Author Sidekick, with Michael Evans, The BookFunnel Podcast Episode 17

A lot of authors don't really realize that your cover needs to be embedded into your epub. And what that means is your software program if you use Vellum.

When you think from a reader's first perspective and realize that's your real job as an author, to put readers first, it doesn't make sense from reader's first perspective to put all this pressure on yourself to finish a series when you can be putting that time to something else that can help the lives of more readers.

We understand being busy or not having the attention span or the energy pennies. So my tip is to pick three hours a month, but take that cue.

From your own instincts. Be like, you know what, maybe I need to step back from this and explore something else that I am excited about. Hey folks, welcome to the Book Funnel Podcast, where indie authors get real world advice on writing, publishing, and growing a career on their own terms. Whether you're just starting out or you're deep into your other journey, we're here to help you build your readership, boost your book sales, and connect with your readers. Each episode we aim to bring you insights from authors, experts and and industry insiders who have been there, done that, and then some. As always, I am joined today by my co hosts, Emma Allison and Kelly Tanzi. And today for this episode, episode 17, we are joined by Michael Evans, an author of sci fi creator, someone obsessed with the future of publishing, also the creator of author sidekick, Michael. Welcome to the podcast. Good to have you here today, sir.

I'm so excited to be here. I think like many, I just found out there's more than one Jamie, so it feels really good to be behind the scenes. I've been a user of Book Funnel now for better part of a decade. We'll just round up and real honored to be on this podcast.

Yeah, it's great to have you here, Emma. You're the one who stumbled upon Michael's Kickstarter and that's what prodded the invite to get you here on the podcast. We'll get to that here, obviously, in a little bit. We're going to be talking about author marketing today. Lots of different things. I'm excited for the conversation. If you want to real quick, just for everybody who, you know watching the podcast now, who might not be familiar with you, let us know a little bit about who Michael Evans is.

Yeah, okay. So I'm a sci fi author of 12 novels, which means that I've been through so many ups and downs and made a ton of mistakes and I don't want you to end up making a lot of the mistakes I have. So hopefully today I'll be able to share with you a lot of advice to not lead you astray to doing the things I did. But I'll tell you some things I did right, which I hope I can inspire you all to do, which is one I I got started and I started publishing when I was 15. I was kind of a weirdo who didn't have too many friends in high school. So it was pretty easy for me to spend all my nights and weekends writing. And then I worked a job at a resort to kind of fund the publication of my books. And after doing all the self publishing stuff, we'll get more into my story in the end. Sure. I ended up doing YouTube full time and livestreaming full time for a year. Turns out you can make a living doing manhunt and Scavenger hunt online. That's a fun, weird story that we can dive into then. I A lot of you might know me from building software in the author space. I did that for a couple years while I was in school. And then right after I graduated Harvard, I went to go work for Mr. Beast. So I was on his strategy team doing data there. Really what that was was understanding how to make his videos go even more viral. So that's. I did, I think when I was there, the channel grew by a little over 60 million subscribers. I was there for just about seven months and I quit a couple months from when we're recording this. And I am now back in the author space, creator space, full time and really excited to be helping people make marketing fun again, connect with readers and get back to people I love, which is all of y'. All. Yeah. Yeah.

I might have to pick your brain a little bit about some of the YouTube related stuff here. As an author who has tried the YouTube thing, feel like there's some, there's some aspects of that that are a little tricky. But again, we'll, we'll get to that when we get to it here in a little bit. What we typically do at the beginning of the podcast, of course, is we take the opportunity to just check in on each other. Kelly, Emma and myself, we're all kind of each other's accountability buddies and we're all authors of varying stripes. How has it been going for you guys in the way of writing these days? Kelly, I know last time you had made some good progress, if I remember right.

Yeah, I made even more progress. I had a day that was probably 6,000 words. I finished multiple chapters, you know, when that spark comes and you're like, oh, the story's there, I got it. And then you just keep going and going. So I had one of those this week and I'm really excited about that. So.

Good deal.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, I also, I also did a few things business wise, which I've been wanting to do, which is I pulled out some epilogues from two of my books that have bonus epilogues in them and moved those into a more of a reader magnet sort of thing. So they're going to be at the end of the book. Here's the reader magnet, you know, at the end of the book. And then I put my books back in Kindle Unlimited, which I've been wanting to do for a bit. It was a lot of work though, because I had to redo my automation sequences. I had to redo, you know, everything that goes with that. You know, I had to pull, make sure my book wasn't anywhere else and, you know, any of the books weren't anywhere else. So, yeah, it was a lot of work, but I'm glad I did it cause, you know, I needed to. And I started running some ads on it just to see if I can get some push. So.

Sweet. Yeah, exactly.

It was a productive week for me. Good deal.

Good deal. Emma, I'm going to pass it to you.

It's been going. I'm in the pro. I don't know if I mentioned this last time, but I'm in the process of doing a second edition of my Tentpole fantasy series. I'm adjusting the tents and then just going through because it's been two years and I'm rereading it. And even in the two years my voice has matured just enough where I feel like I would make different characterization choices now than I would then, but still maintain the integrity, the essence of the story. So I'm doing that now and I got back my first cover for the second edition. So I'm going from couples to objects. I said I wouldn't do it because I love my couples, but whatever trends. But by next podcast, I hope I will have made a decision whether or not to just publish it as a second edition under the same ASIN or do a completely new asin, depending on if Amazon cooperates and actually pushes out an update. Which.

Yeah, yeah, I'd be interested to see what, what happens there with that. So keep us updated because I'm actually in the middle of something kind of similar. I need to do a refresh on some of the. The first Books in my series. As for me, life keeps dropping nuclear bombs on my schedule these days is what it seems like. So as you guys can tell, I'm like, not in my usual studio. And there's a reason for that. Water in the basement. Lots of fun kids that have been sick. It's. It's been all kinds of things, so. Still been making progress, though, on my current work in progress. The dictation has been helping in a way that I did not expect. It just makes sitting down or standing up to. To write just that much easier. Like the getting started. It's less of a hump to get over when you're not having to physically type has been helpful. I know that if I were still typing now and not dictating, I would not have written anything during this tumultuous time that I have going on. Hopefully next week is a lot more calm. Right. Like after tomorrow. Like, I think tomorrow. I know my son has a band concert. I have an appointment. He has an appointment. My kid went to the doctor yesterday, my other kid. So I'm. It's been, you know, a little hairy. Little hairy, but you just gotta. You gotta sometimes give yourself some grace. But, Michael, what about you?

What.

What have you been doing these days in terms of publishing? And I know you said you're kind of returning back to kind of the author space here. What's your current. You have a current work in progress that you can tease or anything?

Yeah, well, I think not too dissimilar from you, Jack. I had a life bomb this week. Different flavor of it called food poisoning, which is a really nasty flavor.

Yeah, that'll do it.

Yeah, that was not fun. So that knocked me off a bit. But the good news is I'm feeling pretty much back to 100% now, and I was able to get two chapters done of my soon to be released. Can't tell you how soon nonfiction book called Readers first, which is all about selling your book, then writing it, which is maybe a little bit of radical premise, but it's exactly what I believe could help a lot of authors. So I'm two chapters in now. Otherwise there's always like another million things going on behind the scenes. But that's been my writing progress.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Awesome. All right, so we come to our first segment in the podcast today. It's. We call it the first segment, even though we kind of have like, the preamble and everything. I don't know, maybe it's technically the second segment.

Now.

I haven't updated the outline, but officially it's the first segment, Tips from the Trenches. In this segment we share with you some self publishing and writing related advice. Of course, all of us here are authors and so we know the day in day out of what it means to be a writer, to be an author, to also have maybe a full time job, kids, other things that you guys can probably relate to as well. And so we come today bearing tips and advice for you. We will kind of go around. We don't share these up upfront with each other. So nobody knows what, what everybody else's tip is. So that kind of makes it a fun little surprise. And I'm going to go first today. I'm going to insist here. A Book Funnel feature that you may not be familiar with is our bulk delivery feature. And I want to share this feature with you. And my tip for this is that essentially bulk delivery what it does, because not everybody knows about it. It's a relatively new feature. It allows you to add books directly to a reader's Book Funnel library. Actually not just a readers, multiple readers. So if you think of like Book Funnel certified mail, where you grab a list of like 500, a thousand, you know, however many readers you have and you send them a certified mail campaign, they get an email with a download link. That's all great. However, there are some potential hiccups with things like certified mail. Emails don't always go to their inbox.

Right.

Especially considering the fact that that email is coming from Book Funnel, it's not coming from you. So if they've never received email from Book Funnel before, that can be kind of tricky for that first email to come in. And they haven't whitelisted us. Even if they have you whitelisted, they might not get that email in their main inbox. There's other things that can go on just with email. It's not certified mail, that feature specifically, it's just the nature of email. And so with bulk delivery, you can add those books directly to those readers. Book Funnel Libraries and then you can communicate with them, your readers, through whatever platform it is you're communicating with them through and say, hey, your books are in your Book Funnel library. You can download the app or you can log in on your browser with your same email and get them there. So that's my tip for today. We built this feature for Kickstarter and Patreon, that sort of thing. But Kickstarter is kind of what we, what we had in mind because you're communicating with your readers usually on the Kickstarter platform. And you have access to their email, of course, to deliver, you know, once you're deliver the, the, the goods to them. That's the only thing that's coming to mind right now. Once your, your campaign is complete. Right. Forgive the informality, but you're communicating with them there already, so it just makes sense to be able to give them the books and you can tell them right there on Kickstarter, hey, it's been delivered. You can use your email, the same email you use for Kickstarter. Log in there and your books are ready for you. They don't have to search for an email that might have gone to the wrong inbox. Certified mail works really well for ARC teams readers who are engaged with you and like you're staying regularly in touch with them. For something like Kickstarter, I highly recommend you go with bulk delivery instead. It can be used for ARC teams too, though.

My tip is actually about formatting, but we actually have had it come through a couple of times in the last, I don't know, week or so, and we might have talked about something similar. But a lot of authors don't really realize that your cover needs to be embedded into your epub. And what that means is your software program, if you use Vellum or Atticus or whatever you're using, typically has a place where you can upload the COVID and it will make it the very first page of the file. A lot of authors, when you upload it into Book Funnel, that we are going to put the file, we're going to put it into your file so when we deliver it, the reader will see your email. But if you don't actually have the COVID actually embedded in there, it's going to basically show nothing. It's going to have like one of those generic things. So make sure that you are using embedded covers and you also want to put the COVID into Book Funnel because that's what shows on your landing pages and that sort of thing. But this is just a formatting tip, because we did see. I. I've seen it come through a couple times this week or somebody. I don't know what this thing is. It's on. You know, this cover's all messed up and I don't know where it's coming from. That's where it's coming from. It's coming from your actual file itself. If you change your cover, this happens a lot too. An author will get a new cover for their book and they'll change it in Book Funnel, which changes it on the landing page. But when we deliver the book, it has the old files. You also want to go in and update your embedded file or your embedded cover so that it'll show when. When you're in your library. And for PDFs, another question that ends up coming in is, well, what do I do for an embed for PDF? And we just will tell you, put it as the very first page. Like, the very first page is your cover, and then the second page is, you know, your copyright or whatever you have as your second element, so.

Exactly.

That's fine.

Who's going to go next? Who's up?

I'm happy to go next.

All right, Michael, what do you got for us?

Do you have a book that has great reviews, great cover, great description, and you're even marketing it, but it's still not selling the way you want it to? There's surprising amount of folks who are in this camp, and sometimes the instinct is that you're just not marketing your book well enough. But what if you're not framing your book to the right readers? So I was recently chatting with an author, and what we found was that she had artificially packaged her book into a genre that she thought was best for her story. And when readers read her story, they really liked it. But the truth is that she was maybe a 75% fit for that genre. Right? So her cover matched that genre. Her description matched it mostly. But then when readers would start reading the book, some readers would just put it down early on because it didn't meet their expectations. That genre didn't mean it was a bad book. They didn't one star it. And when readers got to the end, they ended up really liking it. But she didn't end up getting readers voraciously devouring it in this sub genre. So her marketing wasn't going the way she planned. So in that situation, what do you do? And you might think, okay, well, then I'll. I'll go to another existing genre. But if you're like this author, and I've been in these shoes as well, you might be like, my book doesn't necessarily fit into one genre very cleanly, and if I was to do that, I'd be kind of lying about what the book's about. So you could just shift the book to that genre and change the contents and change the book itself. That's pretty radical. And that also is changing the story you wrote. And maybe that's not something you want to do. So instead you can invent a new genre, which. This seems like a wild idea, but genres Are all just two words, Three words sometimes. I've never seen more than three words. I don't think someone in the comments share a genre that has four words. They will be wonderful. Yeah, they will. They. Please do. Please do that. That I need to learn. We all need to learn. But you can put these words together. And for this author's sake, I'm not going to share the genre that she ended up inventing because it's brilliant and she's about to release and repackage her book under this genre. But what's beautiful is it's not something completely brand new. Like, I was to tell you this, you'd be like, oh, this makes sense. Like, I've never heard of a book like this, but I kind of know what this already is about. Your expectations are immediately reframed. You come into the book in a different way, and it's still that same great story, but you're bringing in a slightly different reader with a slightly different expectation, and as a result, can see a lot more readers. And every genre that exists today ultimately was born of a similar problem. There's certain readers who genuinely really like this type of story and. But it doesn't match the existing stories out there. So instead of forcing your story and your marketing into, you know, a kind of a square hole, into like a round peg or something, you can instead invent a new one. That's my tip for the day.

Yeah. No, that's. A lot of people, I think, would maybe scoff initially, but if you think about it, every genre that's out there was created by someone. And, you know, whether or not. Whether or not it picks up, who knows, you don't always have control over that, but that's a good way to look at it. And I like the reframing aspect of it, too. To say, you know, this is. It sets those expectations when they're going into the book. And I think that sometimes can make or break the experience. Like if somebody tells you when you go to see a movie, right? If you ask the wrong person, like, okay, I'm going to go see this movie, but I'm going to ask my friend who, like, really loves movies, right? I'll ask them, like, what's your opinion of this movie? Before I go see it versus you, ask somebody else, right? Like maybe somebody who's like, you know, what do they. What do they call them? You know, gosh, a video file.

What are they?

I don't even know what the cinephile. Cinephile. That's. That's What? Yeah, yes, yes. Like they just love cinema. You ask them about the latest Avengers movie and they're gonna tell you. Oh, it's just, it's, you know, nonsense. Right. But what if you're a fan of, of the Avengers? What if you're a fan of those type of movies? You want to ask somebody who's a fan of that, you're going to get something completely different and you're going to go into the movie and you're going to maybe start noticing all the things that that cinephile friend of yours pointed out, all those little criticisms that you wouldn't have otherwise if you asked your friend who was a fan of the Avengers. Right. Just as. As an example. So I think that matters.

Oh, it totally does. And there's another interesting kind of point to this, which my brain's broken and I just, whenever I think about something, I'm thinking about like data and all the other things behind it. But YouTube rolled out a B thumbnail testing.

Right.

When I was at Beast, this was obviously we used incessantly. You can even see like, like there's this software called View Stats. It's free. The Beast team created it so you can use it completely free and you can actually see thumbnail swaps that creators do and the performance before and after. Really, really cool stuff. But here's the thing. When you run a thumbnail AB test on YouTube, you would think at the surface that you're optimizing for click through rate. Right. This thumbnail is interesting to more people, but that's not what it optimizes for. It optimizes for retention or watch time. Right. So which thumbnails leading to the highest engagement? Not the highest click through rate. And the one that leads to the highest engagement is what WINS and what YouTube automatically makes the thumbnail. So like to take that psychology over to books, what we oftentimes do is optimize for the ctr. We optimize for the conversion, the sales ranking. Right. But that's actually a long term mistake. In the short run it's a sugar high and we'll see the ranking go higher. But in the long run, you're not going to have the same type of engagement because your packaging isn't aligned with that. And then your sales will suffer. In the long, long run, your marketing will be less profitable and you will have less readers.

Right, right. You're. You want to optimize for. Read through is what you would want to optimize for.

Yes, exactly.

In that case, to, to kind of use the YouTube to compare that aspect of it. Because YouTube is looking for watch time. Right. How long are you spending watching the video they want you to stick around? Well, as an author, you want that read through. You want them to read your book like all the way through in one night and then get the next one and do the same thing. Right. Or, or consume your series in that way. And that's what you'd want to. That's a. I think, I think you're right. Some people look at that initial sugar high of like, oh, my click through rate went up or just, you know, especially if you're running ads, you can see all of those data points and it really sometimes takes a while to really suss out whether or not an ad campaign is successful in terms of read through.

Yes.

And that's what, that's what ultimately clicks are great. But you people got to read the book.

Yeah. I mean you do need, you do need clicks to a certain degree. It's, it's that sort of balancing act. But you almost want to math it out. Right. Like if your line's getting you five times more clicks but you know, a ten times lower read through rate, that's a very dramatic example. But that's probably not great.

Right?

Well.

And what if you're getting five times more clicks from the wrong type of person? The reason why you're getting the 5.5x on clicks is because you repackaged it in a certain way that's attracting a different crowd that might just be larger, but they're not your crowd. Right?

Yep. Bingo, Jack.

So there you go. There you go. Emma, what do you got?

Forget my tip. Michael threw down the gauntlet. I'm going to answer. So Jack and Kelly know I've gone through this metamorphosis where I thought I was a steamy fantasy romance author for years or steamy paranormal to steamy fantasy romance.

I knew this.

I realized, I realized the last couple of weeks I needed to reframe. And thank you for that word. I am a epic fantasy romantic women's fiction authority, which is completely different from steamy fantasy romance. Completely different. But I'm not sure what order those words should come in.

But I think you also got a four genre word. So now the comment is going to have to do a five or genre. We're going to up the stakes for the comment.

Right? Right. I think it's something that.

I think I did have a tip, but like I was not interested in my tip after he said reframe. I'm like, yes, okay, well, but, but.

To, to finish, to wrap that up. This is something that I think you knew for a long time and maybe like you couldn't quite put your. Your finger on it, what the issue was. And just over.

I don't.

Maybe it's some of the guests we've had on or whatnot. But yeah, it's been fun to see you go through this evolution as well. So for my part, anyway, your tip, Emma. Go ahead. I'll quit being sappy here.

Well, well, no, I'm. We could be sappy, but my tip is really a shameless plug for the upcoming webinar. Okay. So if you're coming to me and you're like, emma, Jamie, I don't have time to make content. I need for my newsletter to keep it engaged. I'm super busy. Do I even need a newsletter? Yes, you need a newsletter and you need to keep them engaged. It's a long game. You have to have it. But we understand being busy or not having the attention span or the energy pennies. So my tip is to pick three hours a month, get your favorite beverage. Mine happens to be clear like water, but it does not taste or rhyme like water. And take three hours and batch your content. Now, efficiency is going to be predicated on the fact that you have some infrastructure set up first. So you want templates set up. I like to use checklists. So have a plan going in and then get all that done in three hours. You can do about three months worth of newsletter marketing in three hours if you have some solid infrastructure set up. And in my upcoming webinar, it'll be here in May. I am going to fall on my sword and put on the timer and show you how to either do this epically or fail gloriously at this in 30 minutes.

So yeah, it's gonna be May 7th, folks, for those of you wanna know. I'll make sure we put a. There should be a link in the comments to the calendly book funnel. Live is when we do our webinars first Wednesday of each month for the most part, few exceptions. There will be here in the summer, but Emma is gonna be hosting that one. It's. It's gonna be interesting. I will be in the. The webinar as well. Watching, I guess. I guess watching you crash and burn or watch you. Right. It'll be interesting. But batching content, I. I know for me newsletter, I think some people, some authors, you have things that you want to plug in your newsletter. And so you might be thinking, geez, but I don't know, like, my release is kind of tenuous. It might be this date, but I might have to push it back. Say, well, you can always edit your newsletter after the fact if you need to, but batch it now so that it's out there. And it's for you. Something I did a while back, and it saved me a ton of time and a ton of headaches, and I'm glad I did. I need to do it again, though, because I ran out of Runway because I did it for a few months, and then it's like, oh, I gotta do it again. But I might honestly sit down and do it, like, a full 12 hours and do it for the whole year just so that it was, like, done. Yeah. I'm gonna up the ante here on you, Emma.

We might do a marathon, a challenge or something.

Exactly. Exactly. No, I'm not. I will not steal your thunder. What was that?

Battle of the batches, dear.

Hey, that's a name. That's a name. All right, so onto our main topic for today. Author Sidekick. Michael, this is your baby. Tell us. Tell us a little bit about Author Sidekick, what you help authors with. I know, like, for those who don't know, they're like, I know it's, like, marketing related, but, like, what's all going on here? Give us. Give us the. The quick and dirty, and then we can get into the details.

Yeah. You know, Author Sidekick exists to help you unleash your superpowers to the world. As an author, I think that oftentimes marketing has been billed to us as one size fits or you have to do X, Y, Z. And I like breaking the rules. And I want you to break the rules, too. And my job as your sidekick is to help you first understand what it means to be your version of a storytelling hero and to understand and really, really discover the superpowers you have. Because I think all of us have things that we're innately good at and things that we innately understand better than others or at least better than we think we do. That allow us to make marketing fun for us and most importantly, our readers. And then my second job is to expand your mind with, whether it's case studies, stories, tools, and insights to help you actually apply those superpowers to grow your business and to grow your readership. So, yeah, that's. I'm really passionate about. It's. It's helping creators grow. You know, before doing this, I helped Mr. Beast grow. Before doing that, I helped tons of authors grow their memberships for that. I was obsessed with growing myself to the point of nearly throwing myself off a cliff to do it. And I'm not even joking about that. It's an intense but interesting story. So I'm really, really passionate about helping storytellers really not only get their work out into the world, but build a business where they feel in control. So, yeah, that's, that's what I do. That's the high level of author sidekick. You'll see me around with a bunch of pencils I don't have with me today because I gifted it to someone in Dublin. She's the best. So I have to get a new pencil and I'm going to make it bigger and better this time. That's it. Pencils are a weapon and storytellers make awesome stuff happen.

A couple of things here that I think that you've said that I think could be fleshed out a little bit. And so I have some questions, as you said, making marketing fun, we can get to that here in a little bit. But you talked about your superpowers as an author. When you say that. What do you mean by that? Because I have an idea of what you mean. But when you're talking to authors about their superpowers, I assume we're leaning into kind of what our strengths are, leaning into the aspects of ourselves that are working well for. Because you oftentimes hear what people say, focus on your strengths as opposed to worrying about your weaknesses, that sort of thing. Am I on the same wavelength there with you to some degree or you.

Are on the same wavelength. I've used superpowers in broad terms, but I'll make it very specific. I think it comes down to strategy and tactics. And the strategy that I think authors can use relates to their marketing style. I actually created a free quiz@superhero.authorsidekick.com, but if you go to my website, you'll find it there because there's like a little pop up with the quiz. It's completely free. And what you end up figuring out if your marketing style is these three things. One, what I call your belt, which is think of like your toolkit, right? So these are like the platforms that you're going to use that are probably best suited to you. Again, the quiz is not like a hundred percent accurate, but it should hopefully be indicative of something you can relate to. And you can also read through all the other belts too. There's five belts, then there's five capes. So the cape, not that, you know, it's not to get too, too no I like it.

I like it.

The five capes are going to be your marketing rhythm, right? So it's. It's how you're supposed to market. So actually, Emma's highlighting and I think the webinar that. That y' all are doing, it sounds incredible because part of what makes newsletters tough for people and any marketing activity is that we think we have to do it on a regular basis. But no, you can batch it. And I call that like a cape, right? When you can just batch all together, they get all done in excitement. That's how I do things. I'm not like a consistent. Even if I release consistently, I'm not consistent in how I get it done. So there's that aspect to your marketing rhythm. Then there's your marketing voice, which this is underrated, but it's your mask, right? And your mask, your marketing voice is like, who does the telling in your marketing? Who is the creator of the stories you're marketing? You're going to be like, well, obviously it's me, but not necessarily. What if the Facebook ad or the description was written by your character? We see this all the time in romance with book descriptions, right? It could be from the perspective of your readers, right? This is where reviews come in. But actually using that more in your marketing, bring your readers into your marketing more. You also can develop a sort of Persona. I call this the Phantom mask, where it's not even you, but it's a fictional Persona of what you would be. So turning yourself as an author into a character. I've seen really good examples of this. But if I out the authors who are doing this, then you'll know it's not actually them. So I'm not going to do that. But I'll show you an example. Imagine you are writing thrillers, right? And you're writing, let's call it international, you know, maybe espionage, spy thriller, something in that sort of range. And you as an author, concoct this background for yourself where you're an ex FBI agent or you're an ex CIA agent, right? And you have this detailed background story, y'.

All.

Y' all were never in the CIA or FBI, but no one needs to know that, including your readers. But your marketing can come from that lens, right? So I hope that kind of makes it start to sound a little bit more fun because you're hoping to lean into the thing that works best for you. Again, the quiz will start to 45 questions, but it doesn't take long to answer. These are one to five. You pick, right? Agree or disagree. Right, right. How you feel about these things and it outputs the answer. And then the other aspect of it is the tactics. Like, once you have your strategy, your cape, your belt, your, your mask, you're going to need these tactics. And I have these 50 different superpowers which are on different cards which you can also download completely for free. They're all illustrated. And you can on these cards be able to see these different tactics you can use to grow your author business. And they're actually aligned to the different stages you're. So there's stages for when, like, you're just trying to find who your readers are, when you're trying to scale your readership, when you're trying to just get your first few readers. And these tactics are probably best at those times. So, yeah, I suppose, Jack, you're exactly right in thinking about strengths. And I think I've tried to kind of create this sort of language and hopefully easy entry points so that you don't have to learn everything about marketing. You can instead look at the tactics, AKA these superpower cards that are best for you and use the cards when you need to use them. And then you can use the cape, use the belt, use the mask when you want to put the right one on that you feel best in. And you could wear multiple ones. Like, we all wear different clothes in a day, but we all probably have a style that we adopt most of the time, and that's what that's about. So, yeah, essentially making marketing fun again, from the author angle, the reader angle is a totally different conversation, but from the author angle is how do we take this complicated world, make it simple, play to your strengths. And I think that all goes back to your marketing style and then the specific tactics or these superpower cards that you use.

Right. I actually like the language that you're using around that. I think, number one, it's really creative, which makes it easier to, like, remember how, how you're organizing these things. But you've also. They kind of now each have their own, like, little compartment. And so, you know, like, okay, well, yes, your platform matters. Like, just starting with that one. I think a lot of authors assume, okay, newsletter, I need that one. And then social media is usually like, oh, well, I don't like social media. So I'm just, I'm just going to ignore it, which is fine, I suppose, for some. And maybe that's just you avoid it because you don't like it and maybe it is not your strength, and that's fine. Or maybe there's just that you haven't thought of how you could use social media on that topic of platforms because you packaged these so well. I like it. What platforms do you see? Authors, I guess maybe not considering or kind of ignoring that maybe they shouldn't be. Right. Again, obviously understanding that not every author is necessarily going to have the strengths that align with different platforms. So if we're talking about social media, you know, we've got, you've got YouTube, which is very visual, video centric versus other platforms that are more text based, that sort of thing. But just in your view, what are platforms that authors are kind of like disregarding is like, ah, that's kind of, you know, that would never work or, or what have you that they should give a second look at.

Yeah, love it. So I'll, I'll share with you first how I approach it because I think the, this is constantly changing and one of the games of like, you know, being a adept, like authorpreneur. Right. And I guess like an emphasis in the second part of that word is trying to spot the new opportunities. And how I like to approach this is thinking about from at a marketing angle. Where is there underutilized attention? So what I mean by that is where is their attention? That either one of three things are true. And if all three things are true, you've like found a jackpot, right? One, it's cheap. You can actually get it and pay for it. Or if you can't pay for it, you can access it organically and it's not very competitive. Where again it's cheap to access. I'll give you examples in a bunch of different areas in that. But that's, I'm thinking about like where's attention cheap. Okay. And a classic example that we all know about but isn't cheap anymore is like Facebook ads and 2015. Like okay, cool, right. So that's what cheap attention looks like. Then the other aspect of attention is it might not be cheap, but it has very little competition for SKUs like yours. So I use the word sku. I'm thinking about retail. Right. But SKU is basically just exactly how what goes on a shelf. It's, it's unique product identifier. And when we look at, you know, Amazon ads, I'll use that example. If you're like in a sponsored ad category on Amazon, you are not exactly unique. SKU as a book there, you're not catching anyone's eyes by being a book. So that actually makes it a lot harder to stand out. There's also A lot of book skus there as well, which is also, which is also challenging. So again, I'm not saying Amazon ads are bad, but I wouldn't call Amazon ads underutilized attention from this framework, which makes sense, like everyone knows about Amazon ads. But what are, what are, you know, maybe an example of that because this one's a little bit harder to frame. Think about something like a podcast, which this might not be the best example of a podcast because this might not have your target audience, although it might. But let's say there's a podcast focused on technology and you write science fiction books. How often does an author go on that podcast who writes fiction books? How often does someone sponsor that podcast who writes fiction books? Very, very, very rarely, I can tell you that. And it's not just that you can think about history, right? And you write historical fiction. Think about all the history content that exists and history content creators that they have all these brands flooding them them, right. But those brands probably aren't authors. That's a space for you to again capture your eyes attention where that creators, they've pitched 10 VPNs, their audience, they've pitched zero books. You can be the first. So third, the third area is going to be essentially I call this social hacking. But it's going to be new trending topics that, or trending people that there hasn't been enough conversation around that you can, can you can tap into. So another example here would be there is this creator, I'm forgetting their name and I wish I remembered it. But you can look it up. They created these special leather bound editions of Brandon Sanderson's books and they were like epic, epic, incredible books, right? That they created these special editions and they gifted it to Brandon Sanderson, which is what an epic video. This video gets millions of views on YouTube, goes viral. Imagine if you wrote books similar to Brandon Sanderson and you had created that as your content. You now reached a lot of his readers and also a lot of people who aren't even his readers but just are aware of him, but also probably like that those types of stories. So social hacking is using the authority of someone else or the reputation of someone else or some other brand to gain attention. And now I'll share a bunch of examples how I've done these and then how you can do these. So I'll start in reverse. So when it comes to social hacking, I've taken this to an absolute extreme. And you probably shouldn't go as far as me, but you probably should do it. It so the first thing I'll say is that we live in a pretty permissionless society and it's amazing what can happen when you just DM someone or email someone. The issue is that if you're one of a hundred emails, it looks the same in someone's inbox who's we'll call in high demand. You're probably not going to get anywhere. Like, for instance, you email, let's call it. I'm going to use an example of someone who I don't even think ever touches email because I don't necessarily want. I don't want to be victim of an author going to me. Michael, you mentioned me in a podcast and now, Now I got 50 emails, so. So you find the author who's best for you. But I'll give an example. I do not genuinely don't think uses email. Who's Stephen King? He might use email, but I don't know it. I haven't found it. So, Stephen King, right? Let's say he had an email that's public and open. He gets probably a thousand different emails about, what's your writing advice for me? Okay, let's forget even the reader emails. Like, he obviously gets way more of those, but he might get another hundred or two hundred emails about like, here's my new book. Can you share it with your fans again? Who cares? Boring, boring. Delete, delete, delete, delete, delete. But then he gets that one email that says, hey, Stephen King, I, you know, read three of your books. I found out you really like this food. I made you a huge pastry in the shape of this book. Can I gift it to you? Absurd, right? But maybe he responds to that, right? Maybe he does. Maybe you get to meet him and create some content out of that. Maybe he decides to retweet it. Maybe he decides now to share your next book. So all of this to say that social hacking, there's an R2 it, and not enough people do it because you can do it in every area of life, in every single context. So how I did this, probably my first time, because I've done this many times, but my first time was actually finding this YouTuber. His name was Eric. And you can actually look up on YouTube right now, there's this video called Breaking 100 laws in 24 hours. These are petty laws, to be clear, okay? Not some, like, insane criminal. I jumped off of Santa Monica pier with this YouTuber era, and it got close to 20 million views. So more people know me from that than anything else. I've Ever done. Which is hilarious and kind of sad. But Eric, before I collaborated in that video, we were strangers. So how did I meet him? I saw you was doing a live stream and he was doing a live stream as he was hitting a million subscribers. And at the time I identified something in him which is really key, which is the classic slope over intercept the best people to social hack or right to like actually collaborate. Because I'm using the word social hack. This is like Michael's fancy word for collaborating very strategically. Okay, but like very strategically being like unbelievable keywords because, because too oftentimes we don't collaborate very strategically at all. And also thinking about collaboration as just a simple swap, I think is again boring for readers. Nevermind for you. I mean, how oftentimes can you do just a simple swap? So when we think about this context and Arak, I have something special about him. A million new subscribers is a lot, don't get me wrong. But I knew he was gonna be way bigger. And he is. He has 50 million subscribers now. He low key, fell off. But his editor now is like the main editor for Mr. Beast. So I knew he had something incredibly special. And he did. And it happened to be, you know, his business partner and him. But regardless of what it was, I want part of it. So I saw where he was going. I knew that it would be infinitely easier to break in a million subscribers versus 10 million subscribers. And I knew this is my chance while he was on this island. But the problem was I didn't know where this island was. So I was seeing in the live stream, he wasn't trying to be public about where this island was. I was studying. Literally imagine this, I'm 18 years old, like basically next to broke. It is, I'm home for my first semester of college and I'm like, absolutely manic. Just up at 3am, texting my best friend going, we're going to this freaking island, man. We're gonna find it. I see the skyline, right? I see the skyline behind it. And I go, okay, he's in, he's near, like a development, like a city. Okay? Then I'm listening to these live streams, I'm hearing the accents, there's some random people coming on this island. And I'm going, he's in the south, I know the South. And I don't think it's Louisiana, I think it's Florida. And then I'm going, I'm like, it has to be near Palm Beach. So then I find this exact island, little Moneyon island, and I go, it has to be there, dude. And we're gonna bet on it. And he books a flight. I drive a car down the day after Christmas. I wake up at 2am, literally the day after Christmas. And we're going because we have to get there before he gets a million subscribers and leaves the island. We go and kayak in an inflatable raft. My friend does not know how to swim. This whole video is on YouTube, by the way. And my friend does not know how to swim. And we get there and we show up in suits, top up because the bottom was bathing suits. And we show up with a cake to celebrate for him and our resumes that were we wanted an internship. Wild gave him great content and it ended up working out. His manager is also the manager of yes Theory. And I was able to ideate videos with him behind the scenes and get a lot of good practice in like creating viral concepts. So virality is something I'm very, very interested in. And specifically social hacking is a root to virality. Something I see like just absolutely no authors do. But it's been done across social media like time and time again, the creators doing this. So that, that's my detailed story. Other times I've done this are I gave the Sway boys a keg. If you don't know Bryce hall, he's a weird guy, interesting, famous. Love you, Bryce Hall, I suppose. We showed up to the house, the keg, and I was not old enough to buy one, so that was a very interesting time. Went to the back of Joe Rogan's house to give him a piece of chocolate rolled up like a blunt. There was nothing illegal in it, but it was rolled up like a blunt. And we kayaked also to the back of his house. That was a disaster of a story, but it was, it was interesting. I think this all ended in me getting the executive assistant of Elon Musk's phone number after making a special boring company shaped pizza box for her. And. And that was a wild experience. So all this to say that like I was just a kid, had no real connections, had no idea who any of these people were and quote, unquote, social. Hacked my way into these circles that like I was literally just creating like crazy reality TV show content from and with no other purpose. Right. But you could have imagined how I could have done this to sell books in a way that was targeted to say, how do I connect with these bestselling authors in my genre, build relationships with them, impress them, play the long game, not just thinking about how am I Going to like shill my next book and then create content that's valuable to their fan base and to my future fan base. So that's like one area. The other area that I see is very interesting is we'll just throw social hacking to the side. The second area I mentioned was again this whole aspect of where there's ads but not a lot of book ads. So where there ads but not a lot of book ads. So some examples of that would be like podcasts, YouTube channels, newsletters that aren't author newsletters. Creators who make content for adjacent audiences, but not about books. But that would be interesting. Your book are audiences that you can target with that. And I think would be very interesting to see what conversion rates are there. Very interesting. See they're open to affiliate deals or even just recommending you for fun. Book talk is flooded with books, right? Every book talker gets recommended 100 bazillion books. What if you go to someone who isn't recommend 100 million books but as an audience who also probably does read, maybe not as much conversion rate again might not be as high. But this is also about getting in into like broader audiences as well. So you know, examples that are going to look different from everyone I know for me in my science fiction books, I'm looking at who are technology focused newsletters, who's writing for founders, who's creating video essays like Moon or Cleo Abrams on YouTube focused on like a science education audience. Right. Think like Hank Green literally, but like all of his diaspora, because I love and adore Hank Green. So then the last kind of area circling back is like these ad platforms or places where you can get attention for cheap And I think right now I'm most interested in Reddit. Reddit is an ad platform. They're investing a lot in it and you're able to get leads cheaper there than a lot of other places. I am interested in Pinterest. Pinterest is also cheaper than a lot of ad platforms. Authors have have tended to do well there. And I'm also interested in essentially thinking about Facebook ad formats that have less competition. 50% of inventory on Facebook is video. I doubt that 50% of ad dollars from authors are spent on video campaigns. I doubt it. I don't know what the number is. Only Zuckerberg knows it's a lot less than 50%. So I imagine over indexing on video you might be able to get potentially lower cpm, higher conversions because there's less competition for that specific inventory from authors. So there's actually you know, spaces to look at where there's traditionally books being sold. But how is that not being done? And again, I'll go even further on this point, thinking about product formats that stories can be sold in that traditionally we don't think of as books. So, like, I have a friend, David Vergutts, who does story letters, and that's done really well because it stood out in ads and got more attention. So. So how are you able to create, you know, slightly different packaging for your story? That's interesting. More readers. I've seen scratch and dent books do well. You discount your books but get a way higher conversion because they're scratch and dent. You throw them on the stairs from kdp. You have a romance book that was for paranormal romance. It's a werewolf book, and it's clawed by a werewolf. I want to read that book now. I don't even care what it's about, right? So these types of things are green space and thinking about, like, underutilized attention, too. You're now inserting your book into a different product category, serving a different problem that books aren't traditionally in. So, oh, my God, this is a cool trinket. I can have my wall and, like, lots of people want that. Yet that cool trinket is also an amazing, like, smexy story. Like, I'm in for it, right? So that's how I start to think about these things in terms of the opportunities.

Right.

You just kind of unloaded there, but I love it. That was. I, of course I asked a loaded question, but there. There's so much gold to be mined there. Kelly, I know you had a question. I need to take some time to absorb that first.

Well, I was just thinking about different platforms, and you just brought up a whole bunch of different ones that, like our typical spaces, YouTube, all of these are really good because I know in like, Pinterest, as you were mentioning, for romance, that's a really big one because you have so much to play with when it comes to, like, romance, where maybe Reddit might have some romance overplay. But I was wondering about, like, what do we. What do you suggest for authors who see a platform that they want to do because it's effective in their genre, TikTok or, you know, whatever. Whatever it might be, but they're not exactly comfortable in that space. You know what I mean? Like, they. They don't know what to do when they get there, and they don't know if. If it's for them, but they see that it's effective and they want to try it. Like, what is your suggestion for kind of getting out of their own heads and getting some content created that would work for that space?

Yeah. So I mean, my suggestion is you have to do two things before you create content on a platform and before you do these two things. Don't think about creating content on a platform. And if you don't want to do these two things because you hate the platform, don't create content on the platform to begin with because you only need one platform or one, as I call it, reader growth engine to build a business as an author. So it doesn't make sense to be everywhere all at once. It doesn't make sense to even pursue. I bucketed things as those three categories of like, you know, creators, where there's underutilized attention, there's platforms where you could get cheaper attention, or, you know, ways you can connect and collaborate that haven't been done before. You only need to do one of these things effectively to build a great career. When it comes to platform choice, when it comes to whether it's creating content, whether it's paid or organic, when I say organic, I mean you're not putting money behind it. And when I say paid, you're running an ad, right? When I, when I think about that, I go, okay, the most important thing when you jump into a platform is to be a creature of the platform. Right? So if I'm on Reddit, I want to understand the unique advertising culture on Reddit, which if you're not aware of is, is unique. You tend to advertise on Reddit differently than other platforms. I'm not saying the same copying an image can't work, but there's a chance it doesn't. And there's a chance it doesn't because Reddit's unique and they actually have a history of not liking ads. Although Reddit's now building much better ad products and their audience is getting more used to it. But this doesn't mean that it's one to one copy. Likewise on Reddit too, there's different targeting and I'm just using Reddit as like a contextual example here. There's, you know, tons of different subreddits that you can target. A lot of them are very different than the audience and interest groups that you target on Facebook. Even honestly Facebook now a lot of it's going to be the AI driven targeting with Advantage plus, right, where you might not even be entering in any targeting. You're just, you're copying your landing page, doing the work for you, you. So you want to understand the culture. What I would say is be a creature of the platform before you dive into it. So you don't want to necessarily pain yourself by spending time somewhere that you hate or that you don't feel confident or that you can't find your people in. I think these are great indications that you should leave and go somewhere else. So that's the first thing. The second thing is that if you're creating organic content on the platform, you need to be able to understand what are other creators who are reaching audiences that you'd also like to reach and what content are they creating that's working. And you can create a simple spreadsheet, you know, or Google Sheet, right? Here are 10 people I found who like, they're creating content that's, you know, if I was able to just steal their audience, they'd buy my books, right? And these are the videos that are working, or these are the Facebook posts that are working on these, the Instagram carousels that are working or, you know, insert platform name. Now, when it comes to the ads, I give similar advice. If you're running ads on Facebook, you can literally see in the Facebook ad library who's running ads. So you should be able to and should want to see what authors are similar to you or businesses that are similar to you, or you could think broader. And that's a healthy thing to do. Which people are reaching similar audiences to you and what ads they running and how are they working? Because that'll be able to give you a signal for what could work well. And also, if you visit their pages, we all know how Facebook works. They're going to start feeding you their ads or ads similar to theirs too, which isn't a bad thing. Like, you want to start consuming. If you're doing paid ads, you want to start being consumer of ads, which is a good thing for you to start to understand what ads are working on you and which ones are getting engagement. And likewise, if you're doing a platform that maybe doesn't have an equivalent ads library, I would literally start to reach out to teams at platforms like Reddit. And I would start to go to their help and be like, hey, or Pinterest. Do you have creators similar to this? This is my product. This is what I'm about to advertise. Can you give me case studies of people who've done this successfully on your platform? Platform? If not, that's okay. But then you want to go to an author group or you want to go and find at least similar profiles who've done well organically there to at least then mirror what kind of paid content you can come up with. So I'm always trying to understand, you know, standing on the shoulder of giants who's done well before, be a creature of the platform and then I think you're ready to actually start creating content. And I think until you do those two steps, it doesn't have to take long. You could do this in a couple hours, right? I'm not asking you to take years, but until you do this, I think you can be stabbing in the dark. And I think that's a very tough place to be in. And I also think that a couple hours can give you the self awareness to know if that's the right thing for you or not. And that's where you got to start.

Because the, the TikTok thing, right, BookTok has been really popular. There's a lot of authors who have made six figures and more off of TikTok. In fact, one guest we had on the podcast, I think was the fourth episode, Kate Hall. That's her whole business. She teaches authors how to, how to do that. But for some authors, like, like you said, they're not a creature of that platform. They don't, they might not even use TikTok in their personal life, right. Like, let alone like as an author. So there's some familiarity there that, that I think they're lacking. I think there's some people that are trying to. And I've seen this, I've seen those author pro, because I, I tried to do it myself. I looked at TikTok myself and I haven't fully discounted it because I think that like you said, there's maybe some of my people there. But I'm, I'm also. One thing I've personally started to come around to is like, I've also kind of got to be myself when I'm creating my content too. And some of the content I created in the past is trying to fit this like invisible mold that I had in my mind's eye of like, okay, this is what an author on YouTube should do. And if I were an author on YouTube, I would do this and this and these are the types of videos that I would make. But that's not Jack being an author on YouTube. That's this idea I had in my head that I'm kind of slowly coming around to because I think to some extent you have to be able to. And maybe you can speak to this a little bit more or give me your thoughts on it. Whatever platform it is you're using, you have to be able to connect with people on some level, and your personality has to come through. So if you're trying to force yourself. Okay, all the authors are doing TikTok these days. They're doing TikTok slideshows. Okay. I'm going to just push myself into that mole. I think people are going to sense that your. Your heart might not be behind that. Do you know what I mean? Does that make sense?

Yeah. Well, I think more importantly, attention is about surprise and it's about tension. Like, attention's about tension and surprise. And it. When people already know what the format is and know what to expect. Unless you have, like, you know, you're in the war of, like, insane hooks now. You're, like, in the war of, like, the fancy thumbnails and crazy eye emojis, right? Yeah. Like, unless you just go and up the ante, it's going to be hard for you to capture that attention. So being unique is an asset. Not. Not. It's. It's not a bad thing. It's, in fact, it's a good thing. But I think there's something interesting there because you said, I think to market, you have to show your personality, and I think that that's. Or, you know, to create content. I think that, like, on a place like TikTok, on a place like YouTube, that's more true more often. On a place like Facebook, on a place like Pinterest, on a place like Amazon ads, I think that's less true less often or more true less often. So. Yeah, yeah, that's more true less often, sure. And I think a lot of that has to do with going back to my point on the marketing masks. It's, you know, what voice, like who is doing the speaking. Speaking in your marketing and the who is doing the telling is going to be better suited for different platforms. So if you're. I call it like the neon mask. If you're like the center of gravity of your brand and you are. You want to be that, right? If that's what you want to be, then, like, TikTok's a great spot. Reels are a great spot. YouTube is a great spot for you. And you have to lean into being you. You. You have to lean into being you authentically. And I think that's really important. And especially thinking about your tilt, what makes you different? Why is someone going to come and listen to you and watch what you're doing or engage with you versus anyone else you have to have something that's spiky about you, that makes you separated from the crowd. Otherwise you're going to be in a constant, very tough war for attention. On the flip side, you don't have to necessarily have what I would call the neon mask, but we can think about you being the center of the brand. It could be the characters. Right? Right. And then I think about, well, if I want to create a TikTok for a character, how do I do that? And you can, you can create POV videos on TikTok from the perspective of a character that is all fictional, right? Where you're telling these stories and it's the character and you're leaning into not necessarily who you are authentically, but who the character is. What's important though is it's your brand, right? Because your characters that are the core part of your brand at this point, rather than you and leaning into their experiences and their voice and then fitting that into the broader space of, well, is it like I'm creating billionaire romance? So it's pov. I woke up on a yacht and you know, I'm now in, you know, the whatever, whatever island I'm on. You know, that sounds awesome. I want to be pov. That or pov. I'm in a haunted house and I think there's a guy coming in this door and I don't know what I'm gonna do. Right.

Or right.

You can imagine, like that kind of one content format that we know can work well on TikTok. And then think about all the unique ways you could take it to your story, your characters and make it yours. But then you might also goes, that format's not for me anyways. But I know I want to highlight my characters, right? So there's a lot of different ways to go about it. My big takeaway for folks is don't limit how you think about showing yourself on social media to yourself. It's about showing your brand and figuring out who or what you want to be. The gravity in your brand, it doesn't have to be you. It could be your characters, it could be your world, it could be your fans, it could be a made up version of you. But you do need to have that thing that's being the gravity of your brand center, place. It could be different things on different moments and different platforms as well. But you're probably going to lean heavy on one. And wherever you lean heavy, don't be shy about it. Be different. Because if you look exactly like someone else's, they might as well, just go read someone else's books. Right.

No, yeah, that's.

I'm.

I'm. I'm vibing with you right there. Emma, I know you had. You had a question.

Yeah, and my brain is full. I'm gonna have to take. Intellectual is gonna need a couple days. But I'm. I'm making some connections slowly, first with the reframing and then to the social hacking and then to the stabbing around in the dark. And it's leading me back to a very basic skill we're all taught as new authors. The reader avatar. Know who your target reader is. And then they tell us. You sit down and you write down their age and their gender and their hobbies and all this other boring shit. And you come up with your target reader, and that sheet's supposed to tell you magically who they are and what to write. And I'm like, you've got to have a better way to do it. This. You've got to.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No. So I don't want to say. I don't want to say avatars are like BS But I think they are, to a certain extent, very much bs. And let me first share why that. And then I'll talk about what to do, because they're bs. So I think there's two concepts that matter a bit more than avatar, which is contextual relevance and cultural relevance. So when I think about virality, when I think about social hacking, as. As well, I'm thinking about this concept of cultural relevance, which is how do I reach a broad audience, tap into something that means something to a group of people, but not even think about my product or story? And there's a power to cultural elements. Not everyone needs to market themselves through a way that gains cultural relevance. But one of the people who is the best at this in the world is Mr. Beast, right? And he. Everything he does is designed to gain cultural relevance in some sort of way. There's. I mean, the Mr. Beast playbook would have to be another podcast, but it's. That is. Is the core of. It is gaining cultural relev. And that is what virality is at its core. But reality doesn't sell products. Reality doesn't sell your story. That's where contextual relevance comes in, which is, you know, what place you want your stories to have in a reader's life, you know, what do you want that story to stand for, and when do you want people to come to it, right? That contextual relevance is also really, really important to build, and you can build a great business just off of contextual relevance. You don't need to have any sort of reality, any sort of broader cultural relevance. And you can see books that reach this broader cultural relevance as well. Fourth Wing is probably the best example right now. You also have Suzanne Collins like releasing another book in her Hunger Games saga and that obviously still has immense cultural relevance. So these are kind of examples in the book world. But this can be engineered. And I think earlier I tried to give some examples of how to at least give your brand broader cultural elements to hopefully help engineer that. But when we bring it back to the point of like, I think, you know, actually figuring out what to write and why. Avatars are abstract, right? They are, they are essentially imperfect models and they're very, very imperfect to the point that they're almost useless because how do you know you don't. And what is telling you that? Almost nothing. So you are going purely based off of your instincts with probably very little data to back up what this avatar is. Now if you've done surveys which sound horribly boring, if you've done like broad research and let's say done a comment analysis or review analysis, if I put together a top selling books, my sub genre, I then cobbled together, you know, all 10,000 views those books have. I then put it into ChatGPT and did, you know, some crazy analysis with that, asking it different prompts that then come out with avatars, you now at least have a basis for that, right, where you had at least some sort of foundation for that. But if you're going off your instinct, your instinct's probably going to be wrong. And I also think this other data I'm pointing to isn't all that useful because what matters is did someone buy your book and they want to buy more books from you. So what we're really trying to figure out is how do we design and engineer a story that accomplishes that? I don't care who the reader is. They could be, you know, they could be a 25 year old person who is reading their first book in years because, you know, their love for storytelling was drained after all the high school, you know, English lip books they had to do analysis on. Or it could be, you know, you know, empty nester who reads 300 books a year and you're their 200th book in the subgenre that they've read this year year. And they're, they're super pumped to dive into your story, right? Those are very different avatars. Same book, same story, same impact. That's what beautiful about storytelling is that it can cross barriers like race, it can cross barriers like religion. It could cross barriers like, you know, nation and age. Now, I'm not saying that it isn't beautiful to make certain groups of people seen in your stories. That's incredible. That we need more of. I'm not saying it's not good to write your story to a certain group of people in mind. Sure. But why limit your yourself? Why the heck does that even really matter? So where I start to think about again, what really matters is not who you write for, but will they actually buy. So that's the fundamental question. So then we have to think about how do we test that? So my radical way of doing this is a three step process. So first is identify who you think your audience can be, but not in some sort of, you know, reader avatar sense, but in terms of where you can reach them and what other stories they like to read. Literally, you know, they hang out on Facebook. That's the platform I like to go to. They love. You know, maybe I'm just gonna throw some authors out there that I know, you know, they know read Britt Andrews books, Nikki St. Crow's books, and, you know, maybe like Katie Roberts. Okay. Like, I could see that. I could see folks reading those three books or three authors. Excuse me. I'm sure there's plenty who do. Okay, great. So I know that. So now I'm gonna design a cover and I'm gonna design a blurb for them before I've even written my story. So that, that's very, very key. Right. And you can use something like Book funnel to test your.

This.

You literally can. You can upload something in Book Funnel. You can create a landing page. You can have that email sign up there and you can. I'll get to the second part because you're gonna be like, what are you gonna send them? That's not the first step of this process, though. So the first step, this process is literally just create. Create who you think the audience is. Step two is like, create this, you know, book that hopefully, by the way, getting back to, like, what makes you. You, you're not copycatting other people's books. You're not just jubbling up, oh, these are, these descriptions. You're creating a story you want to write, but with an idea of the conversation that you're playing in. Right. Your book isn't one of one. It is one of one on a shelf with 10 others. So what's the shelf it's on? Right. Or the shelf, you know, Plural. Because it can be in multiple different shelves. You have that cover, you have that blurb. Now you might be asking, my God, this cover is going to be hard to create, right? How do I do this? It's going to cost $100 to create. I'm not asking you to make an amazing cover on day one. I think you need a decent cover. But decent doesn't need to be perfect. You can use case Canva. Canva's free. They have a pro version, but it's free for most folks. You can use free, you know, sites online. Pixabay is one I've used in the past Your choose whether you want to use AI tools or not. Not one to say whether you should or not, that's up to you. But you can do this with or without any other use of generative tools or not and get a cover very, very close to free. There's also places like get covers which is like a bunch of COVID designers in Ukraine which in my opinion is like very, very affordable. Book covers I totally get if you're bootstrapped and can't afford any money in a pocket. But these covers are decent. We're talking for like oftentimes less than 50 bucks. You can also get pre made covers also oftentimes from designers all over the world, very cost effectively. So I'm not asking you to go spend hundreds of dollars on a book. We don't know it's going to sell. But you might need to spend some money or at least some grease work. Right? Getting a cover in that's not amazing, but at least is something and then a description. So now the whole game is we need to get people to actually care enough about this book to give us their email. That's one way to do it. You know, I'm cool with you putting it up on Shopify or even Amazon pre order. I literally put a book up on pre order on Amazon it called Mad World that had no, I had no intention of writing unless it sold. I ran Facebook ads to it, put it off the pre order like published date a year in the future and was just like, all right, I'll figure something out, let's see if it sells. And it did sell and I was able to from there know that the book would do at least okay. But here's a mistake I made with Mad World. With Mad World I put this book up on Amazon, I made the pre order, then I was like, oh my God, these Facebook ads are working. Oh my God, this is amazing. I'm gonna be able to sell books. I'm gonna be able make a full time living. I just gotta write the book now. So I go write this book, right? And if you look on Amazon Mad World, which I'm not trying to promote myself at all, please don't like you don't, probably don't want to read my book. But if you want to at least back up the story I'm sharing, right? The reviews of the book aren't terrible. It's like 4.2, 4.3 stars. It's not terrible. People tend to like the book, but it had a pretty poor read through rate and a read through rate that was hard to make advertising profitable. If I did the math, I was maybe at book four or five going to make $60 back a day on a 45 to $50 day ad spend. It was stressful, not great. If I finally did audiobooks, which would have cost a lot of money, I could have probably made a decent daily profit in the series. But the time it would have taken me to make enough money from the series to fund audiobooks felt like a lifetime. And it was a problem in my read through rate. So what I made the mistake was writing a full book, doing my little beta read thing and then just releasing it and then hoping, well, and then realizing, wow, after this full book after month of time, which might not be that long, but that's how long I was writing a book at the time. And then, you know, a decent bit of money in editing an amount that's not nothing, nothing. You're now out. This was not the right book. You should not have written this book even though the packaging worked. So what I would then do to reverse engineer that is think about the retention point. What part of the story do readers mostly not stop reading after? Right. Usually, you know, in Beast videos we found that it was around like minute three. You know, no matter how long that video is, most people stayed in a story I love. I'm trying to build software myself that tries to measure this engagement with what I learned at Beast. But let's say it's around chapter, chapter three to five on average 30 to 50 pages in. Probably what it is. I'm not sure because there's not enough data on that. But we know there's a point where you're caught up in the book and you have to keep reading. Only write to that point and test if readers will keep reading. Test if they will then go to the next book funnel page or however you're running this text where now they want to sign up again to get the next 10 chapters, the next 20 chapters. That's how you know you have a story people actually care about. And now you can pump money into marketing and also, also pump time and money into finishing producing. So essentially, thinking about your story as a pilot, how do you create a pilot story? Just like they do in movies, just like they do in television, and designing everything around that experiment, the three bottlenecks that matter most. Can you reach an audience and you're trying to ultimately reverse engineer how other authors have marketed so that you know there's at least a viable audience to reach? How can you create something that's unique and stands out to them, that they actually want, which is the COVID and description test. And then step three, do they want your story badly enough to keep reading, reading it and engage with more of it, which is this retention point test. That's how I would think about Avatar in a more actionable way, because Avatar is useless. But these three data points are extremely valuable because by the time you complete this, you know who your readers are, not who they actually are, not their gender or age, not necessarily, because I don't necessarily think that's the most important thing. But you know what they care about, you know what story they're invested in. And now you can finish it and write more of it. And that's how you're going to make a living as an authority, not, you know, brand avatars. So that's what I call readers first. And that would be my answer to your question. Always succinct. I know it's my.

Okay.

There's so much there that.

Wow, okay. And I'm gonna read. I'm going to legit listen to this podcast two or three times. Two questions, one on the marketing side. And I'm not nearly as smart as you for. So forgive me for dumbing this all.

Whoa, whoa. No, no, no, no, no, no. That's not at all all.

So from the marketing perspective, I'll ask both of them the marketing perspective. So at that first step, are you just throwing. Because there's a debate, do you niche down or do you go general? Are you throwing as much traffic as possible at that first step? And then from the craft story perspective, if, say, I've already run all my reviews through chat GPT, and they tell me that my readers really love found family. And I tend to do a lot of found family and family trauma. And I'm intuitively starting to think that my readers come to heal those wounds. Family trauma, things like that. Is that what you Mean by kind of the universe. I'm using my own words, kind of the universal experience rather than niching down to the avatar, like who has those wounds, who's looking for those fields? And it doesn't really matter if it's romance or fantasy, just find those people.

Well, it matters the genre in a sense, like, because those are the conventions and the tropes. But I don't think genre as correlate to like what we think of from traditional marketing world as avatars. I don't always think those are necessarily helpful because like what we think of as like a brand avatar for a company and then how we posit over to reading is like does liking a specific kind of story mean that you have our specific type of person? I don't always necessarily think that's true, which is why I don't necessarily think that's always as helpful. Now when it comes to the first part of your question, which is the traffic part of it, you want to think about the least amount of traffic you can throw at it to actually, actually test if it's viable because you don't want to throw money or time at it. That is more than is needed. You know, if you send 200 clicks to a landing or let me use a round number, a hundred clicks to a landing page to enter their email in to get the first few chapters of a new book, right, that you're, that you're coming out with and only 10 convert and it's free. I'm worried that's not amazing. That's not, that's not incredible. If it's less than 10, you're in bed bad shape. If it's like 30, 40, like that's better, right? From a free, from a free thing to enter in an email, that's pretty darn okay. Yeah, that's good. That's good. I don't want to underscore that, but 10 or less and you're probably in trouble if it's paid. If you're getting no one to pre order your book, you spent $50 or you got 100, 200 clicks and no pre orders. No one wants your book. I mean, like, I know that's, it's mean, but either three things are happening right? This is where we go back to the test. You're targeting the wrong audience, you're not reaching. So you're, you know, you're. That, that's an issue. Your messaging in your marketing is wrong in the actual thing you're using to bring them over to landing page or the landing Page itself, book cover description are wrong. So you just test these things one at a time. If you're doing more than, let's call it a handful of dollars, you can quickly go broke. You can quickly go broke either from a time or a money standpoint. And that's what I don't want, because I was in that boat. I was in the boat where I wrote nine books and thought I had to build the big back list. I was in the boat where I thought I had to run the Facebook ads and, you know, would just spend all this money and would work out and eventually the page reads would come and the rankings would go up. And I, you know, spent about $20,000 in my business to make $3,000 back. And I told myself, I will never do that again. I also went with the vanity press, you know, like, at one point. I mean, I made an unbelievable amount of mistakes. And I think the biggest thing you can do as an author is stay alive, stay in this. And I obviously come from this, like, almost maniacal mad scientist lens where I'm like, you know, experiment and be wild and look at the data, right? And that comes from a brevity of experiences, whether it was my time at Mr. Beast or my time beforehand being very experimental and wild. And that vibe might not be for you, but I think what you can take away from this is one, you do want to be a little bit more experimental. You do want to think about the first principles of what success takes as an author, which are three things. You can boil it down. You need to have an audience you can repeatedly bring to to your story. You need to have them desire your story and pay for it, ideally, whether it's in currency of an email at bare minimum, or dollars. And then once they start reading your story, they need to want more of it. That's this whole thing. So you want to just design your whole life around doing those three things. And I think so often, for me, I spent years of my life writing books two through six that no one ever cared about. That was. I don't want to be too cruel on myself, but that was wasted time. If I had spent that time perfecting these skills that were like, top of funnel, where the real bottleneck is in getting readers. I'm not saying the rest of the skills weren't as valuable, but they're probably 10x less valuable, and I spent 10x more time on them. That doesn't make any sense. So I think we can rejigger how we prioritize our time and our efforts as an author. And I think again, the big thing, the big thing that you have to remember is that this business doesn't exist. Your career, your dream as an author doesn't exist if you don't stay alive. And I don't mean that literally, although I kind of do. Like, I do want you to stay alive and that's really important to me. But I'm not a doctor, so I can't help you there. And I'm not even a book doctor, so I can't even claim to be that. But what I can say is this, that if you aren't financially sustainable, right, you're not going to be able to do this. And you need to be financially sustainable perpetually if you're ever going, I can't keep at the rate I'm doing from a spending basis. Stop, stop. You don't need a ton of money to get this thing started and to keep testing. You could do it with almost nothing to nothing. You can literally do it with nothing. So I don't want you spending money you don't have. The second thing is time. If you're putting more time into this. Who's saying you have to do this on any whose timeline? It's your timeline, right? So operate on your timeline, put in energy into it. That's sustainable for you. And the last thing is make it fun for you. Like, this is where a lot of my platform advice comes in, where the cape advice comes in, the mask and the superpowers and all this stuff. But like, that's all just, you know, know, trying to be more practical. Like, the real common sense advice is if you're not having fun doing this, it's going to get more fun when you're having money for a few months and then when you're not, when you are making money and your mind adjusts the classic hedonic treadmill, you're still going to be miserable and making money. So if you're miserable now and you're broke and you think money is going to solve your problem, money probably won't. Unless money literally is what's driving you into misery because you're not seeingable. So fix that. So if you're senable financial financially and you're putting your energy into this and you're hating it and you're telling yourself, but when I'm making money, I'll like it. The hedonic treadmill always comes. You're never going to grow forever. You're going to catch up and realize you're still miserable doing this thing that you hate and you've turned this thing that's supposed to be a dream, it's something you hate. And that's probably because you're listening to someone, maybe like me, hopefully not. Hopefully you didn't get. Hopefully you, you do decide to do your own thing, but you're listening to someone who's telling you you have to do this XYZ way and you have to do this. And you follow that author who's advice you took or you saw the author go viral on TikTok and you thought you did the exact same thing. And the last thing I'll tell you to do is ignore the world. I'm exactly telling you to look at the world, be strategic with the world. But I'm telling you to look at the world and find the gap in it, the gap in your heart and the gap in the reader's heart. And if you can't find the place that you need to fill that isn't being fulfilled in your life and your reader's life, why are you doing this? There's enough books that exist. There's enough things you could be doing with your time. So that's like my big, big piece of advice on all of this is, is like there's a lot of different ways you can test your stories and I could probably list out a 10 or 20 different ones. But the actual thing that matters is getting into the mindset of doing it, of experimentation in a way that's comfortable for you, in a way that plays to your values and your strengths and that's sustainable for you. If you accomplish that, nothing else matters. And I'm really proud of you and you should be proud of yourself too.

One more question. Guys. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I knew it was going to shut up. I'm going to shut up.

I.

Because it's about step two and this is something I have been legit struggling with the teetering tbr and I've been trying to figure out the answer to this question by looking at myself as a reader. When I'm a reader, if I see a cover, a blurb, and sometimes the sample, but usually it's a cover and a blurb and if it's sticky enough, it doesn't matter. If I have like a thousand books on my tbr, which I do, I will go read that one right away. But then on the other hand I'm like, well, not, maybe not everybody's like that. And then, Kelly, you had a question about this too. The free giveaways but the whole thing is, what are your thoughts around whether or not they should be picking up that book, no matter what, to read it right away, if you did your job. Right. And if they're not picking up that book right away, then do you go back to square one or do you kind of. What do you do?

Yeah. So, I mean, if they're not, you might not want to go back to square one. So let's, let's, let's think about first, the question of if there's a problem is, is your rethread a problem? Right. How do we know? And I think your instincts, right, Emma, they're going to grab onto it fast. Because one thing about books, and this is, it's a tough reality, but it's just, you know, I can. It's going into my reader's first book, a whole essay on the power law and the. In the sociological reasons behind it. So I'm not going to dive into that now because it's literally too boring. It belongs in a book that maybe, you know, if I'm lucky, one person will read. But when I. When I think about, you know, what matters in publishing from a strategic lens, it's 1% of books, it's actually closer to 0.1% of books sell over half the copies. Right, Right. That's not because that author is 50 or 100 times better at writing than you. It certainly isn't. It's not because they're spending 50 to 100 times marketing than you. It certainly isn't. It's because of a set of social dynamics that as humans, we have that all goes back to one simple thing. And there's a few factors going into that I'm not going to get into now because it's just too complicated. But it goes back to word of mouth, right? People having anticipation to want to read a story and sharing it with others. Right. So the biggest thing that will eventually help your book to get people to reading it is when everyone's talking about it in a specific genre or specific area of the Internet. Right. You climb up a power law because there's actually a thousand different power laws in publishing. Each genre and each reader community has its own power law, books that dominate the conversation. So if you want to dominate a conversation, you could dominate the conversation. That'd be wild. You'd be like the next Hunger Games. Right. But if you want to dominate a conversation, you need to climb this power law, which means you need people talking about your books, which means you need anticipation and excitement. So you actually, actually, if you're not getting excitement to dive in immediately to the book. It's not that gripping to people. The odds of them wanting to then share it that excitingly are low. They're out there and I'll give examples of books like that. Life of PI is an example where they dive into the book. And Life of PI is actually like by most metric, I think it's a pretty boring book. The first like 60 to 70 pages, hot take, but I don't think I'm the only one. It's a pretty slow book. But the end of Life of PI is so unbelievable believable. So these are like the slow burn books, right? That takes a while to get there and also takes a while for it to take off. But you get enough readers making it to the end and they're gonna be like, oh my, this is, trust me, the beginning slow. I know you're not. Weren't grabbed by it. Dive back in when you finish this thing. It's incredible. It's well worth your time, right? That type of word of mouth is what gets a story that starts off slow to take off in unbelievable, insane, incredible. And ending that is Oscar worthy. That's classic worthy, right? I love you. Your story probably doesn't have that kind of ending. And it might, it might. And if it does, then we want to see indications of that, right? Like our readers saying that like this blew my socks off, right? Because then they're going to start telling other people about that and then it's like, okay, it started off slow, but it. But that's okay. But what's even better is if your book ends like that and still grips people in the beginning, right? So that's even better. That's what we want. So then going back to like, you know, the point here, if people aren't diving into your book fast, if we're not seeing an uptake pretty quickly, if we're not seeing momentum, it's a sign of one of two things. And this is what you have to test. Either the chapters itself aren't. Aren't as interesting to folks. The first few chapters, they're not okay with the first page even, or you're bringing the wrong back to step one. It's not step two anymore. We go back to step one. Either the audience itself or the blurb isn't right. And I'll be honest with you, it's a lot easier for us emotionally to say the problem problem is the audience. Most of the time when someone downloads a book, sometimes there's a description that beyond knocks our pants off signs. It's okay. But if you're not really gripping someone on page one, that's when they go, okay, yeah, I'll dive into that more later. But if you open that, you peek that open, you know you're on your ebook. You get that book funnel download, you go, okay, it's loaded onto the Kindle. Now I'll just open that first page and you're gripped like, that's success. Right? So I think we need to. I would always start at step two. 2. And really try to make the beginning of our book more gripping. Try and email the readers who did download our book and ask why. Another thing to test as well, to filter out that it's step two and not step one, is to raise the barrier to entry. Right? If you're having readers download your book for free, up the price, make it, make it a price. For even those first few chapters, you're doing this radical testing method. Charge them 299 just to get 5 chapters of your book. Sounds crazy, but if someone wants it, they will read it. Your conversion rate is going to go down longer. Might not be the most profitable. But you're not testing for profitability here. You're testing for where in the funnel is something going wrong. So if it's that first little bit where they kind of like the book, but they're just doing it because it's free and they're never really going to read it, but then you start charging it and you don't get any movement or very little movement, there's your sign wrong, wrong audience, wrong thing. But if you put a paywall in, there's going to be less conversions, but there's still a conversion rate that is decent enough to at least make sense. And that's going to vary for each author. But you, you know, we're going from maybe a 20 to 30% free conversion rate to now, like, let's call it cold traffic. 3ish to 4ish percent conversion rate maybe down to even 2 is somewhat. Okay, okay, fine. But if it's under 1.5% conversion rate now, I'm like, oof. Right now I'm like, okay, this is wrong. But if you get that conversion rate with paid, that to me shows there's more excitement. We filtered for more excitement and they're still not reading through. You've got your answer. So ultimately, it's a process of testing and eliminating confounding variables. And this is not science. It's far from it. It's alchemy. It's art at the end of the day. And your instincts as an author are going to be what's best. But what I'm trying to help you do is how do you have as much actual reader data from your readers informing your decisions in your creative and artistic movement so that you can go in the right direction and not in the wrong, wrong one.

It just makes a lot of sense. And everything that you've said is just, just bringing out, like, the ideas of, okay, how can I fix that? Or how can I make that better? Or how can I can I ab tech.

Right. Well, and a lot of freeing, too.

Because you don't have to worry about those granular details, like, am I writing for women who are 25? Am I writing for women who are 40? And it's been such a headache to try to figure stuff like that out.

It's like, yeah, so I'm a science fiction author myself, so I think in romance, it's a little different because you do have, like, I, I know generally who's going to be reading what I write in a way that maybe in romance you have to be. Maybe, maybe you feel like you have to be a little bit more precise, but it's kind of one of those things where you kind of have to, like, feel it out as you're in the process of doing it, which I think is. It's my crude way of kind of describing what you're trying to say, which is that you, you, you don't assume that you know your audience and, and if you're writing something that is good, I mean, you need to see that somebody's reacting to it. But don't, you know, maybe you don't give up on it right away until you find that you experiment like you said, you test and you, you find out. Like, maybe you get surprised and find out, Emma, that. Yeah, no, it is. It's the totally different age demographic that actually likes your stuff. Or maybe, you know, maybe it's. It's dudes. You never know know, maybe dudes just want to read your, your high fantasy that you thought was steamy romance. I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, honestly, and you might want to put this in, but my hot take on selling books and really any product, but especially stories, is that market pull is always stronger than marketing. And I. Why I focus on resource and why even in this podcast, even though, like Author Sidekick helps you market your books are or whatever, why I like to start really. And why I like to spend a lot of my time focused on how do we create market pull for your stories. Even though I'm not a craft guy, I'm not, I'm just a first principles thinker and I like to look at data is, you know, market pull is always going to be great marketing because your market pull is the actual demand for your story. And this whole process, this reader journey working, right? Doesn't matter how great your marketing is if your market pull isn't there. So I think so much it's about finding that, channeling it and ensuring you have it story market fit. And once you have that, game is over, folks. It's like, you know, if someone shows me data that they have story market fit, it's a very easy conversation to find. How do we show it more? The problem is literally 99% of the time that's not true or evident because even if you have it, it's like a spectrum, right. And you want to be as far along on it as you can be. And of course there's a sort of point where you go, I want to get it out there, it's viable, which I use the sort of word minimum viable story for that. It's viable. We're going to get it out there, it's okay, we're going to keep going. And that's really important. But what separates these hits from other ones are like they have tremendous market pull like the fourth wing does not. Is not like the 100x more brilliant marketing campaign than any other book ever created or at least this year. But it's sold more and its sequel has sold more, at least by 100x than certainly most other best selling books. And that is because there's a tremendous market pull it's tapped into. And it's less about saying here's how to do that and more saying about here's how to test for that. You author, you storyteller, you're the creative genius who's going to figure out who's going to come up with the story, who's going to come up the premise that's going to achieve that. The problem is you're probably not getting enough shots on goal.

Right? Right. Well, and this is kind of, this is kind of, I guess this is within the right to market conversation.

Really.

This is kind of where I feel that's the territory we're in. We're talking about market pull. And that's what it feels like to me. And most people when they hear right to market they think that I just have to write the book that everybody else is going to buy. But testing for the the audience of your book, I don't think people come at it from that angle. Like I want to write this book. I don't want to, I don't want to explicitly write to market and write whatever the hottest latest thing is. I've got this idea in my head that I want to get into out. And even if it is a minimum viable story, I can still experiment and optimize my to find where the market pull for that is, so to speak.

I'm with you. And I think that the issue with right to market, although I love it as a concept, I think that it's not for everyone. And I get why it's not for everyone. And I also get why I'm not for everyone as well. But I think what's really key with right to market that we miss miss is that it assumes we understand the market. And I think, you know, Emma, it's funny because you're using the word like, oh my God, you're smart, whatever, I'm not as smart as you. But it's like I actually like to like literally approach this as naively as possible and like putting the readers first, which is what I, I like to really think this is about is letting the readers show us the answer. Letting the readers starting with what do the readers want? The readers are not a market. Readers don't think of themselves as a market. As I discussed, we can invent genres. This is all language we use. These are all marketing inventions. But readers don't care about that. They care about the story that they want to click with. It's your job to test and understand if you are actually creating a story where that's true and then for whom and what readers is obviously going to be who you bring in to figure that out. But it's less of a brand avatar question and more of a who, who does this story psychologically resonate with and emotionally resonate with question. So I think that's the big thing is that writing to market's great if you understand the market.

Market.

But if we actually understood the market, then we would have a formula for success and it would work every single time. Or the answer is just that you're not understanding the market enough. You need to go study the trends more. You need to go look at the rankings more. And I, I'm, I don't believe that to be true because if that was true, then why wouldn't we all do that? I think the answer instead is we're going to make Mistakes we're going to mess up. Most of the time, we're not going to get it, quote, unquote, right. But if you develop a testing process that allows you to cheaply, effectively, and efficiently understand whether the story you're about to invest your heart and soul into is really the best use of your time from a business standpoint, I can't tell you whether it is from a, you know, a sort of intellectual or an emotional standpoint. And that can outweigh any business concern any day of the week, which is the really, really big point to make. But from a business standpoint, I can tell you what's most worth it, because it's going to be what puts your readers first. And that's what this is all about.

So I had a question kind of going back to that with, you know, the idea that, you know, maybe this isn't hitting in the mar, like, you're not finding that audience, you're not able to, you know, maybe it's not gonna sell or something along those lines, and you're evaluating your market. A lot of the times advice that is given to authors is you need to finish the series or you need to finish. You know, you. You have to keep writing. You have to have a big backlist, which I think is fair. You know, if you have more books for them to read, obviously they're gonna find one at an entry point and they're gonna come in and they're gonna read, they're gonna enjoy, and they're gonna keep reading because they enjoyed. But what do you say when you are evaluating, you've done all the things, you're working really hard to get to that audience, it just isn't clicking, and maybe you're getting a little deflated. You want to move on. What do you do? Like, what is your advice to authors? Do you keep pushing forward and finish the series so that you, you know, are finishing series, or do you maybe move on? What do you do?

Yeah, amazing question. Question. There's nuance and there's. There's not a right answer for everyone. I think that first, if you're going to burn out writing a series, forget what, what advice you want to take from here. But that's not the way forward. Like, burnout's never the way forward. I don't believe that. I don't think we have to burn ourselves out as creatives ever. I don't think that has to be a choice you need to make. So that's first thing. Like, if your decision set involves burnout, don't make that decision now, let's say you're like, I could finish it, but I, I do want to do this whole reader's first thing. I do want to test and see if this other idea ideas better. I think this might be it. My first thing would be like, well, now in the future, you know, because I actually disregard the advice that you need to write a series and finish it to get readers. I like to think of the 8020 of the 8020 rule. And I want you to devote your time into the one thing that really matters. And from a mathematical standpoint, most authors, by most, almost every author has a signature series that makes most of their sales. And the other series maybe make 20% of their sales, right? Maybe all put together sometimes, but even, even the full backlist, maybe it makes up half their sales. But that backlist is directly proportional to what your big hit does. Meaning if you're, you want to really make your big hit and your signature series do as well as possible. You want to have something that can be your breakout, because not everyone has their big breakout, but you do want to at least continue making big momentum. And if this series isn't the thing that's going to make momentum for you, you want to get that signal early on rather than write the full series and then be like, okay, okay, phone that one in. That was a year or two years of time. Now we're going to give it another try because most authors in the camp where their series isn't moving at all, and if you're in that camp, I want to help you. If you're in the camp where your series is moving, congratulations, you're selling books. You're probably already in the top, you know, 10% of authors in terms of book sold, which is a whole other conversation there in terms of you probably still could use this whole readers first thing in a big way. But if you're really trying to like make your sales happen, which is most of the people listening to any author podcast, because, you know, I, from my previous experience, I've done a lot of work in the author community. I know what the data is behind. You know, everyone listening to these things in a great way, you're probably just getting started, which is great if you're, if you, if you're just getting started, you should feel good about that. Even if you've been in this for a while, you're probably not selling well. And that is okay. That is more than okay. That my advice really is to like, hyper focus on like getting that first series to sell using the reader's first process. Not going all the way through. But again, we're in the world where I was where. Where you didn't do that. And you're waking up to the fact that, oh my God. I've devoted, in my case, six books, $6,000 plus $750 to get the next three covers in the series, book seven through nine made ahead of time. Because why not? I'm bullish, even though I haven't even started marketing this yet. And then I built my backlist, I rapid release and finally started marketing because now I could market it profitably, as they say on my backlist. Realizing that this story was not going to hit. That's what rough. I'll tell you what I did and I'll tell you why I did it, and maybe it'll be helpful for people. My story did not have that many readers. Yeah, maybe there was like 50ish close followers to it. I was able to email them, tell them one day I'd be coming back to the series. But these, these pre order dates, these release dates were happening no time soon. Sorry, but y' all are awesome. I'm going to give you my next book in my next series completely for free. The first book that was. And you know, like I. It wasn't to me that 50, 50 fans versus I knew how much more I was able to get if I was actually able to get a series that was to hit. And I'm not talking about being the next Hunger Games. I'm just talking about getting thousands of readers, which is, you know, exponentially more and a viable from a career standpoint. I was focused on that and I was willing to take the hit. Honestly, when I did this, none of my fans got mad. They all understood. They were super happy and, and kind of that was that. Now you might be in a position where, where you have a larger fan base or this fan base you've built up over years and years of time. This was just that one series. You might have like four different series all tying into one world. There's a lot of trust built up. I was switching sub genres, right. So that also influenced my thing where I'm like, oh, all these people might follow me. And that's okay. You might be staying in the same sub genre. So it's really important these people follow you. You might have a different decision framework where it makes sense to finish. But then I'd start to think about, can you wrap up the series early? Are you able to authentically finish. Finish it in the current book you're writing or in one more book might not be the world you envisioned, but can you at least tie the knots in a way that's satisfying to readers? That's how I'd think about it.

I think that's good advice out there. I've had several friends and my own series has been on pause mostly because my life, you know, had some shifts and my writing time, you know, changed and you know, I had something on pre order and I had to back out of it and say, like, guys, I'm sorry, but I'm just not gonna get this done. And I realize I'm starting this book in the wrong place and I need a prequel in order for this to make sense. So I need to write two books. And you know, it is what it is. And I didn't have a ton of pushback from, you know, anybody. They, everybody was very understanding that actually our fans, they're all very patiently waiting still. And I'm not promising any dates, but it is in the works. Like this is part of the projects that I've been working on. I do want to write the books, but I do have to like balance the life, the work, the, you know, the changes that, that came up from since the last book was published. I think it's really interesting though to look at something and say, wow, this just really isn't finding its audience. And I don't want to spend six months writing a book that I am not sure is going to go anywhere. So I think that's a, you know, a good bit of advice for, for people. I just was wondering your take on that because I think there's a lot of pressure that we put on ourselves, especially in this, you know, in this realm where it's like, well, you know, I didn't get it finished and now I'm disappointing people. And that's probably maybe true. But also it doesn't mean you're not gonna come back to it. It doesn't mean it'll never get written. Maybe when the thing that is bigger hits and you have time and you go, you know what? I want to come back to that series and finish it off or whatever. That's okay.

That's really important. And I, I'm going back to these two words. Cause they're like my two favorite words put together, which is readers first. And, and when you think from a reader's first perspective and realize that's your real job as an author, to put readers first, it doesn't make sense from readers first perspective to Put all this pressure on yourself to finish a series when you can be putting that time to something else that can help the lives of more readers. And if you believe that and you know that and you can do that, it doesn't make sense that you can create a story that's going to touch other readers more deeply, that you can do something that's going to be more beneficial. Right. From a. From a business lens or readers first lines, it doesn't make sense.

Sense.

But the most important reader is you. So you do have to put you first. And I think sometimes we can get in our own heads because we think sometimes the things that are best for a business are not what's best for business. So I'm hopefully giving you permission to let it go. But if you creatively feel like you need to finish that series, then do it. But if you feel like from a business perspective or from a reader perspective that you have to do it, if you're in the case that you're describing, the answer would be no. But again, the first reader is you. So do put yourself first. And if you actually feel like you need to do this creatively, then by all means, like, I will never say no.

Well, just imagine, you know, the spark is there when you want to fit, when you're wanting to write a book, and that spark is there. Your book is better.

It is.

You are creatively better. So if you're pulling your teeth out because you are doing something that people expect of you, and you're only doing it out of, like, an obligation that you feel, it's very, very difficult to have those. Those creative moments that actually makes your story the best. So I feel like I just. I'm glad we touched on that. Cause it's like one of the things. It's not just me. Like, I've had questions about whether or not I should. I am. I have already decided that, yeah, I'm finishing this. These books. This is what I want to do. For me, I love the story. I have the story in my head. I just need to get it there right. But at the same time, I've seen people who have, you know, had to step away from a series, and they're like posters filled with guilt where they're like, man, I'm so sorry, everybody, you know, and it's okay. Like, it's okay to say, you know, I'm sorry to disappoint you, Gu. But I think sometimes we're really hard on ourselves when it comes to that. And it doesn't mean that you're not gonna come back to it or you're not going. But creatively, it may be stifling you to try and finish that series.

And that's not gonna be putting your readers first. What's best for your readers is to write the best story. And you're not a machine that just, okay, I'm gonna turn myself on and write the best story, right? Like, you know, bang. Like, you know, we word machine flipped Burr. Right? Like it's the type of thing where if you are not in that space to do that right now in the timeline that you promised, like, this isn't pizza. Where it's like it was a. The pizza wasn't the same today. It was a little bit colder or like the crust wasn't the same. But, you know, I had to eat it by 5pm because like, I had work at 6, thank God, you know, good old Mr. Giuseppe, you know, there with the pizza on time, right? This is, and trust me, there's far more mission critical things than pizza. All right? But like, to even just put it like this, you are nowhere near as timely as pizza. And pizza is not farly as time, far near as timely as, you know, things like surgery and medical care. Right? So, so, you know, that's like, you don't get the choice. You, you turn on and you better be doing your job well or else. I think that, you know, as an author, our privilege in this creative career, and I'm calling it a privilege, even though, trust me, we have a lot of things we're not privileged by. All right, There's a lot of things that we are, are really tough, okay? But one of the things that we should make easier on ourselves is our deadlines because no one's going to die. It's all going to be okay. And I mean that very literally. So you should give yourself the time and space to create the best story because that's what's best for your readers. What would be a shame to your readers is to rush a book that is not your best and to have them be disappointed and go book seven. Man, this series is starting to fall off.

And that you hear that too where you, you'll see reviews of, of something especially if there you can tell was high pressure and then the reviews are coming in and going, yeah, this just didn't. This isn't the same feel. This doesn't have the same, same world building. This doesn't have. And you see that with, you know, the readers will eventually notice that things have maybe, you know, kind of fallen down a little bit, and they're going to notice if your creativity was. Was hit hard by your deadlines.

We can be a worse boss than traditional publishers sometimes. Yeah.

Well, there's something to be said for even being able to take a break from a series. I've done this myself in my current work of progress or work in progress. It was nine books, and I'm writing nine more because I'm insane. But there was like, a few years gap in between, and I needed those few years to take a break from it and then come back and revisit it and get excited for it again to the point where, like, I had something worth writing too. And maybe you'll. You don't. You don't want to necessarily write that off as a possibility. And if we're talking about this aspect of it, like, when you are innervated by the story, story, the story is going to be better. Like, take that cue from yourself perhaps, obviously pay attention to your readers, but take that cue from your own instincts to be like, you know what? Maybe I need to step back from this and explore something else that I am excited about right now. This is something I've been kind of thinking about myself. That work in progress is kind of coming to a natural pause again, where I'm like, I'm running out of that rope of, like, my passion to keep working on it. For now. It's like, okay, I'm just gonna. I'm gonna leave that on pause. And there's these other things that I'm really excited about. And one thing I also wanted to say here was, like, if you have an idea for a story, and I imagine, Michael, in the two hours here that we've been talking, I kind of already instinctively know what your answer is going to be to this idea, but it's that if you put that story out in front of readers and it doesn't work, you've only invested a little bit of time into those first few chapters, like you said, or the beginning of the book. If you're in love with that idea. Idea, you don't have to let go of that idea now. You just have to rewrite a few chapters.

Exactly.

You don't have to.

You.

You don't have to, like, Like, I'm. Honestly, I go and I look back at some of the beginning of. Of my current series that I'm writing, and there are things there that I want to, like, overhaul and rewrite, and the amount of work and labor that that would take to do would be. It. It honestly needs to be done. But that's another story. But if you've only done a few chapters, that's not that hard.

Hard.

That's, that's really. Especially in terms of like the, you could even quantify the length of time that that would take to then go back. Okay, that didn't work. That didn't stick. Let's take it from a different angle. Let's, let's maybe introduce a new idea or, or come at this from a, A, a perspective that I haven't before and revisit it. You're not, you know, you don't have to let go of that idea completely at that stage either.

No, precisely yet. And I think, I think it's. For me, I find the whole process incredibly freeing and it, it's also a self corrective mechanism against every mistake I've made in the process. Because I think that, I think to be at the stage of all of us here listening to this podcast, right. If you're here, you're not like most people in a good way. First of all, you're probably weirdo like us. But more importantly, you are in a seat taking action. Action, right. And you don't take action from a place of hopelessness. You believe in yourself, even though we all struggle with it, all of us do. But you at least have moments, hopefully more so than not, where you believe in yourself and you have hope that this is going to work out, that people are going to like your story, that this story is going to be great. Right? And that is like some beautiful optimism. And I, I certainly have that. But that optimism can really be shifted shot when continuously you are at times what feels like proven wrong. And for me, what burned me out more than anything else was not losing my love for writing or even writing too much. Although I thought it was because I was writing too much, it wasn't necessarily that. It was that I was continuously getting this feedback loop from the world confirming my worst fears that I wasn't good enough. I'm not here to tell you that you're not good enough. I believe everyone here is and I believe you're still. Stories can and really probably are at their core. But there's these simple things about them and simple parts of this process. When we think about this whole grand world of publishing, we just boil it down to these few things that matter that we've discussed and you hone in on those. You can really start to then get that feedback and get that momentum that can turn your optimism into reality. Because I think optimism with continued action and no progress very quickly starts to turn into pests, pessimism. And I think we see that sometimes in the community. I know, I felt that at times myself. I mean, we all have at times where we start to lose hope. And not only lose hope, but lose passion and lose joy. And like I said, my job is the author sidekick with my big pencil. If anything, it's not to help you sell more books. So that would be fun. It's actually to help you make marketing and hopefully your writing life fun again.

Right. Awesome Soft pause here. We're hitting the two hour mark. We just hit the two hour mark. That's usually about the length that we go lots of. It's very dense in terms of information, which I think is great. I think this is going to be a well received episode. We normally do the story behind the story segment here at the end. However, one, for the interest of time and two, also because there's a lot of information that we packed in here. We can forego it. It's not an absolute requirement. How important is it to you to kind of show your origin story with folks? Because if they get to this point in the podcast, they might be catatonic, is my fear. And be like, okay, wow, you know what I mean?

We're definitely gonna have to have an episode two when readers first comes out.

Oh, yes, you're coming back. You have no choice.

I'll gladly come back. Well, why don't we maybe we save my origin story for next time.

Yeah, yeah, we can wrap up and.

Yeah, yeah, I think next time I'll have probably what we can discuss. We could play it together. I can send it to you guys. Guys, is 10 dice will be a little strategy game to plan your book marketing all based around this whole readers first concept. But we can roll it, play together. It might be a little fun episode, but yeah, no, I'm, I'm cool ending it off here. I think people got enough background in intermixing it. So we're good.

Good deal. All right, so we will. Yeah, I'll wrap up, give you the chance to plug anything that you need to plug that you haven't plugged already. And then we'll, we'll go from there and resume. All right, folks, we're going to wrap it up there for today. Michael, I want to thank you for coming on the podcast. Lots of knowledge. I feel like we had a knowledge bomb dropped on us here. A lot of really great stuff. If you have anything that you want to plug, whether it's your website, I know you've got a YouTube channel, other stuff, let us know.

Yeah, well, no, thanks so much for having me on. Probably a little bit of a fire hose. But let me first say that if anyone has follow up questions after this podcast, feel free to email me@hellothorsidekick.com I see all the emails that come in there. I love getting questions from y'. All. So especially if you're confused by anything too, because I as well like want to be able to help you all better. So if someone hears like dude, that made no sense, like, awesome, thank you, like, let me know then my, my next thing is if you want to hear more from me, which I'd be shocked after you've heard this much much if you ever would want to hear more from me. But if you do, you could go to hello, not hello, whoops. Go to authorsidekick.com that's my website and you can set up my mailing list completely free. I send a weekly article there that's usually all about helping you put your readers first and market your books better. I've got like a quiz you can take which we discussed the marketing styles quiz. I'll send you my new podcast episodes. They come out. So my mailing list is really where to go. And then if you want you could go to authordex. Com. The superpower cards that I talked about, they're digital and completely free. When you sign up my mailing list, you get them but you also, if you wanted to, can buy the physical ones and they're quite fun. Then you can actually like play around with them. Shuffle the powers, create different marketing campaigns yourself. So those are available and they have some really cute illustrations. So yeah, that's it. Authorscykik.com awesome.

Well, thank again Michael for joining us today. Of course I want to thank my co hosts Emma Allison and Kelly Tanzi for co piloting with me here on the Book Funnel podcast. Thank you to all those of you watching. If you're watching here on YouTube, make sure you like the video and subscribe to the channel. If you're listening on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or what have you anywhere else you listen to podcasts, please leave us a review and follow us there as well. We will see you all in the next one. Thank you for watching. Check out these other videos from Book Funnel and don't forget to subscribe to the channel.