The One Stop Shop to Grow Your Readership

Okay, well, welcome to this workshop. I'm so excited to be talking with Evan, all about how to grow your readership and how Story Origin can help you do that. I met you, I think, three or four years ago now. Definitely three. It's been three. And I remember meeting you and going, wow. First of all, so cool to meet someone really passionate about tech and the book space, because that's somewhat of a semi rare combination. And it was also cool to see how useful what you've created is. And since then, you've added so much more to the platform, and I think there's a lot of really, really cool things about it. But before we even dive into what Story Origin is, I'd love to first learn about, like, what got you into the space of indie authorship. How did you learn about it? Because for some folks here, they might not even be that familiar with it as well. So it'd be cool to hear, like, how did you become familiar with the world of indie authorship?

Yeah, so I used to write short stories back in high school, always had an interest in writing, and then got interested in tech and entrepreneurship in college. Then I went to work for a few years and I wanted to follow that passion for tech and entrepreneurship and then get back into writing as well. And so I sort of the natural combo was like, oh, I'm gonna get back into writing and I'm gonna build tools for authors at the same time. So I went and I talked to a bunch of authors and I shared with them some ideas for some things I had. And they were like, that's interesting. And having. Having done lots of sort of entre entrepreneurship things before I realized, you know, if someone says that's interesting, it's generally means like, oh, I don't really need that thing. But sure, that's an interesting idea. So I wanted to build stuff that authors actually needed. So I asked them, okay, what are. What are you currently doing? Like, what. What is. What is hard for you right now? And they said, you know, I use this service to build my mailing list. I use this service to find reviewers. I use this service to create universal book links. I use some combination of like Facebook groups and Google forms to arrange newsletter swaps. I use, you know, some combination of Word and Google Docs to an email to get feedback from beta readers. I have my website, but with this other platform, I have this thing. And I was like, okay, okay, okay, I get it. You have like eight different logins, five different spreadsheets. You're doing all this context switching every time you like need to do something is like, where did I, where did I do that thing before? And so I really wanted to just build a one stop shop where authors could do it all. And so all of that stuff that I mentioned, you know, whether it's, you know, building your mailing list, find your reviewers, increasing sales, managing beta readers, building your author website, all that stuff and more, is stuff that you can do on story origin. And I think, um, you know, had I told you that I was gonna do that, you know, six or seven years ago when I was getting started, you would've said, evan, I don't believe you. And that would, would've been the nicest way. You would've said that. If not like, Evan, you are, you are on drugs or something. Um, but here we are. So, so, you know, it took, took me some time, of course, uh, but just I, I'm always working on adding new features and improving story origin to make it that sort of one. Authors to do everything they need.

I love it. No, that makes a ton of sense. And I think the, the first thing is when you're going to, when you're thinking about publishing a book, a lot of the folks here have like written books. Some have also published books as well. But if, let's say you haven't published a book yet, what, where, where do I start? Like, what should I try and do? Because I think it's actually pretty overwhelming when you think about like the whole world of self publishing to even know where to begin, what I'm trying to do here.

Right, Absolutely. Yeah. So I generally recommend, if you have not published your book yet, I would recommend starting with building a mailing list and thinking about your publishing strategy too a little bit as well. So what I generally recommend to authors is if you are a fiction author or I guess fiction or nonfiction, this applies in both cases. But what you want to do is you want to create a reader magnet, something that you give away for free as a sample. You know, sort of like when you're getting a free sample at a food court or whatever to entice readers to check out your work. And in exchange for them getting that free book or short story or whatever you've written, they are, they sign up to your mailing list and then from there you can let them know about when you have a new release or when you're running discounts on your books or whatever. We can get into like what makes a good newsletter. But what I recommend starting with is put together a reader magnet, that thing that you give away for free. When an, when a reader signs up to your mailing list and start building your mailing list and this is, this you can do before you have any published books, right? So generally what I recommend to fiction authors is if you are writing a series, write a prequel short story like 10 to 20,000 words that's a prequel to your book or your series and give that away for free to readers when they sign up to your mailing list. Because a prequel short story is great for a number of reasons. One is it can introduce the characters in a natural way that like a side story or like an extended epilogue or some other, you know, alternative thing might be difficult to introduce your characters with a prequel. It's very natural to be just introducing characters. The other thing is, that's great about it is it hooks readers into wanting to read the follow up, right? If they like the prequel, then they'll want to continue that story. And then the third thing is I recommend it. Being a short story like 10 to 20,000 words is a good sweet spot because it is enough to whet that reader's appetite and for them to finish it relatively quickly without, without decreasing sort of your read through rate, right? So if you, if you write a really, if you write a really, if you give them a book as a reader magnet, it might take them a while to finish it, they might never finish it, right? And so if you give them something short, they'll just consume it faster, faster and so get to potentially becoming one of your customers for your book one sooner. But if you give them something too short, like say it's only, you know, a couple hundred words, they're going to feel like they didn't get what you were promising them, which was a story, right? Like it's really difficult to someone feel any sort of satisfaction from reading a 200 word story, right? So you want to give them something, something that has some meat on the bones, right? So again, you don't have to. This is just a recommendation. And I will say this about everything that Michael and I talk about here today. All these are meant to be recommendations, not roadblocks. So you do not need to have or write a prequel short story if you have today, you've already written book one in your series and you're working on book two right now. And you don't want to take three months or whatever to write and edit and get a cover done and all that stuff for prequel. That's totally fine. You don't need to do this today. Take the first three chapters out of that book one that you wrote and use that just sample version version as your reader magnet that you give away for free. When people sign up to your mailing list. Now, people are. Tend to be less likely to sign up to a reading. Sign up to your mailing list just to get a sample version of something because they know they're not going to get the full story. But many, many authors on story origin have started building their mailing lists with just those sample versions, and then they can. They can add more reader magnets to sort of their arsenal as they go, right? So you can start with just giving away a sample preview version of your book, and then you can. You can write that prequel later down the line when you have more time with it. And many authors have started to build, you know, substantial mailing lists with just that sample version. So if that's what you have today, get started sooner rather than later. Um, because if the. If the. If the options are like option A, you use a sample version of your book one, and you can start building your mailing list today versus option B is like, you spend three to six months writing a short story and editing it and getting a book cover and all that stuff, and then start building your mailing list. Like, go with option A and get started today. Because building your mailing list is something that just, like, compounds over time. And so the sooner that you get started, the better for sure. And all that advice mostly around, like, a prequel and stuff relates to fiction authors, but you can do the same thing in nonfiction, creating a reader magnet. So, like, let's say you are a sort of, like, let's say you are a fitness or weight loss nonfiction author. You might create a, like, a guide or companion to your, you know, weight loss or fitness books with, like, a training regimen or like, some. Some worksheets where they can record, like, what they ate that day or what, you know, exercises they did and stuff like that that your audience would find helpful and that they would want. They would want that and would be willing to join your mailing list to get something free like a companion guide to your nonfiction books. So that was a lot of stuff.

That was great.

I'll stop there.

That was so great. I want to connect it, too, to folks who are here. Hello, Philip from Tuscany. Philip. Oh, my folks should actually share in the chat where you're calling in from. I'd love to hear where you all are at in the world. Tuscany is certainly more exciting than where I'm at. I'm currently in San Francisco but it's not as cool as Tuscany, that's for sure.

I bet all of you San Francisco is cooler than Dallas. So I don't know.

Probably temperature wise, for sure, 100%. But this is such, like, great learnings. I kind of want to sum up like, the takeaways I have from you, because first is something that often blocks us to getting our work out there as storytellers is thinking we need to publish the full thing to actually start sharing it with the audience. And you're saying, no, you don't need to do that. You can create this sort of reader magnet. And in the world of film, because so many folks here are coming also, like, jointly, they're writers who are trying to like, publish stories and publish film. This is the same thing, right? Think about how a trailers work. But you could also have the first episode free pilot. So it's the same thing. Give some of your story away for free to gain a readership. Then what you're saying is really important, which is that you don't just want to give it away and put it randomly online. You actually want to build your mailing list and grow your mailing list, which when you say a mailing list is a group of people who've given you their email that you can contact and follow up with them. And the importance there is that you're away from the algorithms. You don't have to be dependent on, Will Zuckerberg let you post this, but you can share it with them. And it's a good indication that when you're ready to share your full book, your full film, whatever you're doing next, that they'll go and buy, then the question becomes, with this, for me, Evan is, and I'm sure this is the number one question you get with story origin because, you know, great tool. And I know that you have like the ability to send out art copies really easily, the ability to be able to grow your mailing list using story origin. But the ultimate question becomes, how do I do that? Right? Like, I have my reader magnet. I have theoretically this mailing list here, which is all great, but then it's like, how do I actually share this with people to get them on it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there are. So you've written your reader magnet. Now what you need to do is you need to create a landing page for that reader magnet. And so that's where story origin comes into play is you can upload that, you know, that freebie that you've written, put it up on story origin, create a landing page for it. And then readers can discover that landing page and request a copy. And then when they request that copy through story origin, StoryOrigin can automatically add their email address to your newsletter sending service, whether or not you're using Mailchimp or Mail Light or ActiveCampaign or ConvertKit, et cetera. Storage and integrates with a lot of them. If you're using a newsletter sending service that storage and does not integrate with you can always download a CSV of those signups that you get and then just manually upload them to whatever newsletter sending service that you are using. So you've got this landing page, you've got this link to this landing page. How do you actually get readers to discover it? So there are a few places that I recommend posting it. So first would be. So social media is an easy one, right? You can put it in the links like in your about sections across whatever social media platforms you're using. The second one is put it in the front and back matter of your books that you are publishing and selling as well. So when someone buys a book or maybe you have a freebie up on Amazon, someone downloads that book, put that link to your reader magnet in the front matter and back matter of those books. So as you get sales and downloads on those platforms, people will want to get that prequel or that companion guide or whatever you've got, and they will join your mailing list that way. The other place is you can obviously put it on your website. So any readers that come that want to discover you or like your works and want to discover other books that you've written, they're going to Google you, they're going to find your website and there you want to find, you want to be able to funnel them into joining your mailing list as well. Because all this goes back to like you were saying, Michael, you know, social media in general, it used to be that you would just post stuff and people who were following you would see it in their timelines if they were online at the time that you posted. Right. That's how it worked. And now everything is algorithmically driven and you will be lucky if you get 1 to 3% of your audience actually seeing your posts even though they followed you ostensibly to get your content. The social media platforms don't actually share it with them. Right. Um, which is why email is so valuable because like, there's no single organization which controls email and has control over like your, you know, the algorithm of like how emails show up. Like, it's just this like a Date stamp still, right? And so you can always get into people's inboxes. And then so, so, so we talk about three different ways. And I'm going to give you the last one, which is the best one, right? So social media, back of your, like in your books, on your website. And then last one, which is the best way is cross promotions, right? So they. Cross promotions are great because they are free, easy and targeted. So let me break that down. Let's say I'm an author and I write sci fi books, right? Michael's an author and he writes sci fi books. I've got a mailing list of a thousand people. He's got a mailing list of a thousand people, all agree with Michael, hey, I'll promote one of your books in my newsletter a week or whatever if you promote one of my books in your newsletter that you're sending out in like a week or two, right? So we don't have to pay each other to do that. We just can come to an agreement and then we will both benefit. Because some of my readers are going to see his book, join his mailing list maybe, or maybe go buy that book, depending on the nature of the cross promotion that we have arranged, whether or not that's to like build our mailing lists or find reviewers or increase sales, etc. Right? So that's called a newsletter swap. We're just agreeing to promote each other's books in our own newsletters. And I'll clarify there because sometimes people get tripped up on the word newsletter swap. Sometimes people think like that means we're exchanging our mailing lists, which is not at all what is happening. Like that is do not share your mailing list of people who have subscribed to your mailing list with someone else. Right? Like that is supposed to be data that you keep private. All I'm doing is taking a link to Michael's book and I'm putting it in my newsletter that I send out to my readers, right. To my subscribers. So that's all it is. I'm mentioning his book in my normal newsletter, which I write and control and all that stuff. So that is a newsletter swap. Another type of cross promotion that you can do is called a group promo, where let's say you, me and 20 other sci fi authors will all put our books on a single landing page and then we'll all drive our traffic to that single landing page. And so we are all promoting our reader magnets or our books on sale or our review copies. We're all promoting Those together. And so we're all driving traffic to that single landing page and we promote that landing page in our newsletters or across social media, et cetera. So, so they are free, they are easy to set up, right? Like when I'm arranging a newsletter swap, all I need to do is I need to grab that link and put it into my newsletter, right? And then they are targeted, right? When I set up a newsletter swap or group promo or join a group promo, I'm going to be doing that with other authors in the same genre so that I know my book is going to be seen by readers, right, who are in my genre, which is not something that you can really guarantee when you are running like let's say Facebook ads, right? When you run Facebook ads, sometimes it can take a while, possibly never be seen by your actual target audience, right? Because the Facebook algorithm for advertising, serving ads has to sort of figure out who actually wants this ad, who wants to see this thing that this, this advertiser put up. And sometimes the algorithm gets it wrong, right? Like sometimes it can't find your audience. But when you're arranging cross promotions with other authors because you know they've built an audience of readers, you know that it's going to be served to the right people. And so, yeah, cross promotions are huge, growing, super valuable. Those are also another part where story origin comes into play because you can arrange and join these newsletter swaps and group promos on story origin. So there are thousands of authors on story origin. You can, you can see like what dates they're sending out a newsletter. And then you can request a newsletter swap with them and say, hey, I'll promote, you know, this book of yours in my newsletter on this date. If you'll promote my book in your newsletter on whatever date you said that you were going to send it out. And then there are also like lots of group promotions where, you know, let's, you know, it's like me and 20 other sci fi authors, we're all going to promote our books in November together on this single page. And we're all, we're all going to send out our newsletters during November and include this link to this landing page together. And so those cross promotions, newsletter swaps and group promos can be used to promote your reader magnets, which you use to build your mailing list, or they can be used to promote your review copies if you're trying to find reviewers, or, or they can be used to promote your universal book links if you are trying to direct reader traffic to where your books are for sale, whether that's Amazon or Kobo, Google Play, Barnes and Noble, et cetera. You can also use that to try to collect interest in audiobook promo codes. If you have produced an audiobook and you have like ACX promo codes or Spotify promo codes from Findaway, some of that stuff is changing a little bit. But like, if you have these, these audiobook promo codes, you can, you can distribute those through Story Origin as well. Yeah. So there's, there's lots of ways that you can use those cross promotions to promote your books and build your mailing list, find reviewers or increase sales.

So much there. That was awesome. That was awesome. Now I want to talk a little bit more about the group promos and, and also like the cross promos, the group promos in particular, I think are interesting, but cross promos as well. But before we do that, I think we had a really good question from someone in the chat, which let me just say this as a reminder, folks. Me and Evan, we're just here chatting with all of y'. All. We'd love you to share in the chat your questions, because this is a conversation we want to, we want to help you all. And I think this particularly asked a great question. It's, it's something that I hear all the time and I'm sure you do as well, which is. Does email marketing actually work? People often don't like the intrusion, even if they have signed up for a mailing list.

Yeah, email marketing is one of the many authors, if you talk to many authors and they have many different ways of advertising their books, a lot of them will say that their email list is their most valuable way of marketing their books. Email is, is different from a lot of other ways that you can advertise because you can create a personal connection with your audience that feels more private and feels more one on one than any other sort of marketing methods that you might use and, and is more scalable. Right. So I run my own mailing list for Story origin. I started Storyorigin back in April 2018 is when the first public launch of Story Origin was. And I sent many, many, many newsletters over the years. And I. When I started Story Origin, Story Origin was completely free. So Story Origin only had like one feature at the time. Right. Because I was trying to build this like one stop shop where you could do a bunch of different things. And so I decide to keep storage and free until I felt like it really actually fulfilled that vision of being one service where you could do a lot of different things and handle a lot of that complexity for you and simplify your author life. So I kept Storage and for free for a long time. And over that time frame, lots of authors joined StoryOrigin and I sent out my newsletters where I'd say, hey, here's what I'm working on this week. Here's what I'm building out. And also like, here's, you know, just a picture of like something from my life from this past week, right? Whether that be me walking my dog or like me going to the park with my kid or like I baked a cake or like I went and like grilled something, you know, went, went and did some grilling over at like my in laws house or whatever, right? So there are two parts that you need in your newsletter. One is that you need to provide your audience with value, and then the second is you want to build rapport with your audience, right? So for me to provide value to my audience, I would say, like, here's the features that I'm working on and here's improvements that I've made to Store Origin and here's how can you can use those improvements to better, you know, increase sales or find reviewers or what have you, right? So I would provide my audience with like, how they can use Store Origin more effectively. And then that second part where I would talk about like, you know, I for walk in the park or whatever, like that is me building rapport, showing people that I am a human, right? And so I, I did all this even while storage and was free. And I was always very transparent. Like there was a pricing page on Story Origin even when, even when it was free. There's a, you know, a tab in the navigation bar that said pricing. And then when you would click on it would have an explanation for you, like, hey, I'm working on, I'm working on things like here's the promise that I'll make you, which is like I'm going to, I'm. If, like I'm never going to pull the rug out from under you. I will at some point. Like, this will be a paid product, but you will continue to be able to get it for free for several months even after it becomes paid. If you decide that you want to transition away, you don't want to pay for Story Origin and you want to switch to a bunch of other tools or something like that. I wanted to be very transparent about that. So I was always transparent about that. And I was building relationships with people that had joined Story Origin because I was sending out my newsletters. And then when I did finally decide to launch StoryOrigin and said, hey, storage. And you know, I've been working on it for the past three years full time, haven't made any money. I've got a kid now and, you know, I've got to, I've got to. I've got to make this into a real business. Many, many authors were like, finally, like, I've been waiting for you to. I've been waiting for a way to give you money, Evan. So I got like, oh, I've got, you know, I got, I got a couple thousand authors who signed up to Story Origin that first week that it became paid because they knew me personally just from my newsletters and knew my work ethic because I'd been sending out like, you know, here's updates about storage and all that stuff. I don't think that I would have had that same success with my launch had I not been doing those newsletters had people not felt like, like they knew me personally. Right. So all that is to say, you authors, right, you're in a very similar position. We are, you know, we're all indie creators, right? We can build a personal relationship with our audience. And that is something that is a superpower that you have as an indie creator that like massive companies don't have, right. Like they put it on a sort of a corporate face. Right. And so when you get newsletters or emails from companies, like, it seems very impersonal. Usually it's just like about sales or discounts or whatever. There's no relationship building. There's usually not that that much value to you as like the subscriber to these newsletters, etc. Right. And so you just have to keep those two things in mind when you're sending newsletters is like, make sure that you're providing value to your audience and, and then building rapport with them. Right. And as long as you're doing those two things, email marketing is extremely effective because, because you are creating those personal connections. So I'm going to add on a couple more things to that, which is like, how do you do that as an author? Right. How do you provide value to your audience and for many, many readers, what they're usually looking for. They read a lot of books and they want to figure out like, what book they want to read next and add to their to be read list. I have. My to be read list is like very, very, very long. Do I still browse books all of the time looking for what else I might want to add to it because I find that enjoyable. Absolutely. So regardless of how long a reader's to be read list is, they're generally looking for like, other books that they want to add to it because it's fun. And so you, the author, sending your newsletter out, a great way that you can provide value to your audience is by sharing with them other books that they might find interesting, right? So not just promoting your own books, but promoting books that your audience might find interesting. And now you're going to see that this connects back to running newsletter swaps and group promos, right? When you're arranging newsletter swaps with other authors or your books are in group promos where you're promoting other books too, those are extremely valuable to your audience because they can find other new books that they might, that might interest them, right? And so they, they will open and click on your emails to check out what other books you have to share with them. And then the second part is, you know, it's that building that rapport, right, in asking your audience questions and things like that and engaging your audience with actual convers. So, you know, for example, I went, this was, this was, this was a few years ago. But it's just one of those funny stories that like still sticks with me is I was doing some online grocery shopping to be delivered and I bought, I was gonna, I wanted to buy soy sauce and I just added it to the cart. Not really like paying that much attention to the description or anything. Like it's a bottle of soy sauce. What, what do I need to know about it? Right? In the description, had I read it said that it was six bottles of soy sauce, but the product image was of a single bottle of soy sauce, right? And I ordered two of them. So, you know, grocery delivery comes and I got 12 bottles of soy sauce. So, you know, I took a picture of me with my 12 bottles of soy sauce and put that in my newsletter. And then you know, like asked, you know, does, does. Has any, has anything like this ever happened to you and got a lot of responses from people be like, yes, I, you know, whatever ordered this thing and I thought was going to be this size and it was double the size or it was half the size or you know, that, that kind of thing where like, and then, and then those, those emails that I get back, I always respond to them, right? Like people, people have taken the time out to respond to one of my newsletters. I will always reply to them. And I do the same thing with like my welcome emails in my newsletter. Like where, you know, you've joined storage. And I'll tell you like a bit about how to use storage origin. And I always ask like, if, if you have any questions or anything like that, let me know. When people respond to those emails, I always, I always respond to them because I want to make sure that they are, they know that I am there. Like I'm a real human, not just like a robot on the Internet. And so you want, you really want those two parts of your newsletter is the value and the rapport. And the value comes from arranging those cross promotions. And the rapport comes from sharing stories from your life. And they don't always have to be like, funny or interesting or entertaining. Like, you know, you, you accidentally bought 12 bottles of soy sauce. It can just be like, here's a picture of me and my dog walking in the park or whatever. Right? Like, it doesn't need to be super fascinating, but just show that you, you're willing and open to engage with your audience. And that is, that is so valuable.

Yeah, I mean, it's like, why, why would someone like, read a thriller from a new author who's not, you know, John Grisham or David Baldowci? Or like, why would someone go watch a movie where like, the star is not, you know, Chris Hemsworth? And like, the answer is like, they're going to end up loving it, your story once they, once they experience it. But you do need to have like some connection to get them in. And the reason that they're already reading all these other things and watching all the other things is because they're connected to it already. So we can use that advantage as like indie creators to, to do that. And I think in the chat we have someone mentioning that wouldn't daily blogging be more effective than newsletter? And I'd say my quick answer that would just be that oftentimes blogs are actually sent through email. And the only way someone's going to be updated on a blog is either if they manually navigate to the website. How often do you know manually go to different websites and refresh and see there was a new blog? Probably pretty rarely. So you can write a blog, but that blog is going to have to reach that audience somehow. It probably will through an email list. Now what I'm curious, Evan, is okay, so we have these cross promos and group promos we can use because I think, you know, I'm very happy to talk about like social media promotion and ads and all these other things that you can do to market yourself. And they're important. And I'm sure we'll have other workshops, folks, where we dive deep into it. But I think part of what you do that's really unique is you really understand how to promote yourself through these group promos, through these cross promos. And you mentioned a bit on like, you know, finding someone that matches your genre. Right. And that that could be useful. But I mean, the big thing that I think about is like, how do I do that? Like where do I go for group promos and cross promos? And then how do I like know that the other person's gonna be following through on the promise? Right, because if we both have to promo each other, that it's relying on someone else, which I think that becomes a question or maybe even a challenge. So I'm curious how you'd approach that.

Yeah, absolutely. I'll actually do. I think a screen share here would actually be quite valuable. Yeah, so I'll just take you out. So before story Origin, it was sort of the wild wild west. Like a lot of authors would just like arrange cross promotions and things through Facebook groups. Which does have that problem you were talking about, Michael, where like you're never exactly sure whether or not someone's going to follow through on a cross promotion or not. And authors used to give other people like tracking links, like a bitly link to their books and have them promote that. That way they could track like how many clicks that that person sent to their book. But ultimately that data is then siloed to just yourself. And you might know that that person like followed through and sent their link, like sent their, the link to their subscribers, but no one else knows that. Right. So they don't have like a reputation or, or worse yet, like they did not promote your book in that tracking link you gave them. Got zero clicks. And you know that they don't, they don't follow through on their end of the bargain. But no one else knows that. And so other people set up cross promotions with them and not know that like that person doesn't really follow through. So story origin sort of formalized a lot of this process and made it much easier and faster and more transparent. So I'm here on my author dashboard. So if you just go to storerorigineapp.com that's where you'll find Storeroigin. Storeroigin app.com I'll go here to. For authors. And this is my dashboard. And then I will go and click on this browse newsletter swaps button here from my dashboard. And so these are so, so these are dates that authors are sending out their newsletters. So you can see the send date here. You can see there's like, there's a lot of authors that are sending out their newsletters just in the next two days. Like the, the author community on store origin is quite large. Sorry, I, I know. I don't want to scroll too fast and make anyone like dizzy. My wife is always complaining at me. She's always scrolling.

Yes.

So. So, so, yeah, so. So you can see the send dates that, that they're sending their books out here. And then you can see the size of their mailing list. You can see, you know, people have a mailing list as small as 12 people up to this person has 8,000 people on their mailing list, right? And then you can see the tags that are on their, on their newsletter. So like, let's say I want to search specifically for like cozy and mystery, right? So I can find. These are all authors that are so. And you'll see it's here in this, in this input box. Now these are all cozy mystery authors, right? And so I can go to that author's newsletter. I can see what books they want promoted. I can exchange book mention. And I would say, you know, I want them to promote. So all of my, all of my example books on my account are all Sherlock Holmes public domain. So, so I could say I want her to promote my, My Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. And I'll say I'm going to promote it in my newsletter, author's weekly newsletter. And then I. Arthur's weekly newsletter. I'd say what date I'm sending out my campaign. I don't have any example send dates on, on my account yet. And then I would say which book of theirs I would be willing to promote. So you know, I'll promote their. The Reading Problem. And then I'd hit send swap request. And so that will send them a request that says, hey, Evan wants to do a newsletter swap with you. You'll promote his book, you know, the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes in your Oct. 23 newsletter and he'll promote your book the Reading Problem in your, you know, in his newsletter on whatever date he picked. And so that author then, so Casey, Casey has the ability to either approve or decline that request that I sent to them, right? So they don't have to accept a swap request just because I sent it, right? They get, they get to choose whether or not they want to accept or decline it. And then I'll get a tracking link and Casey will get a tracking link to that newsletter swap. And so I can see how many clicks they sent to my book and how many clicks they can see how many clicks I sent to their book. And so all that is just on your story origin dashboard. I can also hit the checkpass stats button here and that will show me how many clicks that this author has sent to all of their cross promotions. I'm not going to do that right now because I don't want to like put this author on blast or anything. Like if they've, if they've, if they've, you know, only gotten a handful of clicks on their cross promotions or whatever. But that's something that you can do before you choose to arrange a newsletter swap with them, right? So you can hit that check stats button and you can see how many clicks they've sent to all the past newsletter swaps and group promos that they've been a part of. And so before you arrange a cross promotion with them, you can be relatively confident whether or not they're going to actually uphold their end of the bargain. And then the same thing applies to group promos, essentially. So that's the newsletter swaps, right? Those are the direct one to one, I'll promote your book if you promote my book type of cross promotion. The other type of cross promotion is a group promo. And so here, let's say again, let's say I want to look at just, let's say I want to look at just mystery group promos and let's, you know, we'll narrow it down even further to let's say, cozy mystery, right? So these are sale type group promos. So these would be ones where I'd be promoting, we would be promoting our books on where they're available at retailers. So I could come here, I could see, okay, cozy mystery authors wanted. I would apply to the group promo. I'd say, you know, I want to promote my book the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. I'd add a little message for the group promo organizer and then I would say, you know, what date I plan to include it in my newsletter. And so very similar to a newsletter swap, I send that request to the group promo organizer. The group promo organizer then gets to choose to accept or decline my book as a part of that group promo. And we can, we can look here real quick at this group promo. So this is the group promo landing page again. This is where like you say, you have that list of authors, books, and they're all on that single landing page. And then all the authors that are part of that group promo are all promoting that single landing page. So everyone that is a part of this is sending the link to this landing page to their newsletter or posting it on social media, etc. So that is the easiest way to find these sorts of cross promotions. There still exists some of those Facebook groups for arranging newsletter swaps and group promos and stuff like that manually and people who will keep track of stuff with spreadsheets and bitly links and all this kind of stuff. But that is much more time consuming.

Yeah, yeah, no, totally makes sense. I, I can see how that's really helpful. And we actually have a, I think a good question in the chat about there's a lot of different data metrics you were showing us and with the click through rate. Yeah, is it, their question is, is the click through rate the percentage of how many people of the overall number of recipients actually click through to your novel?

So the click through rate, when you, when we're on that table of newsletter swaps and it's showing, here's the author's list size, here's their open rate. Here there is, here is their click rate. That click rate is from the newsletter service sender newsletter sending service. So if you've got a mailing list on Mailerlite and you've got a thousand subscribers and your, you know, open rate is 10% and your click rate is 2%, those are, those are stats from your newsletter sending service. And they are just aggregate numbers, right? They are not related to just story origin links or just opens like it's, it's, it's, it's aggregate for that author's mailing list, right? So every link that they include in a newsletter that a reader would click on would be counted as a click towards that click rate that you see on that list. You can get the more specific data of how many clicks an author has sent to cross promotions that they've arranged on story origin by clicking on that View Stats button on story origin. When you're looking at that author's newsletter and you can look at how many clicks that they've sent to each of the past newsletter swaps or group promos they've been a part of on storyorigin. And that does not give you a click rate, it just gives you a tally of the actual number of clicks. So it'll say they sent eight clicks to this author's book last week, they sent 20 clicks to this other author's book last week. They sent 30 clicks to this other author's book you know, last Month what have you. So you'll get the actual number of clicks from the, the, from that, that page when you hit that view Stats button on story origin before you arrange a newsletter swap with them or request a newsletter swap with them.

That's super helpful to see and what like on that because I imagine there's a bit of variance. Like what are you kind of looking out for in terms of like what makes a good partner to work with? Like, either to accept into a crossroad you might be working with. Sorry, to accept into a group promo you might be working on or to obviously like cross promote directly. I know there's variance, but have you seen historically like some benchmarks that we could expect for what makes like a good newsletter partner or a good cross promo partner?

I haven't done any sort of like analytical study on that kind of thing. I think, you know, generally I tell authors focus on what you, what you know, your gut tells you would be a good newsletter swap or cross promo partner. Right. Is, is that like, if you see, if you see that their last newsletter that they arrange on story origin, they had 20 newsletter swaps arranged for their campaign last week, right. Where they agreed to promote 20 books in one newsletter. Like that swap partner is probably not going to be as good of good doing as good of a job of promoting your book as the authority that only had agreed to promote two or three authors books in their newsletter last week. Right. So I would generally recommend like, don't promote more than like four to six. Don't have more than like four to six cross promotions in your newsletter between like your newsletter swaps and group promos that you join. Try to, try to keep it, you know, around four to six. Now can you go up to seven or eight? Yeah, like, sure, that's fine. Like there's no hard limit as long as you're just making sure that you're doing a good job of sending clicks to the cross promotions that you've agreed to in that newsletter. Like it doesn't matter a ton whether it's five or seven, right. But generally speaking, when you get to like, you know, someone has agreed to promote 20 books in their newsletter and I can see that in their past history on storage. And like, I can see like they agreed to promote 20 things in their last newsletter and they sent each of them like two or three clicks. Like I'm not going to request a newsletter swap with that person and if they request a newsletter swap with me, I'm probably going to decline that newsletter swap. Right. Unless again like, this comes back to like a providing value sort of thing is if I really think my audience would enjoy that author's book and like, I think that is a good way to keep my subscribers happy, then I might accept that newsletter swap with that author, even if I know that they're not going to really send me send that many clicks my way. Right? So it kind of depends. Right. And that's also like another thing that you think about when, like, let's say you've got zero subscribers on your mailing list and I've got 5,000 people on my mailing list. Right? It might not be that, like, you're, you're promoting too many books in each one of your newsletters or whatever. Or like, there's this. It could just be that this. There's an imbalance between the number of clicks that we're going to send each other. Just because, like, I've got a huge mailing list and you have zero subscribers, right? I will still like, accept a newsletter swap from an author, which is with, with a much smaller mailing list if I think that it's going to provide value to my readers. Right? Because there are only so many other authors that have a mailing list as big as me, right? So like, let's say I've got five or 10,000 people on my mailing list. Like, there aren't going to be that many other authors in my particular genre with as big of a list as I am. So I'm always going to be sort of the bigger, the bigger, sending more clicks to the other person. Right? But I, you know, it is still to my benefit. And I'm, I'm saying this all in generalities. I keep referring to myself as I, but this is meant to just be generalities, right? Like, any author with mailing list of five or 10,000 people. Right. Will generally agree to newsletter swaps, even with people that have a much smaller mailing list because they need to still send their newsletters and they still need to provide value to their audience. And if they reject newsletter swaps with every other author just because their mailing list is smaller than theirs, right. Then they won't have anything to promote in their newsletters. And then they will just be sending a newsletter out every week saying, here's a picture of me walking my dog. And like, as much as people might think that my dog is cute, if that's all I'm sending in my newsletter every week, like, you will unsubscribe because you did not subscribe to my newsletter to look at just pictures of my dog. And as cute as he is and as good as I might be at building that personal relationship with you, like, that is not value. Right. That does not provide the reader with a reason to continue to open and click on my emails to actually read. Because if they know all they're going to get is another story about my dog, like, it's not, it's not worth their time. And so. And so. Yeah. So, you know, even authors where, you know, they've got much bigger mailing lists, like, this is why you can start on storage and even with 0 subscribers and start building a mailing list and arranging cross promotions, like arranging newsletter swaps and joining group promos, is because also those other authors still need to provide value to their audience. And the second thing is, a lot of those authors were probably in your shoes like not more than like a handful of months ago. Right. So now you have zero people on your mailing list and you see someone with 2 or 300 people on their news mailing list arranging newsletter swaps with them. They were probably in your shoes like two or three months ago. Right. And so they have a very recent memory of what it is like to be in that starting position where you're just trying to figure things out and in trying to get started. And they're usually more than happy to give you a hand and help you up.

That is. I was going to ask you the question about like starting from zero. I think you answered it without me needing to ask it. I was just going there. I was like, I think that. So that is intuitive to me. It makes sense. That's like hopeful. That's good to hear. And I think the biggest thing seems to be like your big takeaway is it's about the readers at the end of the day. Meaning, you know. Yeah, like, if I'm writing a romance story, I'm not confident that someone who's writing, you know, a science fiction story would want to promote it to their audience. Maybe, but probably not the best fit. But if my book really works well for a certain group of readers, there's, you know, your readers come to you and people come to you to experience stories. You know, they don't come to get necessarily, like, you know, they don't necessarily want your daily vlog. Right. Like the daily vlog, if it's like, here's what I'm wearing and here's my makeup is like, you follow someone else for that. That's a different type relationship you with your audience. So if your audience and your relationship with them is providing stories to them. The simple truth is no one can provide all the stories.

Yeah, that's for sure.

So this makes sense to me now. I know we're closing a little bit towards the top of the hour, so what I want to give you, Evan, is a chance to share anything that you haven't got a chance to share yet that you think would be helpful for us to know whether it's about story origin, advice and insights you have for us. And then I do want to leave a couple minutes for some buzzer beater questions that folks have here. But Evan, I'll let you kick it off with just like what do you want to leave us with? You've already left with so much awesome stuff. What do you want to leave us with?

I will just say there's a lot more to story Origin. We've talked a lot about like mailing list building and reader magnets and cross promotions, but there is a lot more to Story Origin besides those things like I was mentioning at the top. So like if you, you, if you are a new author and you're just getting started, like one of the, one of the places that you might get started with on Store Origin is like the Goal Trackers feature that is one where you essentially write a target output for specific time frame. So I want to write 50,000 words in November, let's say. Right? Store Origin will then tell you here's how many words that you need to write every day and you can go in and log how many words that you've written for that day. And your target, your target will change around depending on whether or not you hit that target for that day. So let's say I want to target writing 50,000 words in November and I skipped the first day, right? So my daily word count target on Store Origin is going to tick up a little bit like on November 2nd. And if I skip another day, on November 3rd, my daily word count target is going to tick up a little bit because I don't have that time anymore. And so Story Origin provides. Provides that that word count tracking feature, which is a lot of authors. It's funny, I had an author that told me like in their review of it, they were like, I thought this feature was dumb. I always thought word count tracking was dumb. Then I started using it and now I have to, now I have to count the words that I eat too because they found it incredibly valuable to them for just like making them more motivated and staying on their deadlines. I've had authors who have, who have tracked like millions of words that they've written with storage. And they've said, you know, they're much more productive with using the word count tracker on Story Origin. And that's just like another, another little feature. The next part that you would go to would probably be the Beta copies feature, right? So you've, you've got this first early draft of your manuscript and you're, you don't have a book cover and you don't, you know, you're not trying to market it yet, but you want feedback from readers and you want to know whether or not it sort of hits the target mark for the genre that you're writing in, right? So you can put it up as a beta copy on Store Origin. And the way that a lot of authors used to run their beta copies was like, I've got five people, I've got five readers. They've agreed to be beta readers for me. I'm going to send them my Word document or my Google Doc and, and they'll give me feedback. So you send that, you send that Word doc out to your readers and they will come back to you with like, it was great, I loved it. And you as the author are like, and like, I need more than that if I want to actually improve my manuscript, right? So the way the Beta Copies feature works on Story Origin is readers have to leave feedback on each chapter to unlock the next chapter. So when they read chapter one, they have to leave feedback at the end of it, you know, and you can ask, you can prompt them to give you specific critiques, like, were there any boring scenes? Or like, did you find this, like, did you find this believable? Or like, were there any like, plot holes that you thought came out of this chapter? So you can ask them for that specific feedback and they have to leave that feedback at the, each at the end of chapter one to be able to unlock and read chapter two. And then Story Origin gives you visibility into how far each one of your readers has read. So you can see you've given your beta copy to five people. And you know, person one has finished their feedback all the way through chapter five and person two has finished their feedback all the way through chapter eight or whatever, right? And so you get that sort of real time analysis on, like, how, how far along each of your beta readers is, because a lot of time you'll, you know, like before you would send them a Word document, like, how's it going? And they're like, oh, it's going well. And you're like, what does that mean? Like how far along are you? And you don't want to feel bothersome to people, right, who are doing you a favor by like being a beta reader for you. And so this takes a lot of that sort of feeling like a nuisance out of the equation because it's just automatic for both you and them. And then from there, so you've got this book, you've gotten feedback on it, you are ready to publish it in a few weeks time, but you want to make sure that you're going to give it a really good launch, right? Like let's say that you want to try to, you know, promote it in a bunch of like air in a bunch of different ways on social media or with ads or whatever on like day one that the book launches. Well, one of the problems with that is when readers come to that book and they see that no one has reviewed it before, a lot of people are just gonna close out of that page because they see that there are no reviews on that book. Generally speaking, you want somewhere around like 10 to 12 or 10 to 15 reviews on your book to show that social proof that the book is not just like full of typos or like completely scattered or bad for whatever reason. Right? People want to know that they are, they can trust something that they're going to be spending their money on. So you want to have at least a handful of reviews on it. And that's really hard when you're launching. So what you can do is you can put it up as a review copy on story origin, before the publication date, distribute that to readers and they can request a copy and you can see their reviewer stats. So how many books have they been approved for review copies on storage and before you can see the links to the reviewer profiles like on Goodreads and stuff and see, okay, this person has actually read and reviewed books in my genre before. So if I give them my book, like they're actually likely to read and review it. So you put that review copy up, send it out to your mailing list, arrange cross promotions for it, et cetera, and then on the day that it launches, you hit the, you know, mark as publish button on stored and stored and will tell all of your readers, hey, the book is now live on Amazon or Goodreads or Bookbub etc, wherever you have it, had it listed, available for review. And then your readers on that review copy can go and leave their reviews in those places. And so that is sort of, that is sort of storage can be with you through that whole process, whether it's from just starting to write your books with goal trackers, getting feedback with beta copies, starting to build a review team with review copies and then once the book is actually for sale, creating a universal book link for it where the book is available for sale across Google or Apple or Amazon or Kobo, et cetera, and directing traffic to those places and there's some special features that go along with that too. And then arranging cross promotions to promote all those things. So yeah, and then building your author website. You can also build your author website with Story origin. So when you've, when you've got all that stuff, you can have some place to host it too. So yeah, I think, I think that covers the gamut pretty well.

It's great. No, this is awesome. I. I'm very grateful for your time today, Evan. You shared so much powerful tools this superpowers for our stories and two things I'll share that one. If anyone has any questions, put them in the chat now because we are going to be ending shortly. So I do want to get to any last minute questions. But as we wrap up here, I'll share two things that are that are very fun. So one is just in general. This is going to be posted to YouTube in the days after the event. So if you want to watch a recap or you came in late, there's no worries. You can check out story origin LinkedIn in the description and I'll also follow up this link over email and the YouTube channel. Evan's a great friend and is doing some awesome things for storytellers. So great place to check out. And then I promised y' all for coming live that you may have not even read it. There's a lot going on in that email, but one of the parts of the email was hey, if you came live, I'll give you something free. And as gratitude for y' all coming here, I have these like cards to help you market your stories. You know, if you use the code Movie machine you get them totally free. So coupon code there. So that's all that. So fun things Definitely check out StoryGen free cards never hurt and resilience and stay with it is my takeaway. Philip, that's never a bad takeaway. And I'm just going to say wise. I don't. I feel like that's your zoom name. Maybe it's your real name. Real name Wise Sell. If it is, I'm maybe pronouncing it incorrect. You have a beautiful name. If that is Your name. I've never seen a name. Why sell? It's a cool name. Is that your name now? I'm just so curious. You can unmute yourself. You want to share your name? I'm honestly curious is I'm not trying to put you on the spot. I just love your name. I want to make sure I'm getting it right. Tom McCaffrey. Okay. So your name is not wise at all. So that's okay. That's just a, that's an online name. That's great. Tom McCaffrey. Well, Tom. Tom's a beautiful name as well. Amazing. Okay, Evan, did you want to share anything last minute with us?

Yeah, I'll just say that if anyone has any follow up questions that they think of after this or whatever and like, dang, I really wish I asked Evan this or whatever. Anyone is welcome to send me an email anytime. My inbox is always open. My email address is evanstoryorigin app.com. you can also just go to storyorigin app.com and if you just scroll to the bottom of the homepage, the very bottom of the homepage, you'll see my face, you'll see my name, you'll see my email address. I'm always very transparent, very open. Anyone's always welcome to send me an email or you can hit the contact link in the. In the footer on story origin as well to get my get all that info. So yeah, I, you know, if you sign up to story origin, you'll also get like a welcome email from me. You can always, always just reply to that and send me any questions that you have anytime. So my inbox is always open.

So awesome. So awesome. Okay, I'll make sure that folks have your email in the, in the email as well afterwards. Just noted it down and yeah, so great to have you all here. Everyone has made the rest of their day. You can also follow up with questions with me too and I could forward them to Evan if like, whatever's easier for your eyes and Evan, hopefully I'll see you next week. I guess. I mean, you gotta do your duty of a jury duty, but it'd be great to not have that happen.

Yes, I, I really hope that I do not get wrangled into jury duty like one week out of the year where I like am out of town.

Yeah, it's like, come on, it's like this one week would be nice. Yeah, that would be nice. All right, everyone, we'll see y' all soon. Thank you again.

See y'. All.

Bye folks.