The BookFunnel Podcast

0:00: We are better off saying I want the success that I do, because otherwise we will spend.
0:05: I think there's there's like some grace that authors need to have with themselves when they make that decision, you know, and, and financially you're getting sunk into the hole.
0:15: It might be better to send out.
0:16: You don't want to have to go into that template every month and switch out your promos.
0:20: So what you do, create a promographic, a really nice what you're trying to do is get somebody hand somebody a book and have that person tell somebody else based on the content.
0:30: Hey, folks, welcome to the Book Funnel podcast, where indie authors get real-world advice on writing, publishing, and growing a career on their own terms.
0:39: Whether you're just starting out or you're deep into your author journey, we're here to help you build your readership, boost your book sales, and connect with your audience.
0:47: Each episode, we aim to bring you insights from authors, experts, and industry insiders who've been there, done that, and then some.
0:55: My name is Jack.
0:55: I'm our lead author sports specialist here at BookFunnel.
0:59: And the host of the Book Funnel podcast.
1:01: I am joined today as always by my co-hosts, Kelly Tansy and Emma Allison.
1:07: And in today's episode of the Book Funnel podcast, we are joined by our guest, USA Today bestselling author and creator of the A stack, Russell Nolte.
1:17: Russell, welcome to the Book Funnel podcast.
1:20: Glad to have you here.
1:21: Thanks for having me.
1:22: Yeah, so excited.
1:23: I love book funnel so much.
1:25: We hear that.
1:25: We hear that a lot.
1:26: We try not to let it go to our heads.
1:28: But yes, we're.
1:28: Glad to have you here as well.
1:30: We're looking forward to today's conversation.
1:32: For those in the audience who might not be familiar with you and your work, give us a little rundown.
1:38: Tell us a little bit about you.
1:39: Sure.
1:39: Well,, I started in film like 20 years ago, and then I moved into comic book publishing and I wrote all of these books in one, this is all one universe and I have a bunch of other, but, well, not the nonfiction.
1:52: The fiction's all like 43 books in one universe plus a bunch in another universe, and then I've written like 19 books.
1:59: For writers and courses and all of that stuff, it kind of like did it on accident because people just kept asking me questions and I wanted them to leave me alone so I can write books.
2:11: And they just wouldn't ever do that.
2:14: So I just kept writing more books and doing more things, and then it kind of like took over like my life, especially starting 2021 when Monica and I co-wrote the get your bookselling on Kickstarter book and then escalated over the last four years or so.
2:30: Right, right.
2:31: So it can, it can happen that way for some people.
2:33: Everybody's got a different A different journey on their way there.
2:37: What are you currently working on or what, what are your current projects right now, creatively?
2:41: Well, I write, I guess right now I write a lot of transition, a lot of comics for romance and like let RPG authors.
2:51: I take their books and I move them into comics, and then I write a lot of authors stack.
2:55: Articles.
2:56: Most of my life is in nonfiction now.
2:59: But I did just launch the final book in my God's verse Chronicles universe.
3:04: So as far as writing, most of it's in nonfiction right now, but I am very excited to have people read anything that I wrote because I know what a blessing that it is.
3:15: Right, right.
3:16: Exactly.
3:17: Emma and Kelly, the three of us, of course, it's, how long has it been since the 3 of us have all been here on the podcast?
3:24: I feel like it's been a few episodes, or it's been since June, I think since I've been on.
3:29: Yeah, right.
3:30: Now keep in mind we're recording this at the end of August, so folks, you're probably going to be hearing this and watching this or listening to this.
3:37: In September, but yeah, it's weird.
3:38: It's been a few months.
3:40: So I don't know what you two have been up to either.
3:42: We like to to touch base with each other, Russell, at the beginning, because we're all authors as well, and just see what we're working on.
3:48: I will go first.
3:50: I basically unplugged and went on vacation twice, and then I had, I had a kid start middle school and one start kindergarten all on the same day, and that was, that was enough for me.
4:00: But I am, I'm ready to get back into creative stuff.
4:03: I've honestly kind of just leaned into unplugging for the last couple of months.
4:08: I'll be, I'll be, I'll be quite honest, but Emma Kelly, I don't know if you have any information you want to volunteer, give us an update on where you guys are at.
4:15: Emma, I know you were doing.
4:16: I thought you, did you complete your second edition of Night in His Eyes?
4:20: Is that complete or is that still?
4:22: I can't remember where we left off.
4:24: It got to 180 and it's still not done, so I split off the 1st 80,000 and I'm releasing that as the new book one.
4:33: Night and Storm.
4:34: Son in His Eyes will be booked too.
4:36: Cause that's how we roll.
4:38: So now I'm starting in the arc campaign, and it's just sitting on my hard drive and I'm going insane cause I've never let a book finished books, sit on my hard drive before.
4:47: I'm like, this time you're gonna to properly launch the book.
4:51: I'll hold you to it, Emma.
4:52: I'll hold you to it.
4:53: Kelly, I know you were working on, you're working on a few different things, if I remember, I can't remember.
5:00: Project specifically when we left, I had a I had a collection that I was working on with about 20 other authors.
5:08: We all had it's a shared worlds collection.
5:11: So we, each are releasing once a week and yeah, I released on Mondays, did the whole, the whole thing and it's out there, it's my first book.
5:23: Years since my series, which is still incomplete, I still need to work.
5:27: That's my, that's my next goal is to, to get started back into my original series and finish it up.
5:33: And I have, I have two books that I'm writing for that before I release the one that I'm working on now.
5:38: But yeah, I had on Monday, and it was kind of one of those things you, it's like falling off the bike or whatever, you know, you get back on.
5:46: So give it another try and see how that all that marketing stuff and everything going and but it's been fun.
5:53: And it was, it's a totally different type of book.
5:55: It's more of a rom-com, so it's a lot lighter, a lot faster read.
5:59: And you normally your your main series is romantic suspense, so a little bit of that's correct.
6:04: Yeah, it's kind of like really twisty dark plot, right.
6:08: Right.
6:09: So this was a lot lighter, it was fun to write.
6:11: Cool, cool, yeah, I, the back to school time for me is always like a time to refocus.
6:17: It's kind of like, honestly, it maybe better than, you know, like New Year's resolution time and everybody's like, oh, it's a new year and I haven't made any progress on my goals this time of year for me is like a good time to get focused, so maybe it is for.
6:30: For some other folks who are listening to, I, I don't know, but this, however, brings us to our first segment of the podcast.
6:35: So we're gonna do our tips from the trenches segment.
6:39: In this segment, we share with you some tips for self-publishing, writing, or just general creative advice.
6:46: Of course, Emma Kelly and myself, we are authors, we're all authors here today, as well as our guest, and so we will share some variety of different tips.
6:56: We don't share them in advance with each other, so we do happen to have the same tip.
7:00: I don't think that'll happen this time, but it has happened before.
7:03: It was not planned, we promised, and we don't decide who goes first until literally right now, who wants to volunteer and share their first tip with the audience.
7:13: Kelly, you've got a smile on your face.
7:14: I think you're ready to go.
7:15: Was that me volunteering?
7:17: I guess so.
7:18: OK, so my tip is a a funnel tip, and this came through the queue in the last week, like 3 times, which was kind of interesting.
7:27: Normally, this is kind of one of those obscure ones.
7:30: Some authors were trying to gift a book to multiple people.
7:34: Yes.
7:35: And so they were using the gift to book feature, and one of them had actually published the gift code to a large amount of people, and of course, that isn't, that's not gonna work.
7:45: Because the code is meant for one person.
7:47: So once it's redeemed, it's done.
7:48: And so, and then we had a few that were processing over and over, just creating codes, creating codes, creating codes.
7:55: An easier way to do it if you're, especially if you are just like disseminating the codes to a group of people, is to do print codes.
8:03: So just because it doesn't have the word gift in it, it's still a really viable way to give a book, to gift books to a group.
8:11: Of people.
8:12: And this is actually really true for people that are selling their books, like, like maybe you have a textbook or a workbook of some sort, and you're giving it to a school or you're selling it to a library or something bigger, the print codes, they're not just for in-person events, they can be used for that, so that they can then distribute them to whoever needs those codes.
8:33: So, you know, when you're gifting a book, the code can only be used once and If you email it, it's specific to that person and their email link, and then, but if you're doing it a lot, it's better to just do a batch of print codes.
8:46: And now print codes can last a lot longer, but we've changed things, you can actually give away multiple books with print codes, and there's no expiration date if you don't want one.
8:56: You can always go back in and set an expiration date for that batch of codes.
9:00: And it'll change it, but you can have them be indefinitely open for your group.
9:05: So that's my tip.
9:07: That's a good, that's a good one because people see the gifted book feature and they're like, oh, well, I have to gift a whole bunch of books to people and so they maybe don't read the fine print on that one.
9:17: Basically, to kind of summarize what Kelly was saying, that gifted book feature creates a private link.
9:23: That's when Kelly was saying that if you, somebody tries to share that link publicly, stops working.
9:29: That would be a private link, and a private link is tied to, it's supposed to be tied to one reader, and so, essentially, when a private link is shared, like a gift a book link, well just like Kelly said, it doesn't, nobody will be able to, other than the first person will be able to get it, and that's, that's intended, so it's a safety feature.
9:48: So if you create a gift gift a book and then try to share with everybody, yeah, I've I've been, I've been around long enough, I, Kelly, I I know you've seen that dozens, dozens of times.
9:56: So it's a good tip.
9:57: It's a good one to mention because it's definitely something that people will stumble into.
10:02: I'm going to pull this tip from one of our webinars about newsletter design.
10:07: So we all know you're supposed to have a newsletter template because we don't do nothing from scratch, OK?
10:12: We don't do nothing from scratch.
10:13: So if you want to schedule a whole year of newsletters in advance, duplicate that template 12 times.
10:19: Now, you don't want to have to go into that template every month and switch out your promos.
10:24: So what you do, create a promographic, a really nice one, duplicate it, change the color grade, put the month on it, and then for each month embed that in the corresponding newsletter.
10:34: Then, then, You go to Pretty links.
10:39: You go to your custom domain and you create a pretty link, and you embed that single pretty link in each one of those banners.
10:45: And all you have to do each month is go into your Preins and swap out the link that it points to, which is a lot faster in theory.
10:53: I'm on the book fun dashboard all the time, so it's a lot faster for me than opening up my newsletter dashboard.
10:59: The two-prong approach is this also requires that you host group promos.
11:03: So you have to create a promo, duplicate it 12 times and host it, and then join it with a book.
11:09: It could be a placeholder book, that's fine.
11:11: Because you can always swap out the book before the promo goes live, and then you can dra grab your tracking links and from there.
11:17: No, that's that's a.
11:20: I do something similar and then a lot of time.
11:22: That's a good one.
11:23: So mine's a storytelling one and kind of an odd, this might come out of left field a little bit.
11:29: If you've got a situation, I mean, sure, everybody's familiar with Reddit like stories, right?
11:35: Like the am I the asshole type stories or that sort of thing like.
11:40: drama stories that come in all shapes and sizes.
11:43: a fun exercise is to take your story, whatever it might be, especially if there is a little bit of interpersonal drama to some extent, and write it as a Reddit story.
11:54: And sometimes you can even use this, or you can even use some people that I know use like AI tools to do this sort of thing if you're OK with that, or you can do it yourself.
12:02: Either way, you can like adapt it to that writing style, write it from the point of view of your character, even go so far as to like theorize.
12:09: What would be the comments in that Reddit thread.
12:12: So I, of course, in my book, have a situation that is perfect for that and it was a great exercise that actually led me down several rabbit holes where I realized, oh man, there's things here that I haven't considered that characters would be thinking of doing or character motivations and that sort of thing.
12:28: So adapt your story into a Reddit drama thread.
12:33: If you're not familiar with those, go, go read them and then you, then you might, you might find that helpful.
12:39: Jack, I'm gonna do that for my very next reel and then give you the link so you can see my homework, cause like that's effing brilliant.
12:46: Can you imagine?
12:47: Yeah, no, it, it, it finally dawned on me because I'm like, this is something that sounds like it would be on a Reddit thread, a Reddit drama thread.
12:56: I'm like, well, why don't I just explore that?
12:58: Why don't I just go down that road and see what, see what I find?
13:02: And I did, and it worked out really well.
13:03: So in my case.
13:05: Yeah, it was, it was pretty fun too.
13:06: So Russell, whatever you've got for us, your turn.
13:10: All right, I've been debating between two.
13:12: I think I'm going to change mine to the second one that I was going to go.
13:15: So I'm like an author success business guy, and so I will say that.
13:21: If you want to grow your readership, or like your marketing side of this, like, you should go and study Dropbox, because all companies are, all books are product led growth companies, doesn't have to be Dropbox, it could be slack or any of the companies that are trying to like get really good at product led growth, because books are basically the exact same business model.
13:45: I know Michael Evans says books are subscription, but like I think, which I think is true, but also, I think they are product growth as well, because what you're trying to do is get somebody, hand somebody a book and have that person tell somebody else based on the content of the book and refer other people to it.
14:03: So a lot of suc like there's not a ton of models for success in authorship because like we don't talk about entrepreneurship very much in authorship, but they do talk about entrepreneurship a lot in, in, in entrepreneurship circles and in tech circles.
14:18: So, I mean, you can do that for literally anything, like you just like find the thing that's a comp and tech and then pretty much use those strategies, but, but yeah, that's my, that's mine.
14:28: Yeah, no, that's that's interesting to look essentially looking outside the publishing industry for something that authors are frustratingly terrible at.
14:37: Authors are frustratingly terrible at even following advice when it's in their exact subgenre and and doing the thing that all the people in their subgenre is.
14:48: I was just saying I, I did a webinar earlier and the people were like, will this work for my genre?
14:53: And I'm like, I'm not going through that like I do not care.
14:57: Like, you need that this, this, you need to figure out a thing that works in my exact genre is like the main, frustration that I have with author mindset because the things that are working in your genre will likely not lead to your growth, because so many people are doing it.
15:16: Like, if you want to Really grow the easiest, the most useful way, you should find things that work outside of your genre and bring it into your genre because no one's doing that thing.
15:25: And thus, you have an outmoded ability to grow from it, like you will get outmoded success.
15:31: And you know that it works because you just saw it work like if Dropbox is doing it and working it, it's probably going to work for you, right?
15:39: Right, to adapt, adapt what works instead of doing what everybody else is doing.
15:44: No, that makes sense.
15:45: So that's That's a, you have me thinking already.
15:47: I've got like gears turning in my head.
15:49: It's been some business, my entire business succeeds because I took, I'm very good at extrapolating from known data.
15:56: Like I knew that that worked for comics to do Kickstarter.
16:00: And so I just was like, what if we just did that exact thing with books and shockingly, like it worked because they're both bound objects like same thing with like Substack, like all of these things that I do are just like taking something that Works for another segment of the industry of even publishing or even outside of publishing and bringing it to like my business because nobody is doing it and we all only have 5% of the puzzle.
16:28: So like you ladies who do romance, I love you, but like you do not have 100% of the puzzle.
16:32: Nobody in romance is 100% of the puzzle because like there are things that tech does, there are things that that video games do, there are things that RPGs do.
16:42: There are things that That every other that like you don't even think about that you won't even think our business models and like they will blow your mind and everyone who does that thing does it, and they think that it's the most banal thing possible, but it would like blow your mind.
16:58: You can take lit RPG as one example of this, like, they did a bunch of stuff that lit did, that literature does in RPGs and a lot of things that RPGs do.
17:09: I'm not even talking about the writing, like they took market.
17:11: strategies and we're like, what if we just did both of these things and like exploded in growth?
17:18: Does this translate to social media marketing because it was interesting you were saying that because Dunkin' Donuts, y'all do not sleep on their marketing.
17:27: They have hella engagement, and I was studying their posts for a while.
17:32: The posts are brilliant, and I'm like, I'm gonna swipe some of these posts and do it in romance style, just see what happens.
17:41: Like I mean, I think you should try all of the things, like, I don't know, maybe it will flop, but like, you probably won't get, like, it won't destroy your career to try a Dunkin' Donuts post, but like, the thing that's not going to work is doing the thing that is already not working.
17:59: Like, that's the, like you.
18:01: This is gonna get really wonky, but you, you guys have me on this show, you know who I am.
18:05: Yeah.
18:06: OK, so if you are really looking for growth, you are looking for for the the things you can do that are as far above exponential growth as possible.
18:18: So when I say exponential growth, I mean, you put in 1 ounce of effort and have over 2 times, you get 2 times that effort back or more.
18:27: There are things that you're doing right now that like are giving you outmoded effort, and you're not just doing them because you think You have to do all this other stuff.
18:35: Like, I don't like social media marketing.
18:37: I don't know if it's gonna work cause I don't have social media.
18:39: But like, if it works for you, awesome.
18:41: Everything, the entire problem with the authorship with with authorship can be defined by the fact that everything regresses to algorithmic growth over time.
18:51: So, we end up burning all of these strategies to the ground because they worked great, but no strategy works great forever.
18:59: So your X return will get 5 X return, we'll get 2.
19:02: X return will eventually go one X return where you are putting in 1 ounce of effort and getting and getting one behind, and then God forbid, it goes logarithmic where you're putting in 1 ounce of effort and you're getting less than 1 return.
19:16: So, if you know that this is true for all growth, no matter what you do, like you then, the goal is then to find the thing that has the most growth and systematize it before it gets to 11 growth like Find a place to automate it, delegate it, or drop it, and then find another strategy that works really well, and then layer those things on together so that like by the time you get to, by the time you have 5 years going on, you've got 2 or 3 things that work really well together and will be sustainable, because there is a point of sustainability that will probably be based on Facebook ads, somewhere around 1.66X growth, which is most ads returns, some are Between 1.5 and 2 times growth.
20:01: If that is going to be your sustainable thing, you put 1.1 ounce of effort in, and no matter what you do, you'll get 1.5x return on it, like, you could do that forever, but you can't get 10x return forever.
20:16: You just can't, you can't get a 100x return forever.
20:19: Like authors always expect that they're going to have this strategy and just write it forever.
20:25: And if you are thinking of About your life as an ecosystem, and like your business as an ecosystem, your goal then is to layer one thing a year.
20:33: Like, let's just make it simple.
20:34: One killer strategy a year that you have perfected and can do reasonably, and just every year, you now are doubling that money or 1.5xing your money.
20:46: And by the time you have 6 of those going together, you're now like 10xing every dollar you put in forever.
20:53: Won't be forever, because Even though strategies can fail, even though sustainable strategies can fail.
20:59: But the reason why someone like Sky Warren says, do do Facebook ads is because like she found the sustainability point that she could just do it forever.
21:07: The reason I say do Kickstarter is like, I've done 50 campaigns, and I know that I can do with like 8 hours of work, make 500.
21:15: Like those things, I can't make 500 on those campaigns, but like if I can do 4 campaigns and make 500 profit each time, that's $2000.
21:25: If I have a subscription that makes $3000 a year, $4000 a year, like suddenly I have $60,000 of money.
21:31: We put so much effort in doing the one thing and being like KU is gonna work forever, but like in recorded history, not even most businesses that are, are 10X are like billion dollar unicorn companies, they mostly fail.
21:49: Go look 100 years ago.
21:50: I like the The most successful companies, you will find, like, almost none of them exist anymore.
21:56: They've either been eaten by somebody else, they failed or in some way.
22:00: So like if the smartest, most successful businesses in the world generally all fail, that you are relying on Kindle Unlimited or some other thing to save you forever is just, there's no realistic reason for you to believe that, except that like you have the hope that it will.
22:19: Yeah.
22:20: Right, and you're saying to hunt for those strategies, one way to do that is to look outside the romance industry and kind of study what everybody else is doing, who's who's making that growth or engaging wealth with what I'm saying is like, OK, so we have this author ecosystem thing that Monica and I made, and like there's 5 different things.
22:43: There's 5 different verticals, and in general, they break down to one person grows through optimization.
22:50: One person grows through depth and like thought leadership and being on podcasts.
22:55: One person grows through like launch cycles.
22:58: One person grows through ambassador marketing, which are forests, and one person grows through strategic partnerships.
23:05: So this is a vast simplification, but like you probably resonate with one of those five things, and there are, let's say it's ambassador marketing.
23:14: Well, once you get past arc teams and add like Street teams, Ambassador marketing kind of falls apart like there's where, where, what else are you going to do in like, but like, you know who else is really great at ambassador marketing?
23:28: Every product led growth company.
23:30: You know who's great at like strategic partnerships?
23:32: You know who's great at like thought leadership?
23:34: Well, like Tim Ferris, or like, what like, or Elon Musk is great at like thought leadership.
23:40: Like that's just like his whole thing is like I spend $0 on advertising.
23:45: Just them making it through earned media.
23:47: So like, what, whoever that is, like, there are a finite number of ways to succeed doing that currently in publishing, because publishing is an antiquated industry that like doesn't have very many growth strategies, but no industry is, because if you go to comics, they will say the way you grow is through conventions and Kickstarter.
24:08: And only recently have reader conventions been a thing in Rome and Like the romance community, but like they, if you were a fantasy book, you should be doing big fantasy big conventions of like comics, because that's where tons of pop culture people gather.
24:24: It's not just the reader conferences tend to only work for romance readers, but in general, like, if you are really good at like talking to people and making a connection with them, like there's an entire string of that nobody does, like, maybe 0.1%. of fantasy writers are doing conventions of any kind.
24:45: They certainly aren't doing any, but like, to go to like David Vergoots, he has that scare mail thing, which is just like a thing that he pulled from another industry that was like working really well.
24:56: It's like, what if I did it for horror?
24:57: It's like, shockingly, readers like the mail because they already like reading things.
25:04: So finding something that works for someone else.
25:08: And being like, huh, I wonder if I could like scale this thing that's already scalable.
25:14: It's already scalable, and you can see it's scalable because if someone's running ads to it for a length of time, they probably have figured out how to scale it.
25:21: And if someone else can scale it, you can probably figure out how to scale it, and the fewer people that do it, the better, because the, the chances of you getting outmoded arbitrage on it are very high.
25:34: And the chances that you are going to massively fail are pretty slim, mostly because you probably aren't that successful already.
25:42: So, like, who cares?
25:43: Like, like, what we know, what you know, if you have been through this in any length of time is of the 10 strategies that, like, exist in publishing for growing, like, none of them are working.
25:55: None of them work for almost anyone.
25:57: Like, there are either better at like, but if you really love arc teams, there's are ways to make our teams work 100 times better, just like not in publishing, just like in other places, like not, they're not called art teams, they're called something else.
26:12: I don't know what they're called, Schar teams, but like whatever that thing is, they'll be like, wow.
26:19: Sure, like brand ambassadors, like, what is, what is like a, like people are so like this whole influencer thing is another one.
26:27: It's like, yes, it works for authors, but like.
26:30: It didn't come from authors.
26:32: Like, authors didn't just wake up today and be like, what if we paid a bunch of people to like, talk about our books?
26:37: It came from someone being like, huh, they're all doing influencer stuff and it's working.
26:43: I wonder what'll happen if like people start talking about my books.
26:46: Like I found a good book talker, find a good book influencer.
26:49: Look, they're talking about my books, but then everyone does it.
26:52: And so by the time you do it, you will probably not going to have any success with it because All the 100 biggest romance authors in the world are already now doing it.
27:01: They have dominating it.
27:03: Like the success was in being the first person or the 1st 5 people to find that strategy when it was like 100 or 10x return, and then writing it to hell until like it found some stabilization, right?
27:18: And and the beauty of layering multiple strategies too is if you find one strategy that you get some purchase from.
27:25: Even if you're not in that 10X phase, you can get something out of that one, and then you layer something else on top of it.
27:31: By the time one of those strategies fizzles out for you, you don't have, it's not like you have all your eggs in one, right?
27:38: But the problem is that we ride it until they're unsuccessful.
27:42: Like we, we are not finding that we are either not finding the strategy that has enough arbitrage to give us time, so we're doing something.
27:52: And that gives when it gives like 1.2% growth, and you're like, OK, well, if I know, it will take a year to make this really work, which is what I believe in my deep in my soul, like to master something and make it work and be a part of your business, it takes one year.
28:06: So if something takes one year and you're only getting we growth on it now, it probably will not still give you arbitrage in a year by the time you systematize it, there's not enough time.
28:18: To make it work.
28:19: So you need something that is far above that, that, that like stabilization point.
28:26: So, and with and then you need to use it with the knowledge that within a year, it's going to stabilize somewhere, and like, you'll be able to know what that growth is, which is why an Eisenhower matrix becomes so valuable, right?
28:39: Right.
28:39: So, for for somebody who is, this is a question I I have because you're talking about.
28:45: How much you're putting in versus how much you're getting out and when you're spending money, it's really easy to know like what 1.5x is, right?
28:53: If you're somebody who's just getting started in self-publishing.
28:58: How do you, do you do that math more as like I put this much time into it and it's therefore, like, do you put a dollar amount on that for people who are in that situation?
29:08: Obviously for people who are already making money, full-time authors or even part-time authors, you can, you can just do the math and do the 1.5x or the 2X.
29:17: But for somebody who you're not making any money at all, where do they, where should they start from and how do they, they do that math, what of what they should invest their time in?
29:26: Well, first and foremost, most things that authors do don't make money and will never make money.
29:32: But like intentionally, they don't make money.
29:35: Like, we're only getting paid really when someone buys a book, hires us to speak, right, as authors, like, so all of the stuff.
29:42: that you do, that's not someone buying a book or being paid to speak or like with very few exceptions, are things you do for free.
29:51: She will always do things for free.
29:52: Like, that is why companies like Dropbox had billions of dollars in investment because the best way to, to get someone to, to take an action is to reduce friction and the number one friction is money.
30:04: So like, this is not like I put in $1 and get 1 point.
30:08: 6 whack.
30:09: This is that that sticky wicked middle thing, what people say.
30:13: So, the thing that most authors say is, why is this so hard when they do something.
30:18: And so we define hard as the opposite is easy, but easy means without difficulty, and I don't think anyone becomes an author saying, why isn't this easy?
30:31: What they are saying really is why Can't I push this forward?
30:36: Or why can't I do this with ease?
30:39: Why can't I have something frictionless?
30:42: So what I would say is, if something is hard, really, the comparative is not being easy, it's, can you do it without friction?
30:50: And you don't need a $1 to know what you could do without friction.
30:55: Like you just like, there's certain things that you do, like Jenga, and it's like, I don't push my thing here, but you push the right thing and you're like, well, that thing just slid out with like all the e's in the world.
31:07: So I think it's really hard to tie everything to money, which is what we do, because I used to sell cars, car, advertising.
31:19: This seems like a very big divergence, but I promise you it's worthwhile.
31:23: And I would say, hey, give us $500 a month, we'll give you $800 a month.
31:27: but like, how do you know what your advertising budget is?
31:30: And I then I talked to a guy.
31:32: Mercedes Benz.
31:33: One day, he said, the time horizon for me is 30 years.
31:37: I need to spend 30 years putting money into advertising and marketing, so that when that person comes to my dealership at 36, they want a Mercedes.
31:47: And like what I'm saying is, you have to make them want the Mercedes before you even have the series.
31:54: Like 90% of our time should be spent trying to get someone to know that like, I have a Mercedes here.
32:00: And 99% of that is going to be free.
32:05: I'll, and 99% of the stuff that I do for the author stack, which is like the thing that I do that has been the most singularly successful thing, it's like free.
32:14: I write articles for free.
32:16: I write, I like, I like I, I write blog posts.
32:19: I do this stuff, like I do my podcast, all of it is free, but what is different is it is friction it has little friction to it is frictionless.
32:30: I can do boop and get way, way, way more return than I than I than I could.
32:35: And also some things build arbitrage over time, so there are some actions that Feel frictionless now, but they're like a pump.
32:46: Every time you do it, the same amount of friction, but 10 years later it'll be like, oh my God, why do I start, why do I still do these like author swap shares on my newsletter, these cross promos, because like I only ever get one thing and it means I have to send a new, I have to do it in every newsletter.
33:02: It takes all this time.
33:04: So like you might get this little growth, but like.
33:07: It's it really a boop that you can slide forward, and then there are other things you do, like a mailing list in general.
33:14: It's like, all right, well, if you have a million people on your mailing list, it takes the same amount of effort to write it as it does when you have one person on it.
33:21: Like the, what you get is, so if you write 1 15 minute email a week, which is what I think you should be doing anyway, then you only spend 15 minutes when you have 100 subscribers, and that is an exchange that might feel worth it.
33:36: But when you have a million people on your list, man, that same 15 minutes is gonna make you feel great cause you're going to make a million dollars from that email that you send.
33:45: So, those are the, that's the other side of it.
33:47: It's like you are looking for things that you can do with ease, but that become even more frictionless over time.
33:55: Yes, that's what essentially is what makes them scalable, is that the friction doesn't increase as your So here's a really interesting thing about scale.
34:04: I just read the Science of scaling book that everyone's talking about right now, and the main point was, if something is scalable, it is very, very simple.
34:13: It is a like people think that complexity means you make more money from it, but if you really want to scale something, it needs to be so simple that Everyone talks about it, which is a problem with authorship because most things you write won't scale, they just won't.
34:29: And so we spend all of this time being like, no, if people just knew more about this series, they would buy it.
34:37: But like, that is generally not true, because most things, most series don't scale.
34:43: How many, how many Hunger Games like series can you name?
34:47: Off the top of your head right now, because Hunger Games scaled.
34:50: Like it was a scalable thing, very simple concept, very simple, like hits your base emotions, and then there's more stuff inside of it.
34:58: But like, there's, there are going, the reason I say there are going to be things that are already make it frictionless is because, like, OK, so my first series is called The Gods verse Chronicles.
35:09: It is not scalable.
35:10: But my second The series is called the Obsidian Spindle saga, and the first book is called The Sleeping Beauty, then The Wicked Witch, The Fairy Queen, The Red Rider.
35:21: Like it is things that are just like more popular, and I still brought all of my fantasy weirdness to it, but like I made things that just carried easier.
35:32: There are things that we did in in In the writer MBA that are so much better than author ecosystems.
35:40: They're so much deeper and more complex, but guess what scaled when we didn't talk about it?
35:45: A ecosystems.
35:46: And so, it became obvious that like it is very simple to understand author ecosystems.
35:53: It is very simple because it tells me about my and we have an endless capacity to learn things about ourselves.
35:59: Like, in retrospect, it was easy to see why that scale, but the truth is, the reason why I still talk about all the systems today is because we didn't talk about it for a year and it just got more and more popular.
36:10: And like these are all very easy things you can do without, without like spending any.
36:15: Money.
36:16: Like anyone can write a book and then not talk about it.
36:19: Like, it's very easy to not talk about a thing.
36:22: Look at all these things I'm not talking about right now.
36:24: And then we tend to put money before scalability.
36:30: And what I'm saying is there is an organic scalability to all things.
36:36: And like to go to book funnel.
36:39: BookFunnel is host all your stuff here and pay me and pay us $250 a year, and you just, and then that's it, that's the, that is the that is so much simpler than any other platform, and yet, like, it has scalability because it's like, OK, everyone loves it, it works, it's got one promise, it's got one sale, and boom, everyone is using it in the industry, and then Outside of the industry, like, every time I talk to an author, I'm like, why aren't you using book funnel.
37:07: They're like, well, I have this, this, this, I'm like, it's just like do it, OK?
37:10: Just like go spend 2, give them $250 or $500 like dollars to do the audio too and just like it all works.
37:17: It's great.
37:18: And like that's true with Shopify.
37:20: It's true with all of these things.
37:22: And like, but like, books, I'm relatively confident that Damon didn't just start doing a billion dollars.
37:29: Dollars of advertising for like book funnel when he started doing it and he was like, this seems like a good idea.
37:35: Gave it to some people.
37:36: Those people told other people, those people told other people, those people told other people.
37:39: So like the, the reason I talk about product led growth is like a scalable series.
37:45: You don't have to do anything after you write the book.
37:48: You don't have to do like 1000 interviews, except to show people you can go buy this book.
37:54: Now, you just know you could go.
37:55: By this thing, like it, and then it just works on its own.
37:59: But we put so much effort into the things that we make and money behind it, myself included, that we, by the time we actually see that something's not scalable, it is deeply in debt.
38:13: We are deeply in debt on that series, and then we have some cost fallacy.
38:18: Like, I got to keep working on this series, so there are Things that you do that with ease now, like today in this moment, like, maybe it is social media, maybe you hate social media, but like, you should not do things you don't like because you will not, it will not be successful and also everyone knows.
38:37: Do you think really people don't know you hate doing the thing that you don't like doing?
38:41: Like, everyone knows, right?
38:43: Discord.
38:45: I love to be on it.
38:46: I don't like to manage it.
38:47: I'm like, Well, it's interesting cause there's a number of guests we've had on and like you're connecting some dots to things that others have said, you know, we, and, and names are escaping me right now, which is really embarrassing, but I apologize.
39:03: But no, like the, like you said, this this idea of, you know, if you, we had Becca Simon, and she talked about, well, if you wanted to do it, you would have done it.
39:12: Like you, you just, you would have done it.
39:14: And we're talking about more about like motivation because authors get these ideas of like, oh, well, everybody's doing TikTok.
39:20: I've got to do TikTok.
39:22: And then you, you write this whole like plan about how you're going to do it and then you don't do anything at all and you beat yourself up about it.
39:30: And it's like, well, if you, if you didn't do it, you didn't want to do it.
39:33: And when what you said there about like, like, yeah, you're if you're doing the thing that that doesn't work, like and you don't want to do it, everybody knows, and you know too, you just might not be able to admit it to yourself.
39:45: Well, that's because In order to do, to get, like, you only, the only good marketing is the marketing that you do, or you only do marketing that you like.
39:55: And what I mean by like is like has two factors.
39:58: One is, I enjoy doing it, and two is I have a positive feedback loop from it.
40:03: I use this example of like, if a dog bites you in the leg every day, it doesn't matter how much you like it, eventually you're like, you like, he must enjoy that dog, you're not gonna like them over a long enough period of time.
40:14: You might still take care of them.
40:16: I know plenty of people that have like a not great dog that they are like committed to, but they are having a nebulous relationship too.
40:24: So the reason I say do the things you like is because it already by definition gives you a positive feedback loop.
40:31: You have, you like, like it's just there, like, like you like it, so like you enjoy it and like it at least isn't giving you a negative experience.
40:40: Yeah, right, or, or at least the negative aspects of it are tolerable.
40:45: Right, right, right.
40:47: I was thinking about that with some, you know, authors who have stepped away from certain series and, and they beat themselves up over the fact that they needed to walk away because the feedback loop they were getting is it's not selling, people didn't enjoy it.
41:02: It was disappointing and, you know, I want to move on to something more creative a little bit different and I think there's there's like some grace that authors need to have with themselves when they make that decision.
41:15: It's not easy to make, but again, with we had Becca Simon here, and it was kind of like, who do you owe that to?
41:21: You don't owe that to anybody, you know, you are not the sunk cost fallacy is really real, and that goes for the money that you spend on advertising a series that isn't doing well.
41:34: It's not giving you the returns, you're, you're looking at that feed.
41:37: Back loop and it's just negative, negative.
41:39: And sometimes you have to say, I'm either gonna not finish it, or I'm going to finish it later.
41:44: And I'm going to come back to it when I'm in a different place.
41:47: And I think that's important for everybody to know that like, if it isn't working, if it's not scalable, if it isn't, you know, working for your, your creativity or your all of it, you know, and, and financially, you're getting sunk into the hole, it might be better to set it aside and work on something that makes you happy.
42:06: So this is my, this, this, this is where I'll say something like all this stuff that we said is like just do what you want and and like you'll have, but like I, I have to, now do the other thing, which is like, that does not mean you should write anything.
42:21: What it means is like, let's say you really want to write a cozy mystery book series, a paranormal cozy mystery, and like, you want, you want a guy, main character.
42:33: To run a hamburger stand.
42:35: I and you want them to be a psychic.
42:38: I would say, OK, what is the overall thing that you're trying to do?
42:43: And could you make that a woman who is a witch who runs a coffee stand?
42:49: Because those three things are just wildly more popular than, like, we know that they're more popular.
42:55: So like, if it doesn't break your series, why would you not do the thing that is the most popular?
43:01: in your genre.
43:02: Like, look, don't write fantasy if you don't want to write dragons.
43:05: Like, just like, don't do it.
43:06: Like, like, if you don't like dragons, witches are fairy tales, just like don't write fantasy because like, or write fantasy and just know it's going to be, because there are things that you're like, I have to get this story out.
43:17: I know I'm not gonna make any money on it.
43:19: And it's like, OK, cool.
43:20: Well, how can we maybe make money on this book to at least break even?
43:24: Can we run a Kickstarter?
43:25: Can we put it in an anthology?
43:27: Like, can we do like What thing can I do to, like, at least get value from this thing, even if it's not money?
43:33: Can I give it away for free?
43:35: Like, look, if you know you're not gonna make any money on a thing, and like, like, you should give it away for free, cause the best way to make a million dollars is to give away a million books, copy of your books.
43:44: So like, well, can you do that on book funnel?
43:46: Like, can you do that on retailers?
43:48: Like, I don't know, but like there are all of these red lines that like people have in their books.
43:55: And in order to make the book work, and that's OK, but just like a relationship, maybe you get 3 to 5.
44:01: And like, aside from that, you should just like kind of give the audience what they want, because, like, what do you care?
44:07: Like, do you really care that this person makes hamburger makes coffee instead of hamburgers?
44:11: Is that integral to the plot of your book?
44:14: And if it is, I would say, how, how can making hamburgers be a recurring thing for your mystery novel?
44:22: Well this is not a Food book, like, this is not a like, what is every, you're telling me every book in this series is going to be revolve around hamburgers.
44:31: That does not sound like a series that's gonna last very long.
44:33: And that's again, that is OK.
44:36: If you want to do all of the things I just said, then you should do it with an open mind.
44:41: But we have to get past this idea that like, I get to write whatever I want whenever I want it, and I get to make the money that I want to make at any time, because like that.
44:50: is not capitalism.
44:52: Like that is not the system we live in.
44:54: It was not a system we've ever lived in, going back even to like Conan Doyle.
44:59: Like, he tried to kill Sherlock Holmes so many times and just couldn't because he wanted to write weird esoteric books about fairies.
45:06: And guess what doesn't sell?
45:07: Didn't sell them in the 1800s, doesn't sell that.
45:10: Weird esotesoteric books about fairies just like are not going to get you on to a main stage publisher where like there it's going to be.
45:18: by a lot of places.
45:19: Yeah, so it's like, it's OK to make this choice and to vary your choices.
45:24: I know all of my friends who who are super successful have like birthday books or something that like, they know is gonna make very little amount of money.
45:33: But guess what is really good about like having a big audience?
45:37: You get to write things you want and they make money.
45:40: So like, I can write almost anything and make 5000 from it, somewhere between 3 and 500.
45:45: Which means I can write any weird thing I want.
45:47: Some of the things that I write will make more money.
45:50: But like, we spend all of this time trying to raise the ceiling of how much our books make.
45:55: But I think this is the wrong question.
45:57: The question really is, how can I raise the floor so that any book that I make, no matter how, if you want to make weird books, how can any book, no matter how weird I make it, still make like 3 to 50.
46:09: And it turns out that like, when you have a bunch of people at the top of your Funnel, you end up with a bunch of people at the bottom of your funnel who like your weirder stuff.
46:17: Not everyone, a small percentage, but enough that you could run a Kickstarter and make 3 to $500 that you could like, I don't know, make a subscription just for your weird thing, like, I don't know what the thing actually is, but like, if you had a subscription that made you $10,000 a year, and you're like, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna force them to read this book, and probably you're gonna read it because like, they're paying you already, yeah.
46:40: When I was thinking of like Theodora Taylor's The Universal Fantasy, it plays a lot into that.
46:46: Yeah, it was the author was talking about the ID, you know, kind of the same idea where I know that I'm always going to have some sort of like balcony scene, or I like this in my books every time, and that's like, it gives somebody the emotional Feeling that they like, and you're right, a hamburger stand isn't like cozy and romantic and in that sense of like it brings out an emotion, it might have a different connotation.
47:13: So it is important when you're looking at your overall writing, to talk, to think about that universal fantasy that you're trying to give to your reader and say, You know, yeah, I really want to have this thing happen, you know, yeah, I totally understand what you're saying there.
47:27: Yeah, that's a, there's a whole chapter in how to write irresistible books that that readers devour my craft book about universal fantasies and another on anagrams and another on psychological triggers and it's like, these are all the things that we can control.
47:44: Like we are authors, we can't control necessarily.
47:47: The plot of the book that we have, or like the thing we really want to write.
47:52: But we can say within the bounds that I want to tell this story.
47:57: What are the things that will increase the likelihood that more people want to read it, which is the end goal, right?
48:04: Like, I know a lot of authors who claim that they don't care about the money and whatever.
48:09: Like, I'll let them have that delusion.
48:11: But like, I've never met someone who doesn't.
48:13: want more impact for their reading.
48:15: I've never met someone who didn't want more people to read it or like it or talk about it.
48:19: I didn't know one person who's been like, I wish less people would share my book.
48:23: No one.
48:23: Otherwise, you would keep it in a drawer, because here's the thing, like, all writers are extreme narcissists, because their books on the cover, their names on the cover of the book.
48:36: You didn't have to put that book out, you don't have to put your name on it.
48:39: You have to put your picture on the.
48:40: And it's like, OK, that like, we did this.
48:43: We expect people to not only buy our book, but read it, vour it even, and like, fall in love with it so much that it becomes a part of their identity.
48:52: Do you know, like, how conceited you have to be to say that.
48:58: And we all make it all day every day.
49:00: And it's like, can we just admit that?
49:02: Like, because whenever someone says, I don't care about being known, I'm like, Like, what's your name on the cover?
49:07: Like, well, it's not.
49:09: Why's your picture on the back?
49:10: It's not.
49:11: Why are your words inside?
49:12: You could have left it in a thing, could have left it in a thing.
49:15: You could give it away for free, but you chose to price it at a, at a at a an amount to make money on it.
49:21: And like, it's OK, like, but we have this thing that like we have to be these and all artists are the same way.
49:28: Like, I think, I think are like actually like painters and stuff can get away.
49:32: With this a little bit more because like they're like spending one day on it.
49:35: We spend months on these books.
49:38: Like, we spend years sometimes on it.
49:40: Like, we want people to read it because we think that the message that we're giving them is important, and it is, but like, can we not, can we just pass this like idea that we don't want people to read our book, that we don't like, that we don't look at the, why are the bad reviews hurting you if you don't care?
49:59: Like, why are, why are the good reviews like giving you, like, making your day?
50:04: Like, why did your reader event, where you met two people so exciting to you.
50:08: Like, these are all things that are incongruent with the picture that we as writers have of ourselves.
50:15: And it's just like, it's holding us back.
50:17: I'm not saying go around saying you're like the biggest human being ever.
50:20: I'm not saying to like have this.
50:23: I don't have this big like thing, like, be bigger than you are, but it's like, it's OK to say, I made this thing, and I want you to read it, because I believe in it enough to have spent the last year of my life thinking about it.
50:36: Some of these books I've been writing for 15 years, 15 years.
50:40: And like, I'm, the minute that I was like, you know what I am?
50:43: I'm a metrovert.
50:44: I'm not an extrovert or an introvert.
50:45: I only gain energy when a 10.
50:47: is on me.
50:48: That is the only thing that I care about, really.
50:51: It's not my favorite part of myself, but that's at least congruent.
50:55: That was like saying I was an extrovert didn't work.
50:58: Saying an introvert, I was saying I'm an introvert extrovert, but it's like, yeah, like, I'm gaining energy now, and the minute that I stopped talking and listening to someone else, my energy is going to drop like 100 things.
51:08: I don't like that about myself, but it is a true about myself.
51:11: And we are, we are better off if we want the success that we do.
51:15: We are better, we are better off saying, I want the success that I do, because otherwise, we will spend our entire lives sabotaging ourselves, saying, I don't, I don't deserve this thing that I want.
51:27: And it's like, then you're going to read all of my books and be like, I tried all this stuff, and I'm going to come back to you and say, no, you didn't.
51:34: And I will probably say, You, you take that back, because it is insulting to think you got this from reading my book.
51:42: Like, let me show you what actually would come from it, and all of that stuff is OK, but, like, we need to be congruent with ourselves.
51:50: We need to in order if we want to stop self-sabotaging ourselves, and we're all, the only thing we're better off than lying to ourselves that we want to make money and get our books right is like in self sabotaging ourselves without us knowing.
52:04: Well, this really went off a rail.
52:06: No, no, no, no, no, it's, it's it's a lot to think about incredibly true.
52:10: Well, and, and that self-sabotage can probably lead to like now I'm thinking about it, it's like that self sabotage justifies continuing to do the same thing that hasn't been working, the same strategies that haven't been working because this is it, it's even worse than this because I talked to people who've been doing this for a while, and they, and I'm, they're like, like, why don't I, why, like, why am I not succeeding?
52:36: And I'm like, because you're not doing the things you know work.
52:39: It's like, I'm like, I know your business.
52:41: These 3 things that you've done in the past year got traction, and what happened the minute that they got traction, you stopped doing them.
52:47: And so you already have all these things that are working in your business, but you, you'd want Something new, or like, oh, that wasn't congruent enough with my thing or like, I was, I got whatever it is, like, so many success people who have been doing this a long time and are not successful still at the level that they want to be, are like, they have two or three things.
53:10: I've written them all the time, like, wait, weren't you doing this cool series that was like making a bunch of money I guess, I stopped that.
53:16: Really?
53:16: Why?
53:17: And it's like it got, did you, did you stop liking it?
53:20: No, I like it still, it's just like I wanted to do other things.
53:24: But like, why did you blow up the thing that's working to do the next thing?
53:29: Did you know, and someone like eyes were open when I said this, I'll say it again.
53:33: Did you know you could just hire somebody to do, to have a series that that makes money but you don't like enough, you could just hire someone to do all the work on that series.
53:42: And like, you won't make as much money, but you' Make more than cratering it all, so it all dies, cause like that series has, that series could pay for you to do 1000 esoteric novels that like, you like way more.
53:55: And I'm not saying write that series with the intention to do it, but like, you already have assets that work.
54:02: You have them, and like you just need to keep putting effort into it and like that's 100, 500, 6 grand, whatever, these things over time.
54:13: Like, add up.
54:13: Like if you have 10 strategies that each give you only $10,000 a year in profit, that's $100,000.
54:20: Yeah.
54:21: Mhm.
54:21: Yeah.
54:23: Mhm.
54:23: God, Jeff, Jeff, every 6 months I break up with my Jeff, but it makes such good money.
54:29: I crawl back, like, can we just be friends?
54:32: And then I published another one and I'm like, damn it.
54:35: Why is everybody buying the Jaff and then on my Emma Allison pen name.
54:39: They will still read email me about my older series, and I'm like, I don't want to write the thing you are emailing me about.
54:48: Sure, the question, are you, are you writing ads or doing anything for that series right now?
54:53: These are old.
54:55: Well, I lied.
54:56: I am.
54:57: I just started re-editing the first book in one of the, no, no, not re-editing, like, like taking a thing that does not, that you do not putting any effort into and running ads to it.
55:09: No, I would never run ads to that series.
55:11: No, it's, I don't, the quality is, that's why I pulled the whole thing down about 2 years ago because the writing is just not where I am now, so I would never reading it and emailing you about it, and you probably are trying to find another book with success like that one theoretically.
55:30: So it's like, OK, well, I don't know.
55:33: I don't like everything that I ever put out either, but like, we are now spending time making a brand new series from scratch that will make $100,000 when we probably have books in our past that could just make us $20,000.
55:47: It doesn't have to make $100,000.
55:49: It just has to do some work.
55:50: It could be.
55:51: bundled with other books together.
55:53: It could be like, I don't know what it, what it will be, but like, you went from making money on a thing that people want you to write and they like the the the writing quality enough, so who cares what you think, to like doing nothing with it at all.
56:08: Like, like, it was, it was not like a slow gradual wind down.
56:12: You Nothing and people are emailing you and you're like, instead, I'm going to try and put all my hope into this new thing.
56:18: It was totally an ego thing because I started re-reading them.
56:21: I'm like, this writing sucks.
56:24: I'm not gonna let people read this.
56:25: I'm gonna re-edit it.
56:26: So that's what I'm doing now.
56:29: But this is the exact thing.
56:30: This is the exact thing that I'm talking about.
56:32: Like we are all run businesses.
56:34: And like, look, woman Christina Tosi might hate milk bar, but guess what?
56:40: She's gonna take every dollar that, and I don't know if she does, she probably loves it, but like, she's gonna take all that money and do something she likes now, and this is this is even another part of this because we are not expected to like things forever.
56:54: as authors, we are like, oh, well, I'm writing this series that's gonna do the next 10 years of my life, and guess what, you at 34 and 24 are very different people.
57:04: I hate, I hate every bit of myself from before I was 32.
57:08: And so like, a lot of things that I said I would do forever, even if they're successful, it's not because the books are bad, or the thing is bad, it's because like I'm 43 now, I'm 42 now, I'll be 43 when this launches and so it's like, I don't care about the things that I cared about then.
57:29: , even 2 or 3 years ago, like Monica and I had this the whole time, we would blow up everything that was working because we didn't like it enough.
57:38: It wasn't the thing.
57:40: And it's like, wow, if we had just like Done, systematized it, evergreened it, something we could have made money from the thing that we didn't like, and that would have been able to fuel whatever weird thing that we wanted to do.
57:56: And also, to go back to the thing I said before, frankly, Emma, who cares what you think about your series?
58:03: Like what Here, what matters is what the reader thinks of your series.
58:07: And like if they like your series, then like if they like your series from before, they can have bad taste.
58:14: It's OK.
58:14: Like they are allowed to have bad taste.
58:16: You're allowed to think that they have bad taste, but also, like, this is what I'm talking about, about how arrogant, like how So arrogant.
58:24: A bunch of people are emailing you saying how much they like the series, and you're saying it's not good enough.
58:29: You guys are all.
58:30: Every one of you is wrong.
58:31: And like, what an insult to your readers.
58:34: Yes, I'm like, what is wrong with you?
58:36: I have this much better book over here.
58:39: Can I interest you in this?
58:40: Like, no, I want the contemporary bear shifter, not your dark epic fantasy.
58:45: Let the let the golden goose lay the eggs.
58:48: Let the golden put it back on.
58:49: Put it back out there.
58:51: I'm re-editing them.
58:53: I'm re-editing them.
58:54: No, I'm not putting it back up.
58:56: No, I'm, I, I will re-edit them.
58:58: There no way in hell am I putting them back up without a re-edit.
59:01: Like that's my line in the sand.
59:03: This has just turned into an intervention for Emma here.
59:07: pile on you, but that's fine.
59:09: How long is it, I guess my question and Russell.
59:11: Well you can jump in here whenever you want, but my question would be if you're like, OK, I'm gonna sit down and re-edit them, how long is it gonna take?
59:19: How, what else could you be doing like, and how much is that going to add in terms of value and what else could you be doing instead of that in the meantime if you just put it back out there as is and you focused on that's what I wanted to ask Russell about sunk cost fallacy.
59:34: So I bet you don't even start.
59:37: Well, I don't.
59:37: No.
59:38: But do you even start a nonfiction book until you have enough questions in like the same bucket that you see a trend of what authors are?
59:47: Or do you just, I mean, I write whatever I want, but like, don't all of these books are like, they're from my, my blog or from a collaboration that I did of like a transcripts of like a course that I did, like the author ecosystem one.
1:00:04: It's just a I re-edited the author ecosystem book that I had with Monica and took all of her parts out and added my own stuff.
1:00:10: The direct sales strategy book is like all from old work that I did, like the, the Kickstarter book is based on all of my existing methodologies.
1:00:20: The capitalism book is all just blog posts that I did on the author stack.
1:00:24: The first two, the only one that I wrote flat from scratch was the very first one.
1:00:30: And that's because people kept asking me the same 50 questions.
1:00:33: And then people were like, this book is not enough, we need a course.
1:00:36: And it's like, I don't want the course, can you just do it for me?
1:00:39: And I just kind of like built it from there.
1:00:41: But there's a section in, I think it's the capitalism book called the it's definitely on the blog called The Bulls Eye Method of Growing an audience, which is often very instructive, which is you want people in the core to come to your core.
1:00:57: Gooey middle.
1:00:58: I hate to tell you all of all of this who's listening, but like doesn't matter what book you love the most, it will get the least sales of anything that you want.
1:01:05: Everything you love, there's an inverse relationship between how much something makes and how much you love it.
1:01:10: So like Emma's just very instructive on this, just seems to be literally like doing this thing, but the thing that you can do is say, OK, I wrote these three really core gooey books.
1:01:21: I wrote a book called Worst Thing in the Universe, which is narrated by God.
1:01:23: I said in the distant future about karma and capitalism and like, I love it.
1:01:27: It's my favorite book I've ever written.
1:01:29: No one ever buys it.
1:01:29: No one ever reads it that buys it.
1:01:31: But everyone who does, the four people that do read it love that book.
1:01:34: It's like there's this core gooey thing in the middle that I'm like, this is the thing that I want you to read.
1:01:39: And I know that like, OK, so my first series is a series because you need a signature series.
1:01:45: For anyone who's like, why do I need a signature series?
1:01:47: Literally every author who's been successful pretty much in the.
1:01:50: The entire history of authordom has had a long series that they make money on.
1:01:54: That's just like a thing you need.
1:01:56: I cite a billion examples from every genre.
1:01:59: So you have this long series and I was like, I like mythology.
1:02:02: I, I had these two graphic novels, Katrina Hates the Dead and Pixie Dust, which did very well.
1:02:07: And I was like, I'm going to base my first universe on that, that, that, that became the God's first chronicles, and it turns out things that are popular in comics at conventions are not popular on Amazon.
1:02:17: , OK.
1:02:18: Like Ali is not as popular on Amazon, so then I was like, OK, I need to do better.
1:02:23: I need to write a story with romance at the center.
1:02:27: So I was like, but I don't know how to write romance books at the like really well.
1:02:31: So I ended up writing books that had romance in them, and that was the entire conceit was just, I need to learn how to write romance, so I'm gonna write invasion to like do that, and I need to, I don't know how to write YA action well enough.
1:02:42: I know only how to write like really adult action.
1:02:44: So I can need to write this book, the marked ones, to to show me how to do these things so that I can write my second big series, which is called The Obsidian Spindle Saga, which we talked.
1:02:53: And then I have a book called Cthulhu Is Hard to Spell, which is, which drives into, which is an anthology series that drives into Ichaba Jones Monster Hunter.
1:03:02: Again, the more good like so you need to create these things.
1:03:07: Not everyone does.
1:03:08: Some people just have mass market tastes like Michael Bay just has mass market taste.
1:03:13: likes things that the market likes.
1:03:14: So like, maybe you're that one, most people are not.
1:03:17: But like over time, with each series, you can learn, OK, I did better at this.
1:03:22: Like the the Gods versus Chronicles doesn't sell as well because there's a woman protagonist, and because it's action adventure, fantasy, and thriller, more men tend to buy that genre, and there's not really a romance, which would have been fine if I was writing a thriller starring a Hard boiled detective or something.
1:03:42: But like being as my market is mainly composed of women, like, I need, and most women, the biggest genre among women in readership is romance, and to have the books that had literally zero romance in them, or almost no romance in them, I decided that the obsidian spindle saga, there would be one rule, Shell and Rose can do anything, but they have to end up together at the end.
1:04:07: They can be pulled apart, but they have to.
1:04:09: And back together and they, their love has to win out over everything else.
1:04:12: That is the only rule in the Obsidian spindle saga, and to like use as many fairy tales and stuff as possible.
1:04:17: But like, that is hopefully going to be a much bigger series because it's launching on retailers next month.
1:04:22: But it was a bigger series on, on Kickstarter than like the previous series, because like, it had, my audience was bigger, plus it had like fairy tales.
1:04:32: One of the books is called The Dragon Warrior.
1:04:34: There's no books called Dragon with a dragon name in.
1:04:37: In the series.
1:04:38: And so like it was just like, and I guess then my next series, the one that did the best one Kickstarter was called Dragon Strife, and the first book is called Dragon Scourge, and the second book's called Dragon Champion, because if you want to write a book in fantasy and you want it to have some staying power, you need to write either Dragon in the title with a dragon on it, or fairy tales in the title, Fairy tales in it.
1:05:01: Like one of those two things with potentially romance, hopefully being a Thing or like an epic fantasy, you can write sword and sorcery books like that's another thing, but like there's a finite number, there's a finite number of things that you can do to like get this organic growth, like the author ecosystem became the author ecosystem because Monica was obsessed with enagrams, and I was became obsessed with engrams.
1:05:26: We were both obsessed with Clifton strings and Becca Syme, and so like all of our friends were like in this like architect.
1:05:33: Type of space and like, but we weren't seeing the things that were actually influencing our buyer, our like authors to to buy, to to like have success.
1:05:44: Like we're like none of these, we looked at a bunch of them.
1:05:46: I'm like, it's not really discs, it's not really this like we created one because we were like, this is probably gonna be OK because we need to know why our authors succeed and that and doing this thing is a good way to categorize it.
1:05:59: And like, shockingly, because Majority of the most successful authors in the world are women and who either love indie authors and either love Andy Gram or Clifton Strangs or Disk, one of those three, like having these things gave it a better chance of having success.
1:06:18: It wasn't guaranteed, but like it was, it didn't matter if it was super successful or not because it was.
1:06:23: supposed to be an archetyping system.
1:06:25: It was just supposed to be a sales gimmick that worked as an archetyping system.
1:06:29: Like, it was just a way to sell all of our disparate courses that became this thing above all the other stuff that we did, because the audience carried it, not because we carried it, the audience carried it out.
1:06:42: And again, I would say like, I love author ecosystem.
1:06:45: I love Chula was hard to spell.
1:06:47: I had no special love of Lovecraft before I did Chula was Hard to Spell.
1:06:52: My audience said they wanted Lovecraft comics, and I said, OK, and then I found out he was a son of a bitch, but like.
1:07:00: That makes sense?
1:07:01: I don't know if that helps with the sunk cost fallacy.
1:07:03: Well, I, I was thinking too like Emma, like earlier we've been talking about like what can you do right now that will put this back into motion.
1:07:12: And if you are editing 2 pages or 2 chapters a day, why not start some sort of subscription?
1:07:21: That's exactly what I was thinking, yeah, where you give out early access to your and then you could do a Kickstarter on it and then when you re-release it, that's how you get it back out into the world.
1:07:32: I mean, that's Exactly what I was thinking.
1:07:35: You're still getting yourself like, you know, you're still giving it momentum because you do have these things that are sitting there that are, that are assets.
1:07:43: I mean these are assets and that's one way to leverage back because you were talking Russell about everything should be leveraged 5 times.
1:07:51: I like if you would have backlists sitting around doing nothing.
1:07:54: Because the main reason why I never started a Patreon is my books go through so many drafts that I'm like, I can't give them the first chapter like every day.
1:08:02: It'll be completely different.
1:08:04: But like with that backlit, it's done.
1:08:06: It's it's not going to be, yeah, so that's interesting.
1:08:09: But leveraging.
1:08:12: Yeah, I would also say that some people really want, do want that messy draft that is different the next time.
1:08:18: Like that's what I always say, like, if your favorite author gave the messy draft of their book out for $5 a month, would you pay for your favorite author of all time?
1:08:28: I'm paying her $10 a month to tell me about her HVAC problems.
1:08:33: Just because I love her and want her to keep writing, so I'd probably read the messy chapters.
1:08:38: So the problem is that we don't believe that we're anyone's favorite author, which is another thing.
1:08:44: It's like, it doesn't matter if you're your favorite author.
1:08:46: Like what matters is like, don't insult the people that think you're your favorite author.
1:08:50: Like it is possible that all of us can be the favorite author of A 500, 1000, even 10,000 people, like that would be a huge amount of, of things.
1:08:59: So don't think those messy drafts have, you can't send them, maybe you send them out like for Kickstarter, one of the things that I send is like the early draft, like the draft, draft one, like an Editors draft like something of the people and I charge $5 for a bare bone and then $10 for like the special edition ebook and like a special edition ebook has an audio commentary.
1:09:20: It has early drafts like it has an AI audiobook maybe, but like people are paying for the more in-depth stuff that like you have access that like they want deeper access to your world because Oh, I don't want to say it again, but I'm going to, it's not about you.
1:09:38: It's about how, how your reader can recontextualize their world and through, through you.
1:09:45: So like the big thing specifically with community that people always think about, it's like, oh, I don't want to be part of the community.
1:09:51: I don't want to start a community and like have it all be about me.
1:09:54: And I'm like, brilliant.
1:09:55: Well, like, good news.
1:09:57: All that stuff I said about being a narcissist earlier, the opposite is that you, it's actually It has nothing to do with you.
1:10:02: What it matters is the transformation that you are giving to the reader.
1:10:07: So like, the reader is getting context to, they feel seen, they feel like they have better context to live in the world.
1:10:14: At the best case scenario, you are giving two people the language to talk with each other in a way that makes them have a deeper connection through your work.
1:10:24: And like, so, it is about the Words that you put in here, but like the reason why I said like, who's you, is like, currently those readers are using your work, the Bear shifter books, to give context to their world.
1:10:38: And when you re-edit a book and you change the things that happen inside of it, you are changing the entire perspective that they are using to partially use their world, which is why something like re-edits sometimes.
1:10:52: Go off the rails with the readers and they get big backlash because it wasn't about you the first time.
1:10:57: It's also not about you this time.
1:10:59: It's like, no, you don't understand this moment way that it happened was transformative to me and now you are saying canonically this is not a thing.
1:11:09: This is not matter to you, but it matters so much to me.
1:11:12: Yes, Star Wars, Star Wars.
1:11:15: This is this is what I call the Last Jedi, the wait.
1:11:17: Is The Last Jedi, the Last Jedi problem.
1:11:19: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I, I love The Last Jedi.
1:11:22: It is, in my opinion, the best Star Wars movie.
1:11:25: I love it so much, but it is not a Star Wars movie.
1:11:28: It's a great, it is a great science fiction fantasy movie.
1:11:31: It is not a Star Wars movie.
1:11:33: It breaks the promise that the 7 movies before it and the movie after it have made.
1:11:38: So it's very divisive because you go in in in a way that And or or something is not divisive because it wasn't in continuity like they could have done like their own Star Wars story for 8, but because it was in the continuity, people went in expecting hope, friendship, like love conquering all like all of the things for the previous 7 and it didn't matter whether it was a great.
1:12:04: Movie or not, because it wasn't a Star Wars movie, right?
1:12:08: Well, and even, even just the, as I was thinking about like Star Wars legends, for those who don't know, right, there were the the original movies made by Lucas, and then there were novels and there were comics, and there were video.
1:12:19: I played video games like Knights of the Old Republic, right?
1:12:22: There are characters in there.
1:12:23: These things happened.
1:12:25: And then Disney came along, like, well, that stuff's like not canon anymore, and we're not really gonna explore that stuff at all.
1:12:32: We're gonna make new stuff, and as somebody who was a fan of all those things, that was, it was a big letdown.
1:12:38: I was like, OK, I'm interested to see what new stuff you do, but then, yeah, I have, I have opinions and feelings about how they did, did all that, but they invalidated.
1:12:47: They basically invalidated a part of your existence, right, exactly, exactly.
1:12:52: And and you, yeah, you have feelings about that.
1:12:55: So no, that absolutely, that absolutely makes sense.
1:12:58: We, again, it's it's not about you and as the author, you can look at something you've written previously and go, you know what, I need to rewrite that or I need to, there's, there's something not right about it and I have to go back and I have to.
1:13:09: And it's also so punishing to yourself too.
1:13:12: I feel like, like, you lose so much momentum when you, like, go back and have to correct.
1:13:18: Thing I mean a great exa yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
1:13:22: Well, a great example of this is like the Taylor Swift remasters.
1:13:25: Because she bound liking the new books to an identity of being a Taylor Swift fan.
1:13:33: She said, these, these ones are not mine.
1:13:35: These are actually not my version.
1:13:37: This is not my vision.
1:13:39: This is not even owned by me.
1:13:41: This version that I am making is my version.
1:13:44: So if you want to be deeply in love with me, I am making my own version of this that I own and control.
1:13:50: All of this thing.
1:13:52: I'm a huge fan of Kesha also like Kesha has had like these, these like back and forth things with like her, her her managers.
1:14:00: So like breaking through those, those, those rainbow and gag order, those, those things became like, I feel tied to like these, these songs more than the other ones were because they tied their like.
1:14:16: They said to be a true fan of mine, like, I'm going on this journey and you need to go, and if you, you can, you don't have to go on this journey with me, but instead of Star Wars that said, well, just lump it, they gave the context of like, well, like this is why I made this one, like, reputation is so much better as an album when you realize like all of the things that happened in the years before it and This like scream that she had to get out from being like put upon by Connie and all of these other things, which is like the crazy stuff that Monica and I would talk about all the time because, but like the, the, the, the remasters work, and now that she owns the Masters, people are finally being like, I don't like the new ones that much, but like, like, I it's like, and now I can like the thing.
1:15:07: Well, and she just has doubled too, because, you know, now you can go back and listen to the originals and be happy and they because she's getting the money for right.
1:15:17: And it feels like you're back into the, the feeling that this was the experience that I get to have it back.
1:15:25: So I'm not saying don't make the, don't do the re-edits.
1:15:28: Like if this is a thing you want to do, then do it.
1:15:31: Like they're your things, you can like make whatever you want.
1:15:34: However, it's not quite as simple as like, I'm gonna do these.
1:15:39: Not only are you taking away, like it might actually make it worse.
1:15:44: It might make sales of that series worse, and now suddenly you're in, you've re done, you've rewritten these books.
1:15:50: You're like, great, I'm at least gonna make some money on it and they don't sell anymore because they're like, if she can do this to me, I don't even care, who's to stop her from doing it in 2 years?
1:15:59: Like maybe you break the magic.
1:16:02: And are you making like major changes too, or is it more of like, you know, grammar and, you know, things maybe you didn't have editing?
1:16:10: I flipped the POV and I'm editing the characterization of the male protagonist because he was an asshole in the original.
1:16:20: And that was when I was a baby writer and I was trying to make him alpha and shit.
1:16:22: No, he's a fucking asshole.
1:16:24: I'm like, I can't have that.
1:16:25: Like, I can't have my name attached to that.
1:16:27: So I'm putting some more nuance in his character, which is probably not what my readers want.
1:16:33: Nuance, not my old like.
1:16:35: Why doesn't this become a book?
1:16:38: You flipped the perspective.
1:16:39: Why aren't you just gonna release like a Stephanie Meyers, like, she did a flip perspective book where like you just the tents from third person to person, yeah, yeah, the, yeah, I meant the tense, yeah.
1:16:53: Sure.
1:16:53: I mean, we'll see.
1:16:55: These are the things that go like, you could spend, and not that I'm not piling on you, but like when you think about the thing that is the next part of your journey, like the question is, like, why?
1:17:09: And this makes sense because like you are perpetuating this way that like men are generally perceived and like that is that affects you negatively and you don't want to be associated with it.
1:17:20: It's like this is actually I under like I understand a lot of people don't, don't have this like reason.
1:17:27: They just are, they're still making the same kind of books.
1:17:29: They just like want to rewrite this other book.
1:17:33: And so it's like, OK, what, like, where should my energy be focused on a middle, like, and like they'll go back and do books that aren't even that successful because like, if you think about it in in forward spec.
1:17:52: That was a dumb sentence, but like, if you think about, like, like, you will almost always be able to make a series that's like more to market than the one you wrote by accident to market.
1:18:05: So like if your if your goal is to make a book series that like sells more copies, well, like you already have a floor by which this, so like you could say, OK, I have this series.
1:18:17: to recovery.
1:18:18: I'm gonna reblurb it.
1:18:19: I'm gonna change the inside.
1:18:20: I'm gonna like, like those are pretty easy things like change the formatting, you change the blurb, you change the cover, and then you run some ads to it and you're like, oh, it doesn't work.
1:18:30: Still doesn't work.
1:18:31: Well, what can you do then?
1:18:32: Well, you can write another book one, which is what I did on the Gods verse Chronicles, book, book 5 now used to be book one, and I was like, this is too crazy.
1:18:39: I need to write 4 more books.
1:18:40: I don't recommend doing that.
1:18:42: But like, you could do that and just change what the front end is.
1:18:47: But like, in what way do you think it's worthwhile to change the back end?
1:18:52: Because the front end is supposed to be, is where all of the new people come in.
1:18:56: And so like, if you're not getting people who want to read your book when you send money to it, just making a New book 5 gonna, how is that going to change the equation?
1:19:06: Like, now with the Gods verse chronicles, I said, I said the book 5 is 3 stories.
1:19:12: The first one takes place in the apocalypse.
1:19:15: Second one takes place 10,000 years later, and the third takes place right after that one.
1:19:19: And like, that's just too crazy.
1:19:21: Like no one's gonna come like.
1:19:23: It was like no one is gonna go to book 6, which was book 2 at the time, because book one, people that come in for the apocalypse story are gonna be like, wait, I don't want this space fantasy story, and the ones that come for the space fantasy mythology story aren't gonna be there for the myth, like it's just like, it broke, like didn't work.
1:19:40: So I was like, I could either not make this series.
1:19:43: Or I had this idea for Black Market heroin, which was the book that magic became, and I was like, oh, this is a really good intro because what you want in fantasy to get into like a specific genre, but like, you need an early entry point, like the Dresden Files.
1:19:59: The Dresden Files, the first book, is a pretty boring tame urban fantasy book.
1:20:03: I like it, but like by Book 6 or 7, like he's, he's like driving like dinosaurs and shooting up downtown, like, but like that's not book one.
1:20:13: That's like, so like I can totally see if you're like, look, this series works, there's a great read through.
1:20:19: It's just like, people don't want to take the chance on it cause it's too strange.
1:20:23: Well, you could be like, OK, well, for me, I was like, in order for this moment to work in If I'm gonna start in black market heroin, I'm gonna end at Katrina Hates the Dead, what do I have to do?
1:20:33: And so I ended up having to write 4 books, 4 whole books to a series that was not very popular, that like, to make the series work.
1:20:43: And now it works pretty well, but like, that is, that is like the kind of thing that that you would have to consider when you could have just written the Obsidian spindle saga, then like, OK, well, like, OK, well, I'm just gonna put dragons.
1:20:57: I'm gonna make a dragon book and then some people will find that the, that series, and who cares what this one is, like, the next one, you can only improve, like that one can never be, that series can never be a mafia romance.
1:21:10: Like, it, it can never be a cozy mystery series cause there's 7 books in that series already.
1:21:15: So if I want to make a series that's more popular, it is bound by the fact that it is already a very weird.
1:21:21: book.
1:21:21: It's very weird book series, and like, it only, it's Portal fantasy, which is a very low, like upper upper echelon.
1:21:30: So like, should I do that or should I try and figure out how to stabilize the series and do the work that I can keep thinking about it for years and then make the next thing better and then have people travel from the better from the more popular series into the older series, right?
1:21:47: Right, because you, if you, it's, it, it reminds me of the the Clay Potts theory.
1:21:52: I've mentioned this on the podcast before, so I'll just give.
1:21:55: A quick summary for context, which is that you have two college classes, college pottery classes, they instruct one class on how to make the perfect pot in this style, and they instruct one class that their goal is to make as many pots as possible throughout the semester.
1:22:13: And so, one group is specifically aiming at perfection, and the other group is aiming at production, like make as many as possible.
1:22:20: And there was only one pot made between both classes throughout the entire semester that was perfect by those standards, and it came from the class that was focused on making as many as possible.
1:22:33: And in fact, those students actually got better at pottery just by making as many as they possibly could, as opposed to trying to make the one.
1:22:41: And so, to kind of relate that to this is like, if you put all of your energy into making this one thing perfect, you could have made 10 of the things in the meantime.
1:22:50: And one of them you don't know is I can work on 3 projects at the same time, so there's a secret variable.
1:22:56: No, I, hey, no, I, I, I get it.
1:22:58: I get it, but that there's, I feel like maybe that's, that's akin to some of what, what you're saying here, Russell.
1:23:06: Yeah and you also don't know which clay pot's gonna be perfect like.
1:23:11: Like the end of that story was like they only were judged on one pot.
1:23:16: Like only judged on one pot, and one had to make the perfect pot and the other could make as many pots as they wanted.
1:23:21: So yeah, you don't know which pot's gonna be perfect, but like also don't.
1:23:27: Like, but one of them probably will be.
1:23:30: The thing with a career is like, I don't know, maybe that Bear shifter series in 10 years sells 0 copies, but like your new series sells a billion copies because like the market changes in 10 years.
1:23:41: Like I don't know what like that that that happens.
1:23:43: Either, but like, we, we spend so much time trying to force our opinion on the universe, when like the universe is going to tell you what is true, until you realize that like, you just should like listen.
1:23:59: I like, it will make your life progressively harder and harder and harder and harder and harder until you're just like, all right, fine, I shouldn't have written 10 books about chipmunks in Uruguay.
1:24:11: I get it.
1:24:14: Yeah.
1:24:15: Yeah, right, right, that is so true.
1:24:20: And I think, I think that if you are, man, like the idea being that, OK, if, if you write, write the perfect book and then people buy that book from you, well, what else have you written?
1:24:31: If you took all of your time and energy into making the perfect book, whereas if you had written other stuff along the way and let and, and, you know, allowed yourself to, OK, I'm gonna write this over here and then I'm.
1:24:42: I'm gonna, I'm still trying to apply the, the, the, the kind of the generic concept of writing to market, obviously not going off the rails.
1:24:51: But if you allow yourself like, OK, I'm gonna write this thing and when it's done, it's done and I'm gonna move on to the next thing and then something you write blows up and then all those people are gonna consume everything that you've written and then what are they gonna have to read next.
1:25:06: Is the other stuff that you wrote, right, for those people who, who now become your fans, they're like, OK, well, now I'm gonna, I am gonna read your weird thing about chipmunks in Uruguay because I like what you're writing.
1:25:17: I like this thing you wrote, so that might be interesting.
1:25:19: It sounds kind of.
1:25:21: So there's another thing here which is, OK, so Portal Fantasy is not a very popular book series, but you know what it's really popular as a TTRPG universe.
1:25:31: And so a lot of times we're saying I'm going to keep writing this series and I, I, it becomes successful, even if it can't possibly, there's no rational reason why that is.
1:25:43: But instead if we're like, OK, what if I do want this book to be successful?
1:25:47: Well, horror is a great example.
1:25:49: Horror is recently become more popular with publishers, although I don't think necessarily there will be markedly more readers to horror than there's been in the last 50 years.
1:26:02: But you know horrors really Really, really, really, really popular independent movies.
1:26:08: So like, well, it is like the most popular like indie movie genre.
1:26:13: It is the easiest to get off the ground, and the cheapest to make and they make the most return.
1:26:16: So like, if you want your horror series, or your horror book to do well, then like, maybe you should also try and combine it, spend some time making, trying to make it into a movie.
1:26:27: Maybe you should make a web series.
1:26:29: You know what it's also really popular?
1:26:31: Audio dramas.
1:26:32: You can make an Audio drama for a fraction of what you can.
1:26:36: So it's like, again, this comes into the like, well, like, romance is really popular as a book genre, but it's like not super popular as a board game.
1:26:47: Like, so it's like, like, maybe I can force myself to be like, to, to like make a romance board game, but like, if I was a board game designer, trying to make a romance thing, I'd probably be like, maybe I should make like a what Those dating sims, maybe I should make a book.
1:27:04: Maybe I should, maybe I should go to some of these other venues where lots of people already like my thing, and all it takes is me to say, you really like this lit this TTRPG?
1:27:17: Well, here's this book series, and then you're making a bunch of money on this, on the RPG and also making some money, probably not as much money even as the RPG, but like you can start looking beyond.
1:27:31: Into other genres that like, like mystery things would be a really good thing to send as a as a letter, like a like these letter things that are really popular, and I know that because that's a big part of these letter ones, they send like a mystery in a box, like all of these, so it's like, well, if you were a mystery, and let's say it's like off market, well, maybe you could Make some more money bringing in people to the mystery and you find a different segment of the market, and probably it's likely that they will be readers because they're reading letters and they probably also will, and they like being guided on some level to what the experience is.
1:28:12: So maybe if you write a really cool mystery, they will also like your thing.
1:28:16: And it's all of these, so it's like, I know we went.
1:28:19: Not scattershot all over the world today, but like, it's so antithetical to how authors think now currently, which is the way that I can make my book successful is to rewrite it.
1:28:32: And it's like, maybe you can write another series.
1:28:34: Like, you might need just another strategy.
1:28:36: Like you might like, you might need to write and make a dating sim.
1:28:40: Like, I don't know, but we're currently doing this thing.
1:28:44: Because Amazon is only good at one thing, or they are only good at showing you the next book.
1:28:50: That's it.
1:28:51: Like, this is where the lie that like readers don't read across genre, which is just like, have you ever met a reader or a writer who does not read beyond one small genre, or at least like likes different kinds of movies, like some, like, there may be some, but like that just doesn't, I've been doing this job for 15 years, and since I Started I was like, well, that doesn't sound right.
1:29:14: But what is true is when you buy a mystery novel from Amazon, it is very good at showing you what the next mystery novel you should buy is.
1:29:22: And that's all Amazon is good at.
1:29:24: If anything beyond that, like, the only way that we know how to make a thing is to to make things sell more is drop price of thing, because that's all that retailers have taught us to do for 20 years is like, OK, I can make another version.
1:29:40: Book, I can make another volume of book.
1:29:44: I can increase price, I can decrease price.
1:29:48: Book has to look the same as every other book that exists.
1:29:51: And like, yeah, and that, that's just like, it's, it's not true.
1:29:55: Like in no world or any of the things that I've heard true outside of the shared delusion that authors use to like say, like what the truth is.
1:30:06: But like, if you even go beyond Like comics or board or like RPG games or any other thing that is bad magazines.
1:30:15: That is not true with any, like, nobody reads a magazine because like there's ads in there.
1:30:20: It's like no one reads Vogue and it's like, the only thing this person's gonna do from this is read Vogue, because like there's Hermes bags in there and there's like, there's all sorts of other things.
1:30:29: There's like cars and it's like, well, if this, this industry would not exist for 100+ years.
1:30:36: If all that someone did after reading a thing was read the exact same version of that thing, all they would be doing is promoting other books, other magazines, right, right.
1:30:48: Yeah, I was thinking of some, I'm kind of in the middle of doing some rewrites that I do think are necessary for some reasons, but then I've been looking at like Royal Road.
1:30:56: I'm, I write military science fiction, so it's not lit RPG and I've been wondering like, do I go to the Royal.
1:31:03: Road route because it's not exactly like, you know, it doesn't, it's not the exact fit, but and and maybe you'll have a totally different opinion, but, but something you said, you know, just about like, do the things that other people aren't doing or put yourself in the position where you're going to not be like everything else, like, well, a military science fiction series on a lit RPG, you know, web novel site would probably stand out a little bit if you, if you did it the right way.
1:31:28: And I think that what you should do if you were to do that would.
1:31:31: To get like 4 other military sci-fi writers to all do the same thing together, so you have all of you cross promoting like a new series like each of you like because the problem is discoverability.
1:31:44: Like it's like, OK, well you need Royal Road to deliver that book or to be successful, you need Royal Road to deliver.
1:31:50: So how would you deliver that book?
1:31:52: Well, by saying, look, there's this little pot of people and they all, I should recommend them all together.
1:31:58: So it's just like also bots.
1:32:00: Yeah, no, that's a great, that's a oh boy, and I have book funnel to recruit those authors from, so that's, that's, that's the way, yeah, OK, well, see, I wouldn't have even thought about that.
1:32:09: I'm glad I said something.
1:32:11: Yeah, absolutely.
1:32:12: Emma, you can do, Emma's version now.
1:32:15: You can just do the same but Bear shifter books like 35, whatever 30 year old version I don't know I'll tell you one thing though, if the re-releas make money, my ass will bear shift again like.
1:32:28: I will follow the money.
1:32:29: I'm not that stubborn, but.
1:32:33: Well, I think it's gonna be a little bit better than you think if you can get it done and get it back out there, and I think if you take advantage of some of those strategies like, you know, doing early release or You know, pulling back the curtain and seeing what you're working on is always a very cool thing for readers.
1:32:50: Like they think it's, you know, all wonderful and it's really just us in our pajamas, like trying to trying to edit that.
1:33:00: And it's like a certain percentage of them will be.
1:33:02: It's like if only 1% of the people that read their series that series are interested in all of those things, then Statistically, that's like a significant percentage, but they won't all come.
1:33:12: The reason why you need to do the Patreon or whatever now is because it's like they won't all come tomorrow.
1:33:18: They'll come like you should be doing like 4 or 5 things over the next year and like 100 might come here, 20 might come here, and then over time, you look back and you're like, 0 $30,000 making whatever on this and I'm like, I don't even know how.
1:33:34: I did that and it's like do you recommend having just one marketing focus a year because like if I'm doing Kickstarters and I'm doing Patreons, but you're saying do all the things or am I misinterpreting.
1:33:46: So I think you can start a Patreon is an exclusion to this thing because it undergirds everything.
1:33:55: You have to just not think about like the like.
1:33:58: It has to be 0% of your focus.
1:34:00: You just have to, so like you can do this where you either like schedule it or you have someone else schedule it, like, it can't be your focus until it becomes your focus, but like, and you don't have to necessarily do it, but like you will be a year behind.
1:34:17: You are pretty much, whenever you start a subscription, 2 years from success in that subscription.
1:34:21: So like, if you want Like, I would not say aside from like reading the substack book or whatever, like you don't necessarily need to like make it look good, but say I'm going to, this is a $1 like these are like really low stakes like that I'm doing, like I'm not giving you anything new, but I'm giving back.
1:34:39: I'm not gonna make anything new, but I'm gonna be unlocking my back catalog for you.
1:34:44: Well, I'm gonna be like unlocking like tricks.
1:34:47: I'm gonna like audio commentary on a chapter.
1:34:50: Like, I'll like show you behind the scenes of like how I made this decision or how I'm making this change in the updated book.
1:34:57: All of these are things that like you already, aside from the actual talking, would have to do anyway.
1:35:02: And you probably would have to do the talking because you would want to be up in a some community of your, your humans, whether it's a like so it's, it's like shifting.
1:35:13: When people say I don't want to be as present, I say, but I want Be able to answer questions and be there for fans.
1:35:19: I say, pick one hour a week that you are alive and say, whenever someone asks a question, be like, Great, I'll answer on my live call at this exact time.
1:35:27: That's the only time I'm going to be available for people like, like those kind of, so like you can do, be like, hey, I'm going to go behind the scenes, but like you have to like, and then you would start with the bear shifter and then probably like add in some other things that they can love from your other series, so it.
1:35:43: It's not necessarily like just a bear shifter book, because I know that's not where you want your focus to be, so you want to be like, this is, you get all the bear shifter stuff, but also my next book is whatever that thing is.
1:35:56: So, but I would say the way that the system works best is if you, if you do Kickstarter first, and you figure out how to systemize Kickstarter, and it is because you need a testing ground.
1:36:10: To see what works.
1:36:11: Like, cause all this stuff that I said, like 1% of it will work, but I don't know which 1% of it will work.
1:36:17: So like you just got to be like, OK, I'm gonna test all of these rewards.
1:36:21: I'm gonna test all the covers.
1:36:22: I'm gonna test the blurbs and the copy.
1:36:24: I'm gonna send a but and then you test copy by sending emails of your campaign, like copy and such to your readers and seeing which one's engaged the most, whether it like has a good return or bad return.
1:36:37: And then like, you do the first one and you're like, great, I created all of my marketing assets.
1:36:42: I got the book paid for, I got the cover redesign paid for, I got a little bit of my time paid for, and your job is to just like figure out how to test what they want, so that they will buy directly from you.
1:36:56: Right.
1:36:56: Well, I think we're gonna wrap things up here for today for this episode of the podcast.
1:37:02: Russell, I wanna thank you for joining us today.
1:37:05: Anything you want to shout out, anywhere people can find out more about you or more from you, just, you can let us know here.
1:37:12: Sure, I mean, the author stack is where I, I write all the things, the authorstack.com, like most of them.
1:37:18: They are free to or they at least were free at some point.
1:37:22: and then I have a podcast with Li Savino called the Six Fire Author experiment, all of this esoteric, very weird stuff.
1:37:29: If you somehow have not had enough of it, and like we go into it in a lot of depths and a lot of chaos there as well.
1:37:36: So those are probably the two best places and then my fiction.
1:37:41: is at Russell Nolte.com.
1:37:43: As if you like thinly veiled critiques on capitalism, mythology, and fairy tales, maybe you'll like it.
1:37:50: Excellent.
1:37:50: And we will be sure to include links in the description here on YouTube and elsewhere.
1:37:56: I wanna thank, as always, Emma Allison and Kelly Tanzy for joining me as co-hosts for this episode.
1:38:03: Thank you to everybody for watching and listening.
1:38:06: If you're watching here on YouTube, please like the video and subscribe to the channel, and while you're here, leave us a comments about your number one takeaway from this episode of the podcast.
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1:38:23: It really does mean a lot, from all of us here at BookFunnel, thank you for watching and listening, and we'll see you all in the next one.
1:38:29: Thank you for watching.
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