied. So, like, once they choose to leave, like, they're out. So how do we make it so that they love their experience here? I want to keep coming back. Back. Yes, exactly. I think building, like, content, I think of, like, as a show. So one thing to think about too, with your characters is like, can the newsletter come from your characters? Right. This is all about immersion. I didn't share this graph because of time, but the more immersion equals more money. That is like a rule in media and a rule in any business. So the more you can immerse someone, the better you'll do. So can that email come from your character and be updates in their life, things about them? That's potentially a way to think of that as well. Yeah. Is the Hourglass making a little bit more sense to folks, or is it a little bit more fleshed out that way? Like, we're going from attention to money at its raw basis. But our issue is that we're so focused on attention, we're not actually focused on the money. And we don't get money by building attention. We get money by building trust. Trust. Cool. Okay, everyone, this was a lot of fun. We'll do this again soon. Do this again soon. Yeah. You all can subscribe to this YouTube channel as well. You should subscribe to all the YouTube channels so everyone contributing to Author Tube Writing Conference. But I I create some stuff here quite often, so if you want more from me, you can subscribe. With that said, moderators, let me know if I'm missing anything that I should be mentioning, but this is the end of my presentation. I hope you all have an amazing rest of your day.