Recording of 10 Bonus Marketing Superpowers

Now I'm going to share with you the 10 bonus author marketing superpowers. These are not things you have to read sequentially. These are not all superpowers you have to use. You don't have to do every one of these things. This is not a step by step list, but it's 10 concepts that hopefully change how you think about running a publishing business and reaching your readers. So to kick it off, I want to start with meme marketing. Now, each slide is structured with a front and a back. There's one slide that doesn't have a back, A, um, because I'm just going to rant off a lot of ideas, which will be really fun. But me marketing is something that Dakota Kraut famously uses. He's a literate PG author. He's quite a large literate PG author. If you check out his Facebook profile. He's constantly making memes that his readers then share. And it's one of the main ways he markets his books. And Dakota Kraut is literally will regularly launch books not into just the top 100 of the Amazon store, but the top 10. So he has quite the audience. Now, what is meme marketing? Meme marketing is integrating your story with culturally relevant memes to drive greater awareness and fan engagement with your business. And what I'm going to show you is step by step, how to create a meme for free. Which is fun, because why would, you know, why would we want to spend a bunch of money creating memes? Now, memes I think traditionally we think of as just for fun. We might think of them in kind of like a different, more goofy context. But when we can take these popular, what's called meme templates, which, if you've seen a meme online, I'm sure you all have, they're really popular on Instagram especially. There's a lot of really big meme pages there. They'll take these, like, common formats, like, there's bad luck Brian, or there's like the Grumpy Cat, or there's like the girl standing outside of the house on Fire. There's all these ones that you know. But I even say I'm not even showing you the meme, but you probably already know what I'm talking about because you've probably seen it. You'll then take a message that's attuned to a specific community of people or to even your story. And people will find it funny, people find it relatable, and it's really easy to share something with others when you find it funny and relatable. Right? Like, you've just made it really easy for your reader to share your stories. And that's what me marketing is about. And it's also about making it easy to reach new readers. Now let's dive into how you can actually do that. How to become a meme. Lord, you don't actually have to become a meme word. Maybe not. But first of all, the first step in this process is to identify a meme that is popular already. And I'm saying you'll likely find the best memes on Instagram. But in reality, there's memes everywhere, including on Facebook, including on threads, including, like, anywhere you go. Even on TikTok has some memes as well. Right. And it's nice just to get a perspective of these different memes. Start to get a style of, like, what memes do you resonate with where you go, this is pretty funny. I think memes are like one of those universal languages that, mind you, your memes are probably going to have English text on it, although you could have a meme from a German audience or a French audience as well. Just would have to be localized to them. But I view them as some of a universal language. They cross generations, they cross interests, they cross, you know, religious and national boundaries. They're these cool mediums to actually market and tell a story. Now, how you can actually create a meme is very simple. So I gave you this example of a website that I used before. It's imageflip.com meme generator, and it's completely free. But there's other free Mean Generator sites. If you look up, like, free meme creation online on Google, you'll find other sites too, if that site isn't for you. But each site basically works where you go to the site and again, totally free. And you're going to select a template, right? And that template, it's really important because that template's the image, the graphic that you're then going to place text on top of. And that image is probably going to be something that's culturally relevant. That's been a meme that's trended before. You could upload your own image and, like, make your own meme for scratch. I'm not telling you not to do that, but I don't feel like that's necessary because the real magic comes in step three, which is when you edit the text on the meme and actually make it funny, entertaining for readers. Now, I said for readers, not for your readers, because you have a few Options here, right? You can take a meme and make it something that's an inside joke for your readers. Maybe your character has this, like, classic quote, or there's this sticky situation that happens in your book that you want to share through a meme. Maybe there's this moment where, like, everything is, like, crashing down in your books. You take the girl, it's a very cute meme, with the girl with the house burning behind her, right? It doesn't sound cute, but it is. And you have something that, like, went wrong in your book, like, oh, my God, when, like, the dragons destroy the village, you know? Right. So you can do something like that. But remember, those memes are going to have a specific goal, right? You want to have existing readers share with your friends to increase word of mouth. And that's a great thing. But look, if our marketing superpowers are only about us, you know, increasing word of mouth, then how do we start when we maybe don't have yet who we can share our stories with? Right? That's what we want to think about. Readers of our genre. Can we create memes that are relevant to any readers? Oh, okay. You read romance, you read fantasy, you read cozy. This is going to be relatable to you. Now, this might not directly market your books on the surface. It's not going to drive awareness directly of your story, but it's going to drive awareness of you, your brand. It's going to get people following you, and that's how you ultimately start to build trust and have them find your stories. And this is another superpower that I'm calling out here that I'll give you all a sort of highlight from. But reader napping is when you pick a specific creator or audience that you want to their audience from. So to bring that to light here, you could create a meme targeted towards, let's say, Brandon Sanderson fans if you're writing epic fantasy and reach his readers by participating in that fandom and grab his audience that way. And then of course, four is like post your meme to Facebook Instagram threads. But what's great about a meme is that the meme is almost the entire post, right? Like, you can caption your meme, of course. Uh, but your captions don't have to be four paragraph long captions, right? Like, the meme does the talking. Now, if you want to dive deeper on this, there's a book that's a really wild book called Memes Make Millions by Jason Levin, all about meme marketing. So if you want to Dive, like, more into it. You. You could do that if you want to make this your core superpower. Because it's very possible just through memes alone. And you're right, it's not available on Amazon, Terry. It's only available direct from the author on their website. It's $19, I think, like the ebook and the audiobook. And it's, like, available direct on their website. So if you just Google Memes Make Millions by Jason Levin, you'll find it. But the only place I found is on their website. Maybe it's on other ebook retailers, but it's not on Amazon. Now the next superpower I'll call is like, the book doctor. And as you'll see, some of these superpowers aren't like, deliberate, like, marketing strategies, but there are more sets of questions systems to ask yourself that help you be able to market your books better. And one of the biggest problems we have is, hey, this book just isn't selling right. And when we take a book to the book doctor, our goal is to ask a set of questions that help us determine why a book isn't selling and how we can fix it. I find that so oftentimes we can get, like, really, really emotional about, like, when a store isn't selling. Maybe we like, really like the book and we just feel like it should be selling more. And we keep pouring more into our marketing, almost like blindly. Like, we're not taking a step back to really analyze the situation. We're just pouring more into it. And other times we get scared, we feel insecure, we don't feel like our story is good enough, and we just stop sharing with the world entirely. But then we don't again ask ourselves, why didn't things go according to plan? So here's how you can do that. It's what I call the book diagnostic. Now, I realize this text is grossly small. I tried to stick to, like, front and back. And I'm sorry, the actual, like, author marketing superpower cards, the text is much bigger and I constrained myself more. But I gave you a lot of information here. And note you'll have the PDF version of this as well. But I'm going to go through this in depth with you. So you have it all right now, too. So you want to ask five questions, right? And once you ask these five questions, you should be able to take action to improve your sales, right? And that's the big thing that we want to do here. That's the end goal. So question number one is, have you gotten traffic to your book's web page yet. If yes, proceed to question number three. So we can skip to question number three. If no, proceed to question number two. Now, when I say traffic to a book's webpage, I really just mean, like, do you know if people have actually seen your book? Kind of sounds funny, but there's a lot of people who I've chatted with. This happens myself, too. My first series for a while didn't sell very well. I didn't know why, but then the answer was, like, no one was seeing it, right? Like, they didn't have an opportunity to see it. And then at that time, I started using Facebook ads to have people see it. But I'll tell you what went wrong with that series in a little bit. But I would move on to question number two when I was starting out with that series. Question number three would be my later thing when I realized this still isn't selling, but I'm getting traffic, right? So question number two is, okay, you've realized maybe you haven't really done that much to market this book. You really, you really realize that. You're like, that's why it's not selling. That happens. So then you want to ask yourself, what platforms, cunies, newsletter swaps and content could you create to get eyeballs in your book without spending money or very little? I think this is really key here. You don't want to spend thousands of dollars to fix up your book. If we're taking the book to the book doctor, you know, we don't want it to be like, you know, healthcare in the United States. We want it to make it affordable. So don't do that. So try and not spend a ton of money and think about ways you can get creative about getting some traffic. You don't need a thousand people to see your book. You don't need 10,000 people to see your book. You need just enough to get some signal of whether it's working or not, which will ask in further questions whether it's working or not. So what I want you to do, this is really important, is start writing down, right? Each marketing channel you test each thing you do and write down an estimate of how many people actually make it to the book's webpage. Now, mind you, this is really hard. You're not going to always know if you make a TikTok how much people actually click to see your book. You're not going to know all the time. If you send out a newsletter sometimes, occasionally you want to have your tracking link there, of course, but you know, it's an imperfect science sometimes. So if you want to get tracking links, there's a lot of places you can get tracking links. Bit ly just allows like a few for free that you can get. I'm trying to recommend things that you can at least use to a high level or to a certain level entirely, or usually mostly for free. So Bitly, at least for testing, is going to give you enough clicks for testing for free, which is why I like that and I've used it in the past. And you could include a unique bitly link in your TikTok profile, unique bitly link in your newsletters, a unique bitly link on your Instagram, unique bit link in your Facebook group, unique bitly link at your book signing and be able to actually attribute traffic that way. Is it perfect? No. But is it going to give you an indication which is what we're looking for? Yes. So after question number two, feasibly, we're moving on to question number three at this point, because if you're doing something that isn't getting you any traction at all, like I just encourage you to keep trying and there's a lot of superpowers in here that will, that will help you with question number two specifically. But what we want to do then is move on to question number three, which is ask ourselves, how much traffic have you actually gone to your books web page and where majority of readers from your book come from? Right. Where have they discovered your story? So now we actually want to analyze what we did and actually be reflective. So many of us might be realizing that one thing that we're doing to marketing our books, a specific newsletter swap, maybe it's a freebie newsletter we got mentioned on that brought in most of our traffic and everything else didn't really bring that much traffic in. That doesn't mean that you're bad at marketing. It just means you're good at that one area of marketing. And you know, it's not a bad thing if you don't have exact numbers. But what you want to ask yourself is if you don't have any data here, go back to question number two. Right. If you don't have enough. But if you have some estimates here of how many people have seen your book and where they've come from, you can move on to question number four. And I think question number four is where it starts to get fun because now you have to ask yourself, did the people actually buy or download your story? And if so, you know, what was the conversion rate broken down by marketing channel. That's like the really biggest thing I think is really looking at, okay for freebies. Like, did I get a lot of people to, like, see my book, but did they not buy anything? Okay, Did. Did they end up coming through Facebook and they bought my book more or my newsletter, but TikTok crickets, even though people saw my book. What you want to start to understand now is, is this a problem with you're investing in the wrong marketing channels and you actually have some marketing you're doing that's really working well, or is. And this happens is. Is none of your marketing working too well and you realize that you're having trouble getting people to convert to your book. So if you see that marketing is working well, double down on it. That thing is working for you. Keep going. You just realize that you have a healthy habit that you want to keep reinforcing, right? But if everything is converting low, it's just crickets. It's. It's not going great. You want to move on to question number five, which is, is your book description and cover aligned with the kinds of audiences you are reaching and your marketing message? Right? Like, that's so key. Like, if you are not having your description and cover match your marketing message, then that could match or signal, hey, you're getting all this traffic in your book, but they're expecting. This is a, you know, almost an extreme example. But you keep advertising, you know, science fiction novel, but then they make it there and it reads a little bit more like a thriller. Now that happens. Authors have made mistakes like that, but it can be so much more nuanced in terms of you bring someone there expecting something and then they walk away with something entirely different. And sometimes, whether we're using Facebook ads, whether we're using TikTok, whether we're in Facebook groups, what gets us attention on a social platform and then what actually gets as a reader to connect, right with our story? Attention and connection are different. And one of the real arts of our job in marketing is getting them to align where how we're getting attention and how we're getting readers to connect is ideally the same so that they really want it. So if. If your book description and cover aren't aligned with your marketing message, you know, do try and adjust either your marketing message or your cover. But if they are aligned, then you probably are going to want to adjust the reader interests you're targeting. You might actually have the entire wrong target market, which is kind of weird to say, but sometimes we highlight the wrong interest in Our story, you know, oftentimes we're kind of bound by genre convention, and we take a story that in reality, you know, in reality might be a book. I was talking with the author recently who loves Cryptids, right? And she could say she's writing fantasy, but she's really writing like a cozy fantasy for Cryptid lovers. That's a very specific story that if you're only marketing, like, cozy fantasy, yeah, maybe, maybe you're not getting a great conversion because the real group, who's going to really like your story, you're not being loud enough to reach. And part of your marketing is not getting as much people in your book as possible. It's being willing to have someone fall in love with your story and to be loud about that. So equally, someone could decide they hate your story and it's not for them. And you want to signal that as early as possible. And the earlier you can do that, the more effective your marketing is going to be. So don't be afraid to be loud. Don't be afraid to really share who your story is for, because unless we get really clear about that, we're going to have trouble actually finding those people. Now, what I will say is I want you to think bigger than just genre here. It's not about the genre necessarily, although it can be. It's about the passions and interests your readers share, and genre is a proxy for that. But it can be one genre mixed with one interest. They can love basketball and cold cases. What does that story look like? Well, you can already think of that, right? What does that advertising look like? You can already think of that now. What does that look like for your story? Now? I tried to order these bonus superpowers in a way that made sense. And this flow, I think, definitely works, which is Story Shifter. I tried to come up with, like, cute names, though. That can only make you remember what it is like. Okay, things aren't working. I've got to go to the Book Doctor now. And the Book Doctor is a nice, nice set of questions so you won't get hurt there, right? Story Shifter is kind of fun. Ideally, you can turn into a shifter however you want to think about it. But look, this all happens naturally. Sometimes the book Doctor tells us, like, like these questions, we're hitting a dead end here. Like, this isn't working. And you know what's fun about stories is the story doesn't have to die. It just has to change. It can morph into something entirely new. Now, that's what story shifting is, right? When we Pivot our writing to reach a new reader interest. Notice how I said the word interest here, not necessarily genre. Now, there comes a time for us when we all have to do this right? When we realize, you know, our messaging isn't aligned, or sometimes we're getting people to buy our book, but they're not actually reading it, which is a thing. So what we want to then decide is, hmm, how do we actually do this? How do we actually shift our story? And sometimes what we find in this whole process, through pivoting what we think our story is, we can actually reach a larger audience. Because sometimes these interest groups that aren't as defined by the limitations of the existing book market can cause a story to reach new heights. Right? Think about something like Star wars is a very good example of people who are interested in space and westerns and mashing that together. And you can reach a much bigger audience than just westerns alone or just people who like space alone. So don't be afraid to get wild here. But again, that's not too instructive. So how do we do this? So the first thing I want you to do is think audience first pick the new audience interest you are targeting because you kind of need to know who you're writing for to an extent. But who you're writing for doesn't mean, you know, the marketing Persona of they wear these clothes and they talk this way and they live in these states and are this age like, no, no, no, no. It's more. So what are they interested in, what stories they interested, what movies they like to watch, what creators do they follow. Then adjust the patching packaging of that story before you write a new story or, or revise existing ones. So my suggestion here is you can have an existing story, right, that you want to story shift. But before you shift that story, you're going to create a new product. You can put this up for pre order on a retailer, you can sell this direct. You're going to have a lot more flexibility if you're doing this direct because pre orders of Amazon can get weird, especially if you decide to take one down. So you want to be careful. Pretty Amazon, because that Amazon doesn't like when you cancel pre orders. You'll typically, their punishment is a year of no pre orders. So you want to, you know, think of it as a testing ground. Whether you're doing it direct, what your real goal is here is to then create a hypothesis of what this new story is going to look like and, you know, create that cover and whether you're Creating it yourself, whether you're using something like I think there's like get covers. I think was the one out of Ukraine. That is very cost effective and, and is some pretty talented designers. But you know, I'm not just. You could spend 800 on your cover here. Okay, I, I, and mind you, there's a time and place to spend 800 on the COVID and I will totally support them support that. But I don't necessarily think this is the right time for that. I think this is the time to be scrappy. Right? This is the time to be tested. And what you do is you take that cover, you take that description and you create that new story. Okay, News story. I'm using quotes here because it's not technically yet you don't write it. You don't write it at all. You start to pre sell it. And this is so important because. Yeah, exactly, 35 does get a pretty decent cut. That's the whole whole thing is like, you know, spending amount of money that like hopefully doesn't break the bank. And if it does break the bank, then get more creative and don't break the bank. I don't want anyone breaking the bank over this. And the whole goal is to pre sell it so that you're able to run a Facebook ad, do a newsletter swap and get actual data going back to the whole book doctor process. Getting actual data. This thing sells first because if your book doesn't sell, it doesn't matter what's on the inside. That's a really hard reality. It's true. It's story, first story always. But your marketing story has to be the first story that you know works, right? So you want to see that it's working. Is your hunch, is your hypothesis right? And if it is converting readers, then develop the product. And sometimes that product development looks like revising an existing story and rebranding it. Easy enough. Sometimes it looks like I'm going to put that story to the side and write a new one. But I'm going to shift my focus onto new stories and new audiences. But the principle is simple. Sell first then, right? And that I almost always recommend. Now this next one's fun. Huge change of tempo. Deep breath. I know I hit you all with a lot in our first 20 minutes. We have a long way to go. This is super power number four. We have 10 to cover. But this one's really fun. This one I have a lot of personal experience with and it's the holiday spirit. And I truly mean this like it is the Holly spirit here. And it's one of like, the most underrated strategies ever in, like, any business, by the way. Like, so if any of you are working in other businesses, if, if you're involved with other businesses, which you almost certainly, if you're not, you know, working for a company, you could be working with a nonprofit, any organization you work for. This is like such an insane hack. I can't even describe how big it is. But this is. When you give readers, authors, in the context of our industry and industry professionals, you care about a holiday gift, right? You're building trust, you're showing you that you care about them, but here's why you do it. And I know this from firsthand experience. It's really hard to keep up with relationships. I mean, there's so much stuff going on in our lives. How much times do we go, oh, I love this author. Like, I caught him within a conference, but I just haven't reached out to them. And it's already like two months after the conference. This is getting, getting awkward now. I don't want to say, hey, I met you at X conference and you know, that was last year. Nice to touch base again. I don't really have a reason to touch base. Besides, I realize your business card's still on my desk, right? Those moments, right? We all have the moments, special readers in our life. What are the readers that were like? Like, I wish I could just email them and tell them how much I care about them. And sometimes you might do that, but other times, you know, you're busy, you're like, I gotta write this next book. This is where holidays are. Really great excuse to actually reach out to people and touch base with them. Now I'm going to show you how to do it, but first I'm going to tell you a story. So I've, I guess, for the last two years ran various holiday gift giving campaigns, but I'll share the most recent one I did, which I. When I was on the Mr. Beast team, part of my job was like platform relationships with YouTube and Facebook and also top creators. And there's a lot of collaborations, a lot of people we cared about on that team that helped Beast grow. And I had a budget for holiday gifts. And it was not an insane budget, by the way. I was surprised to see a company that was much, much bigger than Almost is fathomable not spending that much more than what I had previously spent on holiday gifts for doing something in this industry the year prior. All this to say that a little bit can go a long way. But it was my job to send out 52 customized holiday gifts to top creators, like C suite people at YouTube, C2 people on Facebook, et cetera. And it was first of all, a lot of work. So we went like all out on this, like personal notes, like custom boxes, custom merch, exclusive things. It was like very fun. It was very, very fun for them. But so many of them, right, were texting after, like, thank you so much. This meant a lot. You immediately become top of mind for so many people that when they have an opportunity, they're going to reach out to you. And I can't underscore how powerful that is. And you know, sometimes, you guys, it's really that meaningful. But there's going to be a few moments in your life where you really need to count on the people around you. And that's where when you showed up for them year after year, it's going to really matter. And you're also doing this from a place of genuine generosity. Now you don't, as Jocelyn just said, you don't have to spend a lot to do this at all. And I'm going to show you kind of like three different ways to do this campaign. And one of them is entirely for free. And then one of them is very low cost because I don't think you need to be spending thousands, hundreds or even dozens of dollars to show that you appreciate the people around you, which is all this is about. This is just about giving you a deadline to do it. It's the holidays, right? So step one is first to just compile this everyone you like send a gift to, right? And what I want you to do is divide them into tiers. Now, you might only have one tier. I'm going to send everyone X gift or X type of thing. But you might have different tiers. I think that's actually not a bad thing to have different tiers to your gifts. You might want to give someone something extra special and other people that you still care about something special, but maybe not as much effort and personalization. That sounds bad, but like, you all know what I'm saying. Like, there's some people who deserve you to go the extra, extra mile and there's some other people that you want to show your appreciation. But there's only so much time today, right? The next thing is to create the gift and you could create these gifts based on different tiers you divided people up from in step one up to you. But here, like the, the four general tiers, is to write a personal thank you email this is so basic and it's completely free, but it goes such a long way. Just happy holidays. No ask, no, I'm marketing to you. Like disgusting. Do not do that here. Like not in this thing. We love, we love when you market things. Not now. This is not what this is about. This is about building long term relationships with people you care about. So just writing them a note in an email works, but make it personal. You're not sending out a mass email to like the 50 readers. That's what's really important. It's personal, right? It's to each person. You can send folks in your life. A holiday card doesn't have to be of your family. Could be an author holiday card. Create the books you published, right? Be whatever you're comfortable with. But holiday cards are really cute. They're awesome. I feel like as a society we've stopped sending them as much, which gives you even more of an advantage to actually send a holiday card because like, it's just another way to stick out in people's minds because again, like when someone has an opportunity, when someone has something you want them to be thinking about you. So how do you say just like you want your readers thinking about you when they want a book, right? It's the same thing. Which is why you can do this for your readers, right? Something I'm a holiday card. The other one is sending like people a gift book through Amazon or in the retail site you think they'll enjoy. I think this is less good for readers, mind you, but way better for like industry partners, authors. Something that I did was like sending top creators like business books that like I thought they'd like. And I was very happy to recommend a few very famous fans first. And they loved it. I was like, oh yes. I, you know, infecting the message to more people. It's a great message. I love that book Fans first is like a top five book for me all time. But the last kind of thing you could do, like the, the kind of like really custom stuff. It's like sending them wine, chocolates, flowers, like another special guest. I would call this like high cost, like vip. And I don't think you need to feel pressure to do this. You should only be doing this if you have the money and you're making this from your business, right? Like if you're telling me, Michael, I'm not meeting profit my author business this year, great. Send everyone a personal thank you email. You should do that. There's no reason not to that if you've made some Money. And you have a little bit to give away because you're not doing this with any ask in return. Holiday cards are very effective. You can send out a lot pretty cost effectively. Like, you know, we're talking, you know, about a dollar a person. You count it like mail and. And, you know, the actual printing, it's not that much exactly. Stamps are cheap. Then, you know, gift book is where we start to get. Not too pricey, but, like, I care about you. Wine and chocolates is, like, a lot more. But money doesn't correlate to impact. That's the really biggest thing here. And that's where step three comes in, which is including a personalized note for everyone is the most important part. Like, you want to write what they mean to you. Doesn't have to be long either. Like, three sentences could go such a long way, but it's three sentences that actually mean something and that come from your heart. Right? So this is just huge. And it's. It's a marketing kind of hack because it's weird to, like, view it like this, but you are your business, and the relationships people have with you is kind of what you have at the end of the day. Like, if everything else goes away, that's what you have. So investing in that is paramount. Now switching to, I think, a quicker superpower, because this one's pretty easy to grasp, but it's really important. And I literally, like, just with David right now, sharing me a bit about his business, and he incorporated his second payment option where people could pay monthly for Scaremail rather than just once up front. He hasn't seen a difference in conversion to the, you know, annual upfront option. The same number of people are choosing that, and he's now just getting net new customers choosing monthly. So he's just getting extra revenue every day. Which brings me to Superpower, our bonus superpower number five, which is multiple payment options. This is when you give readers multiple ways to pay for the same thing. Gonna say that again. It's when you give readers multiple ways to pay for the same thing, and you increase conversions and result in more income for you. And this happens 100 of the time. This happens 100 of the time. Literally. Like I. You might. It's not gonna get. It's not gonna 10x your income. I want to be very clear about the expectations here, but can it increase your income by 20%? By a third? Yes, if you're making $10 a month. Maybe not as interesting if you're making hundred dollars a month. Cool. Thousand dollars a Month. Very cool. And that's a month. Really, really cool. Right? Once you understand this concept, though, it's leverage that scales with you. Right? Because the power of this concept scales with you as your business grows. Now, what does this actually look like? Right? Like, how do we actually do this? So I'm going to give you some recommendations and the first thing that you really want to think about is from your reader's experience, how with each payment option, can you make it an awesome experience for them? Right? These payment options are for their convenience, for their financial convenience, which is a real thing. We always talk about making things convenient, you know, usability wise, make it easy to click on this, make it easy to get this shipped to you, make it easy to download the book. That's convenience. That's really important. We also, you know, do talk about making things affordable generally in terms of like, convenient price wise. We don't want to charge a thousand dollars for a book generally. That's not an amazing idea unless you have a specific marketing strategy behind it. I will never say it's a bad idea. But likewise, there's really four key ways to actually have people pay. And then I'll talk about payment gateways. They're both very similar concepts, but in terms of ways people can pay for things. You can have someone pay up front for future products. You might be like that. That's crazy. Like, why would anyone want to do that? I would never do that, but. Right, but you might be paying another way. And this person who wants to pay up front deserves to be served. And they exist out there. They are out there. Now. What would be the benefit for paying up front? It's going to be a discount, right? You're going to get a discount. You're. You're going to want to bulk up, right? Whatever that bulk order looks like, a bulk order for a series might be looking a little different. But if you already. Again, use this one with caution, people. But if you have planned four or five books in a series, know it's coming out, but books three through five aren't coming out for another year. Why can't a reader pay $25 for the whole series right now, today? Why not? They definitely can. And if they do, that's more money in your pocket today. And then you have to analyze what is cash worth today versus cash tomorrow? What does that mean to your advertising? Does that make you more profitable faster? Does it help you scale faster? Right. These are ways to think about it. But there's so much creativity here. Then there's Installments. We talked a lot about subscriptions, or at least I have in the past. But installments are equally powerful, which is when you have someone pay for something over time, it's not a recurring payment necessarily. There's not going to go on forever. They don't have to cancel it. That special book box was a hundred dollars, but now you can pay for it over five months for $30 a month. Notice. Notice that though they're actually paying more for the privilege to do installments. So you're making more revenue per customer. When someone chooses an installment now, you know, you, you want to pick what percentage makes sense. I've seen people do anywhere from double for installments to 20% extra to. To nothing extra for an installment. My general advice is to do somewhere between 25% and 100%. And what's really interesting is when you do an installment too, or something of that nature, the behavior incentivizes. So let's say you have a product that would normally be an installment, like a book series, right? And I'm gonna pay 5. This is where you get to have these pricing strategies work over time. The series effectively is like, although it's a la carte, it effectively is an installment. So I could pay $5 for each book, or I could pay $20 up front. Maybe there's eight books in the series. Right? You've now incentivized someone to give you that $20 upfront, if that's what you want on. Right. And that, that's what doing that 100, you know, would lead to. Right? Where people are really only going to choose that payment plan or that installment plan if they, like, really, if that's really convenient for them. The breaking it up versus if it's 15 or 20%, you might have some people who would pay in full right now who are going to divide it in installments. And then you have to think, okay, I might be increasing my conversions, but I also might be decreasing my cash up front. So what does that look like for my business? Can I handle that? You know, in the long run, you're going to make more money almost certainly doing any of these strategies, but you want to pencil it out for yourself. And this is napkin math. This is not spreadsheet calculator time. This is literally okay. If 10 customers buy a book, a book series upfront for 25, versus they could pay me for the special edition book. You know, let's say, let's talk special editions. Keep it simple. The special edition's $100. They could pay the special edition upfront, $100 in my pocket. Or they can pay for it, you know, $25 over six months. Okay, well basically in month one, you can do the math. If you're going to get 25 to 30% more people, more people buying your books in net, then how much would have to go to the payment plan for you to make less money up front? Right? Like that's the calculation you're running here. Here it's very, it's, it's simple aftermath. And you just have to think like this could work. So again, you don't have to get too scientific with it. I love playing around the data and the numbers and simulating conversions. It's fun for me. For you, it might not be as fun, but the concept is so simple. Give your customers multiple ways to pay. And there's even more options here. There's micro payments. What if someone wants to pay for sections of a story, for sections of a chapter, for a blog post, for a character, you know, interview, for bonus art? Right. And you want to get super affordable through a micropayment. There's things like Super Tab Co that are making this easier where Supertab Co, that's the website literally just makes like micropayment super easy. There's other sites out there. There's other like direct sales things that you can use too. What Super Tab does is it decreases the payment processing fee so you keep more of your revenue. And they do that by like creating a tab that like add adds up all the readers tabs over time, these mini payments, and then charges it at once. It's kind of cool because part of why micropayments have been challenging in the past is because of how high payment processing fees are on them. And that's a perfect segue into you want to give readers multiple ways to pay you. Not just multiple ways to pay you in terms of plan options and installment plans and monthly and all that, but actually giving them multiple ways to physically pay you. Like, I understand, like taking cash. The Internet is probably prohibitive. That doesn't make a ton of sense. Although you could technically have your readers pay you by mailing you in cash. Again, that probably doesn't make much sense, but are you available if you're selling direct on stripe, Are you available on PayPal if you're doing a retailer? The retailers probably already handle this for the most part. But you'd be shocked at how countries you're only using stripe that like strike is not available in and that you'll want to be using PayPal and then Vice versa. Right. Where people prefer Stripe, those are the two big payment gateways. I don't want to over complicate things. It's basically if you're selling direct, make sure you're using both. If you're using Shop Pay through Shopify, make sure that you have Stripe and PayPal set up. Those are the two major payment gateways. You're leaving money on the table. Not an insane amount, but probably, probably 5 to 10%, maybe more by not doing that. And one last piece of advice I'll give here. I guess I'm really passionate about this topic for some reason is paying for like lifetime access to a series is really interesting. Like getting lifetime access to a series or to your content to actually be able to support you. I have a case study on this super cast. There's these two political commentators, Crystal and Cigar. They run Breaking Points. It's an independent media outlet, mostly on YouTube. They have a podcast as well. And they basically gave an option where you could get a lifetime access to all of their like paywalled content for like a thousand dollars. And they had about, I think it was something around like 1% choose the option. But it made their launch day like, that was like half the revenue at launch day was that. Which is pretty wild because when they launched their subscription, it was a very big like launch for like they were using this audio subscription platform. Super cast. Pretty wild. So anyways, I can share case studies all day long. I think y' all get the point. Experiment with how you can increase the options. Readers can pay you both in physically, how they can pay you with through payment gateways and the options to pay for your product. And think through readers first. You don't want to screw someone over. You really want to think about, wow, that would be cool. Like dividing that payment up. I have to pay a little bit more, but it's reasonable. Is great. Or again, you're the business owner. You actually vice versa, want to give someone a reasonable payment rate if they want to pay a monthly plan. But give someone a discount if they're paying up front for everything. Great. The psychology of this is all the same. You get to incentivize whatever you want in your business, depending on what cash you want now versus cash later, et cetera. And my advice generally is cash now is a lot more valuable than cash later at any business. So prioritize for that in your options now. Last, next, not last, not even close to last. We're going to talk about content hacking and I love this one, it's, it's, it's fun. So I have a few superpowers that we go over in the 50 other market superpower decks that talk about, like, how to see, see things that are trending and be able to improve, you know, what you're doing based on that. This is not that content hacking is specifically looking outside of your niche, outside of books even, and to see, like, what content is just doing well generally on social media and then using that to discover patterns and make our content better. I can't even tell you, like, so much of, like, how big creators get their ideas and go viral is studying what's working well in other niches, sometimes even in different countries as well. Because, like these core human psychology principles, like, oftentimes, like, there are very much cultural differences, but there's also a lot shared. Right? So how you actually do this practically, this one's simple. I kept this one really simple is you want to see what content is overperforming. What I call, and many people call, I shouldn't say me as if I come up with this. I did not. Outliers for creators across social platforms. You want to find outliers. What is an outlier? So I'll give you an example. Like Mr. Beast, like his videos, all are outliers. It's very hard to say if one of his videos does remarkably better than the last, at least to a public viewer, because it's like, okay, every video gets like 200 million views, right? So like, that's insane. But if we're looking at other creators, right, you'll see that most creators have very few videos that make up most their views. Like, everyone you see who's famous has a few things that made them famous. And that includes authors too, by the way. And what you want to study is, okay, so this TikToker has $500,000. Well, which ones popped off? Like, if you go to Willow winters on TikTok, you'll see like, she's not just going viral every video. She's a few videos that made her really, really big. She's done a lot that done well, but she's had a few that made her real big. Those are your outliers, ones that get 10x, 20x, 30x. Sometimes it's only 3 to 5x, but it's multiple times more than the average views on a specific social media channel. And what's really interesting is you can look across different niches, like in education, like what titles are getting people going and like business, what people are Clicking on different science education videos. What people are clicking on different challenge videos on comedy videos. Like, what is getting people to click where they're coming into video 10x more than your average video from that creator. Bang. That's your winner, right? That's something you want to study. And what you want to then see is patterns. And you have to do this too systematically. This literally just looks like you scrolling through your phone, taking the social media time you're already spending. Because I promise, you're on social media. If you're not, you're awesome. Because it's probably not worth infecting your mind with all of that just for this one superpower when there's 59 others. But if you already on social media, like the average American, the average American spends four hours a day. And if you're actually doing that, just take note of what you're watching and actually try and do the research. Click into their profile. See, like, why did this pop up? And with that becomes something really powerful. Because you get to replicate those strategies, replicate those hooks to your same to your own viewers. Because every ad is getting someone to click on something. So whatever psychological tactic gets someone to click on something for a different niche. Repurpose the language, repurpose the strategy for your own niche. It works. This is what the top creators do. It works. And for proof that, actually, Mr. Beast built USAT, which was an internal software spun out that anyone can use now. And they have a free account you could create. There's a paid version. I don't recommend upgrading to the paid version for authors. It's not worth it. But the free version talks about outliers. He talks about outliers all the time. And he, like created this algorithm that helps you see different outliers in YouTube. So you can actually assign videos outlier scores and then study different outliers in the platform. It's like only the thing that like Jimmy would get into, but it's like super cool. And it's just a great way to look at it. Like that is how you hack it. You have to see what's doing well and jump on those trends and adapt it to going back to our first bonus superpower here. You know your audience, right, and your interest and your readers. Going back to like the book Dr. One going back to the story shifter, like building on that. How do you now make off them? Okay, great, we're on to the next one. Now. This one is fun. I've talked about this a bit in the past, but author debt is more of A concept rather than something you could take as like something actionable, like right now, grow your business and more. Something that I think about when I'm going, where should I invest my time? But it's just the concept that if you had all the relationships, knowledge and experience you needed to be successful, you would be. Right. Like if you knew everything to do, why wouldn't you? And then the only question would be like, are you just not doing it? But if you're doing it, then that's the only question. Right? So paying down your author debt, because this isn't literal debt is how do you accrue these lesson relationships and knowledge as fast as possible and do it in a way that's efficient, that doesn't require you going into other forms of debt and money out of pocket and all these things. Right, so. Oh, skipped a slide. So the three kinds of author debt are ignorance debt, friendship debt, and practice debt. And the first two I'm going to breeze through because the one most of you hear in this call, most of you here watching this, are going to be struggling with, is the third one. And I want to empower you to go for it. But ignorance debt is if you knew everything you need to make 100k a year selling books, right. It would be a lot easier to do that. This is knowledge. We pay that down by watching podcast videos, reading books, doing fun things like this. I hope this is fun. If it's not fun, sorry. But you could do things like this and hopefully learn. Okay, great. If you're here, you're already learning a lot. Okay, I, I know you. I know that you're probably a high learner in your CliftonStrengths, right? It might be a top five for you. If you're here, I'd say there's a decent odds. If it's on the top five for you, you're still here, you're still learning. You're paying down your ignorance debt right now. Number one. Love it. Jocelyn. Yes, that's it. Right, so that's great. That's amazing to be hiring. I also, I actually don't think I'm top five learner or maybe I forgot, like it's somewhere, but I'm, I'm number one futurist. That's my big thing. And then activator. Those are my two big things. Then achiever, whatever. Anyways, I'm very action oriented, which I guess is why I'm going to show you this last one. So friendship debt. Right. I'll breeze through this. It's pretty Simple. If you, if everyone around you was headed on an amazing trajectory would make it a lot easier for you to get there. Notice trajectory here. I'm not telling. You have to be friends with like seven figure authors. I'm. I'm very lucky. I'm very privileged that I have a lot of like amazing like creator friends who do insane things I couldn't even imagine doing. I'm very, I'm very lucky. But you don't necessarily have to be like personal friends and be able to call, you know, a millionaire author on speed dial. Like, like that's great if that's your friend and that might be your friend one day. But that's the key point. That might be your friend one day. How you get there is by being around people who are going places. David and me just started off as great friends. He was at a day job. I was in college. He's a great guy. He's very talented. He's very smart. I knew he was going places. He's here now in a really, really cool spot. You know, having a multi million dollar. Your story story letter business. When you also do cool things. We'll talk about this in practice. Debt. When you have that trajectory where people can see you taking action, it makes it easier for you to surround yourself with the right people. But it's just so important to not ever think about people where I need to be with someone who knows it all. You don't. That's not what friendship debt's about. Friendship debt's not about being with someone who knows it all to help you pay off your debt. Yeah, it can help. It's about being with someone who's going the places that you want to be. Someone that inspires you. I mean that's what life's about, right? Someone like that. It's so huge. How you can find this is being a genuine and good person who helps others. That's the number one thing by far. Yeah. You can start a small group mastermind with like minded authors that meets once a month. I see Willow's been popping in and out here. Willow does that with the Buggos. It's awesome. Willow's a great human being. So she's already, you know, she's doing that. You can join other things. You don't have to start it. You can meet new authors at meetups and Facebook groups and at conferences. Like all these things you could do. But just being a good and genuine person is the biggest thing. Like if it's. If I was to sum it up in one sentence. Play long term games with long term people. That's it. Now let's go to the last one which is where like we probably need the most tlc, right? Which is practice debt. Which is if you are constantly learning and improving through practice, it would make it much easier for you to succeed, right? Constantly learning and improve. This doesn't mean succeeding constantly learning and improving through practice. Constantly learning, improving through practice. A lot of us are great at building relationships. A lot of us are great at learning. I find that a lot of us struggle to pair that with action. Right? And if we don't pair that with action, all of our learning goes to waste. All of our learning goes to waste. That course you took on Facebook ads, useless if you don't start running them. I'm not telling you go run Facebook ads. But I'm telling you if you took a course on it. Okay. Worthwhile now considering why you spent the time learning if you're not going to go do it. Because most of the learning comes through action. Most of the learning comes to that. Yes. I've read some excellent books. I love reading. It's like one of my favorite things to do. I will never say no to knowledge, but at the same vein I will. I hate getting dragged down by knowledge. Like my first priority is to take action to get things done rather than to learn. Because I know I'm going to learn just as much through practice, if not same as more than through knowledge. And don't get me wrong, you want to stand on the shoulders of giants, you want to get people protected, you want to have great friends. All that's so important. But here's how you get out of practice debt. You just take one small step forward every day. Especially for us learners and people who are like me are futurist. We can really, really get caught up in like all the things. All the things. All the things, right? And I, I get it because I can get that way myself. I'm. I'm high activator, which makes it easy for me to just. We're gonna get things done now, right? We're gonna go into it. If you're not a high activator, that might not be as natural for you, and I understand that. But it's really important to get it done. Set goals, hold yourself accountable to making progress and track your progress with data. Are you actually moving the needle towards your goals? Like so oftentimes we set the wrong goal. Like is your goal to write the next book or is it to make money? Now that's not a question that's supposed to lead you one way or the other. That's an honest question you have to ask yourself, is my goal to write this next book, or is it to grow my business to make money? Or is it another goal entirely? Whatever your goal is, the goal, the actual goal that you have not, I want to do Facebook ads, I want to do this, I want to go. That's not your goal. Your goal is to do one thing. Really, you want to achieve one thing. Whatever your goal is, you're practicing to get towards that, and you want to make sure you're getting towards that. Paradoxically, when we actually zone in on that, a lot of the things we do don't actually get us closer to our goals. And it includes our learning. It includes sometimes our friendships. But candidly, don't just cut out all your learning, all your friendships. It's fun to learn, and you need to have people in your life, even get you closer. Goals like, that's unbelievably insane. But one thing that isn't insane is cutting out the practice, not getting you closer to your goals. That is not insane. Why are you wasting your time doing these things? So you want to get really clear about your goal. And one mistake. The biggest mistake I see authors make is thinking that the one way to get closer to their goal is to keep writing. If it's to keep writing, yes. But if it's to grow your business, that's not always the next thing you need to do. It might be really validating. You can sell something first before you write. It might be really zoning on your audience. Whatever it is, it might not be writing that next book. You spending all your time writing the next book might be the thing holding you back from your goal. So you want to practice. You want to track and get closer to where you want to be, and ultimately surround yourself with people who have similar goals. Likewise, if you're surrounded by friends who all want to make a living writing and their real goal is to make money from this, and you just want to write that next book, that might not be the best group of friends for you. Not because any group is better than the other. Because you want to be people. You want to be around people on a trajectory that you align with. Right? That's important. You don't have to think the same things, believe the same things, but you want to share similar dreams. Okay, that was a long enough rant. So this next one is the only one that doesn't have a back, which maybe you're grateful for at this stage because it's been a lot of info and I know. I believe we're on card number eight now, but it might be seven of our bonus marketing superpowers. I should have given these numbers, but who needs them? We're diving it. So Epic Reader Magnets. It's eight, Cynthia. Thank you. I was like, we're seven or eight. I'm just in the zone right now. So Epic Reader Magnets are my kind of. So I. I have a superpower on freebies and giveaways and some of the superpowers you'll see there's probably like 10 to 15 that I think are like, okay, like, these are helpful reminders for a lot of you, but probably nothing real. The freebies to give away one is one of those, like, helpful reminder ones I think is, like, good from a first principal objective, but it's probably nothing new. Epic Reader magnets is where I, like, want you to push the boundary. Right. Here's one of our biggest problems when we think about marketing. This is a great thing. There's a lot of marketing advice online. There's a lot of advice about how to build funnels, a lot of advice about how to reach readers. So it's kind of commoditized, right? The free X thing that we've all seen. The free. Give me your email and I'll give you a novella. Give me your email and you get this, like, bonus epilogue thing. How many times have we seen that? A lot. How many times have you signed up for it? Probably not a lot. How can you create an Offer an epic Reader magnet that actually makes you stand out? Because here's what an Epic Reader magnet does. It helps convert to your freebie at a high rate. And. Right, because they're going to give you their email. And because it's so epic, they're also going to give you more money afterwards because you're going to build more trust. So, as many of you know, I have the podcast beyond the Book, and that's where, like, I always try and, like, help authors expand their ideas about what they think is possible. But I want to be a little bit meta here and talk about what this deck thing is. I'm going to share a little bit more publicly in, like, the big pencil party, a little bit more behind, like, really what's happening in a good way. There's no secret master plan. It's very simple plan. But I was imagining to myself I could give a really good knowledge to people. Just like you can create a really good story for people. People Right. It's going to really entertain and help your readers, just like I want to entertain and help you all. But the thing about it is, how many times has someone told you, sign for a mailing list and I'll give you this guide on how to make money doing X or grow your audience doing why? We've all seen it before. We've all seen it before. And I could, you know, try and pretend like I found the new hack to growing your author business, but I haven't. I wish I did. But I do have something valuable to share. Just like you probably have a valuable story to share, right? So now we're thinking about it and we're like, well, what do we do? And I started looking at things like pip decks. I started studying the entire card market. Every car that's sold on Kickstarter, I've looked at. And I was like, there's something here. And there's, you know, other authors who've done really awesome cards for other authors, like Renee Rose, she has a great romance card. It's like really cool. Romance versus the wall. It's actually technically for readers, but it's. It's epic. And then Becca Syme had her stuck list cards. And there's more. There's like writer the writer emergency cards. There's like a lot of stuff out there that have been done for authors, but there hasn't been anything done specifically on marketing. That's also 4 by 6 inch cards. So bigger with like super focused on like, basically turning what could have just been a series of 50 blog posts into 50 awesome cards that are quick bite size, but pack a ton of punch, right? And I thought, this is a much better reader magnet that's for free, right? That I can now give away to get people to build trust in me, what I'm doing. I might be wrong, mind you, but I'm at least trying to show you that I'm trying to use these own superpowers of what I'm doing. And you can do the same thing, right? It's about looking at something that already exists, adapting to what you're doing. And how can you use that to make your story successful, stand out? Because then someone goes, I've never gotten something like this for free. You know, you go into the store how many times you go to the grocery store and it's like, okay, yeah, they have the new cheese sample. That's free. Okay, maybe you're more excited, but here's the new free cheese sample. But then all of a sudden, you know, they turn that cheese into a free cheesecake sample, and it goes out in five minutes. There's no stale cheese at the end of the day. Like, cheesecake sells out, right? What's your version of turning cheese into cheesecake? I'm not telling you to turn water into wine, cheese into cheesecake here. It's a little bit more simple. How you do this is innovating on your stories medium, right? I'm turning this story that could have existed in a blog post and turning into carts. Right? That's simple. That's it. I mean, yes. That medium, when you do that isn't just that simple. It means you need to create something for that medium. The illustrations and make it awesome. But that's part of being creative. And what makes it fun, it can be the actual genre and audience you're targeting. No one's you're. You've created the first freebie. You know, I don't have the secret to getting rich as an author, so I didn't want to say I have the new thing. But you might have the new thing in your story. You might have the new or. Oh, my God. No one's done this before. No one's written a serial killer novel for people who love baseball. I'm sure they have, but this one's free, right? Whatever. Right? What's your in where people are going, wow. Is it something where the. The freebie isn't quite what we'd think of as a freebie at all. Maybe it's an invite to something. It's invite to an online event they're able to attend. It's an invite to a cuny that has something inside that's, you know, your character's interacting in there. Maybe it's an invite to a serialized email. It's a story, like a story challenge that comes over five days where they're hearing from a character and it's coming through their email and they're like, oh, my God. Like, it's like this character's personally reaching out to me with updates in their life. This is cool, right? I haven't seen this before, but again, now you're making that story custom to that medium. That's really important. You're not just repackaging it. You're actually saying, what does it look like If I wrote a story through email and my freebie was an email story delivered through email? Which is the big mistake we all make, right, Is we try and make something unique, but we don't actually stay honest that medium and really go all in. So go all in and create something epic. Now, my ninth one. Thank you for the reminder, Cynthia. My ninth one. My ninth bonus marketing superpower. Remember, this is not stuff I'm going to be sharing. You know, I might touch on these things in podcasts, but this is not like superpowers. I'm sharing publicly. I wanted to keep this for all of y'. All. And this one, I think is particularly dangerous because I talk a lot about doing collaborations, but I don't honestly sometimes talk about what that really means, and sometimes I'll talk about creators or doing swaps. But this is the most powerful way to do a collaboration, okay? And collaborations are a really great way to grow your business. Like, you don't have to create content. You don't have to run paid ads. You can collaborate with other people and grow your audience. And the best way to collaborate with other people, to grow your audience is through story ambassadors are the people who will share your book far and wide for you, right? These are your ambassadors and you're going to reward them for literally selling your books and products for you. Like, you're going to turn them into your marketing force. Now this, this feels like, come on, that's. That's crazy. But look what authors do, their street teams. Story ambassadors are even trying to take street teams to the next level because I don't think street teams go far enough. Because what I mean, again, sorry for the small text. I try to keep it on one slide to, like, keep the card format. I realize that's not as cute when we're all here together, but I'll again send you a PDF so you have it all and you can copy and paste this, download this all for yourself. But I'll give you my riff in here, so, because y' all are here and that's what makes it fun. So I have a few rules about what makes a great ambassador program that if you follow, you're golden. And I think a lot of times we see these authors with like the 10,000 person street team or whatever. There's authors who have this, which is awesome, by the way. Like, I love you, but, like, that is so disempowering for someone getting started. Like, thank you for letting me know I can market myself at the street team. Now I just have to like, yeah, these can be super fans. Exactly, Devin. Like, like this ambassador army can be your superfans. That's exactly what it really is. You want a smaller, tight knit group of ambassadors, right? That's better than a large disconnected one. So you want tight knit group, five people is better than 50 people who are not tight knit. That, that does look like building people who are emotionally connected to your brand, not just economically. They want to go out and sell books. It's not bad to offer someone money, but it's just as good to offer them other prizes, gifts. And you want to really treat your ambassadors like real people and try and actually build individual relations. Doesn't mean you have to be on the phone with them or a video call, but over an email. Like, they know that you're a real person behind the story and you're trying to build a relationship with them. Now again, you're thinking, well, this sounds a lot like a super fan. You're right, Devin. It is a lot like super fan. But there's one key difference, which is you're actually deliberately working with this group of superfans, which doesn't have to be a large group of superfans to mobilize them. It's an active thing. Like, they believe in what you're doing. I'm going to touch this. And this is my last superpower. They all connect, but they believe in what you're doing and want to share with the world. Right? So step number one is to create a form for someone to, like, apply to be an ambassador, right? You don't want just anyone to be an ambassador. You want to make it exclusive and make sure you bring the right people in who are actually passionate about what you're doing. Because you don't just want people who are trying to, like, get a free book or make a quick buck. Like, that's not what this is about. That's not even a good use of time. Like, it's just a bad idea if someone's coming into it with that. Summer two is that you want to accept the best applicants, right? The ones that you feel like will be best in your space and create a space for you all to chat. Again, if someone doesn't want to join the chat, that's okay. But to be over WhatsApp messenger, just text where people can keep up with each other. Then you want to work with ambassadors for them each to have their own goal. Okay? And this is where it gets so interesting because we think of marketing as boring, right? So we mean when, immediately when I say this, you're like, this is crazy. No one's going to do it. This is horrible. I'm like having people do free labor for me. I'm not for any of that. Okay? I'm not for any of that. Marketing's fun. Marketing is Storytelling and your readers want to tell stories. So I'm not them. How are them to tell stories about your story? Okay, now for more practical stuff. You want to work with each ambassador to have them have their own goal, Right? In fact, in your application, you should have them try and propose this type of thing so you can have them host a podcast focusing your stories. That's fun. For a fan who loves your stories, having a podcast with your stories is fun. You giving them the resources, which could just be your time of like, insights of like, hey, yeah, you can call me up or like, you know, it doesn't have to be a literal call. You can email me or DM me, right? And I can share with you your answer to that questions that you can do in the podcast. Maybe someone wants to start a TikTok channel about your day. Some people love, like making videos. Some people love making videos. There's millions of readers creating videos for free on TikTok. Maybe someone's that for you. Maybe they want to start a book club around your book, right? And mention it in different reader groups, like actually build a book club. They want to build the cuny. The big goal is with these ambassadors. You're relinquishing control. You're letting them do their thing. You're not approving them, they're not contractors, none of that. These are people that you're empowering to share your story by helping them create their own stories and you're rewarding them for it. It can be economic. You can attribute some sales back them. I'm not saying no, but I, I, I like even more, right? Rewarding them with just your thanks and gratitude, that goes a long way. But I, I'm, I'm talking like special edition books. I'm talking merch. I'm talking things that like, will get these people, like, so fired up they can test everything you do early and for free. Right? But I guess the key here is encouragement and structure, right? And actually setting up a monthly call for people for them to all check in for you to know what's going on and for you to make it a priority not just to be like, oh, hands off, do your own thing. No, you're actually going to stay in touch with these people because you want them tied in to what you're doing and you want to be tied into what they're doing so that you can help support them and they can help support each other. And it's just wild what people will do. It's wild what people do when they believe in you. Your story. Which brings us to our final superpower, our final one, our bonus one. And this is just 10 of 60 now, right? Because there's 50 more that I'll be sharing with y' all in. In the coming weeks. In the coming weeks. Illustrations are an ongoing process, but when readers believe they are part of something bigger. Right, than them, you will energize their word of mouth and. And purchasing activities to new heights. That's why I call it wave Maker. Right? You're making things happen. People want to ride something, be a part of something. A wave is bigger than them, quite literally. It doesn't have to be serious, though, right? Like, this is the thing. Like, it can be okay, but it doesn't have to be. It can be very humorous. Like, it can be like, you know, we're just a group of. We're a group of gals who hate our day jobs, and we like to kick back with wine and books at night. Like, that's cool. That's a movement. That's awesome. Like, seriously, it doesn't have to be like, we're taking down the man or we're starting a revolution. It can be, I love that I'm here for the revolution, but I'm also here for. We just want to kick back and have some wine, like, whatever. Right now, if you can align the core transformation your characters undergo in your stories with a similar journey that you want your readers to undergo in their own lives, that is when we start to get this movement to have be really powerful, because that's the deeper theme for your entire brand. That is the Halo effect for everything. Readers come to you for that. So what move? And this is when you can really be intentional about future books you write cross genre. Because if your movement is your constant, you can do whatever you want. And that's what, again, who's done this the best? Taylor Swift. She's not the best. She's not the best. Out of anyone. Out of anyone, probably in the world, at least entertainment wise. There's, like, other orange people have done it really well too, regardless of whether you agree with the movement or not. But Taylor Swift's definitely done the best for entertainers. And it's mind blowingly, like, awesome what she's done, right? I mean, no matter what she song she writes and creates and performs, you are a part of that movement and what she means. And a lot of her songs go back to these core meetings. How can you do that for your books right now? Let's get into some more actions. So create your movement. Three steps, right? You want to, one, pick a meta story that you want to tie your brand together. Like, what feeling are you trying to give your readers? Are you empowering them to overcome monsters in their life, making them take themselves in the world a little less seriously with some humor? Or you finding new love after telling divorce, right? Like, there's so many different things and stages of life, why people turn to stories. Why do they turn to your stories? What are your characters going through? And how does that connect to their life? That's where we get from having a story just be a story to moving beyond the story to everything your story can serve your readers. That's connected to them, right? Because now if you figure out this movement's about again, finding new love after challenging divorce, what are other ways you can serve your readers in that journey, in that movement? It's more than just a story, but it has to start there. Now, step number two is identifying, right? What language you will use to convey your movement, right? What symbols inside jokes, words. Like, how does someone understand what this is about? Right? How are you actually conveying this? Right? Not the boring marketing language or, like, the one sentence you might tell me. Like, michael, I figured out my movement. Great. That's not actually it. Like, create your movement, animate it. Create a story, symbols and world around it. Then step three is arm your readers with ways to show their affiliation with the movement, right? Clothing, other products. I mean, think about how amazingly Taylor Swift does this, right? That's what you want to be doing. You want to be actually giving your readers, then the resources to step up and be involved, which is where going back to our last superpower, an ambassador program, and having story ambassadors can be really, really powerful, right? When you connect both these two powers together, these superpowers work together. When you connect both these together, huge. And I hope you see, too, a lot of these superpowers build on each other. It's all an interconnected corpus that you all have. These are not superpowers that you don't have. You have all of these superpowers. This is not like, you know, Superman can fly. The flash runs fast. Like, you can do it all. You have it all inside of you, and it's just a matter of what superpower you want to use in what moment. But that's what author market superpowers. That's what Author Decks is all about. So I hope you enjoyed whatever we want to call this. It was a lot of fun for me. And I'm gonna just scroll back to the first opening slide And I would love, you know, any questions you all have about this, any way I can help you. I know I. I definitely packed in with a lot. It took me. I. I was like, I. This is overwhelming, but hopefully it's fun, and I'm glad there's a recording. So, anyways, how can I help y'?

All?

What's on your mind? Yeah.

I think we're all in shock.

It was too much. Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no.

It's. It's that fire hose. Of all the things.

Yeah, yeah. The superpowers is very much a fire. Fire hose. I think there's a lot of things that I'll be diving deep into for a very long time.

Well, and I think it's also fun to go back and see. And I'm sure others felt this as well, what we're maybe already instinctively doing. But don't necessarily think of it as this way. It's just like something we do automatically or. Or that we're already. That we don't have, like, a name and a bullet point for it. But there were several times it's like, oh, yeah, okay, I'm. I'm doing some of these and then being able to say, oh, but that.

I want to try. Yeah. And also to, like, lean into what superpowers you're already using more, right? To be like, oh, like, this is actually something that is already working, and that, like, is super valid. And what I love about all these superpowers is you don't need to use all 10 or all 60, because 50 more are coming your way. You just need to use one, right? Like, your goal in one day when you decide to, hey, I'm gonna do some marketing. Is to use one superpower undergirded with the entire theme of, like, having fun. Right? This is not this. It's. There's called superpowers. Like, it's supposed to be fun. If you're like, that doesn't sound fun for me. Like, man, like, the whole content hacking thing, if you're like, honestly, it's probably something instinctive a lot of you already do. But if you're like, no, that. I don't like that thinking about it, I'm just gonna, like, be very intuitive rather than analytical, because content hacking is more analytical approach to, you know, developing an ideation versus you could be very intuitive about it. Like, there's nothing wrong with that. But I guess what's funny about these superpowers, too, is, like, I guess I made them. You could probably come up with another 50 that are just as valid or different ways of sharing them. I have a question with regards. Oh, sorry. With regards to the meme marketing, are there any. Because this is one of my concerns is, like, with using images, you know, copyright issues with memes and things, especially since it's kind of a more commercial endeavor. Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, like, first of all, I'll say, like, not legal advice on the way here. Probably should, you know, say that. But a lot of brands do use memes in their marketing, and if it's something that is being used by, like, a meme template and it's in there, right? Like, if it's. It's. If it's inside of, like, this meme generator, right, and it's already commonly used as one of the templates, odds are, like, you're gonna be fine. I. I would be curious, like, what a intellectual property lawyer would say. They might be more reticent, but there are, like, again, like, Dakota Crowd, big author. Like, he regularly uses memes in his marketing. Um, if you're worried also about, like, the core image and you want to, like, play it safe, that's where you can upload your own images but make them, like, similar or at least play in the same idea. Like, maybe. Maybe if it's like, one. Like, there's one of, like, a grumpy cat. Like, that's a very common, like, the grumpy cat meme. Well, maybe your cat's looking grumpy today, and that's the template you're using over a meme. Like, there's nothing wrong with that either. I generally am like, you know, I like to have fun and be experimental with marketing. But it should be noted, there's a lot of people who are fun experimental with marketing but can get themselves in, like, you know, legal trouble. I've. I've had friends that get into issues with that. Not, like, nefarious ways, but, like, oh, I should not have used that song in my marketing. Right? Like, that was a mistake. So, yeah, do be careful about that. It depends on, like, your tolerance for it, how you're. You know, how you're planning to use it. You know, one thing is, like, if you're using a meme to target a genre or, like, another author's book, I think that's, like, way more appropriate and has way less risk than, like, your actual book. It also matters where you're distributing it, like, in your existing reader group. If you have a meme in there, it's. It's probably not gonna get you the distribution you're looking for. But you know, right, like, it's, there's context is everything. Great question. I'm glad, Tracy, you have a few things you can act on right away. That makes me happy with the Scare Mail. That really inspired me. And I was trying to figure out a way to do something similar, but not like a puzzle. And I've included it in my Kickstarter as like a test run to build the super fans to. The idea of what you call the Ambassador has already started, like, playing in my mind with the inspiration of the Scare Mill. My only concern is when I go to switch from high fantasy to a steampunk fantasy, because that's going to be my next series. The slow transition to get them to stay with me on that. Well, so there's a few things you could do. Like if you're experimenting with this beyond the book activities you, you could create. Like if you're starting with a puzzle, for instance, if, like you were to send out like a few puzzle pieces with a story, right, there's, there's a world where like, the puzzles can combine together to create a larger puzzle, right? Like the, the puzzles tell a story in and of itself and that seems small and minimal, but something like that can hook someone into like, getting that next book. Because even if the new series jump, they're like, oh, like, I gotta complete what I got here. Like, I'm still, I'm still in the middle of this. You can hook them in that way. The other thing I would do is, you know, especially that first book, because once you get them through the first book, right, like, you're, you'll be probably good for the rest of the series is like, talk with them through the process as you're writing it. Especially, like those super fans who are backing you on Kickstarter. Invite them into it and like, try and like, get their excitement and like, stoke it. Like, see, like, like when you're stoking a flame, like, see where that spark is, See what they're, they're excited by and like lean into that as you're talking about it more. So I think it's like being open in your process rather than, oh, here's like another, like slightly like, you know, it's not like a total genre, but it's slightly different and just plopping it on them. They're like, where did this come from? You know, we wanted more of this. But then you're like, no, no, I, I've been actually building this relationship with you, been sharing you through this process this whole way and you're pumped about it. But I, I love to like, yeah, being able to connect things across stories and like little Easter eggs, like, are a great way to tie super fancy. Like the puzzle was like a kind of a proxy. I should have been more clear for like Easter eggs. So, so like Easter eggs can really go a long way and that's another way to do it. Like in fact, another Easter egg that's really simple. It doesn't involve anything physical or too complex. Is like the concept of character cameo or like a character in one series. Again, this could break series convention or rules in your world. So like, I don't want to, you know, solution for everyone, but if you're able to integrate a character from one series into the other that's making an appearance and you're able to highlight that again for these people to bring them from one series to another, that can be a thing that ties together. Doesn't have to be main characters have to be part of the story in any sort of way. It can be even a backstory, like just somehow they spawned in. That's also a way that I love to think about doing author collaborations as well. Again, it doesn't work in every world, doesn't work all the time. But you know, if Marvel and DC can have their characters collab, I think we can have ours too. Jocelyn.

Reader magnets. Epic reader magnets.

Oh, okay, good. I can tell you're on it. Good.

So I have in mind my ne. My current reader Magnet is a 40 years before. It's a 40 year historical prequel to book one. And it's, it's, it's laying the groundwork for the political situation and the antagonists and what does this world look like 40 years before the current protagonist comes stomping in? And within that prequel, I introduce a secondary character who is like the supernatural anthropologist, the supernatural Indiana Jones type who's writing letters, researching supernatural things. And one of my bonuses on my email list is that readers can subscribe to that character's email list and get her talking, get her. They're written from in character point of view, where she's sending emails about the research she's doing. And so one of the things I was thinking about for a reader magnet is putting together like her notebook and having it be like you're getting a copy of the notebook she's written with this information, which is really the world book. But it's from her perspective with her sketches and her notes and you know, notes in the margins. So it Looks like an actual like you know, a field book of somebody who's in the, out in the field researching these things. Now you say like, and I totally agree with you, we get caught into, we'll just write like the 10 page book. Just write like you know, or the little story or whatnot and put it up on Book Funnel and everybody subscribes to it. Is that like, that doesn't seem. I, I don't know. And this is where I'm thinking I'm gonna try it because I'm really curious because I don't see things like that on Book Fun Funnel. I, that it almost feels to me like a whole other project.

Yeah, well, it's not going to like work in the swap ecosystem. No, but how I'm thinking about already is from a different lens. You are creating. It's another superpower. But I call it book liquidator. But it's, it's more commonly in Internet marketing called like a self liquidating offer. But the, the whole goal is this. When you, you know, drive paid traffic towards a landing page, sign up for their email. This would presumably be on your own website and you could just deliver it through email. Right. It doesn't matter how you could use Book Funnel to deliver it through email, but it doesn't, it's not like you're using the book funnel ecosystem. Like that's not the goal. The goal is paid ad traffic. The toughest part about that is like, well I'm like, like I'm now spending a bunch of money out of pocket to get emails and great, I'll make money back later, but how do I force that now? And self liquidating offer turns that on its head and it says, hey, you're gonna actually upsell them after they give their email and make your money back. And I think you've just created a perfect upsell. I'll share why I have the digital again. I think the design that you're doing is really important. You're marketing this as a, like, it's really almost like instead of a book because you can, you can read a book or you can read a diary or a journal, whatever you want to do it. Like a diary could be it. Right? So like there's this diary that still gives you a complete arc. Awesome story, but includes all these awesome bonuses. Don't you want a diary to get inside a character like that? Well, if you do, you get it for free digitally. Great. Download it. Well, don't you want it physical too? That's the next page. Upsell them and What I'd look for is how much can you get an email for? What's that conversion rate? And how can you equal it out where you make all of your money back? Because then you can scale your ads like crazy. You know that any book you sell after that is fully profit off the emails, right? So you've designed a really interesting funnel. The question is, will it work? But that's how you're thinking about it. That's like when a reader magnet goes from epic to completely killer. And you have the framework for it because you have the upsell embedded into that digital thing, which is beautiful. And you'll notice, like, literally, that is what I'm doing here too. Definitely. So, like, that is the entire thing. Math it out where you're able to get that money back. Right? So like, oh, maybe you're able to get an email for 40 cents, right? At scale, maybe. Okay, well, how much can convert to the paid offer? Is it 2%? All right, well, then that means. And we're gonna do the math here. 50 times 0.4. I got 20 bucks. So then we gotta make 20 bucks and profit from whatever that upsell is on average to cover the ad cost. It's not easy. But a special journal diary that is printed for eight bucks, but it's really nice, can be sold for $30 easy. Right? Easy. And, and that's not even counting. You could do the audio bonus extra. That's another $5 upsell. And I mean, think about how creative you can get with it. It's all there. Right?

And, and, and as you're talking, I'm. I'm really seeing, going from the email site, the freebie, the first freebie is sign up for these emails, which is almost its own. It's. It can be its own sequence that.

It just like literally be like, you're. She's writing the diary live to you right now. Or like he, you know.

Right, right. Yeah. And it. And at some point I had even envisioned like, oh, no, because they're coming from an email with the redacted headers. And she's, you know, she's very much talking about, we don't know. I've been assured this is okay. This is secure, this is encrypted, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And at some point I was thinking another upsell is that I've been hacked. And now if you want to keep getting my stuff, I'm going to have to send it to you. And then it becomes like letters in the mail or whatever. And then the next thing would be like a. So I'm seeing, like, it could keep upselling and it kind of creates itself so that. Because I'm already building the world book for the world as the author, and, and all it is is it's turning the perspective to that of a character who, when I write the world book, I'm already thinking in her voice in that world book anyway, so the work is already created. It's just. How do I divide it and turn it into a product?

Well, I think, I think you're. I think you're exactly on the right path. So think away from Book Funnel. In your ecosystem, you could drive traffic to it if you're able to get them on the upsell. That's the principle. And I think I, I would research, I would look at other things people are buying. I would look at other things people have downloaded. I would get some examples. You have, you know, I know you have me on substack for sure, because you DM me there. DM me some links. I'd be very happy to like, just look over things for you and bounce back and forth ideas. Because I think we're at the stage now where this is innovative and, and, and the math can work. It principles are there, but let's get some more inspiration from what's already working. Yeah. So think broad and wide. Like, authors probably aren't doing this, but who, what. Who has done the things like this? What are comps like this that exist? Let's go out there and find it and let's see. Like, is diary the right branding or is it something else? These are small things, but they make such a big difference. Like, what is the exact right way to bring people in? Because there's clearly an ecosystem of offers here and ways you can further immerse them in the experience. But it all relies on, can you get that initial collection, initial email after that, if you genuinely get that interest. I think the rest is not easy because it takes a lot of creative energy and effort, but it all makes sense. But the first part has to make sense. So I think that's what we should work on. And message me. And I'd love to. I'd love to, like, chat on that more because I think that's the next action step is like, just continue breaking the rules. Like, you're right, the answer's on a book funnel. I haven't talked to many authors who've built a career off Book Funnel swaps. Yeah, no, and I love Damon love Book Funnel. Okay. Like, it's a great software that's not to say anything bad about it, but that's just to say that, you know, it's good to break the rules. Okay, I have to head out now. I could talk to you all for hours and hours, but I'm going to stop the recording right now. Let me end this. Thank you, everyone, for watching. If you're watching this recording, you are awesome and.