Publishing Nihilism

Publishing nihilism, the belief that the pursuit of authorship is increasingly meaningless or hopeless. This nihilistic tendency is something I've noticed across all of society and a belief that I've seen more and more of us authors start to hold. And I think that it's dangerous, really destructive, in fact. And instead I want to offer an alternative view, one of abundance, one of opportunity, during a time in which things are darker and maybe even more scary than they have been for a lot of us in recent memory, and maybe even for some of us in our lifetimes. Now, before I share what these three big opportunities are in publishing. And it's really what I see as the opportunity and going beyond the book and why I believe in 10 years the world for authors is going to be so much better than the world today, and why I believe the next few years and even beyond we'll always have problems, Mallas have struggles, but that those problems are actually the very things that will lead to so much opportunity for us as storytellers. But before I actually get into it, I first just want to share thank you for listening to another episode of the beyond the Book podcast. I normally release these every week and I am a few days late in this episode. Don't worry, the next episode will be coming out on time and it's all about how one story makes an author $3 million a year. Yes, one story, $3 million. Pretty cool. The reason I'm a little bit late is because I've had so much travel and was doing a Kickstarter last week and I was in San Diego at a conference. I was finishing up this his starter and it was just this crazy sprint and I was exhausted, needed a few days to rest and reflect. And I've been reading a lot and thinking so much about everything that's been going on in the world. Between what's been happening with the political situation in the US and abroad, between what's been happening with changes in technology and this onslaught of artificial intelligence. And I won't lie, it's it's made me really rethink things. It's made me really reconfront my own beliefs about publishing. And as someone who's a futurist, yet also as a historian, I studied history of science and technology in college. It's tough for me to see a time that is both unprecedented but also has a lot of historical patterns and is something that I think has more ramifications on our future in a faster timeline than we've seen a lot of changes previously and before getting Back to our regularly scheduled programming where I help you go beyond the book. I really need to share this message today that is a bit more broad and is hopefully something that gives you hope in what we're aiming to do here and beyond the book and in where I think we're headed as an industry. Because I won't lie, if you're feeling hopeless in your author career, I don't think you're wrong to feel that way. I get it, and part of me feels the same way. You know, talk to a lot of authors who say, now that Chad can write a book in minutes, why am I writing books? Ad costs have gotten higher. It's gotten so much more competitive in the indie space. Why am I even doing this? It's so hard, it's so challenging. And I get it because I've been there. And at many moments I've felt the same way as you. But I think that's the most dangerous thing we can do, is stop. Stop writing. Not because if we stop writing, we won't be able to make a living doing this, or if we stop writing, the algorithm's gonna turn against us. Because if we stop writing, we're actually going to be abandoning what makes us human. If we stop writing, we're going to be abandoning maybe one of our greatest chances to make the world a better place. Because right now, as a society, we need stories more than ever, more than ever. You know, stories are really designed to help us navigate a complex social and societal landscape, designed to help us cope with, escape from, but also return brighter, smarter, and more empathetic to a world that is ever changing and continues to have more and more challenges. Whoever you write for and why ever you write, the world needs your stories now more than ever. The world needs storytelling, new stories, new imaginations. And it's this lack of imagination that I think has really hurt us. It's this lack of imagination over what publishing can and should be that I think has led to so many of us feeling constricted, feeling anxiety, feeling hopeless. But as I promised, I want to really end, kill this publishing nihilism. I feel it, we all do at times. But instead allow us to embrace what a world could look like of publishing abundance, a new imagination of what the world could look like, what publishing could look like if things went right, if new opportunities abounded. And my belief is that working together, we can turn that if into inevitability. We could turn that if into our future. We could turn that if into our lives. It's why I end off Every one of these podcasts with the mana together, we are boundless. It's something I believe deep to my core. It's something I've always had as one of my core life philosophies, because I really believe that working together, we can accomplish almost anything. But what is that something that we want to accomplish? What is that future that we're trying to create? I think the beautiful thing is that we can live in a multi plural future, in a world in which many different pathways to success exist, in a world in which there's many different possible futures that exist simultaneously. That's what excites me, the fact that we're not all going to live in one publishing future, but there's going to be different ways to be successful in new opportunities that you don't have to pursue all of them, but you can pursue what interests you. And big part of this podcast is again, about showing you those possibilities and giving you the roadmap to pursue them. And this future that I talk about is not as far off anymore. It's not something that's going to come in 10 years, necessarily. It's going to be true in 10 years. It's going to be so evident, it's going to be dominant. But these threads are already here. They're going to keep becoming more and more apparent. And I want to pull some of these threads out for you and show them and show what these three big opportunities will be. And look, these are my predictions. Are they a hundred percent certain to come true? Maybe not. But these are trends that I also think are so inevitable. And despite if my exact imagination is what actually becomes reality or not, something roughly like it is pretty much bound to become true. And these are things that to me, help me see again. In a world full of danger, in a world full of things that are challenges, in a world in which in many ways there's more problems than ever, how we can actually create solutions, opportunities, and experiences that make it all better. Now, before we dive into three specific opportunities, I want to share one last thing. I know I keep saying before. Before it's like, come on, get to the, get to the point, Michael. Stop putting us in suspense. But I just want to add this context because I think it's a really important conversation. No matter where you come across the political aisle, no matter your age, no matter your background, I think that we all feel this right now. We all know we're in a moment. And I want to highlight a moment that is both different and similar in some contexts, which is 2008. And around that time, we saw two kind of concurrent huge changes. One was this sort of overhaul of the global financial system, which wasn't fully overhauled. It was very complicated, but more so propped up and all of this, but certainly a collapse, a true moment of reckoning. And with this sort of shift or change or really fall of the global order, where there's a lot of pain, a lot of suffering, we also had concurrently this wildly new technology come about that in just a short period of time was going to change our lives forever. And that was mobile. When I say mobile, I really mean the cell phone, smartphones. And if you think about it now, most books are bought or like discovered, a lot of which, at least on the cell phone. It's amazing how much that's changed our world. And that plus the Kindle really came to age right as we saw the economy completely shifting and going through a really challenging period. I think we're seeing that again now. We're seeing roughly 20 years later, but really about 15, 17 years later, we're seeing a different type of change where once again, this global order is being upended. And regardless of what happens to the economy, recession or not, there's been so many talks of it, we are certainly entering a changing, more tumultuous, more chaotic, and in many ways more challenging moment here. And I don't like that. That's not good for our readers. It's not good for a lot of us. And it hurts me because during the most challenging economic times are the times when folks, stories that need to be heard are like, most likely not to be told. Because let's face it, publishing requires money sometimes, oftentimes does it requires time, requires mental energy, a certain privilege, a certain investment that becomes really hard to make during these challenging times. But I think it's more important now than ever to continue our pursuit of authorship, continue a pursuit of storytelling, because the world needs us, because there's another big change coming, a big change that's really already here, and that's artificial intelligence. It's really like the next computing platform, the next way that changes how we interact with technology. And this technology is now not something that we do things with, but that actually does things for us in a very real way. It produces, it creates, it generates. And this has some wide, wide sweeping ramifications. And what I'm going to share with you is how artificial intelligence, how this changing global order, how mobile and our last technology revolution are all combining and really three concurrent forces shaping the future of publishing and this future of publishing is something I've been obsessed with for such a long time. Started self publishing now about eight years ago, and I wrote a book on the future of publishing called Creator Economy for Authors, like, three years ago. So this future is something I've been utterly, utterly obsessed with. And it's why I started this podcast to try and share this future that's coming to life today with all of you, to help you go beyond selling books. But what does that look like? That's what I'm going to share. But there's one last part to the 08 story. There's one last part that's really, really important. We saw with 08 the rise in the next generation of this new monopolistic power, Amazon, at least in the publishing world, we've had many concurrent monopolistic powers. You could say Meta is one of them for sure as well. And there's Google. There's, you know, there's the few big tech companies, right? It's easy to rag in them. It's easy to hate on them. I'm not here to go dunk on Jeff Bezos. You know, he's. He's busy with his wedding and planning all that out. I don't want to cause him any more stress. I'm sure he's listening. But what I really want to share is that it was something for a long time that felt like, oh, my God, you know, Amazon killed the indie bookstore, right? The Internet killed the pop star. And it was like, what, what do we do? You can buy all these books on Amazon now. Ebooks are cheaper on Amazon than print books. It's more convenient. Print books arrive next day. Amazon's undercutting all the new release prices to screw all the bookstores over, and they're taking a loss on it. Not an easy life as an independent bookseller. And would be logical to think that, wow, I guess it's all over. I guess these independent bookstores had their peak, and that peak is behind us, and maybe they'll find a new sort of space to stagnate in. But there. There's no way they're going to ever get back to where they were. Except. Except independent bookstores. There's more of them now in the US today than there were in 2009. We have over a hundred new independent bookstores going live in the US each year, and we have now over 2000 thriving independent bookstores in this country. Barnes and Noble. They're for the first time now opening up and expanding their physical, physical. Their physical presence. You have W.H. smith and plenty of more bookstores still thriving internationally. That to me is so interesting and so exciting because we're seeing also a new space of innovation in just indie bookstores. A whole new set of romance bookstores coming about, which never really existed fully before. I'm sure there was a few, but you have like the ripped bodice, you have sweeter than fiction and plenty others that are coming about to be third spaces and incredible sites of book selling that readers are coming to in cities across the world. So independent bookstores went through hard times and it's still not easy to run an independent bookstore, just like it's not easy to be an independent author. It's never easy, but the opportunity is there. And I think one can argue that the opportunity now is greater than it ever has been and it's only continuing to grow. But with that said, they're not the only ones growing. Random house, their revenue grew 8% last year to nearly 5 billion euros. 8% year over year growth isn't insane, okay? But it's respectable. It's very respectable. It's right about on market. It's a little bit less than the S&P 500 companies, but it's not a crazy underperformer. Traditional publishing isn't even necessarily dying, mind you. I was skeptical of that. I actually thought five or six years ago that they would be in structural decline. And they're not declining necessarily. Like television is television seeing much more pressure than traditional publishing. And I think that's really interesting and I think that's something that should inspire us because we're saying the indie bookstores are doing better. We're saying that Barnes and Noble is now an uptrend. We're saying the publishers, look, they haven't necessarily thrived. I don't want to say that. But they're also far from dead and in many ways have more economic power now than they did before. Even if they haven't kept on pace with the average growth of biggest companies in the world, they're still doing quite well. And that doesn't even count all the new small presses that have come about. And again, not that life's easy as a small press. And that doesn't even count all the indie authors and so many indie authors making a living. Thousands in the US alone for sure. I estimate the number is closer to about 10,000 full time indie authors and folks supporting indie authors, be it cover designers or editors, et cetera. I could be wrong. I know that YouTube contributes 250,000 jobs in the US according to YouTube's own economic impact report. So I think that we're not too far away from that 10,000 number. It's certainly in the thousands, that's for sure. And you've seen things like Scribd, Kindle, limited ebooks and audiobooks rise and almost be like entirely new markets like audiobooks haven't led to less ebook sales. Ebook sales haven't led to less print book sales. If anything, they all feed into each other. And if anything, we're seeing new readers and new time that people are spending reading that they wouldn't have spent before. You can now read a book while walking your dog. Mind you, you're probably not reading it, you're probably listening to it, but that's pretty cool. So we've seen this whole economy in space grow, and again, there was massive disruption. If you were thinking in 2006 that things were going to be done how they were done forever, and then thought, wow, okay, these books are free online. Our work's being devalued to nothing. There's no way we're ever going to build this. There's a million books flooding the market. You would have mistaken those challenges for covering up the real opportunities. And now we look 15 years ahead and publishing is bigger and better and thriving more than ever has before. And again, I'm not trying to say it's perfect today. I'm not even trying to say there aren't crazy challenges. Publishing's not perfect. It's far from it. And I really want there to be so many improvements on it. I basically have dedicated my life to doing that. But, man, is it better than it was 15 years ago. And I'm confident that 10, 15 years from now, we're going to look back and say the same thing. But how are we going to look back? What's going to be different about this world? That's what I want to share with you right now. And there's three things. There's three things I'm really paying attention to. And the first is the loneliness epidemic. And the opportunity in that being how we can connect readers together, the kidneys that we can build. So the loneliness epidemic is essentially, now that we're spending so much more time online, we're not connecting with people both online and in the real world in ways that actually fulfill us. We're not having socially fulfilling relationships. And these are at alarming rates to the point that majority of people are now saying they're struggling with loneliness. Young people and folks in later stages of their life as well It's, It's. It's sad. It makes me. It makes me really sad. We, as humans, like, have been on this endless pursuit, especially in America, of more wealth, more this, more that, and missing, you know, the forest and the trees, like, what's really in front of us, which is each other. And I think it's part of the reason why we're more divided than other. Hence together we are boundless. And it's also part of the reason why we're feeling more disconnected than ever. And one thing that you might be feeling is, Michael, last time we had this crazy revolution in books, but we had ebooks, we had audiobooks, we had all these new revenue streams that came about this time around. We have this other crazy revolution where now AI can help us produce more books faster, but it's not necessarily increasing the market, right? And we get this scarcity mindset and this fear that comes from that, that now we have more competition. And if you're saying that, I actually agree with you. I don't necessarily think that there's going to be three or four times more books read in 10 years. There might be, but I don't necessarily think that. And why? It's because we're already spending so much time consuming media and so much time online that we're basically at the limit. The average American spends like 14 hours a day consuming various types of media, 4 hours line alone on social media. We are basically constantly wired up, nearly every waking hour doing something. It is absurd, it is sad. And I would be lying if I told you that I also wasn't a victim of this. And I've used the Internet to try and connect people, to connect storytellers, connect authors. It's part of why I host the story suppers. I go into different cities and try and bring authors together for dinner. It's part of why I even do podcasts like this and try and bring people together for conversations. But it's tough. It's tough. And I would be lying to you if I told you that I didn't just get caught up scrolling through usually Facebook reels or Instagram reels, or caught up scrolling through YouTube shorts, or caught in this kind of like, endless cycle of watching videos, but not living my life. And for as much good as the Internet's done me. I adore the Internet. I adore creators. I adore so much of what social media platforms make possible. It. It has some negative effects, and it's made a lot of us really fucking lonely. And we have the opportunity to solve that Robert Putnam in the 90s wrote this great book called Bowling Alone in the 90s is about how as Americans, we are spending less time really being with each other and we're bowling alone more often. The collapse of these third places, places that we'd come to outside of work and outside of the home to be together with other people. I think what we've seen now is a breakdown of honestly, our home life. We're just staring at screens all the time. A breakdown of third places. And we put so much pressure in work, just as we're also having more disruption on the workforce. And this whole revolution causing a lot of jobs to change and this whole global order causing a lot of pressure on the workforce that then gives us this sense of anxiety that permeates through all of our lives, not just publishing, but our professional and personal lives. And it's all connected, right? But we have an interesting role to play here as an authors. Two great books I love about CUNY are 1. Belonging to the Brand by Marc Shaffer, which, by the way, I met Marc Shaffer at a conference this week. It was social media marketing world, had a great time, have a lot of lessons in there. I shared my lessons on a Facebook live from the comments, but if you want me to do a podcast episode about that, would love to do a bonus episode at some point. But when me and Mark Schaefer met, I asked him to come on the podcast and he was interested. So if he manages to come on and we secure it, I'd love to hear your questions for Marc Schaefer. He's a brilliant author and I adore his work. And in the book Belongings, the brand he talks about again how paid advertising is kind of collapsing in its value and the real thing is like true connections with customers and building a cuny, AKA belonging to the brand. Another book I love is Get Together, which is a book from Bailey Richardson, who was like the first community member on the team at Instagram. She was like one of the first employees there. And it's a great book about building community. I deeply, deeply believe in the power of community, both in real life and URL. And I have two almost concurrent but radical ways that I think us as storytellers and authors are going to be able to fill that gap and really grow the industry as a whole. Because maybe we're not growing the time that people are spending on books. And yes, there could be some price increases in books for sure, but outside of just increasing prices, I think we have an opportunity to have a create a Whole new subset of experiences and connection for readers, that the connection can extend beyond the story, go deeper and with that create more value for our readers, help them more, and also lead to more money for us and the entire industry. I think it's going to be a massive area of growth. And here are those two areas. First is building online spaces in which our readers can connect around their shared passions and really replicating a lot of these. Third, places and experiences that we'd go to in the real world, but online. I mean, our technology plays such an intimate part of our life and how can we use technology to connect us rather than bring us apart and do so in a way that really is fun and really is on brand. And think about like your local bowling alley, think about your local bar. Love those places, want them to continue thriving, but people already spending time online. How can we replicate these experiences in the virtual world and give them to our readers and really connect them? Huge opportunity to grow the industry here and huge opportunity to do a lot of good for your readers. The second part of this is equally interesting and is something that I haven't heard a ton of people talk about. But there's this app, it's called Tolan. I'm gonna bet most of you listening haven't heard of it, but it's an AI chap. I know what you're thinking. Oh, my God. First of all, AI again. Second of all, like, a chatbot does not sound like it's connecting us. A chatbot sounds like it's driving us apart. And look, there's been a lot of searches for AI girlfriend on Google. It's gone parabolic. A lot of people apparently want an AI girlfriend and nothing necessarily is wrong with that. But I am a little bit saddened if AI boyfriends girlfriends and AI partners are replacing real life partners. That would be disappointing. And I think there's an indication that that's starting to happen. But there's also an opposite indication, an indication that this same technology can be used for immense good. Toland is that Toland is a character. He's your friend, they're your friend, but it's not exactly what you think. Toland's designed specifically to help young women. When I say young woman, I mean under 25, but over 18, connect with more of their friends in the real world. We're talking someone to help you talk to friends, someone to help you plan nights out, get out, get dressed. All the things that, you know, sometimes we struggle with, sometimes that we go, it's easier just to stay in the thing, it's easier just to scroll and instead. Nope, get out. Be a part of the real world. This character is designed to do that, and it's working. It's got over a million downloads now taken off. It's really helping people. It was designed in partnership with a team of science fiction authors. One of my favorite authors, Elliot Pepper being one of them, and a team of psychologists and therapists. Really, really cool. And I think we underestimate how much our characters feel like friends to our readers. And when I say, like, feel like friends, they practically are. So there's this really great book. It's called on the Evolution of Cognition and Fiction. It's by Brian Boyd. It's very kind of nerdy evolutionary psychology meets neuroscience book, but it goes through a lot of different studies, and if you're a nerd like me, it's kind of awesome. And one of the studies talks all about how the brain's reaction when you put it under an MRI or an EEG scan. The different areas of our brain that light up when we're thinking of fictional characters are very similar to the areas of our brain that light up when we're thinking of real life friends. And it's hard to obviously equate the two because we don't have, like, a full understanding of exactly what's going on in our brain. But it's a pretty good indication that the areas of our brain that are fired when we think about the people in our real life that we're close with are the same areas in our brain that are fired when you think about the people in our fictional life that we are close with, the characters. And I think the world. One needs more heroes now than ever. And I'm the sidekick. I'm not the hero. I'm not even suggesting you should be the hero, although you are certainly the hero in our story here. But you can create the hero. You can create the characters that become the new leaders and role models for a new generation of readers that's needed now more than ever. And we're able to now use these new technologies to immerse our readers in relationships with our characters that are actually positive, not sucking them away from the real world, but actually bringing them back into it and helping them develop connections with people in it. And I don't think we're gonna have a world where there's four or five, you know, character friends that we talk to that help our lives be better. I think we're live in a world where there's thousands, tens of thousands Maybe even hundreds of thousands. And the characters that are best primed to do that, the ones that have been written with believable backgrounds, with stories and with lives that people care about, are the worlds that you've created and the characters that exist inside of them. Kind of radical. And I'll admit that the first opportunity, the CUNY opportunity is here today. This opportunity, helping readers connect with people in the real life powered by your characters is technically possible today. People are doing it, but it might feel a little far off for you. But let me tell you, in 10 years, I think we're going to look back and see that this new area of publishing, this usage based chatbot connection that readers use to immerse themselves further into your stories and to actually help them immerse themselves further into their real lives and live a better life, are going to be a significant revenue stream in Publishing. Maybe 20% of all publishing's revenue, maybe 10%. I'm quite bullish on it. I think there's, I think there's north of a hundred million dollars a year to be made for authors here. And I think that when you add up the whole industry, in aggregate billions of dollars for creators all over the world to be made here every single year. And it's wild, it's wild, but it goes back to again these problems that we're facing, where technology's going, where the world's going and why the future of publishing isn't going to be us fighting over the world we have today. It's actually going to be us creating a world with so much more and so much greater. And it's that world that I want to help you see. It's that world that I want to help you go beyond the book to create. Now the second opportunity that I see in this new publishing world is Creator street and the rise of rise of it and Crater Street. I define as shops could be retail food and other products that exist online. Think independent shops online. We're already seeing this, the rise of so many authors selling direct on Shopify. But it goes beyond just selling books direct to readers. You're actually going to get to build the future brands. Now most brands, how they advertise, big global brands was television. Unlike traditional publishing, television is an industry that's definitely been in structural decline and that I see much less of a bright future for. I think that thesis has played out pretty true. Attention has migrated away from the television set, especially among younger generations. The average person who watches cable news on TV is now 70 years old. Nothing wrong with that, that's awesome. Except the average person in the country is not 70 years old, and the average person in most countries are not 70 years old. I don't think there's a single country where that's the median age. So that means that a lot of people are not watching cable television. And that is a problem if your brand gained cultural relevance by advertising on television or in newspapers, on radio. And it just so happens that a lot of the Fortune 500 does just that. A lot of the reason how they were able to gain so much market share was by inserting themselves into stories that became, you know, massive, massive cultural stories that then they'd be able to insert ads in between and they'd be able to gain cultural relevance off the back of these stories. Now, cultural relevance happens in the algorithm. Now cultural relevance is multipolar. It's almost unlimited, polar. We can be part of multiple different cultures and multiple different kind of information streams. Instead of the average person shooting into a few channels, we might be part of 10 different communities with distinct content and creators that we trust. Trust is moving away from traditional outlets and traditional institutions and to creators. This shift in trust has been damaging in a lot of senses. We've seen a lot of decline in trust in traditional institutions, and I think that's led to a lot of disruption, whether it be medical, whether it be government, and hopefully it leads to good things. I'm not here philosophizing about the whole world, but I can tell you what it means for publishing, and it's something really interesting. As trust goes away from institutions, especially traditional ones, and to creators, individuals, we're seeing the rise of a whole new way of doing business and building brands. That's Creator street. And the opportunity now here for you as an author is not just to sell books. It's not to grab more attention. It's instead to do something radically different is to convert attention into intention. There's a great book called the Intention Economy by Doc Searles. And I think a better world of describing the creator economy is actually intention Economy. Doc Searles wrote this book a while ago. It's kind of radical. It has some beliefs in it that didn't fully pan out, but the first principles, I think are completely true. That there's only so much attention to the world and that if you serve someone's attention, it's a constant bloodbath and you're never gonna win. It's almost a zero sum game. But intention is this beautiful thing that's durable. It's built on Trust. It's why trust is becoming more important than ever. And it's that intention that we can then use to convert into sales of totally different products. Instead of trying to Compete for the 24 hours a reader has in a day, you're competing for the lines to serve them on every single thing that's on their bank statement. You can build that as an authority. And these technology innovations are making it cheaper to produce and create everything, including all of these goods that normally would feel like science fiction to create as authors, whether it be software, whether it be games, whether it be things like cocktail mixes. The second episode of this podcast is with Maggie Bealer, all about how she's gonna make her own cocktail mix brand based on her books. You can build a wild world around your readers. And this is where I see the opportunity media really building the new main street online. And mind you, I hope Main street businesses thrive. They've been through enough. This is not a zero sum world. This is a world of abundance. New opportunity being created where new businesses can exist on the new street, the new highway online. And that highway happens to be where eyeballs are going. Those eyeballs are going to you creators. And once you garner that attention, there's a whole new business that can be built around it. This doesn't necessarily change the rules of publishing, right? We still have to fight for attention, we still have to create our stories. But now these new opportunities allow us to go deeper and they allow us to go and serve our readers in different ways and create different experiences and products for them that lead to just more money and more opportunity for all of us. And this is a big deal. This is a really, really big deal. And it excites me. And we're already seeing this happening. There's in the YouTube space, like when I was working for Mr. Beast, that company is increasingly becoming a media company that sells products. And not a media company like Chocolate Lunchly. You can think about how you can create products that can have a positive impact in the world and really affect the lives of your readers. And I've seen this firsthand, how revolutionary it can be for a media business to start orienting itself around products. When people trust you as a creator and you have that cultural relevance as a storyteller, you don't need to constantly fight for attention to get sales of your product. Because when readers need X thing in their lives, they're gonna go back to, oh my God, there was a story. And I trust that creator. And this has a special place in my heart. And you've won over their intentions to continue serving them in that way. Mind you, this podcast is all about this. We're gonna get into this over episodes and episodes to come. So just put a pin on this if this feels like a lot and know that there's just so much opportunity coming. And I'm just incredibly optimistic. Now, my last thing is interesting because it's a little bit contradictory to what my first point was, but you'll notice that there's a very subtle shift here that is crucial and that leads to a lot of new opportunity for authors, which is that we're going to see the horizontal expansion of content into new mediums that increase the overall attention that we can get as storytellers. You know, maybe ebooks and audiobooks were the new kind of story formats that opened up to us as indie storytellers of the past. If you think of us less as indie authors, but indie storytellers, I think we're going to start to see movies, television shows, and things like even games open up as formats that become economically viable to produce because of where technology is going to. And they're still going to need people involved in the process. There's still going to need to be great storytellers, and those storytellers are you. But you know, Hollywood's been in a model for a long time where unless you had a movie that was going to make millions, millions of dollars, it just wasn't worth it to produce, right? Never mind market it. But what if you only needed $50,000 to break even on a movie? What kinds of new stories would that allow to be created? There might be more movies, but that would mean different types of niches, rising readers being more satisfied and viewers being more satisfied with different movies that will touch them in their hearts. And again, opening up a new market for our content and for intellectual property, where we get to almost build these mini Disney's around what we're doing. Technology is already headed this way between using tools like Cling, between things like suno, and this future is something that's both unsettling because it is disruption in many ways, but just like traditional outlasted in the publishing space. I don't necessarily see traditional completely going away in this new world either. I see there being a net new creation of opportunity. And I'm excited for that, I'm optimistic for that. And I think that's a whole other third pillar of opportunity for authors is taking our IP and bringing it to life in these new and novel ways that technology is making possible. And if you Add these three things up, right? Community, both IRL and URL products, and really creator street becoming the new Main street, where any business you saw that existed on Main street now can go online and can exist and you can own it and you can create it. And now what we're seeing with new media formats and bringing our ip, so that we're able to not just become publishing house, but become a full media studio, become our own little mini Disney. I see this as being able to radically increase the total addressable market for authors where more of us can make a living and more of us can make more money and more readers can have way better experiences. The bar, in many ways is going to get higher, but it's also going to expand. And this isn't to say that there won't be challenges. This also isn't to say that you have to do all of it, just like before. In our last big change in publishing, you can do one thing, including the existing paradigm and do really, really well. And that's why, despite all these crazy changes in the world and despite how easy it is to feel hopeless, to let the darkness almost paralyze us, to let the uncertainty scare us, to freeze us, I am more hopeful than ever. It's a choice. But it's a choice I have to wake up and make every day, even when it's hard. Because once we imagine a better future, we can go out and create it. If we don't imagine it, then how is it going to come to be? How can we create something that we can't even imagine? That's the magic of storytelling. And this is my story for you. The story of where publishing is going, the story of publishing nihilism. And what would happen if instead we went to a world of publishing boundlessness? That is the future I want. A future for publishing that is boundless. Future for you that's boundless. We can get there together. I know we can. I'm excited. Not being blind to the challenges, but not closing ourselves off to the possibility and the opportunity. Because together we can create that. I've been around this country. I've seen a lot of people. I've met a lot of people. And what we see online sometimes is all the bad negativity. But anyone I meet from any background, I almost always think is a great person. We're surrounded by really good people in this country and in this world. I believe in humanity, believe in storytellers being able to bring out the best in humanity, despite knowing that at times certain storytellers can bring out the worst in us. It's up to us as a collective, to fight for what we believe in and to bring out the best so the future that we see could come to life. But we can't create anything if we don't see in a future. We can't stand for something if instead we choose to believe in nothing and let the hopelessness win. So I give you a vision. A vision for what lies beyond the book. A vision for a boundless future for publishing. I hope you join me. You can subscribe to this podcast feed and get future episodes. I'm really excited to have you here with me, and really grateful. Our regular schedule programming starts again this week. I'll be on time with this episode. Very grateful for you. And as always, don't forget, together we are boundless.