Free 50 Author Marketing Superpowers Audiobook

Book marketing doesn't have to be scary. In fact, it should be something that allows you to share your author superpower with the world. I created the 50 author marketing superpowers to give you just that. Originally, it was designed as a deck of cards, an actual physical deck of cards that has beautiful illustrations and that you can flip through and learn all the core concepts you need to succeed in marketing your books as an author, as well as the ability to mix and match different superpowers. So anytime you're wondering what to do for your next marketing campaign, you could come up with unlimited combinations of superpowers to release in the world. This is a really fun project. So often we think we have to learn hundreds of hours about how to actually market our books. And instead I wanted to give you these cards where in just a few hours, likely under two hours, you can learn everything you need to know to get started. For some folks, you might be getting started and you've never marketed a book before. For some other folks, you might already be making six figures a year. But I still want to help you get started and get to the next level. And that's what this is about. Authors of all stages will benefit from these superpowers, and some of the ones inside are so powerful, they might just be dangerous in the wrong hands. So, my fellow storytelling superheroes, please use these powers wisely. Now, this is the audiobook. It's totally free. Whether you're listening to it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, just know I'm very grateful for you being here with me. Each edition of the book has its specialties. The ebook is very simple and streamlined. The digital deck is beautiful and you can have right in your computer. The physical deck is the most useful and you can find the link to actually purchase your own if you want one in the description below. And the physical deck also comes with a bunch of other digital bonuses, worksheets, and templates. It's awesome. This audiobook is really special. This audiobook has special case studies examples directly from me that aren't anywhere else. The fact you're listening to this audiobook is really awesome. And honestly, how I would do it is if you get the cards, even if you have the ebook, which is totally free, and you have digital cards, I would look through the digital cards and be like, okay, I get these. You're kind of flimming through them and understanding them, spending a minute or two on each one and going, okay, I think I get this concept. But then when you're going out for a run or A walk, doing the dishes. You can listen to this audiobook and really start to distill these concepts. Because my goal is to help make marketing fun again. I want you to be able to use your superpowers, use your strengths to reach readers in brand new ways that give amazing experience to readers and ultimately help you make more money. So that's what this book is all about. Now, a little bit about me before we dive into the superpowers. I'm the force behind Author Sidekick and Author Sidekick's a company and a mission to bring power to storytellers. I've been a sci fi author since 15 and I published 12 science fiction novels in high school. When I went to Harvard, I co founded a publishing platform for fiction authors and through my education and consulting helped fiction authors make over a million dollars a year in membership income. After I graduated, I went to go work for Mr. Beast, the biggest creator on the planet. And throughout all these experiences, I've learned so much about how you can market your books and about the skills that the top creators in the world are using to reach more fans and grow their business. So there's some things contained inside of here that I think are truly groundbreaking and I'm so excited to be able to share them all with you. Now, one final thing before we get to the superpowers is I really want to share with you the framework of how to approach all of this, and that's with the book marketing system. I recommend you start here with a simple set of questions to help you determine what to focus on next to market your books and get more sales. Author Marketing Superpowers is about giving you the knowledge and tactics to market your books better. Unleashing all 50 superpowers at once would cause a cosmic calamity. This system helps you focus your efforts for the maximum impact. Now, the five essential questions. First, we start with who is your story for? This is where the elemental powers help us find our readers. Next is question number two. How will you share your story with those readers? We have another set of superpowers here called the teleportation powers which help us to share our story with the world. Then we have question number three. Are those readers interested in your story? And this is where we have our magnetic powers which help us to engage readers. Then question number four. How will you find a lot more readers like them? And that's where we have our expansion powers which help us to scale our readership. Then lastly, we have question number five. How will you turn your story into an empire? And this is where the command powers come in which allows to scale. Next up is how I'd actually approach using these cards with some special tips about how to use this audio. So first, what is your author's superpower? This is the mindset I want you going to these cards with looking for your superpower. You don't have to use all these cards, but can you find a few superpowers in here that you want to use? Odds are you'll find a lot more than a few, but a few to start with when be great so you can listen through this whole audiobook at once. You can jump around the different chapters in it if there is specific superpowers that you can't wait to hear. This doesn't have to be listened to in order, you just can listen to any part at any time. Some of the concept builds on each other, but it's again, it's not necessary to read it in order, just helpful to read it all at some point so you get the whole picture. Now what I also would love for you to do is think about how you can mix and match these cards together. If you had the physical deck, you'd actually be able to shuffle the cards, which is what I recommend authors do with the physical deck. But digitally you can still shuffle it right? You can still write down different powers and see which ones do I want to mix and match my next marketing campaign. So that's how I would approach using these superpowers. They're super fun and will hopefully help you discover through examples, through insights and foundational concepts how you can better mark your books. Let's get into Superpower Number Reader Lifetime Value RLV Elemental Power Find your readers the gross profit you receive from the average reader during their lifetime as your customer. Reader lifetime value is the most important metric to determine the health of your publishing business. High RLV means that readers are continuing to purchase more of your stories. You have a robust backlist of content and you can spend more money to market your books, thus growing your readership faster. Now let's look at the reader lifetime value equation. Essentially, RLV equals the gross revenue from an average reader over some time. You first want to calculate our RLV by finding your read through rate or how many people purchase one book and then buy the next book in a series. Step two. You want to multiply your income from each story by the read through rate for that particular story. Example, 50% of book 1 readers buy book 2 and 75% of book 2 readers buy book 3. Step 3 add average revenue per reader from merch courses and other products into your rlv. Once we do this, we have to also figure out how we can increase our reader lifetime value. There are three levers for this. First is to increase your read through rate. Reader Meter can help you with this. Next is to increase your pricing and third is to increase the number of products, series length, et cetera. Next up on our superpowers we have Story Mark Fit. It's an elemental power. Find your readers. The definition is when a story meets the expectations of a specific group of readers who have a history of buying books without story market fit. You may be writing a great story, but you likely have trouble finding where to market it. And when you try marketing your story, you likely have trouble getting readers to pay attention. Story market Fit gives you a framework to reduce this uncertainty and sell more books. To have story market fit, your story draft concept or published work must be marketed sustainably at a 3x return on investment, abbreviated ROI. You can calculate this by multiplying the number of readers you get from a marketing activity by the reader lifetime value you garner from that marketing activity. Then divide that by the cost of marketing your book. Ideally this number is above 3. Getting an exact science of this is sometimes difficult. These numbers can feel intimidating. First of all, in the digital downloads you get fiscal deck, I have a little template calculator that can help you plug and play all these numbers for yourself. But the most important thing to know, the most important thing I want you to understand is that story market fit and understanding, if you actually are able to market your books profitably is the most important thing before you go crazy and try and spend tons of money marketing your books because you might be putting your money into a money pit without knowing it. I've done that myself before. I had a series that I thought was great. I was getting people to go buy book one and I spent thousands of dollars, like 1500-2000 ads marketing book one. And I hadn't written book two yet. I didn't know what the read through rate would be and I just was hoping it would be good. And I came out with book two and the rethrate was pretty poor and it ended up being a pretty poor decision for me. I was okay. I ended up breaking even on the series with my ad cost. But when you count in the time and the stress it wasn't really worth it. I was not getting a 3x ROI. I'll tell you that. It was like barely a 1x. So you really want to make sure before you dump money and time and energy into marketing something that you actually have a story that can go the distance. And story market fit helps you with that. Now there's three components of story market fit. Number one is your stories read through rate and a read through rate above 50% is a good sign you have story market fit. Number two is your story's packaging. This is your book cover and description. You may have an issue here if your packaging isn't converting readers at a high enough rate to have that 3x ROI. When you factor in your read through rate and the third component of story market Fit is your target market, you may be reaching the wrong readers through your story and need to adjust your targeting the next superpower is story investor versus Day trader, another elemental power which helps you find your readers. Our definition here is this paradigm describes whether you invest in a long term readership that compounds over time or capitalize on a short term trend. And here's the deal. Most people think you have to pick one, but the smartest authors are astute long term investors while capitalizing on outlier trends in the short run. Thus, you must learn the skills of a publishing investor and a day trader to grow faster as an author. Mindset of an Author Investor Author investors understand the power of compounding. They know that by publishing stories for a specific group of readers for a long period, your readership can grow over successive launches and lead to a sustainable business. Author investors rely on consistent publishing to a specific audience, readership growth at every new launch, and continued sales of previously published books, AKA the backlist after each launch. Here's the mindset of an author day trader. Author day traders rely on exploiting market asymmetries to grow faster. Essentially, this means there's a trend or attention or demand for a specific trope, maybe a specific subgenre setting. And they're able to capitalize on it because not enough books have been created there yet and there's a voracious readership for that specific trend. Author day traders rely on identifying outlier books. These are titles selling a lot better than others in a genre incorporating tropes and plot dynamics from outlier stories into your own and then publishing before the market is flooded to exploit this increased reader demand and low supply of books. Now our next superpower is reader napping. It's another elemental power which helps us to find our readers. And the definition here is if you could steal readers from any author in the world, who would it be? The instinct is to say a massive author like Stephen King. Instead, it's best to practice reader napping with authors who overlap with your target readership as much as possible. For instance, if you are writing a hard science fiction book, do you really want the readers of a contemporary romance author? So here's how you become a reader napper in minutes. First, go to Amazon and browse the books selling inside the Kindle store. If you're targeting a different book marketplace or platform, you can search there instead. Number two is see what books are selling. Particularly browse genres and sub genres similar to the ones you write. Note Amazon nor anywhere else. The Internet has a comprehensive list of every genre imaginable, so get as close as you can. Number three is create a spreadsheet and document top selling books similar to yours. In this spreadsheet, catalog the author's name, the book, and the current sales ranking of the story if it's available. Number four is if you have trouble filling up this spreadsheet or most of the books you are reading out from have a low sales ranking below 10,000 in the Kindle store, you may want to adjust the genre you are writing. You want to ensure you write for big enough readership to support your career. And let me note, I made a huge mistake on this. I wrote my first series why Dystopian? And stumbled into readership because why Dystopian Happens to be a defined market of books now. I thought my next series, oh I'll write like this dystopian game lit mashup that was like a remix of Ready Player One but not really. Totally missed the mark of any market and I just couldn't for the life of me sell that book. And if I had done my research to try and come up with better comp titles, which is essentially what reader napping helps you do, I would have saved myself a lot of pain. So I want to save you that pain because I ended up writing six books in that series. It was fun to write. It wasn't fun for the bank account step Number five here and the last step of reader napping is if you include more than a couple of dozen authors on this list and most are selling well above 10,000 in the rankings, you may want to consider narrowing your targeting to be more specific. Again, our goal is here not to just look at the ultra bestsellers and figure out how to compete with the best selling. It's to figure out how to find your specific readers that you can have a monopoly in people over algorithms. This is one of my favorite superpowers. It's another Elemental power. And it's all about finding your readers. And this one's really focused on mindset here, which is readers first. Publishing is all about putting your readers first and then writing your story. Your readers are real people, not an algorithm to appease. When you write for people and keep their core desires at heart, you change reader behavior. And paradoxically, the algorithms of any platform you are publishing on will work in your favor since they are designed to respond to reader behavior. Now, I've had a few authors I've shared this deck with in beta and they were like, I don't know if I agreed the superpower. And I'll admit sometimes this superpower is really hard to agree with and internalize. And sometimes the algorithm does do funky things that don't necessarily mimic reader behavior. But here's the thing. If you spend all your time obsessing over the algorithm, you're taking away from all the mental energy and effort you could be putting in to making your reader experience better. In the long run, that's how you're going to win. So you should always be putting your readers first over the algorithm. I don't think that the algorithm is really worth worrying all that much about because again, if you do great by your readers, they buy your books, they tell people to buy your books, and word of mouth picks up. Algorithm does see that behavior and should go in your favor. Now, the core values of reader first publishing are this. Reader first publishing is not just about selling more books by focusing on what really matters. It's about amplifying the good storytellers do for hundreds of millions of readers. Value number one is one reader at a time. You don't have to go viral tomorrow. Every movement starts with one person. Value number two is connection over attention. Creating more books is great, but we don't have to drown our readers in content. Instead, put the extra effort into having your stories deeply connected with them. From your marketing to your packaging the themes inside. Value number three is giving is true. Having the free content you share with your readers has to be better than everyone else's paid content to build trust. Now our next superpower is the trust mode. It's another elemental power which helps you find your readers. The trust mode is the combination of market signals like reviews and social media buzz combined with individual reader experiences with your story that alert new and existing readers that you have great books. If a specific group of readers trust you to deliver a consistently great experience in your stories, then you will have a much easier time selling future stories and and other products to them, this is your biggest competitive advantage over the long run. There are three steps to build your trust Mode number one is identify who you want inside your reader kingdom and who they already trust. Sometimes we group readers by defying genre and subgenres. Other times we might group them by interest example cryptid lovers Crucially, we always want to understand which creators this group of readers engages with. It can be books, podcasts, YouTubers, et cetera. Then we want to create trust by having readers associate your stories with creators they already trust. Sometimes this involves getting influencers to review your book or doing swaps with authors. Other times it's showcasing a reader review in your marketing that mentions how your story is similar to another well known story. And the third step is to remain consistent. Surprise and Delight Follow through on your promises to your readers and stick to serving your community's core interests. Sprinkle in some extra surprises for an example. Bonus content to further cement your readers trust I want to throw in the idea here that everyone is giving the same surprises. Oftentimes everyone's running the same playbook. And if you're able to innovate and actually go the extra mile, the extra step to really serve your readers. It's going to go a long way. So get creative. How are you able to frame your reader magnet in a way that's more valuable to your readers? Is it taking something that could have been an audio story but reframing it around something that can now help your readers with sleep? A science fiction story designed to help you fall asleep at night? Or is it something that is able to relate to a specific group of people at a deeper level? Oh, this is a fantasy novel or this is a romance story for people who happen to love a specific sport. These are all things to think about in terms of how you can build trust. You can almost build trust deeper with people when you're able to speak to them and they haven't felt heard. So speaking to people who feel underrepresented in stories, who feel like they don't have the specific stories they're looking for, is a really quick way to build trust. Next up is Story Spy, another elemental power which helps you find your readers. It's a simple set of questions that allows you to see if a book is selling well or not, and why. So often we jump into new genres and begin writing a book without a fundamental understanding of what is already making stories in that genre work. When you follow the Story Spy steps, you have a simple framework to ensure you always understand the genre landscape you are entering. So how to Spy in Stories Legally, of course. Number one, get the numbers first, go to the book's product page online. Typically Amazon. Check out its sales ranking across ebook, paperback and audiobook. How do its relative rankings compare across formats? Is the book in Kindle Unlimited or is the author selling it on their own website or another channel? Number two, get the reader's response. Read reviews of the story on the product page, Goodreads, and any reader groups the author has. See what readers are resonating with. What do they like about the story? What do they love about the story? What are their frustrations with the story? And number three, get the experience. Join the author's mailing list and follow them on social media. See how they market their books and what readers respond to most. Go to the Facebook ad library and see if they are running any ads on meta and if so, what they are. Lastly, read their books with these elements in mind to see how it all works in practice. Now you can do this for multiple stories and spot patterns across well selling stories in your job. Another hack I'll just say is love looking at what sponsored products on Amazon are popping up. You can see what books Amazon feels are relevant to the book that you're on and go down a fun rabbit hole of finding more stories to spy on. So that's another really useful way to use Story Spy. Now our next superpower is the Reader Cities. It's another elemental power. The art for this one in particular is beautiful. So when you get your physical deck, enjoy this one. Reader Cities are the places to find your target readership online and in person. Communicating with one another, you can get the best intel on who your readers are and what they care about by visiting them directly. Unfortunately, no cities in the real world are just for readers yet. However, events and communities exist online and in person. Bringing together your target readers. Scour these events for insights and participate now becoming a member of a Reader City Number one First create a list of all the reader cities that contain your readership. This will include Facebook groups, discords, in person events, and more. The key to the word City is that these groups should be engaged and sizable. If no one posts inside the group of the event or community is small, it won't be a great fit to add to your Reader Cities list. Step number two is now that you have your list of Reader Cities, maybe somewhere around 5 to 10. Join these cities and take note of the books, themes and conversations people are having. The goal here is less to psychoanalyze your readers and more to passively develop a native understanding of what your city cares about. Finally, number three, participate in your reader cities. Comment on posts, interact with fellow readers Share posts from other authors promoting their work. The goal is not to promote yourself here, it's to build the foundation for long term relationships when you market your books later. Next up is Whale Readers versus Casual Readers. This is one of our last elemental powers which helps you to find your readers. Whale readers are the minority of readers who consume a majority of books, typically multiple per week. Casual readers are the majority of readers who consume a minority of books, usually around 10 books per year. Now the Whale Reader Business Model how to structure your business serving Whale readers? One is ripe for a defined genre or or sub genre that has strong existing book sales. Two is write lots of books, typically in a series focusing on writing in the same genre. And last is enroll your books in Kindle Limited and create book bundles or a similar model that makes it easy for readers to binge your stories. The Casual Reader business model is slightly different. How to structure your business serving Casual readers First is write a story that people want to share and or gift others to grab the attention of casual readers. Then create social media content. Target at readers broadly interested in your book's topics. That way you can bring in people who aren't just booktok people or Bookstagram or Booktubers, but actually bring in people who are more casually interested in books but love the topic that your book covers, love the genre that your book covers. Next is create products and services beyond the book that allow you to make more money per reader. This can be clothing education and we dive into this more in later superpowers. Now my big note here is that you can serve both Whale readers and casual readers by implementing learnings from both methods. So you don't need to just say hey, I'm only serving whale readers or hey I'm only serving cows readers. You can do both. You may have different strategies for serving both and that's great. And Write to Community the last of our elemental powers all helping you find your readers. Writing to CUNY is writing for a specific reader interest and letting that interest form the foundation of your marketing, branding and business strategy. Often referred to as Write to Market to CUNY is about discovering what readers care about and creating a story that serves them. The reader's interest does not have to be a specific genre. Instead it can be a hobby, passion, trope, or character journey. Bonus points for combining reader interests in unique and novel ways and hopefully this helps you to expand the definition of right to market and adds new dimensions into the process for you. Now, how to write to a community. First, pick one or a collection of interests and passions you'd like to write a story catered to. I think Silicon Valley is a great example of a TV show that did this. It's a comedy drama that's specifically about a startup in Silicon Valley. So it's, it combines the comedy drama with this untapped genre, at least at the time, which was writing about companies in Silicon Valley. So it's a great show and that's one way to actually combine these. Now step number two here is research the market. Find where folks with those passions are congregating and what stories and media they love. And thinking broadly about media, it could be games, movies, et cetera. And then finally step number three is draft the story and recruit beta readers from the CUNY you are writing for to get feedback. Now you've written to cuny, but how do you market to cuny? First, brand your story specifically to your reader's interest. Be loud and don't be afraid to signal to those who should not read your story. Example, a horror story for theme park lovers. There's actually this wonderful author, Deanna Roy. She has a whole series for pickle lovers, a romance series for pickle lovers, which is also incredible. And she has merch and all these fun pickle related things. That's just hilarious and incredible. Now number two here is build relationships with key people of influence in your community. Could be podcasts, YouTubers, or fellow authors. And finally, step number three is get your book talked about in the CUNY through paid ads, collaborations, content or events. Now we're on to teleportation powers, which are all about helping you share your story with readers. Now this first one is story suit, which are the elements that make your story feel familiar yet stand out to prospective readers so they want to pick it up and read it. The key to success in book publishing is creating packaging, marketing materials and a story that is familiar to a target group of readers, yet different enough in a way that intrigues them. In short, you want to stand out and be attractive to your readers. Now let's talk about the pieces of your story suit. First is your packaging. This is your cover and story description. Following similar designs to covers that have succeeded in your genre as well as similar descriptions is great. Your best spot to stand out here is in your story's premise. How can you hook your readers into a familiar yet unique adventure? Next up is your medium. How your readers experience your story through ebooks, paperback serials, a video on YouTube in story letter format, et cetera. Following the mediums that have proven successful with your readers is a great start, but your medium can be a great place to go beyond the book to innovate and stand out. Next is your message. This is the unique combination of characters, themes and plot points in your story, including most of the core tropes and character arch readers expect is a great idea. But where can you subvert expectations, surprise the reader, and give them a more delightful experience? Now your marketing channel. This is the channel or channels you use to drive awareness among new readers. It can be paid ads, newsletter swaps, paid newsletter promotions, content on social media, and many more. Leveraging, underpriced or underused channels to reach new readers can be a great way to have your story stand out. Now our next teleportation power is Author Mask and I love this one. An Author Mask is the who tells the stories you create in your marketing to readers. Now you might be thinking, I tell the stories to my readers. It's me. That's one option. But let's be honest, how many of us want to always be front and center in our marketing? What if putting on a different author mask can spark brand new ideas and experiences that we can create for our readers? The key here is that we can put on one author mask, take it off and wear another in a different circumstance. Now the five author masks. Our first one is the Neon Mask. This is you. You are the person telling the marketing story because all marketing should be a fun and entertaining story. You don't have to show your face, but you are the person doing the telling. Then there's the Phantom Mask. This is a pen name that tells the marketing story. The difference between a Phantom mask and a neon mask is you can develop elaborate backgrounds for a pen name that would be inauthentic if you kept your own character. Next up is the Avatar Mask. This is when you tell a marketing story from your character's perspective. Imagine a Facebook ad where the character's talking to you. Or better yet, a personality quiz you create for free. You think something like tally, so that allows you to assign readers to different characters to hear more from them on your newsletter, Q and social media. And then there's Dragon Mask. I love this one. Your readers and their experiences become the voice of your marketing story. This looks like encouraging and fostering spaces for readers can become a part of the creation. Think fan fiction, fan art and group mailing lists where readers can add content. Then is the Oracle Mask. This is you, but comes from the perspective of a guide along someone's journey for knowledge and transformation. This is when your marketing story will often involve advice and education in various formats for your readers. Our next Teleportation Power is Bookmarking Plan all about sharing your story. And what's funny about this is sure, by definition, this is the plan you have to share your book with readers and grow your publishing business. But the biggest mistake most authors make is having the wrong kind of plan. Instead of planning a mountain of marketing activities to promote your next book, you should focus on designing a series of experiments to teach you how to best reach new readers. So we're going to simplify and help you take your next steps that you can do the right things and not just a lot of things now the Best Book Marketing Plan Less is More this isn't about taking over the world or having your book become a New York Times bestseller overnight. It's about taking one step closer to growing your readership every day. Step one is to identify one thing you can do to reach a new reader with your story today. It can be posting social media, newsletter swap, going to an event, et cetera. Step number two is to write down how long it took to take the one step forward in marketing your book. Then track how much sales, newsletter signups, or any other goal for your marketing campaign. If step two shows minimal results, go back to step one and try something new. Note Sometimes you'll have to post several times on social media to see traction, so don't be discouraged. These steps are all about helping you find momentum as fast as possible. Then step three is double down on what works best and sell more books. Sometimes the best plan is no plan, but instead a simple way to get you started guilt free. And we'd love to see how you are marketing your books and help you inside the Facebook group Authoropolis and this link, along with any other links I mention in this audiobook will be included in the bonus PDF. There should be a PDF somewhere, or if not it'll be in the episode description depending on where you are listening to this audio. Now the next superpower is the publishing sales model. This is another teleportation power which is all about helping you share your story. Authors typically sell their books to readers in three predominant ways and each can be used to your advantage. How and where you sell your books to readers determines the best way to market them, the price point at which you sell them, and sometimes even the types of readers you reach with your stories. Picking the right sales model for you at the right time is essential for publishing success. Now here are the three publishing sales models. First is Kindle Unlimited. It's the largest subscription service for ebooks. Why? Enrolling your book in KU reduces friction for KU readers trying out new authors since they pay nothing out of pocket. The downside is that you cannot sell your ebook outside of ku, so it greatly limits your flexibility. A hint is that for many genres, Amazon is 80 plus plus percent of the ebook market and KU helps you platform how about going what the what here is to go Y means you publish your ebook and audiobooks across retailers, not in ku. Why is you reach readers and retailers with less competition and depend less on one platform. A big hint here is you can go wide with a story and NKU with another. Now for direct sales. What this is selling paid products such as books on your website or at an in person event. You would do this because you get paid out within days, get to charge what you want, keep all your customer data AKA you have their emails and you don't have to pay any retailer fees. My big hint here is don't replicate the retailer experience in your website. Focus on selling print books and higher priced products using software like Shopify. Now when you're first getting started you're going to have to pick a sales model, right? Because you can't be doing wide K and direct sales with one book. In a singular instance you're going to have to say oh I want to set up my direct store first. I want to go to KU first, I want to go wide first. That decision is ultimately going to be up to you. I think it's good practice generally for you as an author to understand one of the retailers. So to either go wide or in ku. So it totally depends on your approach here. But with one title you can be wide with audio and then selling your print book direct where you can sell that direct to readers on your website and keep a lot more the margin. So there's just so many different ways to go about it and what you really want to think about is for what products and at what moments is each option best for you. You can enroll your book from KU every 90 days, so that's actually a big help. So you can adjust series, cycle them in and out of ku. Likewise you can push things hard on your direct store and then push less hard over time. Generally I'm a big believer that every author does need to get into selling direct because that's really your long term business, your direct connection to your fans. But you should use and abuse these retailers for discovery. What's going to be best for you is going to depend on your genre. If you're writing children's books, it might not be as important to be in ku, whereas if writing post apocalyptic science fiction, it might be very important. So it's going to depend on your genre, which is where reader napping and story spy are helpful because you can see what other authors are doing and try and either use some of their strategies, inspiration or innovate and try and see gaps in the market that they're missing. This is another teleportation power all about helping you share your story and these are marketing activities designed to help you test your book in the market and get your initial readers. When building out your audience, we often think about how to scale our readership. But before thousands of readers purchase our books, we need to cost effectively get our first 10 readers. One time marketing events take the stress off needing a perfect plan and allow you to reach new readers cheaper and faster. So here are the types of one time marketing events you could do A virtual or in person event. Whether it's a local event in your area or an event just for readers of your genre online, these can be a great way to get in front of readers. There's collaborations you can do, newsletter swaps with fellow authors, having a book talker, booktuber or another online creator review your book, or even being featured as a guest on a podcast that ideally readers listen to. Now the next one is discount promotions, right? You can make your book free or low price for a limited time and use discount newsletters like Written Word Media and bookbub to promote it. Now before you dump loads of money into marketing your book, you should utilize one time marketing events to cost effectively reach new readers. Even as you invest in ads and content, one time marketing events should still be utilized to connect with existing fans and get yourself a one time boost in sales. Think holiday promotion, pre order bonuses, book signings, et cetera. One time marketing events I hope take the pressure off of you when it comes to marketing. Your goal when you start marketing is not to have the big grand plan that's going to make you a six figure author. Your goal when you start marketing is to do one thing at a time. These one time events that aren't necessarily scalable but will teach you what messaging works for your readers is your story a good fit for your readers and you need to take that pressure off the whole process and allow yourself to dive into these one time marketing events. Next is author Flywheels. I love the superpower. And it's another teleportation power about helping you share your story. And as you put more effort into a marketing activity, author flywheels help your growth continue to get bigger and bigger with time. So with marketing, there's a widespread myth that scaling means doing more work, spending more on ads, and putting more resources into something. But there's another way. By building growth flywheels such as content marketing, referral programs, even community, you will continue to grow faster over time, even as you put in the same effort. There's three types of growth flywheels. Number one is content marketing. As you create more content and publish it to social platforms and search engines, your old content continues to bring in new readers over time, just as your new content does. Number two is reader affiliate programs. So once you set up an affiliate or reader referral program, new readers recommend other readers to buy your books and follow you. Then those newly referred readers recommend new readers of their own. So many newsletter platforms already have this built in. It's a great feature and I love being able to grow through encouraging word of mouth with referral programs. And our last type of growth flywheel is community, right? The more readers you have engaged in cuny around a specific topic, the more valuable your CUNY is and the more it grows. Now, how to create a growth flywheel. Every flywheel must contain the following. A resource you put into the flywheel, for example, a new post on your blog, a desired output, for example, new readers finding the post through Google or maybe nowadays could be a chatbot like ChatGPT that's increasing, getting more and more search volume. And then lastly, you must have a resource that is amplified over time. So in this example, more posts could mean that you surface for more search results and you then reach more readers and have more growth over time. And a hint for all this is your flywheel may have more than three steps as you break each part into sub steps. So it's important to get really granular about what's in your flywheel. And I want to take a second to pause and share. Like flywheels don't have to just be related to growth. They could be related to your productivity in writing, right? For instance, you might be able to set up a flywheel where you're able to build more and more background information about your world. That makes drafting easier so that the more information you add to the draft, the more information gets added to your world bible, and then the faster you're able to write the next draft. Which adds even more information to the world Bible, makes your process more efficient. There's a lot of different ways you can think about these flywheels. There's flywheels of learning. You can be meeting new authors and networking, learning more about how to grow. Then you can be growing your readership, which then allows you to collaborate with bigger authors, which then allows you to learn more from bigger authors, grow your readership more, and collaborate with even bigger authors. You can see that's another flywheel. Look, you don't have to necessarily have the one flywheel that's going to change your life. The goal is just to be aware of what a flywheel is so you can start to see these things and intentionally design your activities in a way that actually creates a flywheel for your growth. The most common ones I see tend to be content. Building content on like a social media platform can be a great flywheel because it can give you the ability to have more readership over time as your old content gets views along with your new content. So that would work like TikTok, YouTube, especially YouTube shorts and YouTube long form videos are great with this. I also see another very powerful flywheel being your actual backlist, right? Funneling readers into your backlist and as you get more stories, having more surface area for readers to find you is another great thing. So there's honestly so many flywheels working in your favor. And when you were just getting started, you might think a big author like, how am I ever going to get there? But the answer is they probably have a lot of flywheels working in their favor. So it looks easy for them, but it's taken years to get there. And you can get there too. It just takes a while for these flywheels to really get spinning. Okay, now onto our next superpower, the testing trick. Another teleportation power all about sharing your stories. And this one is you can test if your books sell before you write them, and if your readers like your stories before you finish writing them. The testing trick is one of the biggest ways to save money and time en route to publishing success. For authors who have written for many years, they have learned a lot. But what if you could short circuit publishing and learn just as much as they have in weeks rather than years? So here's what a good test looks like. It has to be fast, right? It should take hours rather than days to execute. It should be cheap. Ideally, you should spend little out of pocket money to execute a book test. Get scrappy and then it should be effective, right? You test something that matters. Do readers want to buy and read your book? That's really it. So here are three kinds of book tests and how to execute them. First is the traffic test. Can you get readers to the sales page for your book? Here's an example of how to do this. You can spend $5 a day over one to two weeks on Meta ads and see if you can get readers to click on your traffic ads with your copy and images. If you can't get readers to click, then you're not getting any traffic to your book. And that test is something you can keep refining on. I often recommend starting with the traffic test. How you drive traffic to your book is up to you. It can be through swaps again, it could be through events, it could be through ads. Just make sure that you're not spending any money or time that you don't have. Keep things sustainable. The next is the packaging test, which is can you get readers to actually buy your book? So once you drive traffic to your page, see that they convert to your cover and packaging. And here's the deal. I want you to run the traffic test and then the packaging test without actually writing the book. That's the magic of the testing trick. So you can have readers pre order your story through your website since you're testing it and haven't written it yet. So you might feel comfortable starting out the wait list at first. Then I recommend you actually charging and having readers pay you money upfront. It can be at a discount to the normal book price. But you just want to see are people willing to pay sight unseen of the actual story in terms of they see the COVID they see the description, they're ready to buy. You want to know that you can do that before you really invest in the story. And if the test fails, you can refund your readers. That's okay. Next is the hook test. I love this one. You want to write the first few chapters and release it. See if readers finish those chapters or not. A big hint here is you can use platforms like Reader Meter to deliver stories and track retention. Or you can see the read through rate to purchase the next chapters in your story. So it depends on how you design this. I created Reader Meter to specifically help authors with this problem. It's coming out at the end of 2025 and the whole goal is to be a reader intelligence platform that gives you the insights you need to be able to say, oh, do I have a good story? And if not, where are people dropping off so I can make the story better. Now my big insight here for you that really changes things is I want you to focus on writing the first few chapters of of your story, the parts that really matter and seeing where readers are dropping off in it. So before you write the full book, start getting feedback in those first few chapters and start seeing if those are really right. And once you get those first few chapters to hit, then write the rest of the book and if you can't get it to hit, rewrite the chapters. And this is just a way to de risk the entire book launching process. And I love it. You can literally see how well a story is going to sell before you finish writing it. It's really simple. Again if you do a pre order you can then see if someone willing to go on and buy the next few chapters right. Just make it easy on yourself. Ton of fun here. Testing is so underrated, so underused and I think if you really dive deep into this you can speed up your learning process by 10x. Next up is Copy Cooker. This is another teleportation power all about helping you share your story and this is a simple system to help you write effective copy for your marketing Great copy for your advertisement. Social media and newsletter can sell your stories like hotcakes. Most copy sounds boring just like everything else out there. By being loud in our copywriting, we can attract the right readers to our stories and sell our books to more of them. Now here's the loud copywriting method. So great marketing is loud. L O U D okay. And your words are the best way to do that. Here are four simple steps that will empower you to write thrilling copy. So L is for listen what do your readers care about? What are they already paying attention to? Study Facebook ads, library, the Amazon ad copy of top selling books in your genre and the newsletter from authors in your genre. You can also study other creators, whether it be YouTubers, podcasters that are creating content in a similar niche to you. Then you want to think about you're open, right? Once you develop a good sense of what your readers care about, you want to open up with something that can grab their attention with something unexpected as soon as they begin reading. Great convention. Make your images and first sentence inspire awe in your readers. A little pause here is One of my favorite marketing books is Audacious by Mark Schaefer. It's an incredible marketing book. My other really favorite book is Fans first by Jesse Cole. He's the owner of Span of Banana. SO two just book recs if y' all want them. I think they're great authors. Those are great books. Now, why I mentioned them is because specifically Mark mentions an audacious that the one place to really make content go viral is by inspiring awe in people. Awe is the emotion. That's what gets people to share things. And there's a lot of different ways you can create awe on people. It could be through comedy, it can be through shock, it can be through uncomfortable tension. It's totally up to you how you want to inspire awe on your readers. Now, I, when I was working for Mr. Beast, got to see probably the biggest audience awe machine in the world. We use the word spectacle there a lot. When I was there, his average video gets literally over 200 million views. And it's usually all these wild challenges that are hard to believe are even happening. And that's really the Mr. Beast viral formula. And how he's able to go viral over and over again is just increasingly wild spectacles that get people to engage and get people to share. I'm not saying for you to give tons of money away like Mr. Beast, because you might not have tons of money to give away like he does. However, what I am telling you to do is think about how you can break the rules, break the mold, and do something that surprises your readers because that is what's going to get you marketing attention and that counts, even in your copy. We've all seen so many different book blurbs and book descriptions where we know what's coming next and we tune out. So again, how can you really grab their attention? Next is understand we want to make readers understand how our story will help them. Right after the opening, right after we grab their attention, we want to meet them where they're at and we want to show them what they will feel like when they read our story. Why is our story better than others? And last is do this is when we want our readers to take action. How can they get your story right now? And it doesn't have to be your story. It could be another product, be another service or experience. And also it can be for, for a free story, a paid story, whatever that call to action is. That's what happens when it's time to do. Now let's move on to our next marketing superpower, which is the promotion elements. It's another teleportation power all about sharing your story. And these are the three things that all marketing needs to be successful. Whether it's a short form video on social media or an advertisement. If you create great marketing content, one video or winning ad can net you tens of thousands of dollars. First, know that a winning piece of content often takes making lots of losing pieces of content and iterating over time. The good news is we will shorten that process for you using the three promotion elements. First is the hook. The definition here is it's the first part of your promotion that readers experience and makes them want more. There's a few types of hooks can have a visual hook which could be an image or a video. You can have text, it could be text in an image, a post or a headline. Or you can have audio. It could be music, sound effects or narration, probably paired with a video of some for and my big tip here is that hooks are the key to winning promotion. Test as many hooks as possible and study what hooks work for other brands. Oftentimes different hooks bring in people with different psychology. You actually can have multiple winning hooks that work on different types of readers who all will enjoy your stories. Next is value. The definition here is this is the meat of the marketing Content provides a useful and or entertaining experience to the reader. Types of value are humorous, educational, there could be discounts, freebies, an engrossing story. My big tip for you is to think about how to improve your readers lives by experiencing your marketing. That's a huge phase shift. When you're marketing, you're not selling, you're doing service for your readers. So how can your literal marketing content be in service and entertain your readers just in and of itself? Lastly is the cliffhanger. The definition for here is this is where you leave your readers wanting more and taking action to get it. Types of cliffhangers are an email, opt in. You navigate to the webpage to view content. It could be purchase, pre order, et cetera. And my tip for you is for your cliffhanger to have any impact, your value and hook must resonate with readers. Next up is reader sales triggers. This is another one of our teleportation powers, all about sharing your story. Sales triggers are things that push your readers over the edge. Take action you desire. Whether you want to grow your mailing list, sell a new book, or grow income from another related product, the core reader triggers will help you increase the excitement of your fans for your offer and lead to lots more sales. In short, a great trigger gets your readers to convert AKA take action more often. The four reader sales triggers are number one exclusivity when something is only available to people who take desired action. Bonus content for pre ordering or purchasing a specific story could be epilogue, short stories, et cetera. Making a special edition exclusive to a Kickstarter or your direct store. The next reader trigger is Limited Time. This is when something is only available for limited time. It could be a discount, a freebie, or promotion for just a few days. It can be a preorder bonus, a virtual event, or a limited edition merch that requires purchase before a specific date. Our next reader trigger is Scarcity. This is when there's only a limited amount of something available. So this can be signed paperbacks, merch and special editions as well. It can be a discount to the first 10 readers. There's lots of different options you can go with this. Next and our final reader sale triggers is Discount and Freebies. We've talked about these a bit. This is when a product or experience is available at a lower price than normal. Reader magnets are an example of this, which are stories that readers get for free exchange for joining your mailing list. Another example is discount and free book promotions on retailers. My note for you is you can include multiple sales triggers in the same marketing campaign. Just be sure to not overuse sales triggers as they will lose effect on your readers. Next up and it's our last Teleportation Power is Double Dips. I love this one. It's strategic move where where accomplishing one task has more than one way to benefit your author business. Strategic authors look for double dips everywhere in your marketing. Double dips are activities you can repurpose to help you make more money and reach more fans. Once you learn to think through what makes a good double dip, you will start seeing and creating them everywhere. Here's how to unlock the power of Double dips. So every double dip contains a primary benefit and then one or more secondary benefits for a great double dip they take little time and effort to execute. It's worth it just for the primary benefit alone. And it has multiple secondary benefits. Triple dips anyone? And luckily this doesn't involve triple dipping in nachos shared at a party. None of that. This is your own personal triple dip. That's quite fun. Now here's five great double dip ideas for authors. Number one is turn your writing into marketing. You can live stream your writing process, share early snippets of your books and document progress in social media. Mal Cooper does this with live streams on Facebook. She streams herself writing constantly. It's awesome. And there's a lot of other examples of authors taking this approach. Brandon Sanderson also does like a weekly update on his YouTube channel which is basically him sharing his writing process and what he's doing and it's marketing as well. Next is to turn your research into marketing so you could share your favorite books, anything you find in your research. Dissication on social media. Doing a lot of research into a Scottish Highland romance. Why not share some of the research you're doing? You could create a travel guide. You could create content that's going to engage readers who might then be interested in reading your book. Next is to turn domain expertise into a story. So if you have a day job in a specific industry, include it in your stories and make it a core part of your marketing. An example for this is romance. For software engineers, there could be plenty. I've seen urban fantasy with a focus on medical professionals. There's so cool stuff you can do here. Now my next thing is turn your fan engagement into marketing. Uniquely engage with readers at signings and Facebook groups and share screenshots or videos with their profession on social media. Now in my case, my unique double dip that I've done for the author marketing superpowers is I've created things like this cape that I'm wearing if you're watching the video version, a huge pencil that I gave away at a party authors dressed up in costumes for. We had an incredible author who won the big pencil. But I'm using this big pencil in ads. I'm using it across social media, pictures and really basically taking something that would have been just a gift to a reader and turning it into marketing promotion. Why not? So there's lots of different ways you can think about engaging with your fans and doing double dips there. My last one is turning your ideation into marketing. Why not share your new book ideas online, share your new story ideas, your new product ideas and see how people respond. Now that's it for our teleportation powers. Let's move on to our magnetic powers, which is all about engaging readers. Our next superpower is the Power Law. This is the rule that the top 1% of books drive over half of all books sold. Now to understand publishing means understanding what drives the power law. Since the bestsellers drive such an outsized portion of sales compared to the rest of books and many stick in the best on our list for weeks, months, years and sometimes decades. We have to understand what makes a book climb to the top of the power law. So books are high friction content. Books take a long time to finish compared to other forms of content, and people read fewer books on average than other content formats. Social signals and language network effects are the most powerful forces in book sales. When something is selling a lot. It is also being talked about and a lot of readers are enjoying it. This leads to more sales since people value recommendations from people they trust in real life and online. Furthermore, if your book becomes canon in a genre or specific group of readers, you can be the default recommendation when someone is looking for a specific story. For example, Hunger Games is recommended frequently as a y dystopian read now Publishing is made up of thousands of smaller power laws feeding into the overall mega bestsellers. So up to this point you may have dealt to feed it. How can I break in if the top selling books are so entrenched? The good news is that every genre, niche and audience in publishing has a power law. Billionaire Romance There's a power law there. Cultivation litrpg There's a power law there. The more targeted you get and which readers you want your story to gain mind share, the more the easier it gets to identify which trusted people and spaces online you need to insert your book to climb the power law. Now we're up to the Hero's Lair superpower. This is another magnetic power all about engaging your readers. Your most important asset as an author is your mailing list, AKA Hero's Lair. Your mailing list consists of reader email addresses that have opted in to receive updates from you about your stories. Typically, you contact a mailing list through a newsletter platform, which makes it easy to send emails over the Internet. Following our tips on how to manage and grow your mailing list. Manage your mailing list first, you need to pick a newsletter platform. The top five platforms I recommend for authors are Mailerlite, Beehive Kit, Substack, and Klaviyo. I linked to an article with a detailed breakdown in the description where you can find my full review of the five. You can find my full review of the top five newsletter platforms for authors. So next you want to create groups and segments inside your newsletter platform. Groups are based on how subscribers join your newsletter, whereas segments are based on how readers behave in your newsletter, AKA how often they open specific emails and other specific activities. Then you're going to want to create a signup form. This is a place where readers can learn what your newsletter is about and enter their email to join. Now you've got it all set up. But how do you grow your mailing list? First, you want to share your signup form. Include it on your social media bios in the back of your books and in the newsletter swaps you do with other authors. Next, offer freebies to encourage readers to join your newsletter. Offer a free story like a novella or bonus content. Just remember the freebie must be just as good, if not better than your normal stories. Typically, a freebie is a complete story arc or experience rather than a teaser and ties into the other books you're selling. Lastly is Growth Strategies, swaps to other authors, group giveaways, paid ads, and reader referral programs. These are typically available on your newsletter platform are all great ways to grow. Next up is Reader Journeys. This is another magnetic power about engaging readers, and this is the set of steps readers take from their first impression of us. Until they are loyal customers, we often put a lot of thought into the plot of our stories. What about the plot of our marketing? This is the core of a reader journey. How can we systematically take a reader from a stranger to someone who loves your stories and has put money in your pocket? It comes down to building an incredible reader journey unique to you. Here are the five stages of a reader journey. Stage one Is Genre Aware. These are readers aware that the kinds of stories you write exist. So the big question here is where will you find readers already in stage one? And if they aren't here yet, how will you get new readers to the stage? Or in other words, how will you introduce them to the genre? Stage two Is Story Aware. So now readers must know your story exists. So how are you going to let readers know about your story and how you talk about it? Think about the copy images and experiences you create. Stage three Is Story Started. How will you convince readers to not only purchase your story but begin reading? The TBR pile AKA to be read is your enemy. Stage four Is Story Satisfied. This is when someone's now bought your book and has started reading and likes your story. This is a great place to be, but we are not done yet. If someone buys a book from you once, they aren't a customer, they were a customer. This is where stage five comes in. Loyal reader. This is where we must develop experiences and communication that retain readers and encourage them to buy stories and other products from us continually. A note here in Reader Journeys is that I want you to think about your book marketing like you think about plotting your stories. It's so important to think about the reader experience first and to put your readers first always. We put a lot of time and attention into our books. But the thing is, as authors, our job isn't to write books. Our job is to entertain our readers. And if we start with that thought in mind, our whole process is going to look radically different, including how we market and how we present ourselves to our Readers throughout their journey with us. Now, our next superpower is emails to readers. This is another magnetic power all about engaging readers. I know emails get two superpowers that might feel unfair to all the other amazing things in authorship, but candidly, emails are so important. Like your email list is essential. And if you don't have an email list, as an author, I highly recommend you set one up. It can be free to get started on a lot of different platforms. You don't need to actually pay anything out of pocket, and you can start collecting emails and building your list. How to send emails to readers that supercharge your income. That's what this superpower is all about. Now first, the right number of emails to send your readers is every time you have something valuable to provide them. There's not a specific cadence, there's not too much or too little. It's just whenever you have something valuable to provide. Luckily, we could bucket all of this into automations, regular emails and playbooks for launching new books that allow us to market past, present and future stories to readers without headaches through the power of email. Let's start with automations to upsell new readers. So these ensure every new reader receives a sequence of emails that build trust, delivers their freebie, and give them a chance to buy books from your backlist. I don't recommend having crazy advanced automation start off just a few emails, one, maybe three at most, is good to get you going. But eventually you're able to start segmenting your list and you can use things like tally so to really ask your readers personalized questions that can then direct your readers into your mailing list, into your back catalog based on their preferences and what they enjoy. You can even market to them in specific ways and a specific copy tailored to them based on what you know they're interested in. Because certain books have different selling points to different readers. So go wild and the next thing is thinking about your new launches, right? And oftentimes I see authors send out like one email about a new launch. And I was so guilty of this. I would literally spend like a month writing a book and then spend 30 minutes writing my marketing email and be like, okay, that's it, onto the next book. And I would wonder why, like there wasn't much hype around my launches, like why aren't my readers super excited? Oh, that's right, you didn't do anything to make them excited. You didn't do a build up. So at minimum I recommend a 5 email launch sequence so that you can make as much money as possible from your mailing list at launch. One is a pre launch email. It's going to let your readers know fun stuff's coming. Then a launch day email, then an email sent a few days after launch, and then two emails on the final day of your launch campaign. And this should be the last day that you're offering any sort of pre order, bonus, exclusive, discount or other benefit for buying book. Honestly, this process is simple. You might think five emails is a lot, but it actually isn't that much to hit readers with. You'll be shocked that so many aren't gonna buy until they actually get it in their inbox multiple times because they might be busy the first time they see it. They need that extra reminder. So please do that for your readers. It's. It's a good thing. They want your book. Let them know about it, because want it now. Regular emails are emails in between product launches, in between stories and other things you might have for your readers where you just wanna keep in touch with them. And this is where it can feel so intimidating. What do we share with our readers? But these emails, they can include roundups, books you've been reading, updates on your writing progress, bonus tidbits, insights from your stories. Ultimately, the more you email your readers high quality content, the better. And once a week is a good goal. But many authors have great lists and email much less or sometimes even more frequently. Here's the deal. If you combine something like author masks with this superpower, we're going to start to have a lot of fun. So imagine sending emails from your characters to your readers, so they're the ones reaching out and updating them about things that have been going on in their world between the books. There's some fun things you can do here. And I would really think about layering in some of our other superpowers to add color to your emails. Next is testing new products. So when you have new story ideas, merch, or like other products you want to create, your mailing list is the first place people will go to. I personally love doing this. Once you start to build up your mailing list, you can test new story ideas with them first. You can see if they'll preorder your books first. All of the testing gets easier as you go along because you'll start to build an audience that literally makes the testing process easier. That's like another flywheel, the testing flywheel. So I love doing that and I recommend constantly testing new things before you make it because you want to serve your readers and serving your readers again isn't about writing a book, it's about understanding what they enjoy so you can go and create that now. Our next superpower is social listening. This is another magnetic power all about engaging our readers. And look, social listening sounds scary, but I promise it's awesome. It's all about observing who talks about your books and rewarding the people who support you. This is not reading every one star review. Instead it's about focusing on the positive things readers say about your books and showing your gratitude. It sounds simple, but when done right it can encourage readers to share your book, which will lead to tons more sales. How to do Social Listening Right the first step is to enter the channels where reader conversations happen. Join popular Facebook groups and discords where your readers congregate. Follow influential reading creators, booktubers, book talkers, et cetera and encourage fans to send direct messages and reply to every email you get from your readers. Step two is when fans share their love privately or or over social media. Praise them for it. Show how much it means to you. They took the time to read your story and reward them. Where you can do you have a bonus chapter or teaser for your next book you can share and hype them up. Step number three is sit back and enjoy as you readers share your story with even more people. Now you have just rewarded someone for giving praise to your work and the more they do it, keep rewarding. Making it easy for readers to share your stories is crucial. Encourage gifting. Buy one copy, get another copy discounted and repost your reader reviews so that people are encouraged to also review your book and then see how awesome it is. And if they haven't read it yet, want to go and read it. This is another magnetic power all about how to engage readers. A minimum viable story or MBS is when your story is ready to be marketed to readers to test its reader retention. One of the toughest things about authorship is how you know when to release your book. MBS clarifies when you're ready to launch your book and share future drafts of your story with the world. So when is your story an mbs? As soon as you have something that you aren't embarrassed to publish, are still a little scared to hit the button. I know this is nebulous, but I know so many authors who get stuck in endless revisions. I want you to get out of that and I'm not asking you to publish something that's super messy. Half scrabbled notes together from a first draft. Some of us write clean first drafts and that's wonderful. You might be comfortable publishing your first draft and sharing with readers immediately once you hit the end. And other times you might feel less comfortable doing this. And revisions are a great thing, but you need a point to press stop. And specifically, if you have the first few chapters of your book in a place that you feel good about, I encourage you to get feedback earlier rather than later. You will never know your reader retention before you share your books with readers, and knowing your reader retention is what can help you make your books better. So to make your books better, you have to share it with the world. So you're in this weird catch 22 where you pretty much have to start sharing it with your audience sooner than later. Thus, the goal with an MBS is to address issues keeping readers from turning the pages in earlier editions of your story. Or get your story to a point where you feel that your initial draft is engaging for readers. Then you're ready to start sharing your MBS with readers, get data on your reader retention and you revise your story to create a better draft. And this whole process is really why I'm building reader meter and what that whole platform's for, to really make this whole process super easy and streamlined for authors. Because I think the most important thing in marketing is actually the first steps in marketing of your story and that interplay between your reader experience and your story and using the data from your reader's experience and how long they're reading and what chapters are reading to make your book better. So is your story engaging to readers? Once your instinct says yes, you're ready to publish. It doesn't have to be perfect, just something that is likely engaging, hence viable enough. And if you are stuck in analyst revisions to make your story more viable, don't worry, your MBS is typically first released to beta readers before being published widely. Right? This is just the first minimum viable story you're going to start getting in front of. Readers always err on the side of getting feedback earlier rather than later. You can always make your story more engaging, but you need to see if others will read it till the end first. Now, minimum viable story is very much interrelated to story market fit. Essentially, you release a minimum viable story and you continue iterating that minimum viable story until it reaches story market fit. And then once you have story market fit, you're ready to really scale your marketing, which is what we're going to talk all about in our next set of superpowers. So hopefully this starts to make sense. How these superpowers play together. They're pretty foundational, and these next two concepts are going to dive into it even more. So this next superpower is reader retention, Another magnetic power all about engaging readers and reader retention is the percentage of readers who start your story that make it to a section of your story, for example, a page number or chapter for understanding reader behavior. No metric is more powerful than than reader retention. There is just one problem with current ebook retailers. It is impossible to get a representation of your reader retention. That's why tools like Reader Meter are designed to show your story's reader retention by allowing you to see exactly where readers stop turning the page in your stories. Retention matters because your reader retention determines how many readers complete your story and buy more stories from you. It's awesome if you get 10,000 people to purchase book one, but if only 1% of them finish book one and buy book two, building a sustainable author business will be challenging. Reader retention is useful in helping you see what specific chapters of your story readers are dropping off the most. Likewise, reader retention can differ based on reader profile or the likes and interests of the person reading your book. How to improve your reader retention? First, revise your story where retention rates drop the most to make your story more engaging to readers. Then change your marketing to target readers with different interests who are more likely to read through your story. And last, change your packaging, book cover and description so that your reader expectations are more aligned with their experience inside the story. Next is Retention Point. This is another magnetic power about engaging readers and it really builds off reader retention. So the specific part of a story where once readers get there, they are very likely to finish the entire book is the retention point. We all know the feeling. You're reading a story and you are slowly getting into it. Then all of a sudden you pass the point of no return. There's no way anything will get between you and the end, even if it requires pulling a few late nights. As you will see, the retention point is one of our most powerful marketing superpowers. The magic of the Retention point. Your goal when marketing is not to sell books. It's to help readers get to the retention point of your story. Here's how. Number one, make sure your cover blurb and marketing align with the first few pages of your story. Naturally, you will see the steepest drop off at the beginning of your story. Combat this by setting expectations in a way that builds reader trust. Number two is share your story up until the retention point for free with readers. If you have a hunch about where your story becomes truly unputdownable, then why not share the parts of your story before the retention point with as many readers as possible? And lastly, remind your readers to read your freebies more often than you think. Even if readers download your freebie and are on your mailing list, that doesn't mean they are engaged. Send an automation sequence to check in and encourage your readers to read your freebie. Okay, quick story time here. I've become so obsessed with retention because it's probably the single greatest problem I had in my author career. And then a power that I got to see. So powerful that it's created a multi billion dollar enterprise. Let me explain. When I first got started publishing, I was so focused on getting my books out, writing as best stories I could, getting feedback from beta readers, and again, I thought I was writing great books. My beta readers liked them. I got good reviews. If you look at Amazon, my books tend to have above four stars. My first book doesn't, but the rest of mine tend to have above 4 stars. I thought I was doing well. I thought my books were ready to be shared with a bunch of readers. So I started marketing and running Facebook ads and I started getting sales. I was like 5,000 in the store for a while and I was feeling really good about about myself, really drinking sick. And I was just going, okay, I'll start making money eventually. I was making back some of my money in ads, but I was not really profiting that one. I thought, ah, it's read through. My readers will get to book two eventually. They're not there yet. It takes them time. Weeks go by, months go by, and eventually had to sit back and realize they're not going to make it there. And I spent so much time and energy emotionally, financially, I felt just completely burnt. And it was one of the worst experiences of my life. I felt terrible as a writer. I'm like, the only explanation for me failing is that I'm a bad writer. And the truth is, I wasn't necessarily a bad writer. I just wasn't writing the most engaging stories. And that's okay. That is okay. I was having a lot of readers drop off in the beginning. That's okay. Here's my problem. I wish I knew how to make it better. I wish I knew what I could use, what data was coming in because my readers were saying it was good. I'm like, what chapter do I need to change? If I just need to go back and rewrite the first few pages, I'll go do that. They're dropping off in the second Chapter I'll go do that. I was prepared to do it all, but I didn't have any data. So that's where Reader Meter is unbelievably powerful. But the reason I actually came around to wanting to develop this came years later, five years later, after this experience. I was working for Mr. Beast and I was working in the strategy team, which is the data and growth team at Mr. Beast. I was the right hand man to the chief strategy officer, who's the right hand man to Jimmy, which Jimmy is Mr. Beast. And for those who don't know Mr. Beast, it's the largest video production company for social media in the world. It gets 3 billion views a month. It's insane. Hundreds and hundreds of millions subscribers and hundreds of millions of views per video on average. It's truly a machine like none other. And going on the inside, I realized how they do it. It's all a data science operation based on the retention their videos are getting. YouTube gives great data on video retention, and they're essentially in this constant iterative process that I got to see the inside of and help grow. And now I want to give you those same superpowers with Reader Meter, but also just its understanding of retention. Retention is so important. It's foundational to everything. And if you can nail retention, you basically have the ultimate cheat code to running a great author business. And so much of marketing is actually discovering who will be retained by your stories and what can you do in your story to retain them. And that process is really where like the first 30 superpowers are focused on helping you hone in the next 20 superpowers, which we're about to get into, are about scaling once you've achieved that. But once you nail that one thing, it can just be one story that changes your life, one story that goes, quote, unquote, viral. But you have to focus on that retention to do it. I'm so passionate about this topic. It's the superpowers that I'm most passionate about. Because the power that this has to unlock in the author industry is pretty much unlike anything else. It could totally reinvent how you think about writing books, how you think about your writing process. And again, I've seen this at the highest scale and I've seen what Mr. Beast been able to do and using this philosophy, was able to create, you know, the second biggest show on Amazon prime video ever, only surpassed by Lord of the Rings. Just insane stuff and incredible what has been accomplished. And I've seen the downside in my own personal career. Of not having that data and not really understanding and hyper focusing on this and instead thinking that my problem was a million other things when there was actually this one really important thing that was actually my problem. That's my soapbox. I'll get off of it. And if you're not on the waitlist for Reader Meter yet, definitely join. It's going to be an amazing product and I'm going to make it available at a lifetime fee for everyone too. No extra subscriptions to add to your life. Just a really fun tool that's going to make your author life a lot easier. And even before Reader Meter is launched, and even after, whatever you choose to do, remember retention. And remember the retention point because it's everything and you can see it like the first couple minutes of a video at Beats were way more important than the last couple minutes because that was where people dropped off so much focus and attention went into those first few minutes. And you should be thinking about that same thing in your book in the first few chapters of your story. It's like what agents do, right? I obviously focus mostly on helping self published authors. I love all authors, including if you're hybrid or trad published and especially if you've gone the rabbit hole of querying agents just how important it is to make sure you get your query right. But more importantly, get the first few pages right, the first chapter right. That's so important. Hooking people in. And what I've found is you need actual data on how readers are experiencing that and if they're actually sticking with you, that is the real insight. Okay, so now for our next superpower. Don't shill your story. This is another magnetic power all about engaging your readers. So when you shill, you constantly share something to the point becomes annoying and loses impact. When we shill something, we turn our brand into a billboard without providing our readers any value. People don't have a reason to listen to us and our ass of our audience become empty. Too many of us try to sell our books by asking readers to buy our stories. The real way to combat this is to build trust in your audience. Giving is true. Having the opposite of shilling is giving to your readers. When you share content online, this is entertaining and valuable to readers in and of itself. If you have trouble figuring out how to do this, ask yourself which creators you consistently enjoy content from. What can you give to your readers that would build trust with them and grow your audience? Is it book recommendations and detailed reviews in your genre? Is it great stories native to the platform they are already on video, web stories, educational blogs, et cetera. Make sure whatever you give away is better than the paid content most others create. Make sure your marketing in and of itself is better than the paid content most others create and attract similar audience that would enjoy your books. This is how you really build trust and don't be afraid to promote. You deserve to be paid for your stories and should ask your readers to buy your books directly. You deserve to be paid for your stories and you should ask your readers to buy your books directly instead of asking them constantly. The key is to build hype and provide value 80% of the time. That way don't exhaust people who may just not be ready for it right now, but will be in the near future. So now we're onto expansion powers all about scaling your readers the reader Growth Engines. These are the scalable marketing methods you can utilize to grow your readership. Sometimes it feels like there are a million different ways to market our books. In truth, there are only three ways to market our books that can scale to thousands and even hundreds of thousands of readers. Once you reach story market fit, it's crucial to unlock the power of the reader growth engines. The three Reader Growth Engines Mastering one reader growth engine is enough to get you to six figures and even seven figures in income. And honestly, one of the biggest mistakes I see authors make is trying to master all the reader growth engines, trying to do every little thing or trying one thing out. Maybe it's Amazon ads, maybe it's TikTok, and when it doesn't work in the beginning, immediately jumping to something new, then jumping to something new and then jumping to something new rather than trying to really stick to one engine and build and refine it over time. The first reader growth engine is content marketing. What it is when you create content that is posted on social platforms and gains discovery algorithmically. Why it's scalable is as you create more content, your old and new content continues to reach readers and typically your audience for your content will build so you get more reach over time. Number two is paid advertising. This is when you pay to reach the audience of a platform or person. It's scalable because as long as your marketing is profitable, you can use the same creative over and over again to get millions of impressions across platform and ideally lots of profit. Now number three for a reader growth engine is collaborations. This is when you reach the audience of someone else by working with them, usually in exchange for giving them access to your audience. It's scalable because you can collaborate with dozens of creators or even a few really large ones that can help you reach millions of readers. And Our next superpower is Marketing fuel. You only need one marketing channel to reach scale. Why not make the marketing you invest in fun and energizing? This superpower is all about giving heat you permission to switch up your marketing when you aren't feeling inspired and double down on the things you love to do. Is your marketing fueling you? Ask yourself these three reflective questions. Number one, what platforms do you spend the most time on? What marketing seems to have the greatest impact? Why? Number two, how often do you spend marketing each week on average? What typically are you doing to grow your readership? And number three, do you enjoy these activities? Why or why not? If you find you are spending more time on the things you don't enjoy than marketing you do enjoy, then shift your time toward the things you enjoy. If you don't enjoy any of your marketing, then try out new channels and approaches. Remember, great marketing is storytelling and great stories are creative and entertaining. Next up is content canon. This is another expansion power all about helping you scale your readers. The more marketing content you create and the faster you iterate on that content, the higher the likelihood you generate tons of sales for your books. It only takes a few winning pieces of content to change your life. Whether it's Facebook ad, an Instagram reel or any other promotion, one piece of content can generate tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of dollars. The content cannon is our winning weapon. Firing your content cannon Number one Choose what medium to create content. Newsletters, audio, podcasts, short form videos, et cetera. Number two make content as much as possible. Start simple. Number three Iterate on what is giving you the most views and engagement. Study what is working for others in your niche and beyond. Adapt their strategies to your own content and make it better. Number four Turn the content that performs best organically into paid advertisement. Expand their reach and make even more money from. Remember, a winning series must have winning marketing content. Next up for our next superpower is the Swap Secret. This is another expansion power all about scaling your readers. Turn an average swap into an incredible marketing campaign for you and other authors by creating experience readers actually want to be a part of. Most swaps are not effective. Most focus on list size and doing as many swaps as possible versus engaging with readers and making something that stands out in their inbox. Here's three ways to create excitement around book swaps. Number one is discounts and freebies. This is the most common way authors do swaps, often overused and doesn't get people emotionally bought into your story. Free is a commodity, not a selling point. Number two is reader events. Create joint giveaways of unique prizes, live streams, book clubs, and more. Give readers a reason to participate. Number three is collaborative content. Create bonus content, short stories, or even integrations of characters, settings and other IP elements. In short, give readers of another author a reason to read your story because it already contains elements they engaged with with swaps. Make sure to always follow through on your promises and be kind to other authors. It's as simple to do a swap as simply asking a fellow author. Now, I want to share with you a little case study that is incredible. So a few top YouTubers that I've been able to work with a little bit behind the scenes have done something awesome that I know can be adapted to the author world, which is they figured out on the language tracks for different languages. Because you can have videos dubbed in various languages, you can watch one video in English on YouTube and also watch that same video in Spanish. It's just a different audio track. Obviously the same person might not be fluent in English and Spanish. They'll have a different person voiceovering the Spanish audio track. This is very common. A huge part of the voice acting industry is dubbing. So instead of having who might be a super talented voice actor act specific character's part in a video, they'll have someone famous to it, another famous YouTuber. And that sort of collaboration really gets their fans involved because they're like, we want to hear his voice, we want to hear him act this on the specific video. And there can be an incremental uplift of millions and millions of views on a video from that. So you want to think about what are ways you can authentically engage what another author's fans are interested in into your story and obviously doing it in a way in which you have their permission. Like obviously you're not just ripping off a creator's voice and putting it, you know, as the voiceover in your video that's nuts and terrible and violates IP laws. Instead, like work with them, collaborate with them and see how you can bend the rules of what a collaboration should be to make something better for your readers. Now our next superpower is the launch code. This is a simple process to help you launch anything in your author business faster and more effectively. It's easy to get cold feet and sit around with a great story or product for months without hitting launch. The launch code gives you the playbook to launch something fast and build hype. If it works well, then you can double down into your marketing. If it doesn't meet expectations, go back to the drawing board and create something new. Now the Easy Launch Method there's three key rules of easy launching. Rule number one is you must launch early and often. It's better to get insights from the market about a potential story or product before you create it. Rule number two is launching must be simple. It's more important to launch in the right direction than make the most noise. And rule number three is launches must be fun. We need to make sure this process is not something we dread but is an exciting challenge. And here are three steps to easy launching. Step number one is the pre launch. Set a goal for how many people you'd like in a waitlist before you deem creating the story is worth it to you. Now market your waitlist and ensure you can get people to sign up with their email. Step number two is a soft launch. Now you are ready to accept payment for the story. Your goal is to share it with people on the wait list and see if they enjoy it. Step number three is the big launch. Now you're ready for a bigger marketing push. Share it everywhere you can. The key is to invest time in step number one, trying things first so you can press the big launch on the right story. Don't hit the big red button too early. Have fun. Pre launching and soft launching are a lot less stressful than you think. Now next up is the Invisibility Cloak. This is another expansion power all about helping you scale your readers. So one of the sneakiest ways to market your story is when readers talk about your books in online communities AKA Grassroots marketing. Is it an ad if no one knows it is? I'll admit this superpower in the wrong hands is nothing short of villainous. The Invisibility Cloak allows you to take the passions of your fans, amplify them in the right spaces to reach more readers. Now how to get readers talking about your stories everywhere. The foundation of grassroots marketing campaigns is that there must be a specific story or product. Readers will be sparking conversations around. There also has to be a list of targeted communities, comment sections or other online forums you want the conversation to take place in. And lastly, you have to have a way to recruit according to group of people to talk about your story. Typically this will be your existing fans so that these are authentic conversations. Next is how to run a grassroots campaign. Build authentic relationships with real people, real readers. Then send them the story you want them to talk about either digitally or physically ahead of when you want them to talk about it. Once the story or product is live for the entire world to experience. Have the people you sent your story to earlier talk about it online. Crucially provide them with with places you want them to post about your book, communities, et cetera, and ideas for messages to make it super easy for them to spark conversation. So this is a lot like a street team. The key thing I want you to remember here is that a small group of people who really are invested in a part of what you're doing can go way farther than a street team of 10,000 people. Likewise, you really want them posting in communities, these online Reddit and Facebook groups, and also discords to a certain extent as well, a really powerful place to spark these conversations. So you're deliberately having them share these posts and their conversations and asking questions about the book, sparking fan moments, sharing fan art inside of the reader cities that you found for your story. So this next superpower is freebie fun. It's another expansion power all about scaling your readers. And this is a framework for giving away freebies in five proven categories of freebies that help authors grow their audience and business. It's not enough to simply give something away for free. Ever tried to give away a used toothbrush for free? Probably would struggle with it. We need to give something away that our readers actually want and that build trust with them that our paid stories are amazing. Freebies are something that everyone gets for free. Who takes desired action to typically signing up for your mailing list so that you can later market them as paid products. There's group promotions. You can work with other authors to give multiple stories away for free to attract readers. You can also use freebies inside of paid books and retailers. Encourages readers to sign up for your mailing lists and get bonus content. You can also use freebies for advertising. You can use them literally to grow your mailing list. People can opt in and get your freebie and you can run an ad to that landing page. Now there's five types of freebies. Full length digital books, audio or ebook bonus content, take notes from my characters, et cetera. There's events, virtual cons with creators in your genre. You can do a short story or novella. You could also do just access to a community of like minded readers. The most important part is to make your freebie an incredible experience and to work with other authors who are also committed to doing the same. If you're doing a group promotion with some other authors and maybe you're all sharing a freebie Together and building your list. That's amazing. There's some incredible services that allow you to do that and to actually grow your list together. The problem's this. If other authors don't have good freebies, they might inadvertently lose trust in readers who won't even make it to your book because it's love is. Ah. All those books from that promotion weren't very good. I tried out one or two. They, they weren't for me. So you want to make sure you're working with people who are really committed to creating a great experience for readers who will enjoy the type of books you write. Like, it's probably going to be tough to make the same promo work for horror and steamy romance possible. Actually, that maybe is more possible than other ones, but you get my drift. Now another thing I want to mention is that freebies also are a commodity. Like imagine if you are walking through a market, right, and there's a hundred people there, all giving away free things, but they're all giving away cheese. This one has their flavor of cheese, this one has that flavor of cheese. But after seeing a couple, you're like, I don't want any more cheese. I'm done with cheese. Versus you walk into a market and instead of it all being cheese, you've got chocolate, you've got fruits, you've got different clothes that you can get samples of makeup. All of a sudden you're probably going to take free things from everyone. So how does this impact you as an author? Turns out you can think of all of us authors offering freebies. Like one ginormous market. We're all screaming at readers, come on, grab my thing. And they're all like, yeah, I'm good. I don't, I've seen that a hundred times already. I don't need more of that. How can you create something unique in your freebie that stands out to readers? How can you put them first and really bend the rules of what a freebie even should be? So that your magnets a no brainer for them to pick up. They're so curious. They have to see what it's all about. This is a key superpower and you'll see if we layer the freebie superpower on some of the superpowers I'm about to talk about in just a bit how really wild and awesome this can become. So our next superpower is the paid ad system. And this is another expansion power all about scaling your readers. And this is just a simple and effective way to test run and scale paid ads. Across every major social platform. It doesn't have to be scary. You don't need a thousand dollars course or thousands of dollars to do it. You just need a simple way to get started. The following are the key terms and steps you'll need to get started and eventually succeed on nearly every paid advertising platform. The key concepts of paid ads first is CPM or cost per meal. It's how much it costs on average for 1000 impressions on your ad. The lower the CPM, the more relevant your ad is to your readers. So if you have a high cpm, test new images and copy. Then there's CTR or click through rate. It's what percent of people click on the ad. If you're running a traffic ad, then the platform will optimize for clicks Budget this is the money you allocate to be spent on ads. Start with a small amount you can afford to lose. Then roas. This is how much revenue you make per ad dollar spent. It's tough to get an exact number here, but pixels help to help you track who buys your product after seeing an ad over a set period of time. Now there's four steps to successful ads. Step number one is choose one platform to start on. Most likely it will be meta ads. Number two is create many variations of copy and images for your ads. Use the Facebook ad library to see what ads other authors are using. Number three is go live with your first campaign. You don't need to have specific targeting. Let the AI of each ad platform find the best audience for you based on the content. Make sure your ad aligns with your story. Step number four is iterate and increase the budget. Be patient, your budget will get allocated to the best performing ads. No need to turn any ads off. Instead one work to create even better ads utilizing data on what is working. So first, ads are a huge juicy topic and I think a lot of us can get overwhelmed and not want to dive into ads. Like I don't have 20 hours to learn about it. I'm not going to lie to you and say that this card's giving you all the information you need about ads to be successful. What I am going to tell you is it's enough to get started. It's enough to play around on those dashboards. It's enough to fool around creating an ad yourself. And as long as you are spending money that you can afford to lose, start small. 510 budget a day and only do it if you can afford it. If you can't, then ads can be something you might want to approach later. There's many superpowers to utilize. You don't have to utilize this one right now. But with all this said, I really love when you can take a story that's already reached story market fit, create content about it and post it organically on social media, see if that gets traction and then use that content after it already gets you sales to run paid ads. That way you're like using the money you've already made from that content to fund ads against that content and then get your testing that way. So that's really how I like to do it. I think we can sometimes overcomplicate ads. And to be candid with you, I know many seven figure authors running ads spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year who they're checking their ads dashboard every once in a while. Like every couple days. They'll look at it, they'll glance it, they'll make sure it's okay. They might spend a couple hours a week max maintaining it. Sometimes it's less. On a good week, they might spend 20 minutes just checking up on things. So I don't want to make it sound like it's easy to run ad, but it's also not impossible. And a lot of it's just literally finding out what is the winning copy in images that work for you. And luckily you can test those same winning copy and images and videos on social media for free and see if it starts to get you the correct readers. And obviously ads will amplify their impact. So again, that's just how I think about approaching this. Don't spend money you don't have. But if you do want to get into ads, don't be intimidated and think you need thousands of dollars to start or hundreds of hours. Of course knowledge you can get started with just this card. And that's why this superpower is here to help you. Now next is the infinite reader list and essentially what this is. It's a marketing strategy that allows you to make a profit on your ad costs immediately, allowing you to advertise and grow your mailing list with no money out of pocket. This is the holy grail of bookmark. You get to scale your advertising spend as high as it can profitably without spending any money or very little out of pocket. This is the power of liquidating your ad cost up front with the right upsells to readers. Now make your infinite reader loop. This is an advanced tactic for stories with story market fit. The goal is not to pay out of pocket for ads. This means putting our advertising costs on a credit card and paying it off at the end of the month. So there's no interest. I know for a lot of folks, that can sound wild. That can sound like a ton of risk, and I totally get it. So if the that's you and this stresses you out, you do not have to utilize a superpower. But some of you listening to this are going to be feeling a light bulb go off and be like, dots are being connected here that I've never heard connected before. And some of you may have heard this concept elsewhere, which in that case, welcome to some fun little review. What we want to do is before the date our credit card payment's due, we want to profit from the rest of our reader loop. Hence paying no money out of pocket. Essentially. Let's say you start your ads April 1st and your credit card bill is due May 15th. Your goal then is on whatever spend you have on that credit card bill, whatever ad spend you're making back the money you spent before it's due on the credit card. That way you're not paying off any interest, right? You have no interest payment. Your credit score actually goes up because you're making your payments on time and you're able to even collect points that could be used for airlines, miles, all these types of things, all these benefits. It's again, a great thing, but it comes with risk until we prove our reader loop. So please don't spend money too quickly and don't spend any money that you initially can't lose. Because if your reader loop doesn't make any money back, then you're just delaying your ad payment for 45 days. But again, if we can get your reader loop working, this is incredible, then this is a great marketing strategy. Now, you might be asking, what does a reader loop entail? And first, you just want to create a freebie you will give away in exchange for reader emails. And then an upsell you will share with readers right after that freebie. Essentially, they'll enter their email and the success page they'll be redirected to a new URL. Could be a page in your existing website. And your goal is to upsell them to something connected to your freebie. That way, readers convert at a higher rate and lead to more profit. Huge note is that you must be selling direct to readers using a platform like Shopify for this strategy to work so that you receive income from your upsell before your credit card payment is due. Amazon holds your money for 60 days. So even if you make money on day one on Amazon, they're going to pay you back after your credit card payment and then you'll get interest, your credit score will go down and that's just a terrible idea. So you have to be selling direct on typically your own website using something like Shopify where you're able to actually capture that value using thing. We're actually able to capture that payment and get paid upfront well before your credit card payments. So some key examples of reader loops are a free book, one in series with an upsell to a series bundle. This could be digital or audio. You could also do a free ebook with an upsell to an audio or a physical book. And that's especially great for authors who are just getting started, might have a ton of books. Mind you, the higher priced your upsell can be, the more wiggle room you're going to have in your ad cost, right? So if you're spending let's say 30, 40 cents to acquire an email, if let's say 3% convert to your offer your upsell, then all of a sudden to break even, if you're getting emails, we'll go at 40 cents. All of a sudden you need to make $12, whatever upsell you're selling in order to actually break even on this funnel and get those emails effectively for free. And then you could grow your list and sell them products later down the road and that list will keep making you money and you basically can grow your list with no money out of pocket. That's not impossible. Mind you, that's not impossible, but it's just something to think about. So as your pricing changes, you want to map out what your conversion is going to look like. And luckily as part of the bonuses for author marketing superpowers, you can get physical deck plus a bunch of digital bonuses that allow you to build your own reader loop builder so that calculator you can get it's available linked in the episode notes somewhere. And this next superpower is called social hacking. This is another expansion power all about scaling your readers so you can tap into audiences much larger than your own. By capitalizing on bestselling stories and trending topics in your marketing, you can reach more readers faster and cheaper by sharing content about things they are already talking. You might not be able to get Brandon Sanderson to post about your next book, but you can still reach his fans with your message. Here are three ways to social hack your story. First is create content featuring best selling authors and stories your readers love. Want to reach readers who love cozy mysteries? Then create a video blog or post featuring the top 10 cozy mysteries. Want to reach the readers of a specific author? Then share that your story is a great fit for their fans in your advertising or create a review or hot take on one of their bestselling books. Just make sure to be respectful here. As always, Strategy number two is create content about trending tropes and topics related to your story. See a movie or news topic trending, create a video about it and tie it back to your book. Please be tasteful here and don't try to make light of tragedies and tragedy. Number three is get people you care about talking about your stories by wowing. Send an incredible gift package of your book to an influencer so they can open it online. Send someone a super personalized creative email to introduce yourself. An example of this is Inner Excellence by Jim Murphy being read on the sidelines by a player during the NFL playoffs. And mind you, this was not intentional. It wasn't necessarily social hacking because it wasn't deliberate, but it shows the power of what happens when you can combine your story with some cultural event and really draw a lot of attention to it. Now one thing I want to be really careful about is you don't want to necessarily take social hacking too far. I've been known to go pretty far with it. It's worked out for me. So I want to share this story as a inspiration to you, but maybe don't deliberately follow my steps. I'm not necessarily recommending that, although it has worked for me. When I was back in my YouTube days, I literally bought a bus, road trip the country with my roommate and dropped out of Harvard for a while. My mom was unhappy to create live streams of my life playing manhunt and scavenger hunt in different US cities. They've unhinged. We actually managed to make a decent living doing that for a while and through that whole process I ended up being obsessed with social hacking and connecting with top creators and getting them featured in my videos because that made for a good title and thumbnail. So I did some wild things. I ended up ordering a keg and I was not 21 at this time, I was literally 19. So I had to get some random guy who lived in our Airbnb. He was in another room in it. He went to the store with us, we got a keg and we went to the Sway Boys house where these famous tiktokers rolled up. Did not even know them. Showed up outside and basically were like we have a keg for you. And they were like yeah, this is amazing man. Let us inside. It was hilarious. Ended up kayaking to Airx Island. He's a rather large YouTuber and I gave him a cake when he was doing his 1 million subscriber live stream celebration and asked him for an internship and it worked out and I ended up being featured in a video with him that got nearly 20 million views. So obviously my social hacking is extreme. I can't recommend it at all. But take what I'm saying as inspiration cuz there's some wild things. And likewise I also featured on the Author Sidekick newsletter. Essentially someone who created a video of making special edition books for Brandon Sanderson. It was like these incredible beautiful custom special editions and she ended up getting over a million views in that video. A lot of them. Brandon San Readers imagine, you know, having a fantasy book and being able to build your audience, your awareness by a million plus people. Huge amazing stuff. Okay, so now let's go on to our last expansion power all about scaling your readers called Short form Video System. And this is a step by step process to help you plan the production of videos that will make your books go viral on social media. You no longer need a camera or editing team to make videos on the Internet, just your phone and Capcut, which is a free app. And you can create videos that reach millions across Instagram Reels, YouTube shorts and TikTok. How do we know what should be in our short, usually under 60 second videos? Luckily we have the short form video system. First, divide your video into segments. A video can have as many segments as you want, but generally each video has three segments. The hook what grabs readers into the video. The value the core of the video, whether it's informational, comedic or narrative. The cliffhanger. A surprise at the end of the video that makes a viewer want to rewatch it. Then for each segment of the video plan out your script will be said by the narrator or any characters in the video, your sound, your music or sound effects and use trending sounds because that's a great way to engage people faster. And then your shot. This is like what the visual will be, who or what's in it and then any on screen text. Will there be any text elements on screen and if so, what? So note is with writing books you don't need to follow this rigid of a structure. The goal is that you can use this structure to make it an entertaining experience for your target readership. If you want another bonus, it's a short form video system template. You can get that by grabbing the physical deck. It's a bonus. You get along with the physical deck so you can check that out. That'll also be linked in the description here. And I love creating short form videos. I think there's so much opportunity for authors to use a lot of other superpowers here, whether it be reader napping, story, spy, et cetera, and applying it to content and trying to see what content's trending. Well, what are you able to do to be able to actually get in front of more people and then you can amplify all that through paid ads. Ah, we're starting to see at this stage of superpowers, all this stuff come together and it's really exciting. And with that we're going to move on to our last category of powers, which is Command powers. All about scaling your income. And our first command power is Reader nurturing, which is continuously earning the trust and attention of your readers is what will grow your forever readers, loyal customers of your publishing business. To nurture a positive relationship with your readers, you do not need to communicate with each one individually. In fact, the best way to nurture your readers is is surprise and delight them while continuing to deliver on your brand promise. Now there's three steps to forever readers consistently delivering on your brand promise. Your brand promise is the payoff readers get from your stories and the reason they enjoy your books. For every author, this varies. However, when you know who your readers are and what they want, your core job is to remain true to those desires. Number two is provide suppress to your readers. Surprises are one of the best ways to foster loyalty. You don't need constant surprises. Instead, think of one to two extra things you can do for your readers each year. An example is setting up an automation that asks readers for their birthday and delivers them a surprise short story on the day. Number three is do what others won't. People want to feel cared for even if they only know you by your pen name and you've never shown your face. Be willing to go the extra mile to serve your readers. An example here is doing fan pricing for new releases where you discount them for one day for fans who can't afford the normal price. Another example is adding ways for fans to personalize their stories. Think special editions where the names of characters in the book and more can be customized. And this is all made possible through Lulu's Print API, which is a print on demand company. Really cool stuff. There's really endless options here. Just get creative and put your readers first. Now our next superpower is the reader revenue models. This is another command power all about how to scale your income. These are the core ways your publishing business makes money. How do readers pay you? And for what? There's Kindle Limited. There's plain old selling ebooks and audiobooks. These are wonderful, but I want to expand your mind. What other ways can you share stories and experiences with readers in general? More immersion into your stories means more revenue. For example, think about how much we pay for physical books or games compared to ebooks. Probably pay more for games and physical books compared to ebooks. That's because these media formats tend to lend themselves to more immersion. They don't have to, but they tend to. Now here's how you can immerse your readers in profit. There are infinite possibilities, but the goal is simple. Sell the most expensive thing you can. Following are some examples of different reader revenue models. Moneymaker number one is physical books with print on demand services you can sell print books without ever touching. If you made your digital content super accessible, how would you incentivize people to buy the physical book? An example is Tillie Walden's digital comic on a Sunbeam is available for free on her website. Once people read it, they want the physical copy. Moneymaker number two is other story formats. Story letters such as David for Gut Scare Mail, interactive stories using twine, serialized fiction podcasts like the Magnus Archives. You can sell early access to these stories, access to future stories and subscription or stories in unique format at a premium. Moneymaker number three is products and services. Book boxes filled with goodies your readers will enjoy like Willow Winters does, or chatbots for your readers to interact with your characters like on the Character AI platform. If you are interested in exploring all of this more deeply, you can join the Waitlist for the next beyond the book accelerator at BeyondtheBookAcademy. Com. It opens up twice a year and it's an incredible program that walks you through how to discover who your audience is, be able to build a world around them of different products and unique ways to tell stories and market to them. And then it actually has you take it into action with group coaching and tons of feedback to help you along the way. It's an incredible one of a kind program that's really going to change how you think about publishing and help you get to the next level. So you could find that at BeyondtheBookAcademy.com your writer circle this is another command power all about helping you scale your income and your close writer friends will be one of the most valuable assets in your career. Knowledge transfer is when we share our experiences and knowledge with others. A small group of writers diligently sharing learnings back and forth can lead to you growing exponentially faster. Building your writer circle is how you can meet and forge incredible relationships with other writers that may just change your life. Now here's the steps to building your writer circle. First is join writing kidneys online or in your local city. Most writing committees are free to join and I host free meetups at storysupper. Com. I travel a lot and when I travel and go to new city I try and host a story supper. Second step is once you meet writers and start to connect, create a small group chat together. Online communities are great, but are often not an intimate enough forum. You want a space where people feel comfortable sharing their ramblings, research wins and struggles. Now step number three is to lean in and help people in your circle. Provide feedback on their ideas and stories, share your own learnings with everyone, and ask questions when you need help. Odds are other people are in the same position as you and number four is set a regular time to meet and connect. This can be a voice call, video call, or just over chat asynchronously. What's important is sharing your goals with others, holding each other accountable, and even engaging in writing sprints together. And now we'll move on to our next superpower. Now the Super Sidekick is another command power all about scaling your income. Your biggest allies are the people you work with to make your publishing business possible. Whether it's an ebook retailer, a social media app, a book printer, an editor, or a cover designer, the people behind the magic that makes your books possible can help you a ton. The key is building long term relationships with the right people. Unleashing your super Psychic Here are ways you can build partnerships with key players in the industry that can benefit you over the long term. First is build relationships with platforms to increase your chances of participating in special promotions. Either at conferences, through email, or through author friends, you can build strong relationships with the people behind the platforms you publish on. Number two is to build relationships with service providers so you can get early access to new features and preferred terms. Treat your editors, cover designers, and other service providers with kindness. Pay on time. They will pay you back by doing what they can to work around your schedule to get your edit in or finish up a cover revision. Build relationships with artists and other creatives to turn your story into the mediums you will need to work with other people. Your mom may not be a bestselling author. Artificial nepotism is one of the most powerful forces in the universe. Use it wisely. Anyone can become and insider so our next superpower is Merchant of Record or mor. This is another command power all about scaling your income. The MOR is the business responsible for processing payments and takes on the legal liability of the transaction. When building your empire, you will likely at some point sell products directly to your readers through your website. As the mor, you capture all customer information, including credit cards and emails. With that comes the responsibility to collect, remit and file sales tax. This sounds scary, but it's a lot simpler than you think. How Sales Tax Works for Authors Disclaimer I am not a CPA or financial advisor. The following is not tax advice. You should consult your licensed tax advisor with any specific questions. Sales tax and VAT are fees levied by state and country governments based on where the customers of your product are. This means you can live in Australia, but be subject to sales tax in the U.S. state of Georgia if you have customers there. Yikes. But there's good news. You only have to pay sales tax in VAT when you cross economic nexus in a specific region. Economic nexus is when you pass a threshold of purchases in a region, in other words, number of transactions or total revenue. Stripe tax Built into the payment processor stripe will help you monitor sales tax and VAT obligations for free. If you hit nexus, you'll pay a small fee to collect these taxes from customers at checkout, and then you'll have to register, remit and file with local tax authorities. For most states, economic nexus requires hundreds of individual customers or $100,000 plus in annual revenue from customers in that state. So you likely won't have to worry about this for a while. And when you do, you should be able to afford a CPA to help you. Now, with that said, there's even better news, which is for a lot of authors, you can still sell direct and get the emails of your readers without actually having to be the merchant of record. Software platforms are constantly evolving and so are payment systems. So I just encourage you to do your due diligence when you're deciding between different platforms to use, whether that be Shopify or other places and see how their payment processor is set up. And if they're going to be the merchant of record, or if you are, that's really crucial because again, the merchant of record's actually liable for sale tax and that and if the platform or another service provider is the merchant of record, then you don't need to worry about this at all. So it's very interesting. I'm curious to see how this landscape evolves. But the good news is that now that you know about the merchant of record, you're able to utilize the superpower if you want to. And if not, this knowledge will help you be able to navigate selling direct in a different way. Next up is our Go Global Superpower. This is another command power all about Scaling your income. Making your stories and brand accessible to readers in different languages is a key way to expand your audience and income. I've hired dozens of localization professionals to work for Amazon Prime's most localized show ever, Beast Games the power of great localization is immense, but it requires understanding a few core principles to do right. And seriously, this was really the summary of the key things I learned about being able to translate a very complicated show and localize a very complicated show into dozens of languages that would reach tens of millions of viewers worldwide. So I think these insights should be able to help you whether you're trying to translate audio, ebooks, comics, anything you're trying to do. These are three principles of localization I would keep in mind. So first is that translation is simply taking one piece of content and making it in another language, whereas localization is the process of making your story, ad copy and packaging relevant to specific cultures, including using specific language references and settings that resonate with readers. Always aim not to simply just translate, but localize. Now data driven expansion don't fomo into a new language just because you see an author is crushing it. Study the bestseller charts in Amazon in specific regional markets and see if your type of book does well there. Story Spy Remember that superpower. Likewise, you want to make sure your story has story market fit before you're expanding and taking that IP into new languages. If it hasn't worked well in an English market, I wouldn't take the bet that it would work well in a French market. There's outliers and keys that happens, but I would focus on the English market or wherever you are natively writing books first, and then look to expand after you gain traction in your existing market. Now, quality assurance is essential. This is the most important part of the process. With automated technologies and software, the cost of localizing your story has decreased dramatically. But that said, regardless of the translation route you take, quality assurance or QA is more important than ever, especially for the localization side of things. Great QA requires someone skilled in both the source language and ideally the native speaker of the target language. Interview multiple people, get references from fellow authors, and make sure you are working with the best long term partner who understands not just the language but the conventions of your genre. And if y' all follow Author Sidekick, I'll definitely be doing a whole essay there at some point on actually how to localize. Depending on when you're listening to this, that essay may already be live and you'll be able to find it on Author Sidekick. And if not, then it'll be coming in the near future. A detailed essay on Localization Service providers for authors the landscape's evolving so quickly and I don't want to put something in a book that's going to be outdated in a couple months. So just know that I'm collecting all those resources somewhere else and putting it so that you all know how to approach localization when the time comes in terms of who exactly to work with, what software to use, et cetera Our next superpower is the three Types of Reader cuny. This is another command power all about scaling your income. Now, creating a reader CUNY allows people to come together around shared interests, hobbies and goals. CUNY is the space you own in someone's mind and bringing people together around them. There are tons of tools to build a cuny. However, what everyone misses is that CUNY can be your best marketing. You just have to design it. Here are the three types of Reader cuny. Who your CUNY is designed for is the key factor that determines your CUNY ceiling. The first type, Reader Community is a CUNY for your stories. This has the lowest ceiling and is inherently limited by people who are already interested in your stories. It's great for nurturing existing fans but not new ones. The second kind of reader, Cooney, is a CUNY for passion. This has a high ceiling and caters people who are interested in your overall genre, sub genre, or different type of interest group that's mentioned in your stories. The key to success here is what kind of conversations you can create a space for that don't currently have a home. An example here is the Smuthood creating a space for romance readers to talk about taboo books. Over 200,000 members in there. Or Midnight Monster Club creating a space for people to talk about horror products such as movies, books and other poor product recommendations that has nearly 20,000 members and has only been around for a couple months. And the last type of CUNY is a CUNY for learning. Now this also has a high ceiling and caters to people who want to learn about a topic. For nonfiction authors, this is ideal for fiction authors. Depending on your sub genre, this can be a great fit too. Think Prepper Kuni or A witchcraft cuny about making potions. Our next superpower is Fanatic Builder. This is another command power all about scaling your income now. Fanaticism is the excessive belief or passion in a brand, story or person. This simple three step process helps you turn casual readers into die hard fans. The publishing industry is ruled by superfans for authors. The majority of your profit comes from readers who are repeat buyers of your books. With true fanatics, the opportunities extend beyond books to sell the merch, special editions and other fan experiences. Here are the three steps to fanaticism. You can nurture fanatic readers through your newsletter, on social media, or even inside your books by ingraining the following three things into your reader experience. First is shared purpose. What do people come to your stories for? Is there a consistent emotional journey you take your readers on? Is there a specific passion or background in life your readers share? Use this to unite your readers. Next is shared language. What language do you use throughout your stories that your readers can identify with other inside jokes, names of places and characters? Use this language throughout your marketing and communication with readers and even create merchandise and other products based on it. And last step here is shared rituals. What can your fans come together to do? Does a character in your story love tea or specific food? Integrate rituals your characters have in your stories and encourage your readers to engage in the same rituals together. I had this amazing author friend, E.J. frost. She's one of the smartest, most brilliant authors I've met and she had this group of superfans she had in this private call. It would happen at least once a month, sometimes more often, and they would get together. She had this special group of super fans that would get together in these video calls and they would all have their own unique roles and she wrote kinky romances. They all had this like kinky club where they'd get together, drink wine and talk about the books. But they, they were all role playing to a certain extent. And I just viscerally remember that one of her readers had this gavel and they would hit it to control order in the meeting, make sure that things were staying on track. All these readers in her case were all recently divorced, single, in their mid-40s to mid-50s and just trying to navigate life. So they all came together as friends around these stories and it was really awesome showing up all the time. They were spending hundreds of dollars a year with EJ across all of her different books and products. It was a great thing for her, it was great for her fans and it really supported her business you can think about how you want to go about building your fanatic base of fans. It doesn't have to look like video calls at all. You don't have to involve any sort of rituals that involve readers role playing. But you can. You can have readers play video game hangout nights together. You can do so many different things. It's just really exciting. And frankly, people need community now more than ever. I'm so passionate about where community can go and how fandom can be used for good. So use this power wisely and I'm really excited to see what you all create and how you change the lives of your readers because of this and our last superpower, but maybe our most important is audience is everything. This is our final command power. All about scaling your income. Now once you build trust with your readers through your stories, you can sell them and anything. The entire economy is being oriented around creator led brands. From drinks like prime to beauty brands and clothing. The future of commerce is in the hands of storytellers. Let's explore how you can serve your audience in a bigger and better way than most can even imagine. Follow the beyond your book blueprint to create a synergy map that puts your readers at the center and a world of opportunity around them. Step number one is to define your audience. Everything starts with your readers first. Once you narrow your niche, you can start to imagine the other companies, products and services that solve common problems specific to the lives of your readers. An example is the Romance versus the World card game by Renee Rose. It's amazing. You should check it out and it's a great product that serves her core audience of romance readers. Step number two is to create your vision. Dream big. Here we research other products and map out the world of possibilities and different experiences you could create. An example of this is the Walt Disney Synergy map. It's a beautiful image of how you can build an empire around intellectual property and stories. Digital and physical cards actually have my own little image of a synergy map so you get to see it there. Now step number three is to build your reader first journey. Create your first beyond the book experience using one of the product or content ideas. Launch and iterate using all the superpowers you've learned here. If you want to learn more about going beyond the book, you can listen to my podcast@authorsidekick.com podcast most weeks I release a free episode either me sharing insights or interviewing someone amazing industry who's doing incredible things going beyond the book and you can also join the waitlist the next beyond the book accelerator at BeyondtheBookAcademy.com it only opens twice a year and gives you amazing guidance, group coaching and tons of resources to help you turn your stories into an empire. And that's it. The Author Marketing Superpowers There's a lot in here and now that you have not only the audiobook, but the ebook and the digital deck that you'll be able to access. You have a bunch of different resources here completely for free and you can also go to Author Decks. Com. It's level up your side deck and if you don't have the physical deck already or all the other awesome digital bonuses can get it there. They're amazing. Likewise, you can go to Author Sidekick. Com and join my newsletter completely for free where I help you grow your revenue and readership by putting your readers first. And lastly, Reader Meter is an incredible platform that helps you see where readers stop turning the page in your stories so you can write better books and make more money. Go to reader meter IO to join the waitlist. It'll be releasing later in 2025. Really excited for it. It's going to be a super fun product and I think can really change the game for a lot of you telling stories now instead of just saying goodbye. I just want to share my thank you for getting to this point. There's a lot here and you are welcome to reach out to me with questions anytime at hellothorsidekick. Com. That's my email. I love hearing from y'. All. I love trying to help you any way I can. If you have new ideas, new superpowers you think I should add, let me know. Who knows, I might do more superpowers in the future. Maybe another deck for planning. Who knows? If you have other decks you'd like me to create, let me know. I'm open to doing it. I don't want to create too much, but if there's demand and y' all think there would be another deck that's helpful to you in your life, you let me know. And I've been doing this for a long time. I've been in this industry now for eight years and my dream has been to literally live in the future and create science fiction. And I feel like I'm being able to create science fiction for the future of publishing, where we all together get to define what this future of authorship looks like, where we get to do better for our readers, we get to innovate, and we really get to make marketing fun again. So I hope you had fun reading slash listening to this book. It's meant a lot to me that you've been here. I'm so excited for what's to come. The best is ahead of us in publishing, and if you want to support this mission, the best way you can do this is by sharing authordex.com with any of your author friends. It's totally free for them to get this audiobook, the digital deck, and the ebook as well. So you're doing them a favor by sharing it with them. And you're doing me a favor because the more authors we have as part of this movement, the more amazing things I can create for y'. All. So once again, thank you for being here. Remember, as authors, our job is not to sell books. It's to put our readers first and make their lives better. I'm so excited to see what you can do. My ultimate goal is to give storytellers as much power as possible. That's my job as your sidekick. I hope you get to go on and be the sidekick to helping your readers fulfill their dreams and live a better life. I believe in you. You are awesome. You've put in the work by just listening to this, and you should be proud of yourself and fricking pumped for everything that's to come. So thank you, my storytelling heroes. I'm going to miss you, but I'll see you soon. And as always, don't forget, together we are boundless.