The BookFunnel Podcast

Jack Shilkaitis (00:40)
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. Whether you're just starting out or deep into your author journey, we're here to help you build your readership, boost your book sales and connect with your audience. Each episode we aim to bring you insights from authors, experts and industry insiders who have been there, done that.

And then some. My name is Jack. I'm our Lead Author Support Specialist here at Book Funnel. I am joined today, as always, by my co-hosts Emma Allison and Kelly Tansey and our guest for this episode of the Book Funnel podcast. I'll admit, I have lost track of which episode number this is, but we are joined today by the Managing Director of Author Nation, Joe Solari. Joe, welcome to the podcast. Welcome.

Joe Solari (01:25)
Thanks for having me on. Thanks a lot. It's been awesome.

⁓

Jack Shilkaitis (01:29)
For those in the audience who might not be familiar with you, might not be familiar with Author Nation, just fill us in a little bit about who you are, what you do, that sort of thing.

Joe Solari (01:37)
Sure, so I've been around the book industry for over 10 years. I got into this because my wife is an author, although I pulled her into this author nation thing. I've helped authors with their business practices through that time, a lot of pretty notorious authors, six and seven figure. In 2023, we took over an author conference and have been

rebranding it and building out this whole idea around an author and reader event that we can build a community around. so like that's kind of our jam right now is having fun while we make the world better for authors.

Jack Shilkaitis (02:11)
Yeah.

Right, and we're gonna get into some of that here in just a little bit. Before we do, before we get to our first segment, I do want to check in with Kaylee and Emma, because I know it's been a little, it's been a minute. I think we recorded an episode a couple weeks back, and that was like the first time we had reunited after the summer. Everybody, we had been on vacations and that sort of thing, so it was kind of, it was kind of all over the place for a little bit. But what have we been up to on the author side of things these days?

Kelli Tanzi (02:40)
⁓ Well, I am just marketing the book that I just released in at the end of August. And I've been going back to my previous series that needs to be finished up. I have two books that I'm working on for that. yeah, back to writing. I'm just not in the cave anymore. I was in a writing cave at the end of that whole, you know, I had a deadline and I was like, my bad down. ⁓ And now I'm like, okay.

Jack Shilkaitis (02:59)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Kelli Tanzi (03:05)
But I need to keep that practice up at least. And so that's been a challenge. yeah, so yeah, that's for Matt.

Jack Shilkaitis (03:10)
Right.

Cool. Emma, what about you? Because I'm going last.

Emma Alisyn (03:17)
⁓ The

Kelli Tanzi (03:17)
you

Emma Alisyn (03:18)
arc,

the arc of Prince of Night Storm is out in the ether. I've been on Instagram promoting that. The ebook will be live. I'm keeping it wide and direct because I want to be able to just get it into as many hands as possible. I'm discovering that if you actually social media market, the readers will come. I'm pleasantly shocked. But yeah, I'm just waiting on...

Jack Shilkaitis (03:30)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Emma Alisyn (03:40)
I'm doing the interior art for the paperback and then I will, I'm gonna monetize the paperback. But the ebook, like, whatever. Yeah, but that's all.

Jack Shilkaitis (03:45)
Sure, right.

Cool, cool. Yeah, I myself, been doing a little bit more, how do I say, kinda in the planning stages. I'm really changing my author business model, so I'm trying to get my head around everything that I'm gonna be doing with that. And then in the middle of all that, I got sick.

I was like sick all of last week. And so that really, really has slowed me down. I'm kind of trying to reload state on that. And in addition to that, I've got a toddler that keeps waking me up in the middle of the night. So I've got like, I'm getting hit from both sides. anyway, so yeah, honestly, not much exciting to say. Hopefully we'll have some in the, in the near future, but that's it. I'm going to leave it at that. It's kind of, it's kind of embarrassing, but no, when you get sick, Hey, it happens. You got to give yourself a cut yourself some slack.

Joe Solari (04:27)
Mm.

Jack Shilkaitis (04:28)
So, all right, that brings us though to our first segment of the podcast, our self-publishing tips from the trenches. In this segment, we all share with you some tips related to self-publishing, writing, maybe even some related directly to book funnel. Of course, the hosts and guests will come with our own tips. We don't share them ahead of time, so nobody knows what everybody's tip is going to be. It makes for a fun conversation.

And then occasionally we sometimes come with the same tip. I think that's happened like once or twice before, hasn't it? We, one of us, usually it's one of us on the book funnel team, we come with the same tip and we're like, wait, shoot, you took mine. It's happened before. So I'm gonna go first today just to kind of break the ice. And the tip I have for you is that if you are addicted to your phone, and you know you're addicted to your phone,

Joe Solari (04:58)
Yeah.

Jack Shilkaitis (05:13)
which is, mean, it's a good bet these days that most of us are. Get yourself one of these. This is not sponsored. This is the brand of this is called Brick. You've probably seen it on Facebook, social media. There's other variations of this. Different companies do the same sort of thing. Basically, it allows you to actually lock yourself out of specific apps on your phone and have a use this physically to scan it to lock and unlock your phone, which means if you've got to get some writing done, you can

tap this, lock yourself out of all the distracting apps, go to Starbucks or go wherever and go write somewhere and you literally can't use those apps on your phone. Like it literally blocks you from being able to do it. There are some ways to get around it, but if you do hardcore mode, there is a hardcore mode and if you do that one, there is no getting out of it and that's what I recommend you do. So it's helped me.

Kelli Tanzi (05:53)
You

Emma Alisyn (05:54)
Ha!

Joe Solari (05:54)
Ha ha

ha ha ha ha!

Jack Shilkaitis (06:03)
in a number of ways and I'm working on ⁓ my, I guess you could say this is maybe our first, you know, what would we call, screen addict anonymous. ⁓ My name is Jack and I am a screen addict. ⁓ yeah, exactly. So that's my tip. It really, and it's not just for like getting writing done and things like that. Obviously that's one of the things that I was looking at before.

Joe Solari (06:12)
Hahaha ⁓

Hi Jack.

Jack Shilkaitis (06:27)
There's also just, you know, as a parent myself and how much time, you know, how much quality time spending with your family are you wasting on your screen and all that adds up. Like if you're on your screen throughout all these parts of your day, that's parts of your life that are getting eaten up by it. And so whether that's writing or time with your family, think they all interact with each other. But yeah, that's that's my tip for today.

Kelly, you're next.

Kelli Tanzi (06:51)
Okay,

well, I if we're doing apps I actually my first at my actual like call out. This is a call out. I say this other times. I've said it a couple of times Get your taxes done What are you doing with your expenses go and get them in put them into the thing? Make sure that you're you have your accounting done because tax season is just around the corner. It's gonna come quick

Jack Shilkaitis (06:55)
Hahaha!

Kelli Tanzi (07:17)
I'm not great at this.

Jack Shilkaitis (07:17)
For those who filed extensions,

for those who filed extensions, think October is the deadline, too, for many people as well. So it is timely. Yeah. So there might be some people in that position.

Kelli Tanzi (07:22)
okay. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, but definitely if you, you know, get

Joe Solari (07:23)
Yeah, for last year.

Kelli Tanzi (07:30)
all of your expenses in so that when it's time for you to do all your taxes, it's all done. The other, okay, I have one that is a productivity app. It's called Finch. It's like a little gamification of self-care. So it actually has like a cute little

Little bird they call it a burb the little burb grows and does all these things as you take care of yourself and what's fun is that I got my daughter on it and well, she actually got me on it and I can send her gifts and she can go on adventures with me and it's kind of fun, but it actually is productivity so it's like you get points for vacuuming your house or For me sitting down and doing writing

Jack Shilkaitis (08:13)
Mm-hmm.

Kelli Tanzi (08:14)
Getting your numbers in or getting your scenes the scenes your goals done for the day. It's super cute It's not for everybody, but if you have kids and you want to and you know, it's like hey I'll you know send you a gift for unloading the dishwasher. Thank you, you know that kind of stuff So it's just a fun app That was actually mine was about taxes. But since we were bringing up

Jack Shilkaitis (08:29)
Mm-hmm.

Kelli Tanzi (08:35)
⁓ fun outside things that can help with productivity. was actually, once you get it set up, it just loads up your day and then it's like you get points for everything. Yeah, and it's super cute.

Jack Shilkaitis (08:35)
Yeah.

Yeah.

That's cool. That's cool. Yeah,

I think I've seen some that are like a different theme too. So it's like the same idea, but it's like a pet dragon or it's like something else. So I imagine there's other variations out there if there's a certain aesthetic that if that's what does it for you, you know.

Kelli Tanzi (08:56)
Yeah.

Yeah, it's, it's,

yeah, I can imagine that some people wouldn't be like, that's a bird. Okay. I think it's adorable and, it's, it's kind of, you know, it's things that you're supposed to be doing. Like, you know,

Jack Shilkaitis (09:09)
Yeah.

Kelli Tanzi (09:15)
taking a deep breath, listening, like doing breathing exercises. It's a lot of self care, taking your medication, your laundry. So everything that you should be doing, it's kind of helping you to get through that. And I'm adding like a whole section that's all about writing. ⁓ you know, having time and space rereading my work gets, you know, all of those things are things that I'm supposed to be doing and I'm just not getting them done. So.

Jack Shilkaitis (09:23)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right. No, that's good. That's good. Emma!

Kelli Tanzi (09:44)
It's helpful.

Emma Alisyn (09:47)
What's up? That's my name.

Jack Shilkaitis (09:48)
Hahaha!

Joe Solari (09:49)
Hahaha

Kelli Tanzi (09:50)
You

Jack Shilkaitis (09:51)
What do you have? What's your tip for today?

Emma Alisyn (09:53)
Um, well, y'all may not know, but I love to try out new stuff that's gonna make me money. A long time author acquaintance developed a software as a competitor. Well, I don't know if it's a competitor, but to me it's a competitor to Scribe Shadow and it's called bookshift.io. And I've spent the last 10 days throwing all my ish into French, German, and Italian. I'm not even done because I've got about 49 viable books right now. So it's...

But I mean, I'm making money and it's trickle money, like two to seven bucks a day per book. But with 49 books in three languages, that is just gonna add up over time. So I'm happy and it's very affordable. I haven't had any complaints or reviews about the translation at all. So I don't know y'all, you might wanna, if you have no bandwidth, like I haven't released a lot in the last two years, like Prince of Night and Shadow is the first release in a while.

Jack Shilkaitis (10:33)
Mm-hmm.

Emma Alisyn (10:47)
So like maximize what you already have. People keep saying that. I'm like, okay, translations. Since translations are becoming more accessible, you know.

Jack Shilkaitis (10:50)
Yeah.

Right,

right, right. Because at one point in time, would have been like one of the most, excuse me, one of the most daunting things you could suggest to an author. Right. And now obviously there's some tools that going to make that easier. It's cool to see that there's more competition because I think that does help make it even more accessible. That's neat. I'm going to check that out. Bookshift.io. Bookshift.io, is that right?

Emma Alisyn (11:03)
Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Solari (11:04)
and expensive.

Emma Alisyn (11:12)
Yeah.

Kelli Tanzi (11:17)
What was the name of that?

Emma Alisyn (11:20)
Bookshift.io and

like they're in their introductory phase. So like the first tier is 20 bucks. The second tier is 40 bucks. I started with the second tier at 40 bucks. I got a good book and a half out of it. I've now upgraded to like the enterprise level. I'm just flinging money at them left and right. Like, but I mean, they've been around. I've been knowing them for a while now, nine, 10 years. So like, I trust their integrity with the software and their intent to not try to anybody off.

Jack Shilkaitis (11:34)
Yep. Yep. ⁓

Sure.

Right. Cool. Cool. Alright, Joe, it's your turn. What do you got for us today, sir?

Joe Solari (11:52)
What do I

got for you? So something I've been playing around with, with the show is a different way of doing some email marketing. and so, you know, typically you, you create a sequence of emails. Let's say it's five emails and you come and you sign up and then, and, I'll w where I'm to go with this. I'll explain how an author could use this. So in our case, somebody comes in to learn something about the show.

Jack Shilkaitis (12:05)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Joe Solari (12:15)
I don't have it where you're automatically gonna get that next email.

Instead, there's the first email, next day you get the second email. After that, there's a link you have to click to get the next email.

So this is a two-edged sword we've just created. In one respect, if somebody's really interested in what you're doing, they can binge your email sequence. They could click it, get the next email. Click it, get the next email. Click it, next, right? So they could go through what was essentially a five-day sequence in an hour.

Jack Shilkaitis (12:30)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Kelli Tanzi (12:47)
so

Jack Shilkaitis (12:47)
Right.

Kelli Tanzi (12:47)
it's

automatic. So they're automatically getting the next email right away. ⁓ very cool.

Joe Solari (12:50)
Yeah, so you can do this in pretty much

any email service provider, ConvertKit, MailChimp, MailerLite. I use Cartra. Basically what you're saying, instead of connecting them and go send email to on the next day, you don't. You have a link that says, if they click this link, like a trigger link, send the next email.

Jack Shilkaitis (12:58)
Mailer light.

Right.

Joe Solari (13:16)
The other side of the sword, the non-binging side is you will find a large percentage of your audience never clicks through. They die off, right? In my world, in my view, that's not a bad thing. I would rather know the 5 % of the people that are really intensely into what we're doing and market to them.

Jack Shilkaitis (13:25)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Solari (13:38)
rather than trying to convert a bunch of people that just like, free book. thought I was, you know. So for example, with authors, you could actually amplify this in a way that like my stuff's kind of a marketing thing, but like, what if it was episodic content and emails, right? So not trying to take business away from book funnel as far as delivering a reader magnet, but if you're, you know, it.

Jack Shilkaitis (13:55)
Yeah.

Hahaha! ⁓

Joe Solari (14:03)
Knowing how people are, if you could, maybe before you gave them the full book funnel upload, you tease them into a story, right? This would be a way to see those people that really do care about what you're writing, right? Because you'll see.

Jack Shilkaitis (14:12)
yeah.

Right. There's actually

a way to do that with BookFunnel too. So, and I don't want to hijack what you're talking about, but yeah. So if you, so BookFunnel has what we call a read now links. These can be linked to a sample. So you can like upload your book. It has to be an EPUB format, by the way, can't do this with a PDF. So has to be an EPUB format. And then you can select chapters from that.

Joe Solari (14:21)
well, let's hear about it. Just piggyback. No, no, it's because the idea is the idea, right? Like.

Jack Shilkaitis (14:42)
book to be included in a sample and then you get a link to that sample and you can even include a custom call to action at the end of that. Now if you want to do this with like episodic content you can do that too. There would just be a matter of setting up a book that's for like the first segment and set up a book that's for like the next chapter and then literally you can link them directly to the cloud reader so when they click that that link you'd have to make sure that it still triggers your sequence like you're talking about.

But you can send them an email that lets them read it right away in their browser. So they can still read it in BookFunnel if you want them to be able to do that. Right? Yeah.

Joe Solari (15:12)
yeah, yeah. Cool. Yeah, so,

you know, I'm just with me.

For example, where we're using this is we're running this summer series, which BookFunnels participating in. so we're using advertising. We have people come in to sign up for the sessions. And we say, hey, go here. Here's where you pick the sessions you want to go to. Free content, all great. And then the next email is like, here's how you join the community. So I want to make sure everyone gets that.

Jack Shilkaitis (15:35)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Solari (15:41)
Then it's like, if you want to learn more about some other things we're doing, click here. And those are the people that you're going to want to market to. So one of the promises I make in that is I'm not going to just throw you into a thing to try and sell you a show ticket. I'm not going to do that. It's kind of weird. I paid to get this lead in. my perspective on this is that

Jack Shilkaitis (15:46)
Yep.

Yeah.

Joe Solari (16:04)
If you get engaged with our community, the community is the super ultimate funnel that's going to convert you over to wanting to come to the show when you're ready. But if you do go through this whole email cycle and you do the things there, you're probably going to want to know more about the show. So that's like the last link, which puts you then into another sequence that talks about specifically like, yeah, we do the show each year. This is what it's like. You may be in it, I think that that is

aligns better with a lot of author brands in the sense of like, Hey, I want this to feel like my story world. I want this to, I want to treat you the way I would like to be treated. And far too often we're just finding ourselves whether it's direct sales or whatever, like buy my book now. And that works. But the reality is, is on all purchases, it doesn't matter what you purchase.

Jack Shilkaitis (16:39)
Yeah.

Alright.

Joe Solari (16:51)
98 % of the purchases happen after 90 days. People take time to learn things. And we don't think about the fact that if we build the right system, the customers will nurture themselves.

Jack Shilkaitis (17:05)
Right, right, like a kind of a self-guided way to kind of investigate further and then that lets you through your like automations and so forth identify the people who are like interested right now and give them what they're looking for.

Joe Solari (17:16)
Yeah, well, like.

So we just bought a pretty fancy coffee machine at the house by the time that I placed the order, the decision was made. There was there was a lot of Joe laying on the couch in his boxers with his computer, like watching YouTube videos about coffee machines, right? Right. So there was this whole process of like the so I sold myself on the machine. Based on.

Jack Shilkaitis (17:26)
Yeah.

Right.

Mm-hmm.

Joe Solari (17:40)
a lot of really great content out there about those products, right? So like, I think that when you start to embrace that kind of marketing, it becomes, you know, so less salesy and it becomes automatic, right? It just kind of feeds itself.

Jack Shilkaitis (17:55)
Yeah, yeah. No, yeah, I get that. That's an interesting approach to email automations. There's a lot of this, and you can get a lot out of it if you, it's all in the setup when it comes to email automations. And so that's, yeah, yeah. And that's the daunting part for some people, but like if you set it up the right way, it's gonna pay dividends for you down the road, you know?

Joe Solari (18:07)
That's the dirty secret.

Yeah. And

I guarantee you'll go back in a year and you're like, how did I set this? What did I do here? And you'll rebuild stuff. doing that, that's the real magic. And with where we are today in the fact that you can use things like Zapier and different integrations where something like BookFunnel can be talking back into your email system back and forth.

Jack Shilkaitis (18:21)
Right? Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Joe Solari (18:42)
the more you do those kinds of things, the more customers feel like you're listening to them.

Jack Shilkaitis (18:47)
Right, exactly, exactly. All righty, well, I think that's gonna do it for this segment. So let's move on to the main topic for today. The whole reason why we have Joe Solari here is to talk about Author Nation, to talk about some of the innovations that people are gonna discover through Author Nation. We were talking before we started recording a lot about authenticity. We got a lot of things we wanna get to.

And we've been talking over the past few months too about some new stuff that Book Funnel is doing and how we're going to showcase that at Author Nation. So what I think it kind of all centers around this idea of authentically connecting authors, authentically connecting with their readers, though, is what it comes back to for me. It's like a lot of this stuff, a lot of these the authors who are going to be able to do that and execute on that well.

are going to be the ones who are going to be the most successful in this kind of new era, if that makes sense. Is that kind of the same thing that you're seeing,

Joe Solari (19:44)
Yeah, I think that, you know, there's the, like I say, the features and the benefits of we have a show and you come there and you're going to get a cookie and a cup of coffee and you're going to see some good sessions and all that kind of stuff. But the foundational things that we're excited about and working on is how do we create an experience? Something that a human is going to connect with because.

Jack Shilkaitis (20:04)
Hmm.

Joe Solari (20:07)
that's going to be a major differentiator in an author brand. And it's going to be something that as this world of artifice grows, Like, you listen to somebody like Gary Vandertruc talk about like, hey, there's going to be complete AI social media personalities that people follow. And you're like, ooh, he's probably right.

Jack Shilkaitis (20:25)
Mm-hmm.

They already

exist. Have you, have you s- Yeah.

Joe Solari (20:30)
I know they already exist. I know

they exist, but it's like, they're doing okay, right? ⁓ So like, how do you now compete with that? It's like, okay, well, lean heavily into your humanity, right? And that's why we're focusing on this, like the show is an experience. It's about...

Jack Shilkaitis (20:36)
Yeah, very well, Samo.

Mm-hmm.

Joe Solari (20:52)
what magic happens when human beings get together in the same room or in the same community, the conversations that we just had even before this show changes the trajectory of the four of our lives. That's like, you can't deny that that is the case. And then when you see what we're able to do with, with Susan and I, how we work with companies like Book Funnel and Kickstarter and ProWriting Aid and Amazon, where it's like,

Jack Shilkaitis (21:05)
Right.

Joe Solari (21:20)
It may be hard for authors to think about this, but these companies want to see creators succeed. And so when we're able to kind of collaborate at that level and pull things together and say, hey, if we put this company and that company together, we've had calls where it's like, hey, we got talking to this company that you introduced us to, Joe. And now we're going to do this. And that's creating value for those two companies and a much bigger audience.

Jack Shilkaitis (21:41)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Solari (21:45)
So that's the other part of this thing is, like, Susan and I are really good at like, kind of being the mayors of the village and pulling all these pieces together and helping people see like, hey, if we plant corn over here and wheat over here, it's going to be good for all of us. How about we do that? So yeah, I, you know, we can get into specifics how that's manifesting. ⁓ and, and for us, like,

Jack Shilkaitis (22:02)
Right.

Yeah, yeah.

Joe Solari (22:09)
to see it actually starting to happen. There's always been the idea. It's just like your book. You have this moment in the shower. But when you start to see it manifest on the page or turn into a publication, that's the materialization. That's very different. And it's so rewarding. And we want to be stewards of that and examples of that. I know that was a

Jack Shilkaitis (22:25)
Right.

No, no, yeah, absolutely. I think we're on the same page there. And that's something that Book Funnel is, there's been a core to our mission. mean, Book Funnel was created because the authors did not have the tools they needed to bring that stuff into the real world and make it real and into fruition. we...

Joe Solari (22:52)
Like, if

you know the origin story of this, it was at Smarter Artists in Austin at Johnny and Sean's show where Damon was there as an author, right? So you can't tell me that these shows don't have impacts because this podcast wouldn't exist without that moment, right?

Jack Shilkaitis (22:56)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yep. Yep.

Right. Right.

Right,

right. No, and on a personal level for me too, I remember Damon telling me about this idea before it ever became real. Like I have vague, you know, we had, cause we were, we both had the same editor. That's how we met each other. I've told this story before, so I'm not going to beat a dead horse, but, just so you know, like we knew each other as authors before that. And he, from the very beginning, he was trying to figure out like how to solve these various different problems that.

Joe Solari (23:28)
Okay.

Jack Shilkaitis (23:40)
that we were running into. so like on a personal level, I know I would not be where I am as an author today, like on a personal level because of Damon. And so that same thing is like magnified with BookFunnel. BookFunnel is the same way. kind of, you know, not that we like to just, you know, toot our own horn all the time, but like, I think the industry changed, right, with what BookFunnel introduced. And for the better, that was the goal.

Joe Solari (24:04)
Absolutely. Yeah.

Jack Shilkaitis (24:06)
Right.

Joe Solari (24:07)
Yeah, absolutely. mean, if you were going to like case study companies, you know, some of the momentous innovations in this industry, certainly the Kindle and opening up KDP like created. mean, there's been studies like I can point you out. I'm like how much long tail value has been created. But then like at another extent, like what BookFunnel was able to provide us.

Jack Shilkaitis (24:18)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Solari (24:31)
as a methodology for connecting with an audience, right? And giving us this tool to market, right? Which it doesn't matter that we have a free platform that we can put books on if we can't get people to go look those books up, right? So these things complement.

Jack Shilkaitis (24:44)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Emma Alisyn (24:47)
I find that so fascinating

because like indie authors were really focused on ROI, especially immediate ROI. By immediate I mean like 30 to 90 days. But you don't know in like a conference like this or these situations like this, it might take five, 10 years, but and I'm thinking about it, are the days of really just

and I started out nine years ago, of just sitting at home alone on your computer in your writing cave and making money over, or do we really need to get out there and facilitate these opportunities for ourselves?

Joe Solari (25:18)
Well, I mean, you can stay home, like you're going to go, I'm mean, but you'll get left behind. Like, I'm sorry. Like there's, there's things that when you think about a show like ours, depending on where you are in your career, right? I think there's another thing you can do that's bad too. It isn't just staying home. It's like you come to the show and you just hang out with your bubble of people where you just talk about the same stuff over and over again, or you come to a show and you don't participate.

Emma Alisyn (25:20)
Hahaha! ⁓

Jack Shilkaitis (25:40)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Solari (25:45)
right? You know, I can't like if you're let's say you're a super big deal author and you're like, can't I hate coming to shows because everybody's pulling on me and they want all my information. It's like, yeah, that is that is painful. And it's a cost of success.

but you helping a new author, there's something in it for you because the new guy is gonna be the one that's gonna be the next big deal, right? It's like you go back in time and you look at any of these overnight successes. They weren't, they've been coming to shows, they've been doing stuff like this, they've been working at it, they find their voice, the new series takes off, whatever it is, and then, I'm not doing as well as I used to.

Jack Shilkaitis (26:21)
Yeah.

Joe Solari (26:24)
It sure would have been nice if I was nice to that guy that he would care enough to give me a shout out in his newsletter. Right. But no, I was a jerk and I didn't go to shows and I didn't meet people or, you know, I I was sitting there at tables where I've watched million dollar series come together with people co-writing. I've been there to see. Essentially, subgenres develop at other shows that are show, but like.

Jack Shilkaitis (26:31)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Joe Solari (26:48)
because we haven't been around that long. we can point at certain subgenres that three or four authors got together and like, there's a market there. Let's do it and get after it. So I think that there's that, like the person to person thing, Emma. But then there's the other stuff is like, Book Fund Only and Author Nation spent an hour on the call yesterday where we're doing our scheming. We're creating stuff.

Jack Shilkaitis (26:56)
bright.

Hahaha

Joe Solari (27:12)
that's going to change the industry. We'll probably talk a little bit about it on this call, but like that rolls out at the show. Like these pieces come together because we're having these conversations and these conversations are kind like I can pick like some of this stuff that's happening today is because Damon and I went across the street from Nink and had breakfast together at that Greek joint and talked for three hours, right?

Jack Shilkaitis (27:16)
yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Joe Solari (27:36)
That stuff is what changes this industry. It's like two guys with hair brained ideas like, well, I'll do it. Right.

Jack Shilkaitis (27:44)
Yeah. Yeah,

exactly. And I know in, in, I think, I think the one thing that that's impressed me too, in the conversations that we've had, because, like you said, book funnels participated in the author nation summer series. did, do a webinar earlier this month, earlier here in September, this episode of the podcast might come out beginning of October. So depending on when y'all are watching this,

It might've been over a month ago, but what have you. And we've got another one next week and we're going to be talking about this new feature of ours, the digital ebook signing in that talk. And it's going to be something we're going to be showcasing at Author Nation. But really just like how you guys, your team, when we sit down to talk about these issues, you really are like wanting to get down to like, okay, so that's the idea. Like how are authors going to implement this?

and how are they going to take this and run with it? And I think, which is kind of mirror to some of the conversations we have at Book Funnel too. And there's just, it's cool to see that there's like other people excited about this and excited about how this is going to change the industry for authors or how it could potentially, I don't even think we fully know, right? How this could potentially change things.

Joe Solari (28:52)
We don't. don't. Because

here's the thing is like, we'll create this environment and we'll create some structure. But then there's going to be all these crazy creatives that are going to come in here and take it to another level. They're going to do things with it that we couldn't imagine that will then inspire us to do other things. And I think to help people with the context of like

what Jack and I are kind of talking about is I'll give a real tangible example. So when we took over the event and created Author Nation, we have a three year plan for how we're building out the reader event, which is like, that's the source of all money, right? That's the follow the money kind of model, right? We know that. So what if we can bring more readers in? And then we looked at,

reader events. How do we make this a really successful reader event? Well, there's a bunch of problems there. This gets to like how Damon was thinking about like getting books to a show, opening up the window of purchase, right? So it's not just what you can sell a day, but what you can sell for weeks before a show, right? And so, and how do we make it for the customer that they don't have to go to like 65 different checkout forms for

all the authors they want to buy books from, from the store. So we created the signing store, right? Which is a single, like, and I talked a lot about this with Damon. He helped me out a lot to think through this because I'm not a software guy, but it's like, okay, here's the three problems I want to solve, right? For a show runner, for an author, for a reader. If we solve these problems, like it's going to make doing shows easier, right? Just the ability for you to get your print on demand books.

Right. So you load your files in there. There's nothing exists like this until we built it. And we spent a lot of money to build it. Right. Like you upload your books like you would on Amazon or Ingram or Lulu. And then those books that are purchased for the show get printed and delivered in one load to the event. And we get them to the show. So you don't have to get books to the show. Right. We did that last year. It was 100 % successful.

Jack Shilkaitis (30:58)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Solari (30:58)
Right. Now we learned a bunch of stuff doing that. Right. And so like we're scaling that thing up. And the next thing is what we're talking about with this whole idea of like what we can do with with digital signing and like as we put these pieces together, it's going to create a whole new paradigm for in real life events that may not be in real life. Because like what you were talking about yesterday, you know,

for you. I know you two weren't on the call, but Jack's like, I can I can see this thing where like people are streaming while they're selling their books and they're going back and forth. And I'm like, I can see it, too. I'm there. Right. Like and it's like. So once we get a few people seeing this and doing it, like it's not a new idea. This isn't something that he he thought of, like it's it's something that's going on at other events that is

Jack Shilkaitis (31:31)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Joe Solari (31:48)
a trend in sales that makes total sense of being in a live event, talking about your books, interacting live, then shifting to a virtual environment, which will be possible in the future because of the partnership between us and us taking all the lumps trying to figure it out.

Jack Shilkaitis (32:01)
Right, right.

Right. Right. So for, like for those who are maybe having trouble trying to visualize what, Joe's talking about, I can, I can explain it. And Kelly and Emma, you'll probably remember when we had Russell on last time and he was talking about like taking hints from other industries. Like what was, I'm trying remember the one he talked about. What was it? Was it Dropbox? I think was, was one that he mentioned.

Kelli Tanzi (32:25)
Yeah.

I think

it was Dropbox, yeah. Yeah.

Jack Shilkaitis (32:32)
Right. And like their marketing methods,

that sort of thing. And so what I have, what I've seen, and this is like taking something from another industry. So any of you, right. Any of you who are millennials or have, or millennials with kids or Gen X with kids, right. You probably know what Pokemon cards are. And I actually have like some here, not intentionally as props. They just happen to be on my desk. Like I collected these things when I was a kid.

Joe Solari (32:34)
Mm.

Jack Shilkaitis (32:59)
Just random pieces of cardboard and I never thought that man These are gonna be a thing that my kids are gonna be interested in well nowadays It's totally evolved and there's a whole industry around it and there's people who have these cards that they sell them at shows and so a bunch of vendors will come to a show and they'll sell their cards there and as they're doing this I trust me this is relevant as they're doing this they are simultaneously live streaming on social media and So there's interaction that's happening in person

And then that live stream on social media is a recording that they can use for content, which is gonna, people are gonna see that and be like, I've got this show coming up in my local area. And I wonder if that vendor is gonna be there. I wanna go meet them. And there may be, they like their personality. They get to know who they are, that sort of thing, right? They get to see what the restaurant is like before they actually sit down and eat, that sort of thing. And...

In addition to that, there's interaction then too with the live stream. And so they'll go back and forth with whoever's there in front of them. And when there's downtime, they have the live stream audience to talk to. And a lot of time this is done in the sort of newer types of live streams. The vertical live streams is what you'll typically see, which are more easily discoverable. And so you can just get random people coming in there being like, what's this all about? And then they get, that's how they discover you.

And so you can replicate that same sort of thing into the self publishing industry if you're the type of author who's like yeah I want to go to a show and sell my books, you know, whatever it looks like I know we've had Jason and Leah bond on for an episode of the podcast they go to like comic cons and that sort of thing to sell books

What if you're live streaming that at the same time and there's an additional kind of way to get some discoverability, to create content and even to sell books because you could be selling your books through that live stream, you know, like ebooks and print on demand books and that sort of thing. So that's the conversation that that was had. that for the so for those of you watching now, that's what we're that's the idea that we're we're talking about.

Joe Solari (34:59)
Yeah. And, and for the two of you that weren't on our call yesterday, like, so where we're going as a team is we start talking about these ideas. And for us, it's like, Hey, we want to help you guys roll this new feature out successfully. see that, you know, certainly for virtual events, it's going to be really powerful. How can we use it at a live event? And then it was.

Jack Shilkaitis (35:16)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Solari (35:19)
the ideas start to simmer and this gets back to your initial question about like, do you want to be involved in these things? It's because when creative people get together and start riffing on ideas, cool stuff happens, right? So then we're like, wait a minute. We have this Kickstarter anthology. So Author Nation did a romance anthology with a special edition. Okay. So this is going to get into some of the cool stuff we're doing. 30 authors, some of them that debuted.

We ran a Kickstarter. We raised $23,000 for the Kickstarter. We worked with Kickstarter. Our highest tier, the special edition is delivered live at the event. Right? So you come there and get it picked up. We've got a table there. It's going to be six of the authors that will sign at the event. But then we're like, what if we took the ebook that people bought in that and we offered a virtual signing?

So we go out to our list and Isabella said there was like 260 people. Yeah. That have that, that ebook. What if we said to them, Hey, from three to five o'clock, we're going to be streaming these authors signing the ebook, submit your ebook to be signed at the event. So you could get on in a zoom call and watch them.

Jack Shilkaitis (36:12)
I think so, yeah.

Joe Solari (36:30)
passing the iPad down, signing it, and then magically your tip sheet appears in the ebook that you downloaded on BookFunnel because that's how we delivered the ebooks.

Jack Shilkaitis (36:42)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Solari (36:42)
Like that's the stuff we're doing at Author Nation. Now it could be a colossal mess up, like I'm confident in Author Nation and Book Funnels ability to do diving catches. We'll make it work and we'll learn from it. like.

Jack Shilkaitis (36:46)
Yeah, right.

Hahaha.

Yeah. yeah.

Yeah, yeah. There's some preparation that I think is going to be involved in our parts too and coordinating and that whole thing. Kelly and Emma, also you guys had the chance to kind of showcase this feature with some authors too. And I kind of want to know, because I know I'm hyped for it. Like I'm hyped for it like beyond.

I don't know, I'm really suppressing it right now. And I know Joe... I don't. I really don't. I saved those cards almost by accident. It's not something that I'm really... ⁓ My son is interested in it a little bit, but not that much. So I wouldn't even know what's going on these days with it. But do you think with the... Because you guys have had the chance to talk to some authors about it too.

Joe Solari (37:20)
If ⁓ it was a Pokemon card, what Pokemon card would it be?

Kelli Tanzi (37:32)
Yeah.

Jack Shilkaitis (37:46)
Emma and Kelly, did you see the same level of hype or the same level of like, wow, like that, or is it maybe like they haven't quite figured it out yet?

Kelli Tanzi (37:55)
There's a little of both, I think, for me, for the ones that I talk to. For the ones that do a lot of in-person events, as we were talking about it, and we actually made the announcement at RWA in the talk that we gave, and you could see there was a few people going, what, what, what is that? And then you could see the gears were starting to turn, and some of their eyes are going, ⁓

Jack Shilkaitis (37:57)
Yeah.

Mhm.

Kelli Tanzi (38:18)
but I could do this. And I think afterwards we were talking, we showed it off and displayed it. They were like, can I do this? Can I do this? And they were, again, giving me and Emma, Emma and I, the feedback that we were bringing back to Damon to say, hey, Damon, they would really like it if it did this. And.

Jack Shilkaitis (38:20)
Mm-hmm.

Kelli Tanzi (38:39)
you're right, if we hadn't been there in person and they hadn't been able to contact, like to actually have those conversations directly with us, you know, they could always email us, but having us right there to have that conversation and be like, ⁓ I'm going to write that down. I'm going to take that back to Book Funnel and to the engineering team and say, you know, they would like it if it did this. What do you think? Is it possible even? And then that gives it. And these were authors.

You know of all ranges in all parts of their careers these were not all seven figure six figure authors some of them were had not even debuted yet and they were They were actually looking into doing trad publishing and so they were there learning all that they could But they were also getting an in, you know inside look to say even if you're doing You know trad publishing or if you're if you're wanting to go that route, that's great

Jack Shilkaitis (39:20)
Mm-hmm.

Kelli Tanzi (39:33)
but you should probably know you're gonna need to do these things too. And they were learning those steps as they were going and even they were coming and being like, well, it'd be really cool if you could do this thing. And that conversation couldn't happen. It just was a natural networking of authors talking to authors and being creative, which is what we do.

Jack Shilkaitis (39:51)
Yeah. Right.

Joe Solari (39:53)
Hmm.

Jack Shilkaitis (39:54)
Right.

Right. And that's honestly how this feature has been built out. was the idea was born and then it was like, you know, through having these conversations with other authors, it's like, OK, this is a good idea. There is. is something there. I think for some people, they look at it and maybe see like it doesn't quite fit.

Because it is kind of stretching a little bit of like the paradigm of self-publishing a little bit. Like for some authors, the idea of going to an in-person event and selling their books, I think is stretching it for them even. They're like, no, I stay at home and I write my books and then I publish them online and then I email my list and then I write the next book. I don't go to shows. I don't talk to people. I'm an introvert.

Joe Solari (40:29)
Yeah.

Jack Shilkaitis (40:40)
And I think that's totally fine. And I think that's maybe a model that's still going to be viable for some people, but I think it's going to be, it's going to lose some of the dynamism that it once had where now you could go to a show or you could do a virtual book signing or you could live stream and sign autographed copies and grow your mailing list at the same time. And you can be discovered in so many other ways that there's just so much more dynamism with that, with trying to connect with readers directly that

you're going to be able to, it's what Russell Nolte was talking about. It becomes the 10X strategy where it's a hockey stick, right? Instead of the slow growth for some people.

Joe Solari (41:17)
Yeah,

you know, what I would piggyback on that is this idea of like,

And I can give kind of the seminal moment for me in a second, but like, if we go back five years to where, you know, so 2020, and you look at the things that are available today since then, where people have made significant amount of money in new models in content creation.

And I'm just going to talk about publishing right now. I'm not going to go into things like YouTube and all these other deals. I'm going to. So like the idea of publishing on a platform for free and then making your money in a subscription was, wasn't there was some weirdos maybe doing it, but it was, it didn't have the momentum it has now. It does. When you look at something like Royal road and some of these other, it's,

Jack Shilkaitis (41:53)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Right?

Joe Solari (42:12)
multiple seven figures, right? And those pads crisscross direct selling. There was a few whack jobs out there that were doing direct selling, but the tools weren't even there because I know because I remember Damon and I having these conversations about like what needed to happen. And quite frankly, selling audio direct. I remember all of those conversations with him getting to that point, right? Those things didn't exist. So I put that.

Jack Shilkaitis (42:35)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Solari (42:38)
That was that's the past with where technology is right now. Any author that's watching this, do you think you have any concept of how you're going to be selling books in five years? If you do, please tell me because because we'll have you speak at the show, right? Like that gets back to Emma's question is like we're we're having people come and you know, it's funny because we'll have people they'll see a speaker fly by in there.

Jack Shilkaitis (42:49)
Yeah.

Hahaha.

Yeah.

Joe Solari (43:04)
you know, in a social post like, why is that person speaking? And it's like, well, because you all you do is go into Amazon and look at their Amazon bestseller ranking and they're not even on Amazon. They're making three hundred thousand dollars a year in their Patreon account, writing stuff for free on some weird fan fiction website. Right. And we want people to see that and be like, you know what?

Jack Shilkaitis (43:15)
Mm-hmm.

Right. Right.

Joe Solari (43:31)
this writing on Amazon and, you know, rapid release, it's just not for me. But this other thing, that's me. I want to do that. Yeah.

Jack Shilkaitis (43:38)
There's another way to do it. There's

another way to do it. I know when we had Russell on Emma, this whole this kind of thing came up. And I know that he was talking about like, I don't know if you I don't know if you were pushing. I can't remember if you were pushing yourself down that road or Kelly was trying to convince you to do that or write the whole Patreon model. And as an author who has like.

Emma Alisyn (43:54)
Patreon, yeah.

Jack Shilkaitis (44:01)
You've just mentioned that like your recent release, you're keeping it wide and direct. I think there's like the, I don't know, how do you feel? Because I know the conventional wisdom is, you just put it in Kindle Unlimited. And you just, like, how long is that going to last?

Emma Alisyn (44:17)
I mean, I've been thinking a lot more about the technology available to us and the need to connect with readers and Patreon and I was like, I dictate. I dictate in voices. Why not have a Patreon subscription? You guys tell me this is crazy. Why not have a Patreon subscription where they can watch me from the beginning of the story, just dictate the entire thing. I mean, it'll take 100 hours, but you can watch what you want to watch and you can watch the whole process of it getting raw dictated and then going back and the editing you can.

Jack Shilkaitis (44:29)
Ugh.

Emma Alisyn (44:44)
and maybe even let them have input, although my characters are insane enough. But I've been thinking about how we are going to like, how will writing change? Like, it's not gonna just be you by yourself. ⁓ tell me who's done it so I can study it, man.

Jack Shilkaitis (44:47)
Mmm.

Yeah.

Joe Solari (44:55)
What if I told you that's not a new idea?

Jack Shilkaitis (44:57)
yeah.

Well, Kevin J. Anderson has done a little bit of it, Okay.

Joe Solari (45:00)
Dakota Kraut. Dakota Kraut actually,

Emma Alisyn (45:03)
Okay.

Joe Solari (45:04)
one of his Patreon levels is you come in and you watch him dictate. He's got a, because part of his thing is you, no, he's got the completionist chronicles. He owns Mountain Dale Press with Danielle Kraut. He's lit RPG. if I, and I may be getting this wrong, if I am, it makes the mythology even better. like.

Emma Alisyn (45:10)
Is that the cat guy?

Okay.

Jack Shilkaitis (45:20)
Okay, yeah.

Hahaha!

Joe Solari (45:26)
⁓

Kelli Tanzi (45:26)
you

Joe Solari (45:27)
is he had people because he produces a lot of work. this is kind of earlier on, so they weren't, accusing him of using AI. They were accusing him of using ghost writers. And he was like, come in and watch. I dictate.

Emma Alisyn (45:32)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. ⁓ of course.

Jack Shilkaitis (45:40)
⁓ sure.

Right. Does he do it live or are these just recordings? Really? Yeah.

Joe Solari (45:46)
He does it live. He does it live.

he actually has some because he's doing well. And he's got a process. He has somebody in while he's dictating they're in there editing. Right. Yeah. So.

Jack Shilkaitis (45:59)
Yeah. I believe it,

Emma Alisyn (45:59)
Yeah. Smooth. People don't understand

how fast dictation is. Like, if you get in the flow, you can do a chapter in 30 minutes, man.

Jack Shilkaitis (46:09)
yeah.

Joe Solari (46:09)
Yeah. So like, again, this is where circling it back to the show and these ideas and just what we're doing here in this kind, just riffing and talking, because this is the kind of stuff that happens when you're sitting around a table at a show, just maybe a little looser because you're drinking, is like, you know, it's like, ⁓ go talk to this guy. And if you're at the show.

Kelli Tanzi (46:24)
you

Joe Solari (46:29)
Dakota would be there and you could go talk to him and he would say, okay, this is how I do it. This is the tools I use, right? Like that's the whole idea is, is that it isn't that you should just mimic these people, but it's like here, here are some people that maybe have part of the solution, pull it with what you're doing and figure that out. Like I, and whether that's going outside of the industry or inside of the industry, you know, one of the things that,

Jack Shilkaitis (46:43)
Yeah.

Joe Solari (46:52)
You know, I attribute to Russell Nolte is, you he was one of the guys that was early on Kickstarter. And one of the things that really resonated with his story with me is this idea of like, Hey, I'm not a fast writer. What if I, I write over here and keep myself kind of revenue neutral at best. Maybe I make some money.

Jack Shilkaitis (46:58)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Solari (47:13)
And then I have three to five books that I can go rapid release on this other platform.

Right. It's like that's a really powerful model. Now, what we've done at Author Nation is we went to Kickstarter and said, hey, how about you coach our people? OK, so we have a Kickstarter cohort. You don't have to come to the show. It's free. You just join our group. You can lurk and learn about Kickstarters, but we're tracking everything because data is important to us.

Our group at this point has said that they want to do $43,000 in pledges. We're about halfway through. A lot of these people are kind of launching their kickstarters in sync with the show. Um, we've already had $180,000 in pledges raised. Right. So what's that? Four acts more than four acts. So like,

From me, what I'm proving out is I have the data is like, hey, if you be part of your part of our community and you do the things that we say to do, you're statistically. Have a higher probability of success, like in orders of magnitude, because we know there's there's at least three at this point, authors that debuted their first book on Kickstarter and raised $1500 or more. And I know the data we can.

Most debut books lose money. Right. So like we're changing the game by pulling these ideas together and collaborating and doing this stuff and us helping with the structure. Right. So that's the kind of stuff that becomes really fun. And then it's like, remember we said that the Kickstarter anthology, maybe where we do this thing with book funnel, doing the virtual signing, like all these things start to influence each other and become.

Jack Shilkaitis (48:42)
Yeah.

Joe Solari (49:00)
something that hasn't been before. So it's like, is the industry going to change? Yes, because we're changing it.

Jack Shilkaitis (49:06)
Right, right. Now, there's like, I'm just thinking about this and there's so many, there's so many pieces that are coming together that I think. So you've got like this whole like early access business model, and then you've got Kickstarter, which is like how you would launch your book. And then to me, something like, obviously, there's direct sales after that. It's like there's like these three phases, like we've taken

Before, I think it was very hard for authors to show their process and to profit off of their process. The book had to be finished and edited and then you launch it. And now everything before the launch is something that you can profit from and you can actually turn into content and readers are interested and they want to know and they want to be involved.

Joe Solari (49:40)
Yeah.

Well,

get your notebook out Emma, because here we go. So what if your dictation, which is an audio file, got put over into 11 Labs and turned into character voices? And then, by the way, 11 Labs is going to be at the show.

Jack Shilkaitis (49:53)
Hahahaha

Emma Alisyn (50:08)
I'm right with you there, man.

Jack Shilkaitis (50:08)
cool. ⁓

Joe Solari (50:10)
And, and

one of their big things that they just launched is 11 reader. Right. Which is a model where you, you, know, you revenue share with them, but, and by the way, the, the, the secret little scheme they have there is because of that free tool where you can put any print in and have it read. I can't remember what they call it, but it's, you know, like if you want to throw stuff up there.

Emma Alisyn (50:15)
Yes.

Jack Shilkaitis (50:15)
Mmm.

Joe Solari (50:36)
That's creating an audience that didn't exist before that they're they're exposing 11 reader books to. Right. So there's them. There's spoken. Spokens got a whole model to multi-voice stuff like so like there's probably something in that model you're playing around with where with automation your dictation after it's cleaned up is turned into you know.

Jack Shilkaitis (50:39)
Yeah.

Joe Solari (51:01)
an immersive audio thing, could be outtakes, whatever, but like this gets to what we were talking about, whatever it was 15 minutes ago. Do you think the way you're gonna make money in the future is the same way as now?

Jack Shilkaitis (51:13)
Yeah.

Yeah. Right.

Joe Solari (51:14)
No,

the intellectual property that you have, like this gets to some really core stuff with authorization, like we're way underneath the hood. Your intellectual property is an asset.

Your audience is an asset. Your business needs assets to exist. You bring those two assets together, they leverage each other. One without the other is useless. So like we're talking and thinking about how we help you guys with intellectual property. How do you do workflow? How do you do productivity? How do you get your craft better? How do you, you know, spin this IP off in different ways?

Jack Shilkaitis (51:31)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Solari (51:50)
But then this like whole reader thing is about like, how do we get more audience for everybody and expose them to these different things?

Jack Shilkaitis (51:59)
Right. And I think BookFunnel has a... Gosh, man. Yeah, no, I'm just, I'm thinking of all the ways that we plug into that. Because it's even more than I think people realize, even with like the, with the new digital ebook signing feature, like that's great. But like all of the existing features BookFunnel has fit into all this stuff already.

Because if you have this content, you need a way to deliver it. We've got a delivery method for that. You need it to be discovered. Well, book funnel promos and swaps can help you find the readers in your genre, right? Like there's so much that book funnel can plug into. And this isn't meant to be a podcast. Book funnels are just so great. And we predicted the future. And we're so amazing, even though we are. But that's the thing is like all, you five, you're right. Five years ago, you wouldn't have thought like, ⁓ you.

take these pieces and you put them together and now you've got this entirely new business model and way of doing things that nobody could have envisioned before. Like before it was like, well this author here over there does Patreon and that's how they do it. I have no idea how they did it, but they do it and that's how they make their money. And this guy's over here making, you know, a million dollars on Kindle Unlimited and I have no idea how he does it. And this person ran Facebook ads and there it's like, and now all these things are getting combined together.

in a way that's like, yeah, in five years, who the heck knows? You're gonna, you know.

Joe Solari (53:18)
remember a conversation that Damon and I had, and it was around.

folks that are white labeling the book funnel app so that they have their deal. And I said to them, think from an industry's perspective, that's the dumbest thing we can do.

Jack Shilkaitis (53:26)
Mm. Right. Right.

⁓ I'm sorry, Damon.

Joe Solari (53:35)
And here's why, because

well, he's just serving his customer, right? Right. And I understand why, because they're trying to build a facet of their brand. But from a strategic standpoint as a collective of creators that want to break the shackles of big tech, creating a platform that the entirety of listeners and readers trust outside of KDP.

Jack Shilkaitis (53:42)
Yeah, there were people asking for it, so yeah.

Joe Solari (54:03)
that being the book funnel app creates leverage as a community. Right. So like in my view, I think the author shouldn't be pushing that way. They should be sending all your customers into that one app and getting people comfortable with that because weirdly one of the obstacles for, and I know this because I do a lot of stuff on direct audio.

Jack Shilkaitis (54:08)
Yeah.

Joe Solari (54:25)
The big thing is like, well, you know, my books are inaudible. And I understand that, or all my books are in Apple. But if all my books were in book funnel.

And all, the other authors books were in book funnel. Like then that obstacle is killed for everybody. And then, and then who knows what the company can do with that in the future. Right. ⁓

Jack Shilkaitis (54:43)
Yeah.

Right. And we're not,

we're not the type of company either to then see like, ⁓ tons of you are using the book funnel app and you're coming to us in droves. Let's, let's, ⁓ you know, tack on some extra, right. Some extra hurdles or fees for you. That, that sort of thing, you know, let's give you the raw deal. I know we're not that company and I'm sure that there's, it's not just going to be book funnel doing this. There's going be other platforms, but I think these are platforms that are built by authors.

Joe Solari (55:14)
Well, I can attest to what I know that Damon has made multiple choices to walk away from giant stacks of Scrooge McDuck money.

Jack Shilkaitis (55:14)
And that's.

Joe Solari (55:25)
because of how he believes the market should be. Right? So like it's in good hands. That's the other thing is like trusted source at the wheel between him and Julie, right? So like, you know, there, the opportunities for him to cash out and, have that database exploited because here's the other thing I would argue is outside of Amazon and Apple probably.

I wouldn't be surprised if you guys had a bigger reader list than app.

Jack Shilkaitis (55:53)
Well, in theory. In theory a bigger list. Because we don't have it. It doesn't exist.

Joe Solari (55:56)
Yeah. I know, but you get, I know it doesn't exist, but it's like,

if there was like, it's, it's in there in the cloud data, like, but like my point, and he's purposely built it so he can't, but like, if you look at an agglomeration of readers, and this is something I think about a lot, because the other thing I've been, where I've been spending most of my attention this last year, I got a great team. They're running the show.

Jack Shilkaitis (56:05)
Yeah. Right.

Joe Solari (56:22)
Like we're, I've been focusing on building this reader event, right? And we've got 4,000 registrants for the reader event. Yeah, yeah. And we're projecting, because it's a free ticket, we're projecting, we're probably gonna have about half of our final list number show up at the event, right? And our vision is,

because we have the space to do that scaling to a 5,000 person multi-genre reader event or bigger, right? Again, it's gotta happen over time. But when you go back to what we've been talking about, when we're doing the kind of experiences and we're doing all this cool, fun stuff, like it becomes super easy to get people to come, right? And, you know, in the end, that's like, it gets back to what I talked about.

for is like how are we building that audience we're helping you build that audience you guys are a great place to build audience too and I know I there was another thread in there but I lost it at this point

Jack Shilkaitis (57:17)
Mm-hmm.

No, there's so many threads.

There's a ton that are all interweave. And I think it's... I try to be careful not to push authors to be like, you've got to do all the things because there's... Right. And I liked how Russell put it in the last episode, which is like, you want to build layers. And so like, do this thing for a while.

Joe Solari (57:33)
Don't.

Jack Shilkaitis (57:42)
And then once you've got that figured out and you've got it to a place where it's stable, then layer another thing over that and then focus on that for little and don't feel like you've got to do. OK, there's 10 things on my list. I've got to I've got to go to reader events and I'm going to sign up for all of these. And I've got to start a patron and I've got to I've got to do a Kickstarter is like start with one thing and then build up to. But but understand how those things are connected at the same time. And I think that big picture can be overwhelming if you think you have to do it all at once and you don't.

Joe Solari (58:09)
Right, absolutely. I

think that that's the worst. like when people ask, what's the one thing you would say about somebody coming to a show? It's like, well, figure out where you're at now. Right? And I'll give you kind of some guidance. Like you're newly published or you haven't published. Right? You're published and you're not profitable. And then you're published and you're trying to figure out where you want your business to go.

three very distinct people focus on getting to that next one, right? So if you're not even published, if you come to an event like this, you're gonna get your mind blown, you're gonna get racked up that learning curve super fast. But I would rather see you spend your money on your book cover and your editing and do a bunch of our free stuff, right? Go into our Kickstarter and be in that community and lurk and do things.

because the economics on this business are super hard. The next group is like published and this is the biggest group published and not profitable. You're never gonna get there doing everything. It gets back to like getting the assets right and aligned in a way that's aligned with you, right? With your ups and downs and your cycles. And so in our view, one of the easier ways of doing that is start out on something like Kickstarter in our community.

where you can get some wins and stay revenue neutral, right? Because, you know, what kills 90 % of small businesses is they run out of money. And I'm not talking about just publishing. It's like all business. Like what happens is you don't have enough working capital to run the business. You run out of money and you make really stupid decisions, right? So like, how do you fix that?

Jack Shilkaitis (59:30)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Joe Solari (59:49)
Well, we can help you do that. And then the next thing is, like, there's too many ways to do this. And by doing it all, you're going to, you know, Joe Polizzi's got a great thing about like just picking one channel and hitting it super hard rather than spreading out across all channels, because it takes so much energy. And I think that's true. Like if you're going to do Patreon and a free platform, it's really easy to look at the guys that have made money, but don't discount the fact that they wrote.

Jack Shilkaitis (1:00:03)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Solari (1:00:15)
470,000 words on that platform before it took off. Right. They didn't just go on there for three weeks and like, well, where's my million bucks. Right. They were driven by their own, you know, passion or their curiosity where the story was going. Who knows? But like they did it. So like, I think that's like to the core of the show is like, don't try and do everything.

Jack Shilkaitis (1:00:18)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Joe Solari (1:00:38)
Don't try and be in every session. Be at what gets you to the next thing. And you're going to have so much more success.

Kelli Tanzi (1:00:44)
What I think is really interesting too, with what you're saying and just kind of thinking about these new processes, these new ways of bringing in income, they're pretty intimidating, right? Kickstarter, think...

can, because you see how many people are, you ⁓ I pledged this and then I messed up the finances and the shipping, you know, something happened with shipping and I didn't realize that we're coming from here. And so I ended up losing money. So you hear those horror stories and you think, I'm going to get it wrong. And so a lot of people are like, I don't know how to organize it. But with the cohort that you're offering, it's basically just support. You're giving people who already know or

are working together at the same time? Is that what I'm assuming with the square heart, you're learning together or you have people helping who are actually already know.

Joe Solari (1:01:29)
yeah, so.

So

there's T Thorncoil, a couple other folks that are like, this is their business. This is the business they've chosen.

of Hyman Roth from Godfather 2. And they are saying like, here's the things you need to get in place, right? And you got Orianna Leckard, who's the head of publishing, who's seen more campaigns than anybody else on the planet for publishing, will hot seat your campaign in this thing. That's one of the things they do. But a lot of the stuff that, yeah, is like, if you just hang out and you listen, you're going to be like, OK.

I probably shouldn't do this thing and that thing because I don't have the finances because some of these things take some upfront money. know, they're like trying to do a campaign like somebody that does quarter million dollar campaigns isn't smart, right? Like you want to do a campaign that's suited for you. Like, are you just a debut author? Like we have glowing examples of how that works there. Like don't try, just do that, right?

down the road, maybe it's like, hey, you know, I do audio books. There's a little bit of a different strategy to raising the money for your audio books, right? And I think it's a great platform for that. Like thinking through all those different things. I wanna take my IP and go into games. Well, that's a different thing. So like maybe you need to be looking at some other people as your example. So yeah, the whole idea is to give you like the core thing I talked about on the stage last year is like, you need a peer group.

You need accountability. Liftor on devices, most creatives are just going to be chasing butterflies. You need somebody that's like, they're going to hold me to what I said I'm going to do. Right. And you need mentors. You need people that have been there. And I'm going to say, look out for this. Right. That gives you so much more success.

⁓ but I think the, the insidious thing in this industry is, especially if you go to a show like ours is like, well, now I've got 16 things I'm going to try and do. And it's like, no, do the one and repeatedly do it. Like, don't just run out. I did Kickstarter. Now I'm going to do Patreon. No, do another Kickstarter, right? Do it and then do another and do another. And you know what? In three to five years, you'll have a list of people on Kickstarter. That's massive.

that are expecting and you know what this isn't new. Michael Sullivan has been doing this for almost 10 years. Right. He launches his books on Kickstarter first raises a ton of money then he goes into regular distribution. This isn't unfounded it's not like we just figured out the secret of the pyramids it's like there's guys that have been doing this. So.

I think I answered the question.

Kelli Tanzi (1:04:00)
No, I think you did. Yeah, I mean, it's really about that building a community within authors as well as your community of your readers, because that's, we hear a lot about building community with your readers having, and you hear the new catchphrase, not really catchphrases, because they're just new, unique ideas. So things like subscription models was not a thing. I don't know how long ago it's been since.

Jack Shilkaitis (1:04:06)
Mm-hmm.

Kelli Tanzi (1:04:23)
you know, Patreon really be, you know, took off and now you have Substack and you have, you have all these other, you have Reem, have other places where you can publish your books or you could do early access and people have been using those in creative ways for a long time. And you have those trailblazers who are...

leading the pack when Kickstarter first started, it wasn't most likely for publishing. It was for all sorts of things. And, you know, you had the the leaders that went out and started to, know, the trailblazers that went out and started, you know, giving it a go, see what happens. And wow, that was that was successful. And now now we have more of a clear picture. Those of the people that have been sitting going, I don't know if this is for me or I'm just getting into publishing and

Joe Solari (1:04:58)
Yeah.

Kelli Tanzi (1:05:09)
and I haven't even published yet, what are my options? I think the risk is that you do want to do all the things, all the Patreon, the Kickstarter, the direct sales of this. And I think you're right in saying, and I think this is also coming with Russell that we just had last week. Pick a thing, make it work.

If it doesn't work, fix it, change it, do what you need to do. And then after you're comfortable and you're succeeding with that, then you can try something else and add in Patreon or something. So I think it's just interesting that when you have a community of other authors that have that experience, that's one of the things that you do get from being in these, even if it's not the in-person event, but doing all the other events as well. If that makes sense.

Joe Solari (1:05:31)
Yeah.

It does, it does. you made me think like, so like, kind of an analogous to that is this idea of the conversation that we were having yesterday about, like, we wanted to get together and talk because

I have a hundred percent confidence that Damon will figure out the technology. But then there's how do we make this a success for the industry? And when we choose to do certain things and how we do certain things is what's in our control. Right? So like one of the, we're in a window now we're at whatever is 40 days, 44 or five days from the show where like, I've got a lot of great ideas, but the team has 100 % ability to tell me no.

just to remind me because I get so excited about what we could potentially do. And it's like, that's a good idea. Let's write it down in the parking lot and implement in 26 or 28 when it is going to work, trying to make it happen. Now is like, no, we have these five things that are important to execute this year. This is one of them, right? We want to make sure that we walk away with really good examples for people.

Jack Shilkaitis (1:06:43)
Hehe.

Kelli Tanzi (1:06:45)
Yeah.

Joe Solari (1:07:00)
in real life to inspire them to take the virtual signing tool and some of these other initiatives where they need to go. and so that's just for authors. It's goes for you the same. You're creative. got all kinds of ideas. You talk to another creative, you see this bright future chill. What were you supposed to like?

And on the other side of my business where I work with authors, this is something that happens every single time when they come back from shows. I met with Sally and we got this new idea to co-write the series about this dark secret. really, when are we going to do that? What are we going to put aside for that? Because we had a business plan. yeah, you're right. So go back and tell Sally we're to do that in twenty seven. Right.

Not saying it's a bad idea. I don't want to, you know, rain on your parade. Let's plan for 27. Let's and let's actually plan up into that and make it even better. But we have some really cool stuff. That needs to be finished.

that's going to turn into cold hard cash sooner and has much more certainty. when you're in that world of possibilities as a creative, they all seem the same. The Sally thing and the project that's due in 90 days.

Jack Shilkaitis (1:07:58)
Mm-hmm.

Right, right.

Joe Solari (1:08:11)
I hope you don't, I'm not making

anybody feel too seen, but like.

Jack Shilkaitis (1:08:14)
No, no, no, no, no, no, I think for

creatives, I think that's like, there's there's like infinite possibilities. There's an infinite number of directions that you can go in. And so that means it's and talk is cheap. So it's really easy to be like, oh, yeah, we could do this and this and that. And like, you know, I don't need to sleep so I can do these other things. Like sleep is optional. Right. And you you get begin to make all these plans. And and then the problem is that you without

Like you said, focus on the thing that has the shorter time horizon. The thing you might be really excited about right now, maybe you have to put that on the back burner and then like you said, maybe that's 2027, maybe that's 2028. Heck, maybe it's 2032. Whatever it looks like. But the problem is that if you don't do that, the thing that has the more immediate time horizon isn't going to happen.

Joe Solari (1:08:54)
Yeah.

Jack Shilkaitis (1:09:02)
Because that other thing is taking all your attention and then that thing's not gonna happen and then all of a sudden, you're not getting any wins, And that's discouraging. And that's like, you're sinking down into a hole and yeah, you just gotta finish what's in front of you. ⁓

Joe Solari (1:09:09)
Yeah, yeah.

Well, and

you know, this gets into the nuances of the how publishing works is the real, the real driving force is a thing called cumulative advantage. It's, it's, it's a compounding of your audience over time. Nothing goes viral. That's things can be amplified, but the actual idea of what is true word of mouth of,

somebody suggesting your book, another person picking it up and reading it, that's what's considered a complex contagion. Right. So like it doesn't just happen like that. It takes trust in another person. It takes trust in a brand. Right. That only builds up over time. And if your brand is like all over the place, then like you never build up that momentum. Right.

And so it's like, why isn't it going? Well, it's because you were on Patreon and then you were on Kickstarter and then you're over here. And it's like, I understand you want all the customers. OK. But back to that policy idea, what customers are we going after and building right now? it's KU customers. OK. Very different marketing strategy.

Don't worry about direct sales. Don't worry about this. Don't worry about that because that's a subscription service on a particular platform that needs to be marketed to a certain way. And you have to do these things. God bless. Let's do it. But if you 10 % all of them, then it's like what you're just saying. Nothing. There's no wins.

Jack Shilkaitis (1:10:32)
Yeah.

Right.

Kelli Tanzi (1:10:34)
I just wanted to kind of touch in on about the the reader event. I know it's being ⁓ shifted over to to the Paris Hotel. So what what's going, what are some of the things that are happening within the the reader event that would be, you know, really exciting to know about?

Joe Solari (1:10:49)
Sure, sure. there's the specific thing you're talking about is why we're doing that is more logistical with the existing contracts that we inherited.

they could give us that space for the full day. It's actually hard on us because we're like closing down the one show completely and moving over to this other place. So it's gonna be a little limited in the sense of it's just a signing. So this year we've totally focused on audience building, right? So being like kind of a teaching moment representative to authors is like knowing what our constraints are in our business. We can't do panels, we can't do a bunch of stuff.

How do we make the most of this year and build for the next year? And we know we're doing some cool stuff with BookFunnel at this thing. We're running out our second year with the signing store. But this year, a massive amount of our focus has been on this whole idea around me, we're doing the marketing to bring readers in. right. We can, lot of shows you can go to, they'll tell you like, hey, you should do this marketing and do this course and do these kinds of ads. And it's like, how about we just go do the

We're pretty good marketers. like we've been running a campaign all year. understand we started with zero list. We built this audience from scratch. We have 4,000 people that have registered to show up for the event. It's a free ticket. We know of people that have paid for the VIP because we did this whole thing where it's like sign up for the free ticket. Then we upsell you into a VIP bag.

those people that pay 50 bucks for that, they're definitely going to show up. There's a couple hundred of them. Right. But if you do a little show math, we figure about half of those people will show up at the event. So we're going to have a much bigger audience. And so the idea is like we're building a multi-genre audience out there that physically show up and are really into listening and reading books. Right.

Where that goes in the future, this kind of is what we're talking about earlier. It's like, well, the following year in 26, we're going to add panels back in. We're going to do things because that point will have shifted the event to all in one place back at Horseshoe. And the reader event will fall on Saturday, which will get way more people to show up because it's not on a workday. So those are the kind of things like how we're leading by example.

dealing with our constraints, how we're changing this event. But why are we doing things like having a dude like James Patterson show up? Well, if you're a thriller writer, if I was a thriller writer, I would want to be at a signing table near there so I could steal his readers. Okay. Straight up poached the dude's readers. He's got more readers than anybody else in those genres. He's in a lot of genres too.

His main thing that he wants to talk about is a non-fiction book about disruption. Who would have thunk an 80 year old man is going to tell us about disruption, but it's going to be good. All of that is to say, we want to create an experience for readers that you can slot into. And if you're the kind of, we're not saying everyone should do a live event, but if you are, it's going to be a place where you can kind of do it again with support, like our Kickstarter thing.

not feel like you're just out on your own. And then it's something that we can do well year after year is consistently build that audience. And it gets back to that cumulative advantage thing. guess what? Next year, when we promote this event, we're going to have pictures of a lot more people in the room with bags with books of James Patterson. We've got a super big guest coming in 26. That guest has agreed.

to be part of a graphic novel anthology. So we're going to do another anthology that will launch at the event. This is another crazy idea of ours where we've got Robert Napton, who's the head of legendary comics. So he knows the thing about putting out graphic novels. He's going to be our editor. We're going to do a multi-genre graphic novel anthology.

and have a pretty big deal author with a short story in there as well. And we're going to deliver it in November 26. So like there's logistical stuff with getting the artist to draw this thing early and how we do all that. But again, it's like we're trying to help everybody think through like, ⁓ you know, have I thought about doing a graphic.

Here's all the here's maybe a way to try it out with us. Here's a guy you could like part of our requirements are if you want if you want to be considered in that graphic novel anthology at that show, you have to attend Robert Session this year. Because he's going to explain to you their process and how they adapt, you know, written form. To graphic novel treatment. So even if you weren't planning on doing it,

with us learning that would be super helpful if you're other people. like that all for us, like everything kind of starts to blur, like having educational stuff that connects with the show, having the show be the fulfillment because in my perfect world.

Somebody is able to go to our event, stay for a full week in Vegas, eat in Vegas, drink in Vegas, and have the books pay for that whole thing and come home with a few bucks.

Jack Shilkaitis (1:15:47)
Right, right. No, that's a good vision to have.

Joe Solari (1:15:50)
Yeah, it's not gonna happen right away for everybody, we're like, we have to put all the pieces in place, right?

Jack Shilkaitis (1:15:53)
Right.

Kelli Tanzi (1:15:54)
Yes.

Jack Shilkaitis (1:15:56)
But it makes sense. It really does. Yeah, no, that's a good direction to take things in.

Joe Solari (1:16:05)
Yeah. Well, you know, we get and these are legitimate questions like you'll see on our ads and be like, how am I going to afford a $500 ticket? I'd have to sell this many books. And it's like, yeah, you would.

Jack Shilkaitis (1:16:19)
Yeah. Come sell them. Right?

Joe Solari (1:16:20)
Yeah, like, so like,

you're, it's a chicken and the egg thing. You're probably like, here's the other thing about this is like, when you think about the vast world of

You know, there's 34 million titles on just on Amazon. And then you start thinking about the competition and the knowledge, just the fee, the fact that there's a bunch of people that have never heard or seen of this podcast or book funnel, like how disadvantaged today.

Okay, like you thought you had a tough like and then like the people that don't come to live events and then the people that don't come to a lot to author nation. Like I think that our group we've got advantage like it's a it's a serious competitive advantage that makes it a lot easier to succeed. If you want to be like, I don't want to do this. Whatever. I don't care.

Jack Shilkaitis (1:17:01)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Solari (1:17:08)
you know, I'm just going to make it for those that do decide to come play on our awesome playground that it's the funnest, coolest, safest playground there is.

Jack Shilkaitis (1:17:17)
Awesome. Awesome. Well, I think, I think we have, we could keep going, obviously, but I think we've to wrap things up here for today just, just because this podcast cannot be, you know, 10 hours long. Who knows? Maybe a special episode in the future. We have toyed around. Well, yeah. And that, and that's the thing I should mention actually on that note.

Joe Solari (1:17:29)
Just come to the show and have this conversation.

Kelli Tanzi (1:17:29)
it

Thank

Jack Shilkaitis (1:17:38)
For those of our viewers who are used to attending Book Funnel Live, which are our monthly webinars, we're planning to do Book Funnel Live from Author Nation this year. It'll probably be one session, but like a longer session than what a typical one would be where you can jump in and jump out at different times. It'll be kind of fun. We're working on that a little bit here. What exactly we're going to do for that, but we are going to be doing that the Wednesday of...

Joe Solari (1:17:45)
Woo!

Jack Shilkaitis (1:18:02)
Author Nation. So look forward to that. Of course, we have Book Funnel Live in October, too, coming up. we've got that. I'll have more details for you all then. But anyway, we'll wrap up things here for today. Joe, I want to thank you for joining us. Before we go, anything you want to shout out? Where can people go to find out more about Author Nation? That sort of thing.

Joe Solari (1:18:23)
We never got to talk about my time share.

Emma Alisyn (1:18:25)
HA!

Kelli Tanzi (1:18:27)
you

Joe Solari (1:18:27)
I've got a multi-level marketing system here. Come on.

Jack Shilkaitis (1:18:27)
This was a joke before we started recording that rather than that's the reason why we had Joe on here. ⁓ Right, right, right, right.

Joe Solari (1:18:38)
No. So, AuthorNation.live is where authors go to sign up. ReaderNation.live is where you get the reader ticket. If you go to AuthorNation, ReaderNation is included to walk the floor. ⁓

as far as like selling books there, that's closed.

that you needed to be in there three months ago. So, but like anybody that's on here that's thinking about it, like please come meet Jack and Emma and Kelly and get your mind blown.

Jack Shilkaitis (1:18:58)
Yeah.

yeah, absolutely. It'll be fun. I know there's some people, some folks that I've met the last year, even the year before when before it was Author Nation that I got to see again and it was great to catch up with people in person. yeah, by all means, Book Fun will have a booth there. Come stop by and say hi to all of us. I also want to thank my co-hosts, Emma Allison and Kelly Tansey as always for...

Your help couldn't do this without you guys. So thank you for joining me today. And thank you to you guys, the viewers. If you're watching here on YouTube, please like the video and subscribe to the channel. And while you're there, if you want to leave a comment on your number one takeaway, that would really help to push this video out to other authors like you who would be interested in hearing this message. If you're listening on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or...

what have you, please follow us there and leave a review. It really does mean a lot to us. From all of us here at Book Funnel, I want to thank you for joining us today for this episode of the Book Funnel Podcast, and we will see you all in the next one.

Joe Solari (1:20:08)
Bye.