What Working for MrBeast Taught Me About Writing Books

It was announced that Mr. Beast is writing a book with James Patterson. Pretty wild, but maybe not that unexpected. But what maybe is more surprising is that Mr. Beast and working for Mr. Beast taught me a lot about how to write great books and ultimately how to build a business as an author. And those lessons, five lessons in specific, what I'm going to share with you today. But before we dive into it, if you're watching the YouTube version, you can see my background. This is my first ever podcast recording from San Francisco. And at the end of this episode, I'll actually share with you a special update on a project I'm working on called Reader Meter. Fans of the channel who've been here for a while, you'll know a little bit about it, but I'm going to be talking about it more because I'm very close to launching it. But let's dive into the lessons because if you don't know Mr. Beast, he's the most subscribed to creator in the world. He's approaching a billion followers online and on YouTube alone has over 400 million subscribers. And this number is growing at roughly 10 million new subscribers a month. Mr. Beast alone as a creator is growing faster than many social platforms are. It's mind blowing. And I was lucky enough to be able to work on the strategy team. And the Mr. Beast strategy team is essentially a group of folks who use data and industry insights to help inform make the videos better, make the businesses better. And I got to work right with the chief strategy officer to help really make Mr. Beast videos go more viral. And you might think a game show on YouTube in which most of the viewers are male, most of the viewers are younger, that doesn't exactly overlap with the prime reading demographic, which tends to be older. And most of the time a lot more women read on average compared to men. So do misbeast videos really have a lot to teach us? And the answer is yes. Not on the specific storytelling style. Please don't go off creating game shows and books. Although games and books and role playing games and books, specific LITRPG tend to do well. But I'm not suggesting you do a game show in a book. But what I am suggesting is that we take some of the first principles that Mr. Beats taught me. In the next roughly 10 minutes, I'm going to share with you those five big lessons. Let's start with lesson number one, which is that retention is everything. It's the most important thing. So when I learned at Mr. B, especially by analyzing the YouTube analytics and seeing which videos were doing well and which videos weren't and why so crazy to get like access to the Mr. Beast YouTube studio. When I was in there, it was very clear that the thing that mattered most was if someone kept watching a video. And we even did these retention analysis where we look at each segment of the video, see where people dropped off, and then use that to inform how we can make the next video better. You know what, what was it about? Was it the lighting here? Was it that this was just segment dragged on too long. It was really fun and insanely useful. And retention. And essentially your read through rate dictates how successful you can be as an author for two reasons. One, the more readers who read your books, this is something we don't always think about, but the more readers then they'll tell to read your books, right? Like when you're engaged by a story and you spend a long time with it, you start telling friends about it. So word of mouth grows faster the more your retention is. But there's another really important point, which is if your retention rate's higher, people are gonna end up actually reading more of your books. You're gonna make more money on average per reader. And the higher lifetime value is lifetime value, meaning the average revenue you make per reader. The more you can spend on ads, the more money you make in general. It's just a flywheel that's almost impossible to beat. So retention is everything, as you'll see. You know when how much sales you get a book one, you know how much sales you get a book two, but you don't really see within a story where your retention drops off or not. And I've actually built reader meter to solve that. I'll talk more about that in a minute. But now we need to talk about lesson number two for Mr. Beast, which is the retention point. Studying these retention curves of each video, I learned something that there was a moment in most Mr. Beast videos, usually on minute three, but the retention would drop off. That meant that let's say you start a video with 100 viewers. Not everyone's going to finish the video. So maybe this one logs off at second. Five, this one logs off at minute one. Most of the people who swipe away from a video and stop watching do so in the beginning. And there's a moment in that video where you hook them and at that moment you start to see your drop off really level off. That moment is called retention point. And it's a magical moment in our stories because we can do two things to this one. Obviously the more people you can have retained by the retention point. That's a really great indicator of a higher read through rate. But there's also another really important thing here, which is if we're trying to test what your read through rate looks like, you can actually switch out those first couple chapters of your book and be like, okay, is this a good opening? How about this opening? How do these openings compare to each other and actually produce pilot stories? Which is what I teach in the reader's first challenge. And it's super exciting to go through that process and be like, I can test stories quicker. I don't need to write a full book to actually understand if it's going to sell well. Because if people stick with it up to the retention point, there's a very good chance that as long as I don't completely crap out and I could stick with it, that they'll stick with the rest of the story as well. Now let's go to lesson number three, which is AB testing everything. We would literally develop dozens of thumbnails for every video. We ab tested thumbnails tons of times when we went live on YouTube, we'd constantly be tweaking the backlist, constantly tweaking titles. There's a reason for this. It's called the Matthew effect. A small change, a small optimization in a 1% better click through rate or slightly more people watching further into the video doesn't just lead to slightly more views, it actually leads to outsized returns. Because the creative industry works in a power law, right? Few people make a lot of the monies, but there's not like they're that much better than the rest of us. Like the best selling stories aren't 10 times better than stories that don't sell as much, but they sell 10 times more. That means small improvements in your ultimately reader retention system. How you get readers in and how you keep them in. Small improvements can lead to huge differences in revenue because of the cumulative advantage you get over time. Essentially, you keep more readers, which means getting more readers. And this effect snowballs. It's not fun when it's working against you. It's really, really fun when it's working for you. AB testing is crucial in this. AB testing is hard to run as authors. Why? It's because you've launched with one cover, you launched with one title. Reader meter changes that. We have an a B testing feature that we're actually finalizing right now, which is wildly awesome. So cool. Where you get to literally put up a cover, see which cover drives the Most conversion to the story and then see, okay, out of that cover, you know which chapters. I can change the first three chapters and make them different. Which chapters lead to the most read through rate. Wild, wild stuff. Fourth lesson I learned from Mr. Beast is to test formats and then double down on what works, but always be testing new formats. What do I mean by formats? That's so weird, Michael? What I mean is whether it's an ad, whether it's your social media marketing, or whether it's your books itself, formats being analogous to a series you should be testing. Instead of writing a three book series that might not sell, writing a five book series, you should write book one, see how it goes. And then concurrently, maybe working on another series concurrently, be working on a lot of authors who have pen names already doing this. You don't even have to have a pen name to do this. Then double down on what works and write book two, book three, book four. And if it doesn't work as well, or if that marketing method doesn't work as well, you can switch. You can start now a new format, test a new series and see if it works. And then what we would do is notice a point in each kind of format when interest started to wane a little bit and the retention started to dip when compared to segments of the previous video in that same format, which for him would be different challenge formats, different types of game show formats. And that is when we would kill that format, stop that series. It's not going to write anymore, not going to create more videos. And luckily we have multiple formats going and we're always testing new formats so we can keep producing winners. Because not every story you make is going to be a hit. Not every story is going to sell the same. But in a calendar year, if you know that you have at least one or two stories that's going to do well, even with some experimental ones, it's just super helpful for your cash flow versus having a great year and then a super big dip. Obviously, Mr. Beast, so many employees, a huge channel. The goal is really to try and like level out those dips. And that was the way we did that. Okay, lesson five now is probably the biggest one. And it's something that blew my mind because I've always been passionate about how do we like build things, experiences and products for readers beyond just books? How do we make money beyond selling books? What I do at Creatorwood, right. Creator Wood is a platform that helps turn your story. You just upload your book or your script and we turn it into Movies using AI. It's unbelievable. So obviously beyond the Book is something I'm very passionate about, but this is another level, Mr. Beast. You don't just make YouTube videos. He's got a literal chocolate company. He's like modern day Willy Wonka and that chocolate company. I won't say how much money he makes. I know how much money he made last year. It's a lot. It's a scary amount. And all I will say it's more than the YouTube channel made by a very decent amount. And that's the opportunity that as storytellers, we build trust in our readers. And yeah, there's money in books, but there's even more money in selling products related to the books that can further immerse readers in our lives. Is it beauty products? Is it clothing lines? Is it different technology? Is it games? Is it movies? Luckily, on the beyond the Book podcast, we talk all about that. And I'm probably overdue for an episode on my Learnings in the first year, beyond the Book. So if you would be interested in hearing an episode of some of the things I'm doing behind the scenes with other creators, because I consult with top creators to help them go beyond the book and what you'd be curious. Just in my Learnings, I'd love to hear from it, but I need to do a few synthesis episodes because we've had a lot of guest episodes. It's gonna be some more solo ones going up and then we'll go back to some more guest episodes too. In fact, I have some amazing guests coming on the podcast soon. That's my lessons now. One last thing I want to share with you, I'm so unbelievably excited for is Reader Mirror. I'm going to be giving a demo and doing like a full podcast specifically on it when we're in beta and preparing to launch. And I'm going to be giving everyone in beta a special lifetime discount. Essentially, it'll be $99 for folks who join during the beta period. It'll be a quick window, but if you join, you get a great discount. It'll be $199 for a lifetime fee afterwards. No monthly subscriptions. Reader Meter does five incredibly special things. One is it helps you see where readers stop turning the page in your story. So whether it's a previously released story that never sold well and you want to try and test again, or a story that did well but. Or the story that hasn't come out yet. Right. You can test that here. Beta editions, previously released stories. All of that's welcome on Reader Meter. And ultimately you can then have readers start to read your story and understand when they stop reading, oh, this is the chapter they dropped off. Let's make that better. This is the page they stop reading on. Maybe, maybe we can make that part better. The second thing we do is we benchmark your retention and read through rate to other authors using Reader Meter. So as more authors use Reader Meter, this will get even more valuable because we'll have just a larger data set to feed to you for you to see in aggregate how you compare that way. You know, okay, I'm outranking authors. I'm not, I'm doing a little bit worse. And it's helpful because it's hard to know in a silo if your data is good or not because no one's going to have a hundred percent read through rate. Right? No one has a book where everyone starts and finishes. But this benchmarking really helps. But we don't stop there. We also have a B testing. So this one's mind blowing to me. You literally can a B test different beginnings of your stories, different covers and different descriptions and see what leads to most tension and the highest conversion rate. Reader Meter also lets you charge for your stories. You don't have to use Reader Meter to sell your books. You know, there's no specific grades, something like that. I encourage you to publish other platforms. Reader Meter is really something to test on before you're ready to publish elsewhere. But what makes Reader Meter really special is we take a zero percent fee, but we cover sales tax and vat, so we're liable for it. You don't have to worry about it. So we handle that for you. And of course you get all the emails of all of your readers and all of your followers too. Like all the free readers too. You get their emails and, and they share your data explicitly with you. So if there's a reader who has like a specific part that you're like, what? That's weird. Like you'll actually be able to see their data. They consent to it in terms of reading on the platform. So it's really like readers are here to help you. The software is here to help you and you can even make money and keep it all to yourself, which is pretty, pretty special. Now what's the fifth reason? Fifth reason is we also do our best to help you get discovered. Reader Meter is not a massive platform. We're just getting started. Okay? So I don't want to pretend like we have millions of readers on the site. We have exactly none right now because we're still not even in alpha yet. We're rolling out to alpha probably in the next like I'm hoping early next week. So by the time I record this, we'll probably be in alpha like by the time it's out. And we'll be in beta certainly before the end of the month, but probably we'll be in beta probably a week after this is launched and then we'll be out to the public by the end of the month. Really wild stuff. End of September. Amazing. I'm shocked. I've been like so busy. I'm like working 80, 90 hour weeks. But not only did we accomplish releasing Reader Meter, which was a huge goal of my big roadmap this year, but also now have launched Creator with a whole new platform. So sticking through on all the promises, making amazing things to help storytellers because there's just too many things to do to help y'. All. Like I can't stop. I just got to keep going because there's too much to do. I'm really, really excited. But the fifth amazing thing about Meter, as I mentioned, is that we don't. We actually help you find your readers. And it's not because we have this huge platform, but because we have bundles. They're free to enter. And that's when you can work with other authors in your genre and your sub genre to try and beta test your stories together and get a pool of beta readers who can then help you read your story together wild and again with your lifetime fee and Reader Meter, once you pay it, you don't have to keep going on and on. You can just use it for unlimited stories, unlimited everything, make unlimited money and that's it. $200 above. It's really my gift. The writing community. I really want to make something amazing, something that y' all will be really excited on. Most of my time, candidly, does go into creative. It's a much bigger project, much bigger in scope, and it's the real big bet I'm taking. But Reader Meter is really fun project. I'm making sure it's staffed up so that you'll have great service. It's something that I still will spend time on developing as well, but it's not where the main focus is. So my real goal with it was to like write a love letter to the author Cuny and create the thing that I wish existed that would have supercharged my career by 10x, I'll share more of that story and exactly why I'm passionate about it when we actually launch Reader Meter. But in the meantime, thank you all for being here. You're here early, so you'll hopefully get in that beta rate, which. I'm serious, like, 99 for. Everything that this is Lifetime is like, I think, an extremely. It's like a dangerously good deal. Like I said, it's my gift to the author of Kudi. You're welcome. I hope you enjoy it. Now, with all that said, an amazing rest of your day. As always, don't forget, together we are boundless.