Story Market Fit When to Scale Your Author Business

Story Market Fit. How you know when to scale your author business. Look, the biggest mistake you can make is trying to scale before achieving Story Market Fit. Now today we're going to learn what Story Market Fit is, how you can achieve it, what your author life will look like before and then after you achieve this magical superpower that we call Story Market Fit. Now, this card that you're seeing on the screen is part of my completely free 50 author marketing superpowers. It's a beautiful deck, illustrated cards that gives you 50 superpowers to help you market your books.

I'll share more about it later, but.

For now, just know if you see these cards showing up in the screen.

I'm giving you a few superpowers to.

Help you grow your author business. But who am I to talk about growing your storytelling business?

Well, I like to call myself the Author Sidekick.

This is my sort of logo. I got it on my shirt. Weird and funny. But what I will say is I've self published 12 sci fi novels in high school and I've sold thousands of copies of my books. I also co founded a software company that helps authors make millions of memberships each year while at Harvard. I also, when I graduated Harvard, went to go work for Mr. Beast on the strategy team. So I helped really use data to help grow the channel. And now I work behind the scenes to help some of the biggest creators launch projects. I'm also the CEO and co founder of Creatorwood and also of course everything and Author Sidekick. So I'm busy, but I get a lot of different insights into the creative world. I'm far from an expert. I don't think anyone's an expert at this thing. We're all just learning as we go. You should take my advice and filter it. I'm someone who loves data. I'm someone who's very analytical, but I'm also someone who really has a heart for storytelling. And you may resonate with some of what I say here and I hope it helps you grow your author business. You may take some of the stuff I say here and be like, eh, that's not for me. And that's okay. That's exactly what you should be doing. There's not one way to grow an author business. There's not one way to think about it. But I hope what I'm about to share with you helps you. And ultimately it comes from my unique and weird story. This is one of the books I wrote. I'm going to tell you about what happened here. I'm going to tell you about the big mistake I made. But first we need to talk about what story market fit is. And what I want to share with you is my journey of coming to understand what this means and my evolving understanding of what it meant.

Because there were times when I thought.

I had story market fit, but I was wrong. And being wrong cost me a lot of money and a lot of stress. So story market fit is when you have a defined group of readers consistently engaging with a story market and they buy more books from you. Okay, define group of readers consistently engage the story and they buy more books from you. That's amazing, right? It's like, cool. I know who my readers are for the most part. I mean, you don't know where they live, but you know, you know at least a little bit about them, right? You know what they like and they buy more books over time. So you know that you don't just get a fan to buy something you want. They can keep coming back over and over again where you start to really have a storytelling business. Right? And this story market fit, this concept is really the foundation of every storytelling business. But I didn't know that. See, when I wrote this series. You'll see. First of all, seven reviews, 3.7 stars. I can. I can hate on myself. That's not very good. That's not very good. Okay, I want to say this and be really upfront. Your reviews do not actually mean whether you have a good book or not, especially the amount of your reviews. But what I can say is that a book with only 7 reviews and a 3.7 star rating probably didn't make the money back that it cost to pay for the editing of the COVID design.

And since I'm the guy who made.

This book, I can guarantee you it did not pay back. What's even sadder is you can see here, it's book one of six, Meaning I produced six books, books in this.

Series.

All of which never, ever paid out. When I say paid out, that just means that they paid the money back. It took me to actually advertise and produce the book. So that's a very fancy way of saying I lost money on all these books. It's fine to lose money, okay? To be clear, if you need to tell a story, you need to share with the world, that's great. That's beautiful. I. I wrote and published 12 sci fi books. I spent well over $10,000 in a pocket doing that. As much as I loved telling stories, I also didn't love going broke. And that's what was happening. I was saving up all the money at my job in high school and pouring it all into trying to ultimately sell books. And I thought that selling books would allow me to publish more sustainably. Of course, I was wrong with that. See, I thought the foundation of a book business was book sales. This is where we started off. And I honestly wasn't very good at it. It was pretty pitiful. And think about it, right? Like, getting book sales is the nature of being an author. At least we think we're going to disprove that in a little bit. But at this time in my life, this is exactly what I thought. I thought, yep, that's exactly what being an author is. I'm going to sell some books. So I went on my local TV and I talked with my book. You could see me here. If I look young, I was extremely young. I was, you know, definitely in high school at that time. And I was excited. I thought maybe this television interview would be the first of many, and it would get shared throughout the world that I had written a book and that people would want to go and buy it. Except this television interview that aired locally in Charleston, South Carolina, got me zero sales. So I was like, I don't know what it is, but I'm bad at selling my book. That's what I thought the problem was. So I went on a mission to solve it. At 17, I traveled to 20 books in Las Vegas, and I was too young to even check into a hotel room on my own. So I had my grandpa come with me. And of course, I still had to pay for all my expenses and fly out there. But it was like, you know, michael's investing in his business, but someone has to support him from the family because he can't do it himself. First time on the strip, first time in a casino. I was literally walking around the casino, and someone was like, you shouldn't be here. I'm like, I got the commerce badge. Like, we're good. But they tried to kick me out of the casino. It was a lovely time. And I went up on stage right after someone talked. Not the kind lovely man pictured, but another huge author who sold millions of books. And I asked them, can I have an internship? And I was convinced that if I can just intern with a big author who had sold books before, I could learn how they did it and I'd be able to sell more books. Well, luckily, they said yes. And that internship did change my life, because it did teach me how to sell books. I'm certain of that. And it Was honestly, it was time to cook. It was time to cook. I was rapid releasing this series. Book one, book two, book three, book four. I threw down my credit card, put it, put some Facebook ads on it. And I thought, I know how to do this now. I know the ads dashboard works. I know to create ads.

I know to get ready interested.

Like am I a pro? Absolutely not. But am I going to make a living doing this? My golly, I will do anything to make that happen. So I felt like I had the roadmap, I had all the skills and it was just, it was just a matter now of seeing it all come in. Except it's not how it worked. $10,000 later, a thousand plus hours later, many tears. This was, this was devastating. I realized there must be a better way because the truth is my book wasn't selling as we saw. I mean look, I was running ads to, it still wasn't getting any sales. It was devastating, Devastating. I was like, oh this is, this is not good. This is not good. But I got an idea. Just because I know how to get my book in front of people doesn't mean it's a book that will sell. Therefore, what if I test if the book will sell before I write it? So I did that. You can see here from the screenshot. This is just about five years ago, actually well over five years ago. We're all collectively getting old people. We all get old every day. But we had 99 units pre ordered of this book which was my, like this was life changing to me. Now how did I do this? How did I get 99 pre orders for a book when my last book got got seven reviews? The answer is I didn't go viral. Nothing like that. I, there's no, no crazy hacks. Instead I ran an experiment. I put my book, first book in the series up on Amazon for pre order. I got a cover made by my wonderful cover designer. I thought this is an expense. But spending a couple hundred dollars to see if a book's going to work versus thousands of dollars and tons of time was well worth it. I wrote a description as well for the book and I put it up on Amazon. Now I set the pre order date for well over a year in the future because here was my cooped up plan. As everyone knows, Amazon is not a big fan of you canceling or changing reviews. So what I thought was if this test works, I will then be able to move up the pre order date and publish earlier. If the test doesn't work, then I have plenty of Time to change the COVID change the description, and keep that.

Same book up for printer. But just change the book and then ideally a new experiment works and I.

Can release that book. Kind of a wild plan. I'm not sure I'd recommend this now. In fact, I've been working really hard to develop a solution that doesn't require that madness. But here we were, and I did this, and it worked. How I got these. 99 sales were for about 30 days. 30 to 40 days. I ran a $5 a day Facebook ad and I thought, wow, like, I'm almost making my money back pretty much on these sales. I was selling it for 3.99. I think I made like, almost all the money back up front. I thought, dang, you know, once I have future books in this series, once the ebook actually is available in Kindle limited, where a lot of people write in my sub genre, I was like, I think this is gonna just do really well. I was convinced. I was like, I think this is going to nail it. So I thought I had hit the jackpot finally after years.

Now I'd been publishing for three years. This is my 10th published book because I had one series before, Conspiracy Chronicles as well. So this is my 10th published book. And I thought, finally, like, this is my moment.

Well.

Some other good things happened too. I interviewed the creator of Outer Banks. It just felt like I could finally do this now. I was meeting some cool authors. If you don't know how to banks, Great show on Netflix. I just. This was my moment. Like, I. I literally can't even describe to you. Like, I was working so hard to now get the first book out and write it so I could then release it. I was working super hard on book two and book three in that series because I was like, great, I can sell it now. Therefore I can rapid release. So I was pouring my heart and soul into this. But I was happier than ever.

Absolutely happier than ever.

That all came to an end. We know how it is. We know how it goes. It's when the reality hits. I was bleeding cash again. But I had a. I had a nice sales ranking. I had a sexy sales ranking. Look at this. You can see here, a screenshot of this graph here. For a couple months, you can see this thing was hanging at roughly 6,000 in the store between maybe like 5 and 8,000 on a given day. So I thought, you know, I would do this math.

I'd be like, oh, my God, okay.

There'S like 10 million books on Amazon.

And my book is, is 6,000.

Which means that out of all books right now in the world, my book is being sold in the top. Do some more math. 01% of books. Wow. I'm special. I am very, very special. It was a very good sugar high, but there was no nutrition in there at all. There was no nutrition. We can see here what happened. In July of 2020, I made eleven hundred dollars for my book business. This is from ebook sales, a tiny sliver of paperback and a good chunk of Kindle Limited, by the way. I don't advise for or against condolemented, and this talk is not about ku. And I hope whether you go trad, indie, ku, wide, direct, whatever you do that I'm about to share with you helps. This story is useful for you. But, y', all, this was. This is bad. Okay, I spent $1,100. $1,143 is what I made. Excuse me, but I spent $1,500 on ads that month. So I lost money that doesn't even count, producing the book. That in itself, you could say, oh, okay, but he's early on in the series. Except I wasn't. Book one, Mad World, I had produced literally at that point, first book, second book, and third book was on the way. So out of three books in a.

Series, I still wasn't breaking even. Now, again, okay, well, Maybe I need.

Nine books to break even. Maybe I need 12 books to break even. Okay, we can tell ourselves that. But the data paints a very different picture here.

Mad world, I made $828. Not bad. It's about half my ad costs. Except Cruel World, which was book two in that series. I made just over a quarter of that. I mean, just over $200. Now, I don't show you the screenshot here, but if we were to look at the screenshot of August, you would see that Troubled World was very troubled. Very troubled. It did not jump back up. It was making about $140 in a month. If you do some quick napkin math, you start to realize that just to even make a 30% return on my ad, just to even make a couple hundred dollars a month, I'm gonna have to go out and spend, you know, thousands of dollars to make back a couple hundred dollars. And I'm gonna have to have six plus books in the series. There was another alarming thing. I knew authors, my genre on KU were getting a lot of their income from ku, but actually, a lot of my income was coming from book sales, particularly of book one. I started to realize something. I Thought the page reads would come in. I thought the waves of people would come in and that they were just downloading it and they hadn't started it yet. Except the read through never came. The answer is they started my book and they stopped. Which explains why Book one's income should be higher given my sales ranking. But it didn't have enough page reads because people stopped reading. Book two's income should be a lot higher. But people didn't even finish Book One, so of course they didn't buy Book two. And then forget about Book three, forget about Book four. You see, my problem here. I thought my job was to sell books. I was finally doing that, and I was still losing money at this point. I gave up.

I thought my conclusion here was that I'm a bad writer, right? Like, yeah, you have to market a good book, right? People say that all the time. I didn't have a good book. That was my conclusion. I'm like, I'm bad at this. If I'm 10 books in and still can't write a good book, I am bad at being an author. It was crushing. It was devastating. So, as one does who loves being a storyteller, I found something else to do in storytelling. I started making YouTube videos. Then I went to go work for Mr.

Beast.

And it changed everything. It changed everything about how I approach publishing. Yeah, I heard myself out for YouTube views. I did that. And pretty funny, because this whoring myself out on YouTube taught me something. The reason.

And I will switch slides because we don't need to be looking at this. Okay, okay, maybe this is a little funny.

I was filming this thumbnail.

This is the thumbnail people would click in for the YouTube video. You notice the Holy Bible. You notice some masks because it was Covid era and I'm like, sleeping in bed. And the title was something like, you know, overslept class or something of that nature. The thing is, and where YouTube actually is my sort of saving grace. And what taught me so much was that each new video was a new shot at doing a new title and thumbnail that can engage people. So I, like, really went out. Like, what I realized very early on is that people engage with Manchester. People engage with, you know, shirtless Harvard students, apparently. So I literally, on YouTube, again, hoard myself out for views. But it was an iterative process. I didn't just do it right away. I saw that that was getting me the most clicks. I looked at the data, I doubled down. But I didn't do that, just reviews. I did that for actual like retention as well. So it wasn't just about people clicking in. I was also looking at, okay, how long is someone watching my video? Where are they dropping off? And I would make the next video better based on where people and why they were dropping off in previous videos. So I was able to iterate very quickly and what normally took me half a year to a year to write a series, get some books out, and test if they're working well. I now every week had a new shot at understanding what's working and actually improving. This is when I realized something. I thought I was a bad writer, but in reality, I never gave myself a fair chance.

I chased sales, not superfans. I chased rank, not sustainability. But what if there was a better way to grow your storytelling business? One that doesn't require shirtless thumbnails, one that doesn't require you doing a million things, wearing gazillion hats, and most importantly.

Burning a hole in your wallet and in your hearts. Focus on achieving story market fit first. Or as I like to say, readers first. That is what this is all about. Readers first. How can we put our readers first at every step of the publishing process and achieve story market fit? If I had focused on that in this iterative testing process, I would have been able to improve much quicker. I wouldn't have lost anywhere near the.

Money I did, and I would have.

Been able to do something a lot more like the arc I had in YouTube, where I was able to rise from just being a little YouTube creator to eventually working to help lead the strategy team for the largest YouTube creator in the world and Mr. Beast. So with that story, I now want to talk about the three components of story market fit and actually how you can achieve it. I know I spent a lot of time in the story, but it's important that you walk away knowing these moments and these mistakes we make. And see the mistakes I made because I want to help you avoid them. And now, knowing those mistakes, I want to start talking about what you can do and actually achieve star market fit. Let's put this all into action now. So first is, can you get eyeballs on your story reliably? This is the three reader growth engines. The second component of story market fit is can you get people to purchase or download your story? Then the third component is can you get people to read your story?

Oops.

Can you get people to read your.

Story to the retention point?

So there's three things here. We need eyeballs. We need something that we can consistently get eyeballs using the three growth Engines. We need to know that we can get people to download our story and.

We need to know that we can.

Get people to actually start to read our story to this magical moment that we call the retention point. So the big mistake we make as authors, to be clear, and this is exactly what happened to me, is we optimized for getting sales, hitting best seller lists or our rank, perfecting our story, building out the whole thing, building a whole series. Rather than achieving story market fit, we focus on all the wrong things when we really should be focusing on just this one thing. So let's do a little Venn diagram.

Here where we look at the activities that we do after story market fit when we're actually ready to scale our business and then what we should be doing before starting market Fit. And what a lot of you might realize is that you may be scaling a specific series that's not ready to scale because you haven't achieved star market fit. Right? Because our store market fit is three things. Can you get consistent traffic to your stories? Can you get people converting to actually want to download your book or buy your book and can you get them to keep reading it? Once you validate that, then you can start scaling. But how many of you are not doing that? How many of you are actually just scaling right away and doing post story market fit activities when you really aren't ready for them yet? So let's look at first the things that happen after store market fit.

Publishing full books.

Why would you publish and write a full book if you're not sure people even going to make it past the first couple chapters? That's something you do. After you have string market fit, you then complete the story and write more stories in the series that goes with finishing a series. Rapid ads, rapid release, scaling ads, same thing. Audiobooks. You do not need an audiobook if you haven't achieved storm market fit. Some things we always want to be doing is understanding our readers, writing and honing our craft and one time marketing events which are essentially things we do that are one off to promote our books. Maybe collaborations, maybe short five dollar a day Facebook ads, maybe it's TikTok videos. But it's not like huge launch campaigns. Again just like little things to get our book in front of people and hopefully the right people. Now things that we should be doing before starting make It Fit are story pilots which we'll go into detail, but they're essentially just snippets, right, of a story. The first couple chapters that we released.

To see we can actually hook people.

And keep them reading.

Then it's hook testing, right?

Hook testing is the actual premise of your story, your cover, and your and your blurb. Can you get people based on the hook to actually want to buy your story? And then, you know, before we even get to that blurb and cover, what are you using to actually talk about it? Like, what is the hook that's working to drive traffic on social media in a collaboration or even in a paid ad? Like, what is that? Like, oh, my book is, you know, Sharks meets Twister. Oh, well, Jaws meets Twister is certainly Sharknado, right? And that could be your hook. Now that's probably not your hook because you didn't write Sharknado, but that's the point. Reader Growth engine foundations this is out of the three scalable ways to grow your business, which is content marketing, paid ads, and collaborations, which one do you want to double down on and which one are you practicing at this early stage?

But the really biggest thing is the story pilot and testing to ensure that you're creating something readers want. And we'll be touching on that deeply in just a little bit. So what I first want you to do right now. Let's pause and take a second here is reflect with me. What percentage of your time do you spend doing things focused on scaling your author business? What are the things that you're doing after story market fit and what time, what, what percentage of time do you spend doing these activities? Publishing full books, finish a series or rapid release, scaling ads. And by the way, publishing full books also means writing all the time you spend writing those full books as well. Now, what percent of time do you spend trying to understand if your stories have story market fit? What's the time that you spend building a reader growth engine, doing hook testing, working on your blurbing cover, creating story pilots. Now, given that, which if any, of your stories already have story market fit? Because if you have story market fit, presumably you should be spending most of your time on, you know, things you would do after start market fit. And if you don't have start market fit, you should probably not be doing that. So now what would happen if you spent 80% of your time on activities that match the stage you are at pre or post star market fit? What would your authorization look like? What would your life look like? I'd posit that you would learn and grow a lot faster.

And most folks listening to this, I.

Would guess, are pre store market fit. And you will always be pre store market fit at some point. Because even if you're Releasing a new series, a net new story, then you have to go through this process again. So learning this process is great, whether you're a beginning author, an advanced author, or somewhere in between. So now let's actually talk about process and how to do this. There's really three steps here to storymark event. The first is to exploit a story gap. I love story gaps. It's something specific that readers desire but that has little competition. Maybe it's a trope twist specific subgenre packaging. Second step is to develop your minimum viable story. I like to call this your story pilot. A story pilot is just writing your first few chapters, description and title. The next step is share your story with the world and validate your story. The goal is to quickly understand is this story going to work? And move on if it doesn't. Right. That's the whole goal here. We want to pick a story gap. What's something about our story that will.

Make it stand out? Essentially, what is the hook? What is the hook that you're going to use? Then once you know your hook, you're going to write a story pilot based on that, the first couple chapters and we're going to do this up to a very point of your story called the retention point.

And then we're going to share your.

Story with the world through one of the reader growth engines and validate if the story gap is bringing readers in and if the pilot is keeping them there. And if you accomplish that, you have achieved the hardest thing in this author business that the thing that most stories fail at.90 plus percent fail at this. And if you succeed at this, you can supercharge the whole thing. And the tough part is we spent most of our time in activities that don't allow us to get better at achieving store market fit. We spent most of our time not focused on this, so we don't get better at this. So no wonder you're not making the progress you want. No wonder I published all these books but didn't had things go the way I wanted to. And it wasn't until I joined the Mr. Beast team and saw that their relentless focus was on click through rate, AKA what gap could they exploit in the content market to get people to want to click? And then b, how could they get people watching the first couple minutes of the video? That was the entire focus. That is how they become the biggest YouTube channel in the world. They've obsessed over that more than anyone. And when I saw that, I was like, what we're doing is not much different. This this is all kind of, this is all storytelling.

And I.

My biggest mistake was not doing that. But we can rewrite this now. We can write a new chapter together, one where you pursue story market fit.

Let's talk about each of these steps. Story gap, again, is the number one factor to make your book stand out. There's a few types of story gaps. One is a messaging gap. This is a specific theme. Maybe it's a character or trope that hasn't been exploited yet that you can do. Could even be a setting, right? Think of like small town romance. Maybe there's a specific type of cowboy mountain romance that has been set in a specific city before or a specific small town that folks might know that they might be interested in. Beyond story gaps, we have.

Essentially beside the messaging ones, we have the formats.

Or the mediums at beyond the Book. It's my podcast.

I host it every week. And it's a podcast where I help authors go beyond the book, turn their stories into empires.

And a lot of this looks like.

You know, going into things like movies and shows, which I run a whole company for, but then also things like games and story letters. I mean, imagine if your book was in epistolary format, which David Vergutts, one of my best friends, does. Or imagine if your book was in, you know, comic. It could be a different format that's interesting readers. Now you want to make sure it's not super expensive to test it out and see. But sometimes just a story gap where, ooh, this story hasn't existed in this type of format yet, can really get readers into another story gap is related to actually the packaging of your book.

So is this thing about the COVID.

Is it how you brand the genre? Like, are you creating a new genre? I wrote an article recently on my author sidekick newsletter@authorsidek.com all about that totally free article. And it just talks about how you can invent a new genre. So is it something to that effect.

Where you're combining sub genres in unique ways? Or even a cover, right?

You might do something interesting on your cover. Or you might say, oh, my books are scratch and dent, or my book has a werewolf claw on the COVID You might, you definitely want to buy this book. So it's something you want to have in your shelf. It's like you're selling, you're selling direct. The story gap and the sales channel you use might, might differ, but that's where a lot of of this magic can be. So next up is creating a minimum viable story, AKA a story Pilot. When I made these cards, I called it a minimum viable story. I think this is still a great word, but I think Story Pilot is even better. So maybe the new additional.

These cards.

I'll update this to Story Palette. But essentially this is when your story is ready to be marketed to readers to test its reader retention. And ultimately the goal here is, is to create a story that engages readers up to the retention point. Right?

So when we validate our story.

Let me, let me skip forward to the retention point slide here. The retention point is, is the specific moment in your story that when readers get to. They probably won't drop off. They're probably going to stick. Stick around in your story. So that's like super important. It's like the foundation.

And essentially what I love about the retention point is that when you understand this concept, you realize this happens early on in videos. Like when I was working for the Mr. B channel, I almost always saw that the retention point for his videos would happen within the first three minutes and you'd see very little people drop.

Off after the first few minutes.

Thus, you're better focused on making your story better in the beginning to, to then hook people later.

And that's where most of your effort should be going.

Can I hook people in the beginning? Because if you lose people in the beginning, you have no shot at getting them, no matter how good the ending is. So with this knowledge in mind, completely changes how we think about it.

Cause it's like, wait, I only need.

To write my story up to the retention point.

And the retention point is probably gonna.

Be early on in my story. Now, your retention point specifically is think a specific cliffhanger or moment where the narrative drive of your story picks up to a specific moment where it's like, very hard to put down. We've all experienced this when we read. We know this.

You're getting into a book.

You're like, I think I'm into the story. And then you have that moment where you're into the story, you can't stop reading.

And you're like, there's no option.

I'm not gonna. Do not, do not finish this book. I am finishing this book 100% right. That moment is the moment you wanna write up to when you want readers thinking to themselves, oh my, I'm here now. I'm totally finishing this book. And what's really tough as authors is we don't get this data right now. And what I want to share with you at the end is something cool, something secret. I've been working on to help actually give you this data so you can better understand where your retention point is right up to it. And then ultimately make see where people.

Are dropping off in between the retention.

Point and the beginning of your story.

To make those parts better.

Because think about it, if you have 100 people start your story and then only 10 people make it to the retention point, yeah, you might have eight or nine finish because most will stick around after the retention point. But you definitely want to improve what you're doing for the retention point. And then it's like, well, where are they dropping off? Like, are they dropping off in chapter one? Are they dropping off chapter two? Are they dropping off in both? If so, which one is more? Which one do I need to address more? This is all like the data driven way that, you know, I thought about concept, Mr. Beast, and I want you to now think about your storytelling.

And if we go back here.

The big thing with a minimum viable story is creating essentially a story pilot, right? Something that it's not a complete story, it's just the beginning of your story. It's a pilot. It's the first couple chapters up to your retention point and then releasing that into the world and seeing what readers think. And then if it works, double down, write the full story, write a full series if you want. And if it doesn't work, iterate and try a new story or edit your existing story. So story validation contains three things. This is really what this process is, you know, trying to get story market fit. The process of getting story market fit is what we call story validation. And there's three things. One, test if you can get eyeballs in your story. Two, test if people will buy or download your story, which is what we call benchmarks. And then three, test if people will read your story to the retention point. Hopefully this makes sense because we've been kind of going over this, but now it's like we're going to, we're going to outline it in even more detail. So this is another one of the superpower cards, which I love this one. It's called the reader growth engines. Essentially we always think about like, oh my God, you do this to Mark myself, I need to be on TikTok and reality. There's only three reader growth engines and you only need one to scale your business. And ultimately what we're trying to do by achieving star market fit is decrease.

The chance that our story doesn't make money.

And ideally, like, once we achieve store.

Market fit, we know with near certainty that our book will make Money. And part of using these reader growth engines early on is validating that our book will make money because we have a consistent way that we can bring viewers in. There's content marketing, which is when you create typically short form videos and TikTok or YouTube to bring viewers in. There's paid ads, which is when you pay to reach the audience, typically on Meta or TikTok. Sometimes you know, you'll have Reddit thrown in there.

There's collaborations, which is when you reach.

The audience to someone else by working with them, usually in exchange for giving them access to your audience. This could be like newsletter swaps and things of that nature. So essentially you just need to double down on one of these reader growth engines and effectively drive traffic to your story and get them converting and get them retained.

And it's good in an early stage.

To experiment with these and, and see which one you really want to learn and double down on because you don't need to do it all. You can get to 6, 7 figures with any of these. Seriously. And it's just a matter of what you want to get good at. And when you're trying to achieve story market fit. Part of that's understanding at a small scale, not a high scale, but a small scale. Can I bring readers consistently in through content? If so, then I'll just create more content or work with more content creators. If I can bring in people consistently collaborations, then when I'm ready to scale, I'll work with more collaborators, I'll do more swaps.

It's paid ads. Great.

I'm spending $5 a day. When I want to scale, I'll start spending $50 a day, I'll start spending $100 a day.

Things of that nature. Now benchmarking is really important because this is when we take traffic that's coming in from a reader growth engine. The eyeballs are now making it to our story page and then understanding if they're converting to our story, meaning they're purchasing or downloading it at a viable rate. When I say viable rate, this means just a rate that you can build a good business on. Like there's no like one rate, you know, it's not like, oh my God, if you don't hit 20%, you know, so I can fit. But it's more so that there's a healthy range of conversions that makes it easy or possible really to make a profit from your books. Whereas, you know, there's some conversions that are so low that it's going to be hard to scale up and actually like get readers in profitably. And likewise, there's a certain point where increasing conversions doesn't really matter. So let's talk about that. 30% from click to sign up for a free product is what I would ideally get. Like, if you're driving a freebie on a newsletter download something like 30% is good. 5% from clicks to buys for a $5 book is is pretty good. You might see higher on Amazon, you might see lower elsewhere. Likewise, this might not be all buying. If you're driving the traffic to Amazon and your books in ku, you're going to see something different. People also ask me during this testing phase when we're trying to achieve starting market fit, should we charge for our story? My answer is if we want to like run the best possible experiment, yes, like you would. But honestly I don't, I don't see that as being the benefit. Like you can do that, but emotionally that feels hard for me. So I'd rather give away those first couple chapters for free just in the beginning and test if we have something so that there's very little pressure to finish the story or continue on with the series and you can feel good about, you know, moving on from one experiment to the other. So your conversion rate ultimately is what.

Determines your customer acquisition cost or how much it costs to acquire a customer. Your read through rate of retention is what determines your LTV or how much money you make on average per reader. LTV is lifetime value. So at some point you can get your customer acquisition costs lower, but there's a diminishing return at some point where you can't really get people cheaper or with less effort. Whereas lifetime value is where all the alpha is, because you can always feasibly have readers read more stories from you and make more money on that end. So I'd much rather increase my ROI by increasing my LTV rather than decreasing cac. Mind you, if you're hitting the metrics and benchmarks we discussed above, you already in a pretty healthy range. So yeah, you can optimize more, but really where you'll do well is just increasing your ltv.

So we already talked this retention point card, but what I want to share before we head out today is some takeaways. Do not scale before you reach store market fit. I also want you to focus on story validation, not just sales growth reiteration and a reader's first mindset. That's so so key. Don't scale before market fit. Then we're going to focus on achieving story validation because if we validate our story and go through the story validation process. We can then achieve store market fit. And it's not like this magical moment where it's like, oh my God, I have store market fit. But it's this moment of decreasing the risk and uncertainty that your series is going to work. And if you increase the probability that your series is going to work when you start to scale, then you have a very high slash increasing chance that it'll work. And this process is not easy.

It's hard.

It's hard, but it's a process that I hope saves you a lot of time, a lot of money. It's a process that I hope helps you a lot faster get towards building a sustainable and profitable storytelling business. I certainly have seen both ends of the coin and I want you to do the one that, at least for me, has worked a lot better now. Growth Iteration Readers First Mindset this is the biggest thing too. How many of you are going to follow my advice to a T And it's logical, extreme. None of you, including myself.

We all have stories we're passionate about. We all get emotional. We're not going to get as analytical as I'm suggesting here, because this is really a very analytical and data driven process. But I do want you to grow through iteration and that Readers first mindset because that's really what's going to be key. So some things I want to share with you completely free is one the.

Author marketing superpowers deck.

Go to authors ik.com you can download on my mailing list. I'll also make sure that we include the PDF somewhere in this so it'll probably be linked in the description wherever you're watching it. Super excited to be part of this conference, by the way. It's so much fun. The Writing Gal is the best reader. Meter is a tool I'm building. It's in stealth right now, but it's coming out probably by the time you're watching this because I'm recording this several weeks ahead of time. Probably the time you're watching this, it's probably out most certainly in beta, unless you run into some. You know, I don't know how long alpha is going to take, but assuming it's out, it's a platform where you upload your books to. You can test story pilots, you can test stories at an early stage and see when readers stop reading your book so you can actually see where your retention point is. You can see again where they drop off and you can make your story better so you can validate your story and achieve store market fit. Really, really fun stuff. That's at readermeter IO. Lastly, a free book here might be interesting to some of you. All about some of the things I do beyond the book and helping authors make movies. And that's at blog CreatorWeb TV. With all that said, thank you all for listening. Everyone has amazing rest of their day.

And as always, don't forget, together we are boundless. Thank you everyone.