Day 4 of the Author Marketing Superpowers Bootcamp: Stop marketing your books. Do THIS instead...

So this is our reader growth engine talk. I am super excited to dive into it. And the first big thing before we even cover, like what a reader growth engine is, is to cover actually what our job is when marketing our books. Because I think marketing can feel really intimidating because it actually feels like we have to do the marketing. We have to go out and do the selling of our books and get everyone to buy in. And it feels like this endless task we have to always market, it never ends in reality. That doesn't have to be true. And I actually think what great authors do and great actual marketing looks like is not actually doing the marketing itself necessarily, but building a system that markets your books for you. And that is exactly what a reader growth engine is. It is supposed to be that system for you. And what's beautiful about Arena Growth Engine is there's not one growth engine that exists. I like to think about it a lot like Formula one. I was recently actually at a NASCAR event and I was down near the pit. Thank you, Christopher Hopper for that. But each of these race cars are literally like their own customized engines. There's some similarities, and we're going to talk about the similarities that a lot of these engines share. But how would you choose to run the race of authorship? And how you choose to build your readership is going to depend based on who your readership is, what your story is, what exactly your business model looks like. Which is why I'm super excited in the second half to dive in with some of you personally and actually work through what that might look like for you. But that's ultimately what a reader growth engine is. And I know this, like, from talking to a lot of others. It's like you launch and it's this scary moment of, okay, we launched and then what happens? Right? What do we do after that? How do we keep drawing up attention? And in reality, I like to think about the launch as the moment in which you're just trying to validate whether this thing has story market fit, whether this story is even worth actually building a growth engine for. And then after launch is when it actually gets exciting and when you can actually start to get more readers. But before I even get into where the growth engine is, we have to talk about some more of the misbeliefs I think a lot of us have around marketing and these misplace I know I used to have. So first one was that we have to market ourselves using multiple methods. Have to master Facebook ads, Amazon ads, TikTok. I'm going to share in the end of this talk how doing multiple things can be really good, but doing multiple things at a high level is how like a seven figure author goes to a multiple seven figure author or tries to hit eight figures, which there are quite a few indies now at the eight figure level, which is exciting. They're not necessarily sharing the numbers publicly, but I can guarantee you they're indies who are hitting that mark now, which is really exciting and very high. Seven figures is certainly a thing. That's incredible. I'm so happy that's a thing. But why are you worried about getting to eight figures when you still need to make your first thousand dollars and $10,000 and then a hundred thousand? Like, you gotta start somewhere. And for most people, until you get close to seven figures or $100,000, I just don't see that much benefit in diversifying between multiple marketing methods. And what we'll talk about is you really build a growth engine around one way to market yourself and one way to market your books. So Amazon ads and Facebook ads are relatively different growth engines. TikTok's a different growth engine from meta ads, and meta ads is a different growth engine from doing something like a podcast. And all these can work and be great and they can feed into each other and it's beautiful. But building multiple growth engines at once from start is really hard. It's like trying to again build a fleet of race cars when you don't even have one. Now, another thing we often get into is even if we look at one method, whether it be Facebook ads or Amazon ads or TikTok, we think that, like, more is the answer. And getting more reps in, like practicing more is huge. But ultimately it's the small improvements we make along the way that lead to exponentially greater returns. And one of the biggest mistakes I see is people will post content on, let's say TikTok, and they'll keep posting and come up with a new idea and make a new post and do this and a new post, but they're not looking past at the data of how they're performing. Or they'll post these Facebook ads, but they're not really paying attention to which ads are winning and why. Or they'll go into podcasting, but again, they'll not look at which episodes are doing well and why. And it's a really big problem because what ends up happening is you end up doing marketing and you're trying to build this growth engine, but you're not doing anything to actually optimize it and fine tune it you have this broken machine that you haven't even really looked at yet. So that brings us into the third thing we do, which is we don't look at the data. Right. We need to see what's working for other authors. Go to Facebook ad library, see what people are running in terms of Amazon ads and try and figure out like what are they doing that's working? What can I do that's working? And specifically like if it's Facebook, you want to see what ads have the highest ctr because the ads are getting more clicks oftentimes mean they're going to convert better. That's usually the case. If it's not the case, then there's another issue there. But when it comes to driving traffic, that's a good thing. On TikTok, what videos are driving the most retention and if you're not getting a lot of retention, why? An even better question is what Facebook ads are getting a lot of reach and a low cpm but also have a low click through rate. That might mean that Facebook ad is really relevant but it's just not optimized yet. So you've hit something great there. And then likewise what Facebook ads have a high click through rate but low reach. That means they might be a engaging ad but to a smaller group of people, which isn't a bad thing. But then you want to figure out how can we create a message that still resonates with a large group of people and is engaging enough for people to click on. And the same thing goes for TikTok. You can have TikToks that are super low retention but reach a wider audience than your average TikTok. That's an indication again that something's going on here. I that's like the biggest thing to know is just literally plotting out where are you getting views, where are you not? And the author hub bonus is going to try and systematize that for you. So you can actually see, okay, this is my marketing content that's performing at an outlier level. But the takeaway here is that to actually refine and go look at the data and strategize and improve in one area takes a lot of work. And it's not that more marketing is the answer or more channels. It's actually focusing on doing one or very few things at a very high level because the incremental return of doing just a little bit better is huge. And why that is is there's this other. It's one of the other superpowers, but it's the Power law. And the visualization is perfect. I should have actually put on the slide. But it's essentially an exponential curve where you have all these books, all the books plotted on the x axis and the Y axis is how much sales, Right. Or you could invert it. Right. But regardless, there's infinitesimally small number of books that are getting a lot of the sales. And same thing works on social media platforms. Same thing works with ads, like all the way down. There's more essentially results coming from very few. It's like the Pareto's principle. Of the Pareto's principle, a really good book about this is called the One Thing. The One Thing is about how everything in life, business, science, you name it, your personal life, your relationships, goes back to one thing. The Pareto principle of the Pareto principle. So let me zoom out here and bring this more practical. Do we really think that the bestselling books are 100x better than the average book? Do we think a winning ad is 100x better than the average book? It definitely is not. But those small little improvements that take you up a little bit can lead to you again. You move a little bit forward in that graph and that's 5x more sales. 5x more sales because it's exponential, the return. And that's for everything pretty much in the world. And it definitely in media, everything in this whole industry you could even touch. That's the principle. So that's the most foundational thing to understand. Now the next thing is what is a reader growth engine? Now that we understand there's these things at play that we misbelieve about marketing, what does a reader growth engine tell us? It's different. And a reader growth engine is essentially just a scalable way to drive readers into your reader journey. And I included the superpower for reader journey here. And the whole goal is to get more results with less proportional increase in effort. So I don't want you working a hundred times harder to get a hundred times more sales. I want you maybe working two times harder or, or three times harder or maybe even not harder at all, which sounds insane, but it's completely possible. I'll give like a very short personal example which is over the last 10 days, my podcast for beyond the Book has seen 100% plus uptake or increase in daily downloads, which I'm very happy with. I have not done anything different. I've not shared it anywhere else that I normally don't. I. I have not released more episodes than I normally do. I have done Nothing different. That is literally just from okay, wow. It is continuing to grow. And now my effort now when I release a podcast gets me two times more reach than I was before and I'm not putting in any more effort. Theoretically, you give it a year, two years, three years, four years, I might be getting 10 or 20 times what I am today. So part of a reader growth engine is the compounding effect in what you're doing. And so often we spread ourselves thin and take away our compounding impact because if you're trying to do a podcast, TikTok, Facebook ads, Amazon ads, all of that sounds great until you realize that where is your compounding benefit in all these different areas? Like you can get them to work together, which we'll talk about. But when you're first getting started, it's a lot to deal with and oftentimes it's not the best strategy. Now with a reader growth engine we have to back up before we talk about even more deeply, which is how do we know when we're ready for it? And this is the biggest thing. It's the thing that I made, probably one of the biggest mistakes in my publishing career on and it's the thing that I don't want to happen to you. I'm writing about it tomorrow for the third day of the boot camp for author marketing superpowers boot camp. But the TLDR is this. It's not enough to be able to just sell your book and get readers that it's not enough. Distribution is everything. But you need a great story, which a great story is not anything literary. It's not even a review count. That's not how I define it. Because if it was those things it would be very hard to understand. When we reach really is just having a retention or a read through rate that's high enough for it to be profitable. Reviewers are going on and buying future books in a series. And what I did with my World Gone Mad series is had decent reviews. I was able to get a lot of sales on it through Facebook ads and I just figured this is going to be amazing, this is going to be a huge series. So I went ahead and I wrote book two and wrote book three and my read through rate was about 30 to 35% from KU page read rates and I think sales was like 25%. That's quite low. That's a very low read through rate to the point that it's very hard to make any money. And if I had a higher read through rate, I would have been making double to triple the money on my series, right? Cause I would have double to triple readers reading through. I didn't have that. And there was an author I was talking with maybe two weeks ago and she was talking to me about her marketing problem and how she wanted to figure out how to scale. And I was totally with her. I'm like, let's figure it out. But before this, can you show me your KDP dashboard? And she's sure. I'm like, yeah, I want you to log in and show me everything. Show me all your sales. I want to see the history of it. So I'm just looking at it and studying it, trying to figure out what's happened here. Because again, like the data aspect of it is where I like to nerd out. Because I'm a numbers guy the other day, which is weird because I also love creativity, but I love numbers. And I'm looking at her charts and I'm going, the numbers are not adding up here. There's something wrong. And we basically did some back the nav calculations because again, KDP is tough because they don't actually give you a set number on what your read through rate is. They don't tell you where you drop off. That's why I've been working on things like reader meter. But regardless, I'm in that dashboard sitting in there. And also like 3 downloads to or 99 cents downloads are going to have a different read through rate than you would see from a full price book. So it's a lot of alchemy that goes into these calculations, right? It's hard to just pinpoint a specific number because we all have different marketing strategies and business strategies and all these things. But it was very clear to me that she was not getting a read through rate high enough that would be able to make much profit no matter how well we got readers into the first book. So I was like, this is your problem. You can't market this series effectively right now. So we now have to go back to the drawing board and figure out is it a different audience that you need to reach? Is it the book itself where readers are dropping off? And that's where I encourage you to start first is understanding is this product actually working? And I'll use an example because Maggie's here and I talk to Maggie a ton. She's one of my best friends. And Maggie is doing her Trope Tale book and then Kickstarter for the Trope Tale mix and something we talked a lot about, especially as she takes this leap into like full time Being in the industry and creative entrepreneurship is, what are you going to do after the Kickstarter, that initial launch? And today, ironically, I'm gonna maybe share with her what that could look like. But until recently, I haven't even wanted her to think about that, and I still don't really want her thinking about that, because it doesn't really matter how you can get more sales or product if you don't know if the product's gonna be good enough yet, if you don't know if people actually like it. So testing it out and actually seeing, wow, people like it, want to buy more of it. In her case, her retention would be consumers coming back and buying more drink mixes. Right? That would be the signal. That's the signal we want. Then we know that's an amazing product and so exciting. So it's not even the initial Kickstarter launch and the money coming in that matters. It's seeing that they actually like it and want to buy more from you. So with that said, like, that's where we have to spend a lot of our time. And if you are listening to this going, I don't think I have three market fit yet. That's okay. You might not be ready for reader growth engineering yet, but the good news is that you will be soon. And when you are ready, you have all this here to benefit you, and you'll have all this to think about. So that's my. My cautionary tale. I don't know. But do I really need a growth engine? Because I'll tell you, it's time. Just feels nice to be like, oh, I'll just grab a few sales here. I'll just grab a few sales doing that. And then also we see books. And I'm gonna share with you the financials of a specific book, book series in a moment that I find unbelievably fascinating. But we sometimes see these books take off and we go, obviously, I want that. However that book went viral, however that took off is what I want. And that's possible. You can have your book go viral, but viral is not a concept that's mythical. It doesn't have to do with even a sales number. It doesn't have to do even with a chart position or a bestseller status. Viral is a number, and it's called the K Factor. And what the K Factor is. And this is taken from the world of viruses, literally. So every virus is a K factor. Covid has a K factor. And you actually see this in the spread of every single virus. Right? It's Fascinating. You can map it out. And if you're into epidemiology, my ex was years ago, which is funny, but it taught me quite a few things. And I guess I'm reusing it here. So thank you to my ex. That's the one good thing she did for me. Just kidding, but just kidding. That was way too harsh. Anyways, when you have a K factor above one, what that means is for every reader who comes into your story, they're sharing it with more than one reader. One or more readers, right? Having a K factor above one, that effectively means your story can spread forever, right? Because you can use the math. One reader comes in, they share it with another reader, that reader then shares it with another reader, that reader then shares with another reader, that reader then shares with another reader. Oh, my God, we're done. This is like, discussion closed. Like, how do we achieve that? Here's the thing. You can achieve that, but it's always going to be for a fleeting moment. Even the most viral of all viruses, including Covid, eventually reach a point where they spread through a specific population. And that K factor goes down below zero. Or, sorry, below one. It goes somewhere between zero and one. Where, of course, for every person who gets a virus or who reads a book, there is still some word of mouth taking place, but it's likely below one, which that means if you map that out over a period of time, which isn't a long period of time, all of a sudden one reader that comes in is going to turn into none that come in. There's going to be no one new to spread it to over a period of time. If your K factor is below one. And again, there's specific cultural moments, there's specific things that can happen that can cause your K factor to go up. There's what we'll call super spreader readers, super ambassadors, which I talked about in our last chat, that you're able to maybe mobilize to increase your K factor. There's fun things you can do here, but there's no series ever that is sustained a K factor above one. And when I say that, that's so literally to the point that the Bible has not done that. Like, nothing's done that ever. There's a point in which continued growth requires investment in marketing, which, if you don't think these institutions of story, I'll put it that way, don't market themselves. They clearly do. And an institution of story, that's by an indie author, which is my pivot here, which is quite a large institution. Of story a multi billion dollar empire. Regardless of your thoughts and her interesting takes in the world, Pottermore Publishing, we probably all know the creator of it. Pottermore Publishing publishes the indie audiobooks and ebooks. J.K. rowling, she always retained the rights to those. She never sold the ebook and audiobook rights to a publisher, which. It's wild. Not everyone knows that. I think it's really cool. But I was sitting there going, how can I figure out how much money this thing makes? It turns out the UK you have to be pretty transparent with how much money companies make that are even private. And always every year their finances end up getting reported on. And you can go look at them, you can see the profit and the revenue that Pottermore Publishing makes so effectively. You can see the finances not broken out by expense item, but you can at least see the top level finances of one of the largest indie authors in the world, which is. It's weird to think of Jake Rowling as indie author, but she's a hybrid author. But certainly like she has independently published ip. Right? So we can learn a lot from this. And when we think about virality, I mean who tops Harry Potter? Very few pieces of media ever at that viral peak. I imagine that k factor was above 1, but that viral peak was at this point 20ish years ago. Right? It lasted for a while, but 20ish years ago, it always dips back down. And I'll show you that it dipped back down for her. So when we look at the Pottermore Publishing finances, there's this fun little article. It was published in the Bookseller, which is basically a trade publication outlet that reports the publishing industry. And I just want you to look at two numbers here because really only two numbers that are important. One is the revenue. That's wild. That's nearly £50 million. That's just. That's namely from the audiobook and EDM book, the audiobook and ebook of the Harry Potter series and the other Harry Potter connected IP under Pottermore Publishing. That is absurd. That is absurd. Again, I've never ceased to be amazed by that number. But think about it. An ebook and audiobook doesn't cost anything relatively to print. This revenue, I imagine is net after retailer fees. I don't know that for a fact, but I imagine so because you know that it's not like Amazon pays you a dollar, then takes 30 cents. They pay you 70 cents for every dollar you make in the platform. So again, that doesn't feel like that can be recognized as revenue. This is basically feels like from A when we think about gross profit and net profit, the gross profit of Pottermore Publishing I bet is like extremely close to 100%. That might be a little bit of exaggeration, but it's got to be over 90. What are the expenses involved in fulfilling these ebooks, audiobooks? Not that much. Right. But the net profits, what's interesting, what are they actually taking home in the pre tax profits for a 21% margin. 21 meaning right around 11.4 million pounds. Look, I don't feel bad for Pottermore Publishing and the author behind it. Plenty of money there, but that's not that high. That's surprising to me. Why only 21% if they're selling ebooks and audiobooks and we know that the ebooks and audiobooks lead to basically near, near profit. These things are already written. I don't, you can't have that huge of a product development team here. What operations team needs to be had or even support team for that matter when it's just ebooks, audiobooks. I'm not saying there isn't those expenses in there, they're certainly in there. But the only thing that really I can come to here is that there's a multi eight figure budget each year being spent on ads and marketing to advertise the ebooks and audiobooks of Harry Potter. That's immense. That's immense. And they're spending this every single year without fail. You can go back five years, six years, 10 years and see these numbers. It's grown over time. It used to be at the 30 million pound a year mark just about five or six years ago. So it's actually grown, which is tremendous. That's insane growth. Think about that. But they're obviously marketing their books. So all this to say that you need a way to be sustainable over like a decade, 20 year timeline to market yourself. That might not require money, it doesn't have to necessarily, but has to require some investment of resource, time, money, etc to keep your books out there. Because if your k factor is below 1, which it will be at some point, your sales will eventually go to nothing unless you have new leads coming in. So that feels like an extremely daunting task. And the whole point of a reader growth engine is to say hey wait, we can get these new leads, we can get new readers into our business without having to work super hard. Like we don't have to be stressing about this month after month. Not saying it's easy, but once it's built, maybe it just needs some fine tuning as it goes around the laps on the racetrack of getting your readers. Maybe it needs some repairs here and there. It can break down, but ideally it keeps running and can actually keep going faster and faster. So now we have to look at what the three reader growth engines are. And I'm going to share with you some very recent examples in the media of big publishers, big stories happening where there's major investments going on into building out their own reader growth edges. Because, shocker, so many publishers don't have their own reader growth engines, which is alarming. And it actually is part of the reason why trad publishing kind of sucks at marketing. But they want to change that because they kind of have to because there's so much competition. If you're. You could just go indie, right? So it's becoming an interesting time where we're seeing market pressure leading towards a lot of players having to innovate in how they market books. So let's talk about these three reader growth engines. First is paid advertising. And I could give you like a full masterclass in paid ads instead. I have a feeling this is something that I'll be covering as we break down some of your own reader growth engines, which I think I'm gonna start with you, Maggie, because I think we'll hit paid ads in our conversation. You can pay for ads, newsletters, meta ads, Reddit ads, Pinterest ads, creator sponsorships. The biggest opportunities I see in paid ads ultimately come down to winning ads. The power of a winning ad. I've talked about this before, but it's so immense. And seeing just the dashboard of people spending millions a year in ads, you. You think it's like remarkably complex, but it's really not. They just end up having a few killer winning ads that they're able to spend hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars on. These are authors, right? One ad can make them that much money in terms of ad, spend millions of dollars in profit. So it's really about finding that. Because the rest of their ads might lose the money. All of the rest of their ads. So talk about going back to the small incremental improvements leading to exponential returns. Pareto's principle of the Pareto principle, right? The power law in action in our advertising. When it comes to these platforms too. Focusing in on one for that reason is really important because there's certain creative, certain copy that will perform better, certain durations on specific ad platforms. And you can copy and paste. And they might work on other ad platforms too. But it's really important to hone in one place first. Same thing with creator sponsorship. There's specific integrations that brands run that'll work across 20 or 30 channels. Right. And they can spend tens of millions of dollars on that. Likewise, another thing that brands do with creators, which I personally love this model, it's something that authors can think about doing, is having a creator make UGC for them for free, essentially. But you agree to pay them a percentage of the ad spend that you put behind that media if it converts. So there's this. There's this tiktoker. I won't mention his name because he probably wouldn't want me saying it, but he has a lot of followers. But he doesn't charge brands anything to advertise. And instead he says, you will give me 20% of the ad spend that you use on my video. And if you don't spend money behind paid ads on my video, that's fine, that's chill. But I know you're gonna really like it. You're gonna want to. And he's made tens of millions of dollars from single videos doing that. So all this to say that one video brands and authors are able to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, times millions dollars on. So in paid ads, it's thinking about winners. Now, content creation is a completely different game. Yes, in content creation, you will have winners. Winners that make you lots and lots of money. But here's the issue with content creation compared to paid ads. With paid ads, you can say, hey, Mark Zuckerberg. Hey, Reddit CEO. I actually don't know their name. I should have looked it up. Hey, Pinterest Guy or girl? It's guy. I know it's a guy. I forgot his name. It's so sad, all the tech things. There's a bunch of people who look like me, but it's not a good thing. It's not a good thing. But regardless, they pay them to get continued reach. They say, hey, I'm going to pay you, and you're going to take that asset and keep getting it reached. Okay, great. Awesome. That's the rule that we have the platforms. Except there's a sort of loophole, which is that if you either own your own piece of media, newsletter, podcast, or because an RSS feeds a direct relationship with an audience, Right. They get that notification directly. RSS feeds what's called a protocol network. Protocol networks are not owned by anyone. No one owns an rssv. No company does. And that's a good thing for you. Just like email is a protocol network, if it's a corporate network, aka TikTok, aka Facebook's pretty bad at this. But TikTok, Instagram and YouTube tend to be pretty good at giving you organic reach in the algorithm. But their deal is this. And it's fascinating because there's two sides to this incentive. They heavily prioritize new content for short form content. TikTok and Instagram are almost entirely focused on new fresh content. YouTube for SEO purposes actually does have decent backlist discovery where content can get you continued reach over time. But it works. Sometimes it's hard, but it can work really well. But even YouTube has an incentive to prioritize new content. You might be going, why do all these platforms want this? Yes, it has to do with ads entirely, but it's not wanting you to pay for ads necessarily. Brands, because they're used to paying for ads and television and that's a multi hundred billion dollar industry that's collapsing. But that money's moving towards online and digital. They're used to paying for media when it's new and fresh. They want to pay a premium to get on the new episode of Game of Thrones, not the rerun. Right? So these ad platforms can charge more CPM for new and fresh content, therefore they literally give it a boost in the algorithm. It's not a conspiracy. I know this from talking to the people who run the platforms. So what you need to know with that is if you're building your own media brand, you need to create something that can consistently bring in new viewers with new and fresh content. So as opposed to paid advertising where you create a winner, you might create a hundred terrible pieces of content that no one wants, but no one's going to see it because you're not putting money behind it. And all the money is going to go behind the winner because you'll see the winner, the conversion is going to be there and you'll put all the money into it. With building a media brand, it's a completely different mindset. It's how do we consistently build an audience over time. That's going to compound because each new show I create, I put the same effort into, but my audience grows with each show. So retention is key, which is why we think about less about content creation, which is how I framed it on the reader growth engine card. But I wanted to really, since we're diving deep into it, really share with you the nuance here. What you're really doing is building your own media brand that people want to come back to. That's how you win on social media versus paid ads. And that's what a lot of authors get wrong. Because what they end up doing, and you might be one of these authors, is okay. But now you can change your Strategy. You'll make 10 videos in a row advertising your book. Okay, that's cool. How is that interesting to the consumer who followed you, wants more TikTok videos from you, but now is on the fourth video of you advertising your book. They already bought the book. Why are they still there? So then the algorithm is going to see that, oh, hey, viewers aren't retained on this channel very well or retained on this profile very well. We're going to now deprioritize it. And don't think this doesn't happen. It happens all the time. So you can actually be shooting yourself because you're doing your marketing wrong, not because you're not creating great videos, but because you're thinking about it wrong. So if you want to build your own media brand, you need to be thinking about. These are all the media brands that exist. These are all the media companies. Which media companies are different? Publishing companies necessarily. They're overlapped, but they're different. Thinking about things like Box. Thinking about things like Refinery. Thinking about things like timeout market. Thinking about things like which Timeout Market is actually timeout, but Timeout market is a whole other really interesting business that I could get into. But regardless, thinking about YouTube channels, right? And thinking about podcasting shows that you watch. Thinking about things like Good Mythical Morning, right? And Link, you don't know them, they're awesome. Thinking about like the good old days with Smosh, which that show got acquired and then corporate kind of acts the main characters. And you still got Anthony PD out there with his own YouTube channel. But Smosh still exists, right? Thinking about these formats, right, that last. That's what you want to create a format that can interest your audience. So that was incredibly wrong land. But the Takeaways are building like a book review site where you're advertising potentially other people's books. And it could even be a TikTok or YouTube channel, whatever. And you might be going, why would I ever do this? Simon and Schuster is literally looking to do this. They're literally now moving into building out their own book review sites, building out their own podcasting network where they feature authors not just for themselves, but other publishers, because they want to create the center of conversation that people come back into so they can insert, when it's time, their own books into it. Their own published books. Genius. And they're investing into this in a big way, the next one is like reader community, right? I love reader communities. These things are. These are media assets unto themselves. Thinking about different Facebook groups, you can build that, again, retain people in a different way. And you're not necessarily creating the content, the community, you're just seeding it and then creating the systems and processes for people to interact. Then there's like interview podcasts. And why do I mention interview podcast? Is a very specific reason I do, because interview podcasts give people a new opportunity to come in on each new episodes. Serialized fiction podcasts I've talked a lot about before, but are typically a bad business. I'll explain why. Serialized fiction podcast, you're publishing for free, right? You monetize early access, but a small amount of revenue is going to come from that. So what ends up happening is these shows have to be started from episode one, right? Because they're serialized in a way. And then you end up progressing through all these different episodes. They take off over time. So you might take off when you're on episode 50. But a lot of the money in podcasting and in media in general comes from ads, right? So what ends up happening is they're getting all these views, episodes 1 through 50, but no brands integrate with it because the brands didn't want to sponsor it when it had 10 viewers. Now that it has 100,000 new viewers a week, they would love to sponsor it, but it's already posted on the RSS feed and can't be edited. These are big things that are hindering serialized podcasts and being a good media business, they can be great for storytelling, great for experimentation, but that really, you want to think about less discovery oriented. And how do you paywall that? Right? Because paywall is where you're going to win in that, whether it's early access, whether it's literally keeping future seasons behind, a paywall entirely. Because there's a lot of serialized podcasts that can't break even, that are really big. So that's just another really interesting note on that. Then there's vertical television, which is a new format, but it's time traveler. POV is an example on TikTok. But it's usually people either using. It could be real videos that they're getting stock image from, or like AI generated images using something like midjourney, then throwing it into cling and animating it, and then taking that and making their own literal one off TV shows that are not serialized. Remember, because you want new people coming in too. People are doing this with animations as well. Fascinating Stuff again about how you can grow. Then you could go get super creative with it. There's cooking shows for readers. Imagine, like, all the different things you can do to reach readers. So think about, again, building a media brand and what that looks like and how that can funnel into your books and everything you're doing forever and always. That is something key. Okay, so the last thing here, I'm going to pause. I'm going to pause after this, and then we're going to dive into going through some of your reader growth engines, and we'll start with Maggie, but then after that we can go through any. Is. I want to make basically just two last points. Last one is affiliates. So I've talked about ambassadors before. Affiliates are a growth engine because they are using someone else's audience. That's the principle. And it's someone selling to their audience. The trick of it, it's hard to get kickstarted. It's hard to get kickstarted because until you have an audience, it's hard to connect with other people, have an audience. But there's ways around it. There's retail, which is interesting. This is what traditional publishers typically run off of traditional publishers. Basically an affiliate model. Right. If we actually think about traditional publishing, it's effectively an affiliate model at mass scale. Right. They have distribution and relationships to all these different affiliates, AKA bookstore owners, whether it be reps at Barnes Noble and regional reps, or whether it be obviously indie bookstores, and they then get shelf space. That indie bookstore has an audience and traffic already coming to it. And that indie bookstore owner that is empowered to sell it and get a cut, that is an affiliate. So affiliates are a really broad thing. And like I said, they're hard to break into, but extremely scalable. And we see authors like Matt Deniman who've partnered with publishers to break into that format, and he's clearly utilizing that growth engine a ton. If you're wondering why is Matt Deniman growing so fast, he's having this moment right now. It's because he's literally gone all in on this growth engine and it's worked for him. And again, these are things you can do as well. But what I don't like about affiliates is that they're not permissionless. No one's telling you, like, whether you should be able to run a paid ad or not. You don't have to ask for permission. You don't have to ask permission to build your own media brand. You have to ask for permission to collaborate with people. It's part of what Makes it beautiful. It's part of what makes it challenging to get started. But I wanted to broaden your idea of what you think about as collaborations, because it's just using someone else's audience and having the market to it. And anyone who has an audience anywhere in the world could fall under that. But scaling it again is difficult because those levers can be a lot to pull on. But again, once you have 10 people sharing with their audience, it's on 10 bookshelves. You get to continue benefiting from that forever. And that's pretty cool. Maybe not forever. You might not be on their shelves forever, but for as long as you're on their shelf. Now, the goal in all this, as you can see, is to have people keep hearing about your stories, even when you stop talking about them. Right, your show's done. You turn the camera off. You stop writing that newsletter. You stop writing that book review blog. You're still getting reads. You stop creating ads. That winning ad still has money going behind it. You stop recruiting new affiliates. Your existing ones still have it on their shelves, whether that's digital shelves with quotes, which long term, I'm very bullish. That model or like in person, like shelves. So with all this said, there's one last thing I want to share with you, which is that these models working together, these growth engines can do wonders. Wonders. Paid advertising can work really well with building your own media brand because you can funnel people into the media brand that way and the media brand can build trust to have them purchase more of your products, AKA stories. But there could be other products tied to that. The media brand can build trust and relationships and even feature people in it who could become future affiliates. The affiliates obviously can lead more people to the media brand and paid advertising. It's a virtuous cycle. All this works in tandem and together. But all of it's really hard to get kickstarted because like I said, the benefits of getting to the top of the power law on any one of these engines is so high that it's better to focus on one. And I truly mean that. There's people who will try and do it all. There's people who can be successful doing it all. I have friends who've grown companies remarkably quickly, both within and outside of this industry within months to multiple millions within a year to eight figures. This has happened. People do this all the time. And it's because they got radical and focused. They're not actually working as hard as you think. And that's my takeaway for you. My Takeaways are focus in Build the reader growth engine. These are all they are. You can't. There's that. You can't get much more. This is. These are your options, but it's finding your reader growth engine and what works best for you. What works best for someone else might not work best for you. Meta ads. Maybe not. Maybe it's a reader community. Podcasts. Maybe, but maybe you actually want to do Pinterest ads, right? Whatever it is, there's tons of opportunity. Now, with that said, I figured how we could end. Like the second half of this workshop is actually make it a workshop and less of me talking at you and more working with y'. All. So I want you all to prepare because I guess I'm putting Maggie into the hot seat first. And we're going to dive in. I have a whiteboard ready in Canva, and we'll dive in and start talking about how to build Maggie's reader growth engine. After that, we'll certainly have time for at least one more, maybe more. I don't know how long Maggie's going to take. I want to. Want to make sure I give her ample time because we'll learn through that process. But I'm going to have at least time for one more of you, maybe even multiple. I don't even have a hard stop in 40 minutes, so I can go over. So be prepared and be thinking as you're watching the exercise me and Maggie go through, which she's not been prepared for this, by the way. She just came on the call, and I was like, oh, Maggie, you'll be great for this. But as you watch the exercise that we go through, know that I would love to do the same thing with you. So just be prepared and you don't have to do it. No pressure, but I'd love for you to do it. So with that said, I'm going to switch it over to Maggie. And before we even dive into any reader growth engine talk, because a lot of folks are going to be listening to this in the future, the recording and might not know you. Why don't you give a little instruction to who you are and what you're creating?

Hello. So I am currently working on creating a cocktail recipe brand for Bookworms called Trope Tales. And last year, I ran a Kickstarter campaign for it, and it did five figures. And I've been having some good success with that. And I am actually working on developing a instant cocktail powder mix line for the brand. So that's what I'm currently Working on. But. And I will be running a Kickstarter for that at the end of summer, slash, early fall. And I know it sells well, the book, so I know the powders will do well, hopefully. And I guess where I'm like, not struggling, it's like, how do I go from, like, point A to point B? Because I already did the Kickstarter. I know there's a demand for it and it did really well. And I still get, like, random sales on my website. Like, I got one this morning from a random person and I'm not even running ads or doing anything. So I'm like, I know there's, like, demand for it. I'm just trying to figure out how to scale it.

Love it, basically.

Yeah. Cocktails for bookworms.

Yeah. I mean, you're seeing the random sales are because of word of mouth and that K factor. Right. And, like, you can literally model it out. If you were to look up, like, the model of grass, the spread of viruses, that word of mouth that you're experiencing and that little trickle you'll get, and you know, it doesn't fully die, but it's still there. It's probably what you're experiencing, that which is great. It's an awesome sign. The fact you had a great Kickstarter means that there's demands. The product, people clearly like it. You're seeing word of mouth, amazing signs. But I know that you've had the question, like, what's next? So thinking through this reader growth engine talk, I know that for the drink mixes, you might not be ready right now to turn on the reader growth engine for that yet, because you are in the medium stages. Like, you're deep in the middle now of that product development. But once it's ready, which won't be too far from now, you'll be ready to turn on a reader growth engine. And a lot of folks listening might be in the same shoes as you, or in a couple months, they're gonna be ready for this type of thing. So when you hear it, what do you start to think of in terms of where would you begin building a reader growth engine? What would you start to think about?

Ads.

Ads. Okay.

Probably because that feels a lot easier than creating a bunch of content on TikTok.

You know, that's actually a great point. If what feels easier is a great place to start because you have, like we talked about, it takes so much investment, doesn't necessarily mean money, but certainly time or energy, emotional energy into a specific area. So if ads feel like an easier place to start for you, you can always change your reader growth engine. Meaning this didn't work. I want to go somewhere else. So where would you begin with ads? What does that even look like?

Yeah, I mean, I've run a couple in the past and I've gotten sales from them. I turned it off because I was running them during dry January. So I was like, this doesn't make any sense. Why am I running ads right now?

That does make sense to maybe dial it back during that period.

Yeah, yeah. So I was like, okay, I'm going to run them again in the summer because it feels like more of a time where people would be buying and consuming cocktails. But, yeah, I mean, I just created some graphics that I thought were good and I ran them and I saw that some did better than others, but I didn't really run enough to really get good data on it. But I've done some TikToks and some of them have done well. So my next step would probably be to run ads with the videos that did well.

Yeah, no, you could definitely run ads the videos that do well to them.

Or like, from them.

No, like, you would use the same video content and then upload it to Meta. Yeah, yeah, you just use the same content.

Yeah.

Because it's ultimately about the psychology of it. It's okay. Something clicked here are the people on TikTok remarkably different than the people on Meta. Possible. But I would be willing to bet that probably isn't true. So it's a good place to start when testing ads now. Okay. We could talk a lot about. Because what I love about this product is like, I can see a lot of different ways to market it. Like, I can see you could build any one of these reader growth engines. But if we focus on ads, first of all, if you want, you're welcome to share your ads dashboard and I can take a look at it. We can all see it. You don't have to, but I would be curious to see what you actually spent and where that went and what ads did best.

But I'll pull it up.

Yeah, no, that would be great. And then the big thing is, like, when you're running ads, you're limited by your growth, is limited by your cash because you're spending money and then not. You might not be making it back immediately. So my first thing to think through with you would be how can you profit immediately on your ads so that you aren't going in the hole, but actually making a profit so that you're not even spending real money? Out of pocket. You're not. You're making that money back. There's an immediate roi. So that would be, I think, the thing to try and nail with that for you. That would make this a growth engine that can really grow. Marketing isn't easy, but 90% of it's just trying. Like that's the big thing. It's not that there's a perfect strategy. There is not. It's just seeing. Okay, so this was the last 30 days that probably won't have anything because I don't think you're running ads right now. Right?

Yeah, but this is from the ad set that I ran.

But you were running ads in the last 30 days.

I ran it. When did I run this? Is there a way to see what day I ran?

You can change the date so you can go up there and then you can change it to this year.

I think I ran it at the end of February. This one. Okay, how do I do this year? Where's this year?

You can up. Up there. You'll be able to change the dates. Like you can scroll back a month and just. Yeah, enter whenever you'd like. Oh, you only are doing January 1st now.

Oh, my God. I don't know how to do this.

It's all good. This is a good little tutorial for everyone. So this is the Meta ads dashboard. If no one's used it before, you can go from here and advertise to Facebook, Instagram and then like some other properties like messenger and WhatsApp. But typically, I guess you can let the AI kind of optimize for the ad placements you want. But most are going to be in the feed. Occasionally there'll be a few story ones. That's where most of the impressions are going to be, where most of the ad spend is going to be, where most of the profit will be. Meta works where you have three things. You have the campaign, then you have the campaign basically is what you set like a budget at. You can optimize the budget based on each ad set or have meta do it for you. Then you have ad sets. Each ad sets. Basically you're targeting or how you're niching it down. So you could be doing retargeting ad sets, retargeting audience you've run ads to before who visit your website. You can have ad sets for specific countries, you can have ad sets, specific demographics or specific like interests. Typically having meta choose the targeting and interests tends to be good. But if you want to feed it some indication of who your audience is. Oh, they like romance books as a starting point. That can be helpful. But I would almost always let Meta also get people outside of that audience, which is an option you can select for that because meta's AI is very good. Now then the last thing is obviously your creative. Which creative can be in. You know, you can have the same creative be in multiple ad sets. You would just have to copy it into each one. And you can actually copy engagement over too. If you use the same ad id. This is getting like really inside baseball for a quick tutorial. But regardless, you have all the different copy that you can do. Images, headline images could also end up being videos, and that's meta ads. You basically want to take the limited targeting, you give it a budget, and most of your time is gonna be spent creating like hopefully incredible copy headlines and images that get people to go into whatever link you're sending them to, which is probably a place to either buy your book or sign up to your mailing list. I love when they get to sign up to your mailing list. And then after get an upsell that allows you to grow your audience at a fast rate so you can sell them things later, but then also allows you to make back the money you're spending acquiring those emails off the upsell, which is infinite reader loop, which something I cover in powers. But anyways, with all that said, I think we now can see your ads, which is great. So it doesn't look like you, I guess. Cost per click looks great. 13 post saves 198 link clicks. Does it? Are you able to see. You were using Shopify, right?

Yeah.

Are you able to see anywhere on here? You might have to scroll to the left or add it. Were you running a traffic campaign or were you running a conversion? Traffic campaign. Okay, got it. Cool. Immediately I'm thinking like, so you. Where were you sending them?

To my website.

And that was just the product page to buy your Trope Tales book.

Yes.

And the price point was.

I think it's 35.

Okay, 35. And it costs what you. What's the cost of goods sold there? Like $5. Cost of goods sold is like how much it costs to produce the product that's being paid for.

It's about five or six. Six.

Okay. So roughly then you're maybe taking home. Let's call it throw in some margin there. 27. Although you're probably making more than that. So that's your gross. Although again, it's probably a little bit higher and you're getting 40 cents. Link clicks. Okay, that's so then bringing cold traffic to a paid product. Conversion rates obviously vary, but if we're looking at paid ads and we're diving deep into paid ads right now, and I wish, like, I could go on for, we could go on for 10 hours about paid ads, but I actually, genuinely want to cover paid ads in a period of time that, like, is manageable for you. So you can walk away and be like, oh, I get this. So, yeah, three parts to the funnel. Right. You've got. Part one is like the actual, like click, right click to it. The next step to the page, to the web page. Remember the web pages, which in this case you mentioned triple book. So you're getting 40 cents on average. Now let's look at this first step. Is there any of them that we're getting? If you scroll back over to the cost per link click, were there any of them that we're getting? No, they're all about the same, so. All about the same. That's not bad. Okay, I have, I'm going to have some feedback for you, but it's not, it's not terrible. So what this means is that no ads under overperforming from a, a, a click perspective. Now there's the conversion perspective. So what we typically expect, there's different benchmarks for link clicks. But I honestly would like to see this be cheaper for you. I'd like for you to get your clicks down to, at this scale, 20 cents, that when you scale up, it's 25 to maybe 28 cents and maybe even cheaper than that. Yeah, your clicks are a little bit expensive. So it shows me this. You don't have bad ads, but you don't have a winning ad.

Yeah, I also didn't run it for that long either.

Winning ads will show up pretty quickly. You'd be surprised. Like, you don't have to spend a hundred dollars to find a winning ad. You can spend $10 and you'll see it's a winner. That's how fast Meta will show you. This indication to me, given they're all here, is that there probably is no one. Now we can look at the creative and I want to get there, but this is just how much the numbers can show you. Now the next step is this. And this is where you'll start to see why I don't like this cost per click and why we need to adjust it. But I want to see what your actual conversion was. But typically I'd expect cold traffic to convert to a paid product at around 1 1/2 percent. Give or take 1% on either end. Obviously, 0.5% is very hard to make money on. 2.5% is great. You could be getting 2.5% since it's lower priced. Maybe. But you're going to probably be under 3% of cold traffic converting. Right. Like almost. If you're above 3%. That's amazing. Like incredible. And I'm so happy for you. That's difficult to do. So let's just benchmark it at 1 out of every 50 clicks. If we do 50 times 0.4, we're at $20. So you're spending $20 to make $27, which means you make roughly 7 or $10 in profit. That's what I'd be roughly expecting, seeing this. That's not an amazing return. Not bad. It's really good if you have more books to sell them. But in your Trope Tale series, you don't. Now here's the trick. You have drink mixes to sell them, which technically could make this remarkably profitable. There's a good conversion to that remarkably profitable. Which is why your offer and what you're charging matters so much. Oftentimes, the people who win in advertising are the people who can afford to spend the most. It's not who's the best at ads, it's who can afford to spend the most. Which sounds depressing, but it's also a game about spending money. So that's why when you talked about doing the Dream Mix, I was like, this is a genius going to work really well. And I was very happy to see you do that. But the other flip side of it is, damn, if we can make our ads work even better and have a higher average order value, AKA more money that we're making per customer. Well, that would be incredible. So what I want to ask you before we talk about that and this whole reader growth engine is what, from these 198 clicks, how many purchases did you get?

None.

None?

None.

None. Okay. That's okay. You're good. So first of all, this is a really great indication of it's a good thing where you spent. Let me think. You spent about 80 bucks in these ads.

Yeah, I was like, yeah, like around 100. It was a $10 a day ad spend for seven days. Oh yeah. So 80 bucks? Yeah. Not 180 bucks.

Depending on who you are, could be the difference between you making your electricity bill or it might not make much difference in your finances. If it's difference between making your electricity Bill or not, aka 80 is money that you can't afford to lose, then you should not be, you should not be spending money on paid ads like that to get going. You should save up for it or be even more conservative than Maggie. Spend $5 a day. Spend only spend $10. Whatever you need to do. Obviously cynical significance comes at 334 typically. Although a thousand clicks is probably better. But cynical significance starts around 334. That's what I remember from my stats class. I could be wrong, but it's somewhere in the 300 range. Like where you can start to have that you didn't quite hit the point of statistical significance. Which what that means is you do need to get enough data to know what your conversion rate is, right? So it's tough to say, but given that you have none and you don't have significance yet, but you have more than like 20 clicks, yeah, that is a little bit of a cause for concern. For me. My first thing would be one did you take the people who backed your Kickstarter and input it in Facebook to try and create a lookalike audience from it?

What is it? No.

So look like, look like audience is when Facebook basically you feed Facebook emails. You could say hey, here's a list of 100 emails. More is better. A thousand emails, 10,000 emails. I want you to go find people similar to these emails. And Facebook typically this is almost dystopian, has 50 to 60% of like emails. You'll give it in their system already so they know who those people are and then they map who those people are onto building out your own lookalike audience of that right. I would building look like audience because you could build a look like audience your mailing list. Maybe not all of them have bought so it might be like lower intent group. They might draw an interesting lookalike audience compared to people who have bought such as your Kickstarter backers or plus shopify conversions. You also might be able to do that for people who buy specific products at scale. Right. Anyways, that's effectively what it look like audiences. One that's an interesting thing to try because when you're trying to not spend a ton of money on meta to test it in the beginning, giving it as much direction as possible while still letting the AI do its thing can help it be more efficient. Because this sounds weird but like 100 bucks is nothing to most brands advertising in meta. So for them, oh, I spent a couple. I spent 100, 200 on Meta and then the ads went through the learning phase and now they're out of the Learning phase. Okay. But for you, like, anything you can do to get out of the learning phase faster is probably a good thing.

So how do you import the audience?

So if you go to the three, like, three lines, all tools, I believe. Yeah. Audience are. There you go. So click audiences, and then in there you can create a custom audience. And then when you. Basically, you'll create the lookalike audience from your custom audience. So you can click create a lookalike audience, but then it's going to ask you where you create that lookalike audience from and ask you to pick a custom audience. The custom audience is going to be, here are my mailing list subscribers. Here are my Kickstarter buyers, et cetera. So you could say, like, where it came from, right? It came from customer list, offline activity, et cetera. Offline activity could be like buyers at a book signing. And then you could say what percentage you want it to be in terms of the population. Do you want it to be the 1% of the U.S. population closest to that audience? Do you want to be the 10% closest to that audience? It's pretty fast. It's incredible. Yeah, it's incredible. And again, like I said, once Facebook's trained up on you, you don't even. You're good then. Now my next question for you is, did you pixel up your store?

What does that mean?

Maybe I'm speaking a little bit. I should be more clear. So meta pixel. It's essentially a tracking pixel that you can input into Shopify. In fact, Shopify is a really good conversion with Facebook's C API, AKA Conversions API, which basically allows Facebook to see everyone who buys your product on Shopify. Do you have that set up?

I don't think so.

Set it up. It takes maybe 20 minutes. Yeah. So if you go to apps, I would go to. Yeah, and then you can enter in pixel and then like from there. Or marketing, too. I think it might be in. It's funny, when I'm put on the spot with all these dashboards, it's, oh, my God, where is everything? Yeah, Facebook and Instagram. I would check out that app because there's the free plan there. Okay, yeah, take that. But I think it'll be in marketing, actually, where you'll be able to install the pixel. It's a very simple process. There's a bunch of different, like, YouTube tutorials on it. I'm trying to remember exactly where it is in Shopify. Oh, yeah, there you go. Marketing apps down here. More marketing apps. Because here's the thing about what happened here that I'm really interested in? You chose to run a traffic ad. But what a traffic ad tells Facebook is, hey Maggie, thank you. We're going to take your money and get as much people to click on your link as possible. What that doesn't tell Facebook is, hey Maggie, we're going to take your money and get as much people to buy your product as possible. Once you hook up the Pixel to your Shopify store and give meta visibility into what actions are taking place in your store and if someone's buying your product or adding to cart, etc. Because it can see all these events, there's the Facebook Events Manager, where once you set up the Pixel, you map on what events happen on your website and what they mean for meta. Then you can run what's called conversion ad. And Facebook conversion ads are all about like driving conversions and those will be optimized to find you buyers. Yeah, I would think about doing that. Because you're using Shopify. Traffic ads are really good if you're using Amazon because Amazon doesn't give you amazing conversion data to feedback to Facebook or which is. Which sucks, by the way. That's not ideal. It would be better to use conversion ads in that case. But it's just. Or if you're trying to grow your mailing because you want just get traffic in clicks, get this free email downloads and then traffic ads make sense because technically you don't want cheap clicks, you want cheap buyers. And that's a different thing. So that's my first criticism before we even know, we haven't even looked at an ad yet. So I do want to look at your actual ad creatives, but that's just where my mind goes to. And I apologize for not knowing off the top of my head exactly where the Pixel stuff is in Shopify. I'll try and find it right now.

I would love to hear more about that.

Facebook Pixel is amazing. And every ads platform basically has like their own Pixel. So, yeah, basically, okay, you're going to want to go to the Meta Events Manager, create the Pixel there, enter your Shopify store URL and then it's going to go from there. So you'll set up on the Meta ad, not in Shopify.

Okay. Yeah, I'm probably gonna have to look up a YouTube video for this too, because this is. I don't want to mess this up. This is.

Oh, it's easy. Yeah. So you'll just go there and then.

Yeah, connect data.

Exactly. You'll actually do is you can let me send you. This link here.

Yeah, there's like a step by step because I'm like, yeah, this is Superfi's.

Whole business is basically built off meta ads.

Okay.

Yeah. That's how most people make their money on Shopify. Okay, so now that everyone here has a little crash course, do we want to actually look at your ads? Because I'd love to actually see them. Because I think what we're seeing here is this growth engine can work, Right? I want to be very clear. This growth engine can work and it's not necessarily, oh, take all the courses and watch all the YouTube videos. It's literally like getting in there, seeing, oh, my God, this didn't work. Why? Oh, my God? Maybe it's because I didn't check my pixel. Maybe it's because I'm not feeding Facebook the right. Any sort of indication of who my audience is when I already have buyers, therefore have an advantage and could give it a little head start. Maybe I'm not actually going through and optimizing for the right campaign goal. Like I need to be optimizing for conversions. Or maybe it's traffic. Whatever it is in your case that could be causing all to fall apart. Because ads, this weird game of, like, little optimizations, like what I'm seeing here with Maggie's ads is not typically bad performance. It's just you can expect to make all of your profit from winning ads.

Yeah.

When we actually look at your ads too. That's another key part of this funnel.

I only ran it for a week.

It's hard to tell, but you have enough data to start to see some things you do. So let's look at your images. If you can look at the actual creative, I'd love to see it. Because they all look the same in terms of. Roughly in terms of how their performance was. So I'm curious how similar they are. So let's see what they actually say. And actual.

Okay, wait, hold on.

No, no. Yeah, exactly. Show me the. I want to see exactly what a viewer sees on the platform.

How do I, like, figure that out? How do I see that? Is there a way to.

You will go to. If you. If you click right now, you have to click the new traffic ad. Troup Tales. Click that.

Oh, edit.

Yeah. And then you click edit. And then you should be able to see it all there. And then it looks like you have the same copy and headline, but you just have four different image variations. Is that correct? That's what it looks like. Yeah, that's what it looks like.

I have different headlines.

For each one you have different headlines. Okay, okay, okay.

The same cup.

So now this is getting interesting. So I, I have a few friends who run Facebook ad agencies and I don't proclaim to be a Facebook ad expert. I like to. I think I'm good at teaching the first principles how to do all of this in terms of thinking about marketing and systems. But I don't also think I'm that bad at Facebook ads. And there might be different schools of thought around this, but for me, I like to think about it very systematically. And your goal, this is. Now we're going to like this growth engine optimizing to this. Your goal when running meta ads is not to necessarily make money and get sales. That's your end goal. But your first goal is to find a winning ad is to understand what a winning ad even is. What is the psychology behind it? Why is that working? The tough part about when you have all these different headline variations is this one. Think about how much data, AKA impressions, it takes to get statistical significance on any one of these combinations. That means more spend a lot. Right. That also means more learning time for Facebook. You're giving it more stuff as it sit through. Don't get me wrong, I say all the time more is better. But more is better in a very specific sense. With ads, more is better in that you should constantly be testing more, but you're. You need to get clear data first. So here I'm not getting clear data at all. We don't even know what headline worked, what headlines, I have no idea. So I don't recommend in the beginning doing this. Once you have. This is a difference. Once you know your winners.

Yeah.

You can throw them all in one mega campaign and all your winning images in one mega campaign and just let the AI do its thing. That's great at that point. But you don't. You're not. You're just starting. So I would literally take it down to one headline here. You don't have to do it right now. This is a lot to do, like literally while we're live. But so you understand that's the kind of process. One headline, I want to then test that one headline. Now let's go even deeper. You have these images. Images are great to test, but for every image, you have to test that headline and copy with that image. Likewise, if you have two headlines, you have to test two headlines. Every copy image, which doubles the complexity. So everything you do doubles. Doubles the complexity. Every little change you add in the beginning. I'm looking for Simple. And what I'm looking for is the most high leverage place in our process that we can optimize to get a winning ad. And it's a book all about this is called Cashvertising. It's an amazing book, Cashvertising and what Cashvertising talks about. The principles behind it are how big New York ad agencies make money from ads. It's freaking awesome. Everything about the book is awesome. I love it. And it's not about Internet marketing ads at all, which is why I like it, because I always like taking things in different areas. But what you need to know from that book is that there's specific sections of an ad that if you could spend all of your time optimizing, you should. And effectively they're talking a lot about newsletter headline, newsletter ads and things like that, like literal newspaper ads. So the headlines, everything in that. Right. In Facebook personally I found it's the image. Cause the image is what draws the most attention. So you're better suited to run one headline, one copy, but throw in 10 images more on that front. Because you're testing images right now. 1. Once you get the winning image, take that winning image. And I promise you, every time I run a Facebook ad, I see one or two images go so much better than the other ones. Like double to triple cheaper in terms of whatever my outcome goal is. So once you put all those in there, then you can go, now let me test the headlines. But that's not a process that takes days, it's a process that takes weeks. And ideally you've been able to make some money throughout the way. So it's not like you're just hemorrhaging cash the whole way through. You're actually ideally able to start making some money at some point because you've optimized to get winning ads.

Yeah.

And knowing that you can keep making the winners better and keep finding more winners. And what you want to do essentially is have a testing process, right. Where you're going to have an ad set that becomes your image. Ad set, we just pile new images into and then we have these set copy. And maybe over time you create a new ad set or update that ad set to have new ads for winning copy you find later on in the process does better because you want to use that winning copy on every new image and or new video as well. Videos a asset that catches eyes. Then next step is going to be headline testing. Right. And the next step is going to be copy testing. But at some point, if you have a winning ad, just let that sucker run too, and spend and let that thing spend money. But then continue trying to optimize that winning ad in and of itself. And that would be the process I take it through, going from image to headline to copy, and then continuing with each winner to update your process that as you begin testing new images, you're incorporating concepts, the winning headlines and the winning copy. And likewise, when you're texting, testing the next winning copy, you have those winning images. Right? It all builds in itself and all builds its knowledge. And ultimately, who usually wins in ads is not who makes the most ads, but who tests better. And testing is a volume plus strategy game. And you can do it. So, yeah, I guess everything I'm seeing from you is you've got a good product, you've got all this down. But then there's one last step here, which is that if we look at the ad and we read the copy, I want to then go read the copy and then go to the actual Shopify page because I am curious if there's a reason people are dropping off, because there might be. And that would then be crucial because it doesn't matter if you have a winning ad if no one's buying. If you scroll up, you can actually see the copy you entered in. Okay, wait, there we go. So let's read it. Me Trope Tales, the world's first cocktail SP book inspired by popular bookish themes, Letter a tropes featuring 50 specialty drinks, hand drawn illustrations and funny anecdotes. Get your signed copy with exclusive bonuses, a bookmark, sticker and postcard. Perfect for any book lover looking to elevate the reading experience in Bar cart. Okay, people were clicking on that.

There's multiple. Oh, there's multiple oops.

So that. Oh, so this is getting.

There's a lot of them.

Well, but most of them have the same theme though. But yes, this is. You can see my whole point that.

No, that's the AI thing. The primary text is right here.

Oh, okay.

That's not what I did. This is AI.

That's fine. Okay. Those variations actually are more readable, actually.

Yeah.

But they have the same core point. So I actually don't think those variations are major. Usually the meta AI variations are not major, which isn't a bad thing. Like, they're not trying to. They're trying to add little optimizations, not completely change everything.

But.

Okay, so I. I get what it says to me that aligns actually very well with your product. So can we go to your product page? Because I'm wondering, like can you. There's. You can see how much confounding variables are in this situation now. It's almost mind numbing. And I'm sorry, because now you at least can knock out some of these confounding variables. But ultimately like your goal in anything is to try and understand like why or why not is your book doing well and take out all the other things that could be noise. So the noise here I have so far is too much headlines, images, not making it easy to see winning ad. But I'm not too concerned for that because that's more a winning ad situation. You did get 200 clicks on the click situation though. It's like the traffic. That's the thing that I'm concerned about, the traffic and the lack of pixel. But on top of that, let's at least do our due diligence and look at the page because maybe there's something going wrong on your product page, maybe not.

I actually have to head off because it's my mom's birthday and we're going out to dinner.

But all good, all good.

This is the website.

Okay. Wait, you sent them to this page?

I sent them to.

Because I don't. Oh, nope, that's why. Look how far down the buy button is. No one's scrolling that far. True.

Then if they go to this. Because this is where I initially had it.

Yeah, that's better. Much better. Much better. That alone might three extra conversion.

To have a go to this.

Oh, yeah.

And I want to stay for this.

It's all right. It's all right. Your mom is way more important than this. Thank you, Maggie, for volunteering. That was a lot of fun. I'd love to do one more with someone else who ideally is not doing paid ads. Ideally you want to do another growth engine and are at some sort of phase in it. I'm a big fan of simplifying things, but it's very easy to complicate things. So we want to make it as simple as possible. With all that said, between content, community, everything, without building your own media brand or collaborations and affiliates, does anyone have a growth engine they want to workshop?

Where would. I'm thinking like membership, community.

Let's do it.

Let's do it. I have not started it. This is like your ground floor conversation.

No, that's. I love it. It's perfect. And by the way, I know we're over. I'm completely famous for doing this. At this point, I'm not famous for doing it. I'm famous among few. But this happens. All the time. So if you have to go, no worries, it's being recorded. But this is too much of an exciting topic. There's too much here with reader growth engines to not dive into. And I think there's so much more to learn when we get to go hands on. I'm not in a particular rush to get going. Jocelyn. I think probably I'll call it definitely if we go longer than 40, I'll probably call it. But let's just dive into everything we have here. Which sounds like you might be more at the ideation stage here, which is perfect because I think a lot of us are also at the ideation stage in whatever our growth engine is. So walk me through. You said paid membership. Let's back up before then, which everyone knows where I start. Which is before we have a reader growth engine, we need to know who our readers are. So who are your readers? What do you create?

I am creating urban Fantasy for over 40, Gen X, predominantly women.

Love it, love it. Okay, I'm with you.

Second book publishes Thursday.

Amazing. Huge. Amazing.

October.

Yeah, that's incredible.

So I'm in.

Bill.

I'm in building audience visibility stage.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, let's. I always. I have so many questions, but I also want to keep on topic. Let's dive into this audience building reader growth engine. Have you marketed yourself so far? And when you hear the word reader growth engine, what starts to come to mind for building yours?

All the things. So right now primarily how I'm doing this is through Facebook ads. I'm doing the testing through all of that just for the book sales. I'm focusing primarily on getting the word out about the book. I have a newsletter, so newsletter ads, community building, getting like readers together. That's pretty much it. And yeah.

Okay, okay. No, makes total sense. So do you think you're ready for reader growth engine?

I think I could be at the very beginning of it.

Why?

One, because I know I can handle doing the work because I've done lots of other work in other products and other businesses, so I'm not worried about that. I know I have an audience. I have as I'm finding the audience. I have a very loyal, engaged audience. It's small but mighty at the moment and the word of mouth is happening in ways that are very strange and exciting.

Now do you have all these are really like really good signs and like amazing. There's a sort of. I like to think about story market fit because that's the predecessor to being able to create a reader growth engine. That's how I like to. You want to clear that bar first? Yeah. Which is the hardest part of clear, by the way. That's what. Once you have that, I automatically start thinking your success as an author is undeniably inevitable, which is so exciting. But you know it when you have it. And like I said, there's no hard numbers behind it. But for book two, do you have a pre order up for it? Yes, if you don't mind sharing roughly, you could either share the total shares sales number of book one and now the preorders book two, or you could share roughly the percentage of people who bought book one who bought book two. And if you don't know it, totally pull it up. I would love for you to see that.

I don't know it yet.

Let me see here. Let me pull it up. Let's check it out. Let's check it out. That's a great data point. That. That's because I think you have a lot of qualitative signals and I love that. I love that I as well though as a cautionary entail. This is not to say that I'm one of the most optimistic people out there. I'm very helpful for you. But I had a lot of optimistic signals moving into a series. I did not have story market fit on my readers that I found really liked it. But unfortunately the actual market of a defined group of readers that I was going to continually reach with it, the host apocalypse survival folks were not as into it even though I had amazing signals, my readers and even good reviews in the book. So there was a sort of like qualitative quantitative gap that was weird where I had like a small group of loud people. But when it came to the masses of my audience, the masses of my customers, it was hard to make the numbers work. So that is not to say that you don't have it just to be a cautionary tale on that. I think it's good to always mix quantitative with qualitative.

And one of the things I know, especially in this genre is it will build more as more books come out because it's a very untrusting genre right now.

People want to see three plus books. It's completed. Yeah, 100 exactly.

And I'm not thinking of anything big in the next week. Let's. How do I share?

Oh, I'll stop sharing. You're welcome to share your screen. I'd love for you to share your screen.

Oh, I. Oh, I can. I don't have to share, but.

Oh, you. Whatever you want. Yeah, whatever's helpful for you.

So I can just tell you. The pre orders on book one from July to September were 34. The pre orders now on book two from January to now have been 18.

Okay. So the pre orders of book one were 34. The pre orders of book two are 18. Yeah. Okay. And what were the sales of book one? Because like preorders plus like current sales since it. Because that would be like we're not going to get your actual read through rate. We're going to get an idea.

So my sales. Okay. Of print or anything?

Any anything.

So I've sold just about 75 print books.

Nice.

And I'm a couple thousand ebooks.

Nice. Okay. Okay. Cool.

That is I'm at 1928 ebooks.

Cool.

That's awesome. And you're in KU. Correct. Correct. The biggest indicator I think is going to actually be the page reads. That'll probably be your least noisy data in this, which is interesting. But once book two comes out, which is next week, what I would be really curious to see is the metric which you probably are familiar with. But folks listening, this will be good review or maybe an interesting new concept is like a full read through in ku. Right. And Kendall Unlimited, in your KDP dashboard there's a section when you go back to your enrollment details, it'll give you your KENP or your Kindle normalized page count and that's effectively how long they say your book is in Kindle Limited. So for easy math sake, if your book's 250kenp and 10,000 pages long, that means you've had 40 people read it. So what you want to see is comparing apples to apples here in terms of your next book might be shorter or longer. How many full read throughs of book one compared to book two do you have? Is that an imperfect metric? It is. And I could talk for days about why, but it's the best indicator Amazon gives us. It's pretty terrible still, but it's at least decent enough. Yeah. So I would be curious over time, over weeks, over months what that looks like in comparison for a rough benchmark. Like I see Elite series and Kindle Ltd. Book one to book two have 80% of the full read throughs of book one. 80% of that number will move on to book two and then after that it'll normally be like 90 plus percent, even 95% plus. Especially because in KU you don't have the friction of buying more. So it's a really good indication of just is the story enough to keep them around Now There's a lot of reasons why you might be saying 80% sounds high to 90% sounds high is it's not actually that high because the KU full read through is a flawed calculation. You have people who will read 5 pages, 10 pages, 15 pages and drop off and never come back and. But you don't know. So that's why I get pissed at it because it's like weirdly annoying. But all this to say that I think you have insanely good reviews. Looking at it like 4.4 on Goodreads, 4.6. I. It's tough to know until we get a little bit more of a signal. But part of it is you need to take effort. You need to put in. You almost need to start building the engine and turning out a little bit to get the signal. And there's almost like a degree of story market fit. So when you said you have are at the beginnings of it, my analysis would say the exact same thing. Which I think is actually a really cool place to be. And you're in the exact place to be seriously considering a reader growth engineering and knowing that building it is likely in your near future. Because even if this isn't exactly it and you don't end up having incredible story market fit, this isn't a rewrite the whole book or start a new series or pivot entirely. You're at a level in which I would say it might just be some tweaks here and there, which there's an art to figuring out what those might look like or even if they're needed. I think it's all good signals. We need more signal. With that said, I think it's a great thought exercise to go into building a reader growth engine. My advice to you would be not to go out and build it immediately. Let book two launch. Yes. Get signal on that. Yes, exactly. And then once that happens, I would start to dial up the reader growth engine a little bit. Right. And start to experiment with it and see are these numbers holding true? Are readers sticking through? Is this all working? Which is really fun. So with that you mentioned paid membership or membership community stuff. I know. Scott's also thinking about that. Who's live here right now. Fabulous. Which is great. And you're welcome to chime in. Scott too. We can do a joint thing right now as well.

You just said we're running over. You want me to start talking about community building.

Yeah, that's what we're here for. This is the. This is our workshop. That's what we're here for. Okay. I will say this.

This was something Michael recommended to me. I've been doing tons of reading on community building.

Okay.

This is a great book. And Michael. I'd heard of Michael of Mighty Networks before Michael confirmed that if you haven't gone through their free video course series. Do that.

Yeah.

Have you done that?

I've used Mighty Networks a lot. I've built other communities through them for like reader groups or whatnot. So I'm very familiar with the platform.

Are there. Were those paid or free?

One was paid and a couple were free.

Okay. Yeah. So you've got that experience there. I have never built a community before. I'm all about. I'm going to go down a rabbit hole. I'm going to read every book and article and watch every video about. So I've been hoovering that up. I would say if you haven't gone, even if you've used Mighty Networks, the video series is. It is literally everything they've learned distilled down into very short, easy to digest videos. Best practices. And it's as Michael has keeps reminding me, it's a lot less work in terms of content creation. I always want to do more content. And what I've realized between Michael and the research is it's not really about that. And so I just, I'm going to share that in case that's not something that's. Don't. It's not going to take a lot of work to launch it. It's going to take a lot of work to keep it going. But it's totally doable. It's totally doable.

Yeah. Are those communities still going?

Jocelyn is.

What was that?

Are this community still active?

Couple of them have left the platform for various reasons. One of them moved over to Circle and that. And one is still on Mighty Networks. I'm just not involved with it anymore.

Gotcha.

It grew beyond the capacity I wanted to give it. So I, I was kind of. I, I stepped out because I wanted to be doing this thing.

Cool. Very cool.

What were you gonna say, Michael? I didn't mean to interrupt you.

No, I, I love it. I think the biggest thing when thinking about a growth engine is thinking about your CUNY design. And I like to think about a cuny, like a city. And the, the best cities have. I shouldn't say the best cities. That's not the right word. The fastest growing cities tend to have an industry or something they're known for in the States. Los Angeles, which I'm here now, I'm actually about to see Scott in literally a couple hours in person, which is amazing. LA is known for entertainment also now. It's diversified a lot since then. All right. But it's a very diverse economy here. But entertainment certainly is still what it's known for. And it's a lot of people come here for. You got San Francisco being tech, New York, finance. You have the cities, they have something. And even towns have their own version of an industry, whether that be a specific factory located there, specific company, a distribution plant. All this to say there needs to be a reason for readers to come to your city. Cities are really durable to build when you design it, but you want to design it for growth. Because sometimes when we think of CUNY as a growth engine and then CUNY as a business model, they're slightly different. A membership, paid membership. CUNY probably is more akin to a society or a speakeasy or a gym or there's better real world proxies for paid membership because you have this interest, you have this passion, and you want to be a part of this group for either status or some sort of transformation. But that group in and of itself tends to not just like books, tends to not just naturally have millions of people coming to it organically, but ends up being the type of thing that you need to market and have a growth engine for. And the best growth engine for paid community is often free community and free community a growth engine for your stories, for anything. So what makes acunity design for discovery or for customer acquisition? And I think there's three principles of it. So the first is that it can't be a community based around your brand because your brand limits the growth of cuny. Going back to my Simon Schuster example, they're not building a cuny, but they're building media products. And they even understood from their media products when it came to podcasts, if they just did it based on their authors, they'd limit the growth of the media product and the media products. What gave discovery to their actual products. Therefore, they are willing to feature other people who they don't publish, maybe get other people on the bestseller list because they know in the long run, in the medium term, that's going to lead to more growth for them. It's the right play, it's the smart play. Now the other thing, the second principle I think when designing came for discovery is thinking about what space you want to own in someone's mind. I think like literally do an exercise. We can do this in a moment because I'm pull back up the canvas of a Word map. Right. And thinking about this is the community at the center. What words do you want people to associate with your community? What makes your community special? And the idea here is that it's actually tough to compete with an existing cuny. Extremely hard. It's way easier to compete with an existing media format. There's a reason for that. When you have a media format that does really well, a consumer might want more of that media format. AKA oh my God, I love this show. Yeah, similar show sounds great. I'll go to that show. Why not? And there is still a power law to it. But it's not as durable. There's a lot more churn in it, meaning it's a lot easier for or worded another way. Authors drop off the top of bestseller chart a lot and then new authors come in. It doesn't happen as often with communities. Communities are a lot more like cities. How often does New York fall off the list of the number one finance hub? It doesn't happen. It will maybe one day, but it doesn't happen. These things take hundreds of years and it might never happen. Who knows? I don't know. I'm not. I'm a futurist. But there's certain things I don't even pretend to know. That feels like these networks are so powerful. When you're building a community, you're not creating content, you're creating a network. That's the shift. And what you need to understand is why are people going to come to your network and leave other networks? Spend more time. It's sub. It's not complimentary stories. Why authors? Very collaborative. Because it's complementary. CUNY is not complementary. It's often substitutive. You directly decide to be part of ex creative cuny. Right. As authors. And it means you're not spending that time in another one. And speaking of the author cuny, we all know a few Facebook groups that have been unbelievably durable for years and may just be durable for years and years to come and aren't even having any interaction at all from their original leaders. And I'm not saying it's a good or bad thing. It's just a fact. It's wild. So you want to go and build that for yourself. So the biggest thing is thinking about how you differentiate. So how do you differentiate? There's three ways to differentiate, which I'm giving you almost like bullet points and bullet points now. But here are the three ways. First is covering a new topic, having a space for conversation that has not happened Before. So in your case, maybe that's combining urban fantasy with another passion. Like we're going to do urban fantasy and cooking urban fantasy and knitting urban fantasy. I don't know something. I'm throwing stuff out there. Urban fantasy and travel. It could also be a specific sub genre demographic within urban fantasy. We are only like women in our 40s in the fantasy. Urban fantasy. I don't think that's the best kitty, by the way. But it could be a great community. I don't think that's the best way to market it. But regardless, you get that point. Or it could be we only want name X sub genre of urban fantasy. We only talk about this and oh my God, I've been waiting for place to only talk about this. It's like the person who goes, and I'm using another analogy here to cities because it's true. The person who like lives in, let's say the back bay of Boston and then decides, okay, I love the architecture here, I love the good food, but I hate the traffic and the high prices. I'm out to my little place, my, my new little city. I'm going to move out. That gives me that. The little stuff I really like. I don't need all the bigness here.

It's.

And we see that happen all the time. And the third way you can differentiate. The second way. Sorry, you could differentiate or I think I'm on the third way you could differentiate. First way is going to be your combining passion. Second way is niching it down, getting really specific about your topic. The third way is going to be the mindset, the movement. And some of the biggest author coonies have done this unbelievably effectively. I'll give you the best example, which is 20 books, 50k. I mean, when it started, right? Like it was a movement, it was a literal movement. It wasn't that 20 books was the only business community out there for writers. It was not. It wasn't that 20 books the only community talk of the things it was talking about. It was not. Then why did 20 books take off? Because it was very clear that this was a whole new movement of how to be a writer that still combined all these other topics and conversations. So to say we are urban fantasy, we are readers of urban fantasy who are here because we use this to get through challenging times in life. Or we love urban fantasy because we think it's the thing to bring humor to the world. Or we love urban fantasy because it turns us into badasses. Like whatever that is. Like Creating a movement around urban fantasy is the third way to do that. So again, to review, you have the first two things you want to think about here, cuny, which is what is the reason people are coming there that makes it special, not making it around your brand. And then the third thing, the third big bullet point in this whole list is going to be how do people engage the kidney, right? What makes it special in terms of what rituals do they partake in your community that are going to be different than other places? Because you can build a community of people who want to come around wellness. Or I'll give you even better example, you can build a community, people want to come around yoga, right? And you can have a whole movement around yoga and it can be based in a different space. But then when you incorporate the ritual of puppies in the mix, all of a sudden that becomes supremely interesting, right? So thinking about what is your version of puppies, what is your version of yoga? Puppies. And there's examples of it, like some kidneys, like under index, uncertain knees. They might not let people share certain types of things. They might also like share things in a different format that you encourage people to do. Hey, like this is going to be like you sharing like in this community, we're not just going to talk about books, but you're going to share like what you're eating and what you're doing while you're reading. And it's just constant pictures of I'm at this park or I'm reading, I'm drinking this tea. These are different types of rituals. Maybe it's we quote our favorite things in our books here. That's what we do. That's our ritual. Like you share the quotes, we're sharing it and we're sharing these things. Maybe it's fan fiction based, which you have to be careful of, but that's a lot of people love that. So as long as you make sure that people are not pirating and being respectful of ip, there's lots of different ways to go out of the fan art. Oh my God. So anyways, I could go on for hours about cuny, but that's my like framework in terms of how I'd approach it. So I'll throw it back in your core. Considering all that CUNY designed for discovery and how you're able to position that CUNY in a different way, what do you think that looks like for you?

I'm almost thinking Gen X. Yeah, that's, that's what I'm thinking is leaning into that way because then you can. It's not my brand. There's about the mindset and the movement, the feral children of Gen X who are now the feral adults. That's cut. That's. I would be leaning into that kind of like movement in terms of leaning heavily into what it, what does it mean to be Gen X? Because there is a certain nostalgia now of us in that generation that are looking back and seeing who we are now and how we became who we are based on how we grew up and who we were. And there is a real like calling to Gen X to find each other. And there is also a certain irony to a Gen X community.

That is so true. As a fellow Gen Xer. That is so true.

I think there's real demand there. I have an author friend who also had a cuny of fellow Gen Xers and this is a pecuni, not a community designed for discovery, although they had that too. They were next level when it came to community. But needless to say, my point is they had about 10 or 12 women who were all recently divorced Gen X who really were struggling to make friends and had lost a lot of their world or social life. So they came together through books online, ended up having these like our wine chats. And that's what it was like. The ritual. Right. Because I think you now have, you just really outlined like the sort of niche, like the, you know, you niche it down in terms of in this case the who it's for. Because it could be the who, it could be the why or the what. So you, you niche it down on the who. That was such a similar way to explain that. I explained it a long way. There's three ways niche on a community. Who, what or why. But regard you did the who, then the first thing you did too is really important as well, which is that you've now made it for everyone. Right. In terms not for everyone, but you've made it not just for people who are read your books, but people who like urban fantasy. Energetics. You accomplish steps one and two now it's the ritual.

Yeah, yeah. Because I think a ritual could even be like the book club of the things we read the original old school urban fantasy from the 80s and the 90s. That is not paranormal romance. That is not paranormal women's fiction. Because that's more to what I write to is like that old almost horror urban fantasy before it got sparkly. Yeah. So I thought a lot about that is doing what. I mean I've often, I've even thought of like the old urban fantasy podcast. The bringing the people around. The old love of what Urban fantasy originally. Why we loved it when we loved it when we were 20. Why the things that Gen X has a very different urban fantasy. Yeah, our urban fantasy is very much more horror than the urban fantasy we know today.

Jocelyn. Yeah, no, it's great. Let me give you the challenge of this reader growth engine. Every reader growth engine has a challenge. Paid ads are really good for numbers geeks like me who like optimizing things because you're gonna dive in and the challenge is how many steps the optimization can go wrong. Community is not really a numbers game from an optimization standpoint at all. You can throw out a lot of the advice I shared earlier because it's just not applicable to this growth engine. But there's one thing that's hyper applicable or not hyper applicable, hyper important, which is that communities, when we talk about like any form of a network, it's. Sorry. So communities need what's called a node. And a node is essentially the minimum amount of people interaction for the network to produce value. And people in networks often cluster around nodes. So you have to basically create a node and then the node ideally actually self perpetuates, which doesn't always happen. And it takes a while sometimes to get to the point where, where cunies are self sustaining. Like that's a beautiful place to be in. So the actual tough part. Yeah, so the tough part is actually marketing community in the beginning because communities are one of those things that like is really durable because eventually you can sit back, not even run it, have other people run it and have it work everything for you. Like communities are an incredible asset. Communities are one of the only things you can buy. Like I would never buy a paid ad from someone. A paid ad is not an asset. Content and shows you can buy from people. I think they're remarkably difficult because oftentimes if they're not participating in it, it loses all the value. Communities are hyper valuable. If I to acquire a community, like would be an amazing business. So what you need to think about then are what are the communities that you can siphon people from in a respectful way? So you know, what podcast can you speak on? Where can you interact in? Where can you share yourself? Because that's where you're going to be able to grow. So you have to have that concerted strategy. And I actually love this reader growth engine for you because paid ads is a growth engine that can scale very quickly. It's high risk, high reward, literally. Content also can scale quickly, but also can go down quickly. Content is one of those that goes up and down, but can also be very durable. Typically though, it takes longer to get started. Community takes 612 months to start to pay off on average. That doesn't mean you can't do it faster, but you'll feel those fruits for years. So that is my the honest pros and cons to you with it. But I think you're in a good position to start it because you're not looking to necessarily take off right now. You're looking to actually set the seeds in motion. And what I love about CUNY is CUNY is probably the only marketing method outside of if you design a really well designed show where you don't need to have story market fit to do it. It's funny because I give advice and then it's oh, there's so much nuances even to the advice I give and I the advice in story market fit is the right one for most people in most situations, which is why I share it. But this isn't a valid exception to it. You can build a great CUNY and not have story market fit, but know you're going to create for that audience and know that eventually one of your stories will have story market fit and retain that audience because the CUNY has such a long term payoff that building earlier is actually a good thing versus paid ads. If you don't have story market fit, you're running into paid ads. Disaster zone. Content is in the middle. Again, it's you can start it earlier, but because content's not as durable when you take off, you'd really like to have. You'd really prefer to have story market fit. Whereas the community you can take it off, have a huge CUNY and not have any product to sell them as long as you're okay with that because that community likely will stay unless again, drastic things happen. But even I've seen drastic things happen in cunies have state. So that's my long short answer on it.

Now Scott, you're talking about doing it on mighty Networks. Building your community on mighty Networks. What about a community that's built in a way that's like a like just I'm thinking like a zoom. Does it have to. Does it have to like a we meet once a month is like the book club, the urban fantasy after dark book club club as like a beginning stage to start see to start feeling out. If it starts getting a group or do you immediately go to something, does the node need to be like fixed or can it be a barge? Does it have to be a city or can it be like. Like.

I think it's up to you depending on where you are in terms of time, learning the system, firing it up. Because it's. It's not going to be an overnight thing to fire up a Mighty Network community, money, all that. I know they have a free plan, free community, they've got a free community that's really cheap. But the bottom line is, and I'm very curious to see if Michael has different views on this, but everything I've read so far has said that one to one peer interaction is the number one metric for a successful growing community. And as soon as you take it out of membership IO Kajabi School Mighty Networks, as soon as you remove it from that platform, what you lose is that ability between zoom calls for the people to interact. Now you could replicate that through discord.

I was just thinking Discord.

Yeah.

There's a way to do it that so can you for sure. But make sure you're building in a place for them in between those calls. 247 asynchronous connection, connectivity, engagement. Because including this book which I swear Mighty Networks read this and use this for their tutorial video series, it's all about that engagement. Like quick win, get them engaged, get them whether it's in some way shape or form, reward them for joining the community right away, get them on board, get them engaged. That's going to be critical. So yeah, you could roll it with a patchwork of zoom and discord for sure.

Yeah. Michael, I think that you. When is async's important. Yes. But also a timeline of a couple weeks versus a couple months versus a couple years is different. Meaning if zoom's easier for you to get started for a couple weeks I think that's okay even for a month or two. But for several months for a year having that only be it and not graduating then day sync I think would be an issue. The rollout's important. Like you need both at a relatively early stage but early stage is relative so it can be over a period of time. And the other thing I'd say is that you want to think very carefully when you're designing a community because this is focused on building a reader growth engine for you around a place that can drive growth for you. And it's really interesting because I've seen communities grow to large sizes of many different platforms. So kidneys are weird because the tool you need to grow, it can vary. But I'll give you what you should look at. So I've seen big cunies on school, I've seen big cunies on Discord obviously I've seen big communities on Facebook. I've seen big communities in my networks. If you're doing a paid community, completely different. There's specific platforms that are optimized for paid communities that I tend to think are good good for that. When you're talking about a free cuny, what you really want to optimize for is this. Imagine back to our city example. Think of the Internet as these massive highway systems. You could plop your city out in the middle of the Ocean. That takes three layovers and a 24 hour trip to get to. For patrony. There's nothing wrong with that because people are okay. Like people might want to go to the Bahamas at that point point. But for a free cuny, is that really the most efficient way to grow? The answer is almost certainly going to be no. So what you need to analyze is and using one of the superpowers here, what are the other reader cities that already exist? Where are they? How can you build, for lack of better words, an edge city off of it? If you're not familiar with an edge city is that would be the highway belt going around most our beautiful urban design in America around the belt roads and the cities there. I think Tyson Corner in Washington D.C. was the first one that you know, geographers and demographers noted. So all this to say that that would be the number one thing in terms of the tool that I look at when you're optimizing for discovery, for acquisition. My instincts for you, given that you're talking about probably creating for majority gen X woman is going to be Facebook. The downside of Facebook is it's not amazing at one to one connection. So what you're gonna have to do is build out some channels because Facebook has the channels feature now. And you're gonna want to incorporate tools like letterloop that people can opt into. I think the zoom calls will be important actually connector in that you can design things with tally that are completely free, that people fill out forms and automate things. The back end with zapier that connect them over email, again all opt in. Because the most important thing about connecting people one on one is that they are okay with it. So there's nothing wrong with using Facebook as the discovery tool and then getting deeper within it using a bunch of free automated tools to get people like deeper connected. So that that's my instinct for you. But I would actually do the exercise of looking at the reader cities and seeing what's around. Just based off of what you've told me, that's how I would approach it. Yeah, but just here I'm saying I'm suggesting on Facebook, I don't really like.

Facebook, but that's where my, that's where the majority, all the research I have done on marketing is like, it's Facebook.

There's one exception to it that Scott didn't bring up and that I didn't bring up yet, that I want to bring up to folks who are listening that might be useful, which is a community platform called Discourse. It's technically free, but it, if you run it on your own server, but it's a hundred dollars a month otherwise, which isn't cheap. But I'll tell you why, it's not that expensive either. Essentially what I like about Discourse is it's really good as a SEO based forum. So the problem with Facebook, the problem with Discord, the problem with Mighty Knox, the problem with all of them, 100% of them, is that the content's in a silo. So if your community members are going to be creating valuable content that people would want to discover in and of itself, creating a forum similar to keyboards, right. For folks who remember that, that can have immense value because then you can actually leverage Google's highway right to grow what you're doing. So depending on again, the rituals and the conversations that are going to take place, the tool that you use to build your community is different. So again, Facebook's probably my suggestion. If you start with Zoom and are going to figure out what those exact rituals are, then you could wait because maybe Discourse is an option. I personally am a big fan of it and when it comes to, I haven't invested heavily in doing anything very real yet outside of like closer knit author Cuny stuff. But when I get back into doing a more concerted effort for growing an author Cuny, my long term bet is on Discourse personally, because of the content authors are going to create being valuable for other authors to find for free online. Which makes sense with the Cuny design and the content, the rituals that would take place because like you research any question about authorship, eventually that's going to show up and it's going to lead to more growth. So that makes a lot of sense for that. But I don't know if it makes sense for you, but I wanted to bring it up because there might be other people listening who are like, oh my God, that's great. Like I want to Create a prepper survival community and oh my God, everyone who's going to search up content about like prepper and survivalist stuff is going to land on my forum. That sounds epic and that's pretty smart. Versus in your case if you're having a lot of posts that are like more personal and more touchy. Not that's even a bad thing to be searchable through Google, but who's searching for that?

So anyways, yeah, now I should have mentioned earlier migration. So if you start with Zoom discord and in two to three months or even six months you want to switch to something else, that's yet more people further get down that have to now go to a different platform. And so I think if you can test it re sign up, there's lots of ways to market that. Michael and I have talked about that in terms of gauging interest. Put your money where your mouth is. Not just I'm interested but I will pay for you based on what you're selling. You can do all of that before you build the community to make sure like Kickstarter that there is a demand in the market for that.

All right, thank y' all so much for watching this Reader Growth Engines workshop. It ended here. We could have gone on for hours and hours and hours. But I hope this gives you a real taste of what it's like to build your own reader growth engine and gives you a framework and hopefully some steps to help you figure out what that looks like for you. If you have any questions about building your own reader growth engine, I'd love to hear from you. You can email me at hellothorsidek. Com. Likewise, the reader's first challenge is literally all about helping you get your book out into the world. Get your first few readers and then start to think about building a reader growth engine. So if having some more hands on experience and going through a true CUNY experience where we all have the challenge over 10 days of marketing our books and selling to readers first, if that interests you, then I'm sure you'll love the readers first challenge. With all that said, thank you so much for watching. I had a ton of fun with this and I hope you all have an amazing rest of your day. And as always, don't forget, never forget, together we are balosing.