Why the Smartest Authors Don't Rely on Book Sales

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Your job is not to sell books. The smartest authors, they've gone beyond that. They're making merch, AI movies and shows, story letters, games, drink mixes, tons of wild things in the world beyond the book.
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Today, I'm gonna be sharing with you exclusive webinar I shared with members of the Creator Wood community to celebrate the launch of the Beyond the Book book, which you can download for free below.
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It includes 100 weird, wild, and fun ideas to help you make a living as an author.
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I'm gonna be breaking it down how you can do each idea, who it's right for, who it might be wrong for, and ultimately, hopefully you'll be inspired to take your author career to the next level after this video.
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All right, we're gonna dive in right now. I hope you enjoy it.
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I'll break down what Beyond the Book means in the beginning, and in the end, we'll dive into 25 of the 100 ideas because covering 100 ideas in this video would be way too much. [static] [ding] How's everyone doing?
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Where are folks calling in from? Put in the chat where you're at. I'm in San Francisco today, so I'll put San- Steve Allison from Arizona. Where are you, Steve? Phoenix, Arizona. Ooh, Phoenix. Lovely. Yes, absolutely.
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Weather isn't hot. All right. We don't miss the snow. I don't miss it either. Where-- Did you used to live in a snowy area? Beg pardon? Did you used to live in a snowy area?
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I did 28 years in the Army and then another 10 years training troops, but I lived in Colorado. Oh, nice. Okay. Thank you for your service. I love Colorado. It's very nice there. It is. It has its great moments. For sure.
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For sure. We have Los Angeles here. Winnipeg. I hope I said that right. Minneapolis, another Los Angeles, Virginia, Orlando. We're pretty much covering-- I guess we're missing New England.
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We're missing other countries like the UK. Chicago. Love Chicago, Atara. I used to live there. Amazing. Okay. I have a slide deck that's on the longer side, but hopefully manageable, question mark. We'll see.
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I think we'll get through it. But what this is for is essentially the Beyond the Book, which I'll describe what it's about. You all will be getting a free copy of the book tomorrow when we send out a webinar recording.
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So before we dive in officially, I'll just mention that Beyond the Book was actually what inspired Creator Wood. I used to have, it still exists, but I don't really monitor it anymore.
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I'm not really that active in it. But I used to be a part of this Discord community for authors called Beyond the Book, and what inspired Beyond the Book was essentially I had been
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building software for authors for a while, then I went to go be on the MrBeast team. When I came back, I kinda just quit my job and was like, "Okay, I'm just gonna go back to helping authors."
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I had a catch-up call with a bunch of my author friends, and I basically was just like, "Tell me what you need my help with. Tell me how I can help you." And everyone kept going back to the same things.
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They were-- At least what they were talking to me about. They were talking to me about, okay, they wanna make merch from their books. They want to think about doing things on social media.
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They wanna think about how they can build communities. And all of a sudden, at, like, my last call, Scott was his name. Scott, I should say, is his name. Scott Walker.
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He tells me, "I think you-- what you do is you help authors go beyond the book." And when he said those words, I was like, "This puts it all together." And what happened when he said it, I was like, "Wow."
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Had a lot of clarity, and I started a podcast called Beyond the Book. Funnily enough, that podcast is the Creator Wood podcast now.
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And in that podcast, I started interviewing authors who were doing things beyond the book, authors like Kevin J. Anderson, who
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if folks are familiar with the rock band Rush, he created books that literally included songs that Rush... Yes, 'cause he knows them. It's such a crazy thing. Yeah, his s- book had a soundtrack made by Rush. Pretty cool.
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It's amazing. One of my really great friends, David Vergots, who he's actually launching an AI movie soon, like a full feature-length AI movie. We think it's gonna be done in the next two months.
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Obviously, production timelines, things can shift, but things are on track so far, moving ahead really quickly. He has a feature-length AI movie coming out of his epistolary story called Scaremail. And Scaremail
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is basically story letters that are delivered every other week, 24 horror story-- 24 letters in one horror story that you have to read one at a time. And in the last two years since launching that story,
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he generated gross $4 million in revenue from that IP, and after ad costs, after production costs, he's done quite well. So that's really cool, and I was seeing that,
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and we were just all hanging out in this Discord group. And then one day, there was these two authors, Cassie Alexander and Novae Callum, who were talking about the fact that they were using AI videos to
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promote their books. They were creating these short little teasers on TikTok, and they were doing really well. They were getting lots of people to view these books.
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And honestly, I had gotten so passionate about Beyond the Book, and I was just so enamored by this whole world that we were building here, that when I saw this whole, "Wait, people are using AI videos?"
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I'd used AI videos to-- before, but I'm like, "People can actually sell books from AI videos." I realized, like, there's the bigger play here. Why?
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Why are we making AI videos to sell our books when we can have people watch our AI videos and then watch our full-length movies and shows? So it was literally that conversation exactly a year ago.
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It was actuallyCheck my calendar. So it's April 29th today. It was a year ago tomorrow that this all happened. It's been a year since the inception, the kind of weird thought of
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what if we were turn, turned books into movies and shows.
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And what's really cool is now the second version of the Movie Machine's coming out, which if y'all are here, as a thank you for y'all being here, I can't give you an exact launch date of the Movie Machine.
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What I can tell you is that we have a number of creators using it, but it's in a sort of like early beta, but we've been working out a lot of the kinks. We think it's a big step up, and
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my favorite part about it is that you can chat with the Movie Machine to make movies now. You don't need to click all the buttons. But let's put that to the side. As I said, it all started with Beyond the Book, and
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because of Creator Wood, I haven't really talked that much explicitly about Beyond the Book in a while. And to be honest with you, this is still, like, the thing I'm most passionate about.
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It's how do we turn a story, how do we turn an idea into essentially a mini Disney? And when I was at MrBeast, I s- learned something wild that got me even more passionate about this.
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And I've shared this stat before, but it's pretty wild, and it's that MrBeast makes a very small portion of his income from YouTube, from his actual videos.
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I can't say the exact percentage because, A, it's changed since I was there, and B, that would be not the best thing to do fully publicly, but it's such a small percentage that it's shocking.
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It's well under 10%, which is crazy. You're like, "Wait, the biggest YouTuber doesn't make most of his money on YouTube or even 10% of his money on YouTube."
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And the answer is he's built a whole world, the almost MrBeast cinematic universe at this point, beyond the videos. And I don't think we should all be doing exactly what MrBeast is doing for many reasons.
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We probably wanna create different stories, probably have different audiences, all these things, but there's something that we can learn.
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And instead of just telling you about going beyond the book in some long-winded rant, what I actually wanna do in this book, which you all will get, is give you 100 basically ideas of how you can go beyond the book.
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So what we're gonna do today is basically speed run through a lot of these. Candidly, if I chucked 100 ideas at you in the next 37 minutes, I think most of you would tune out by idea 30.
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It's a lot to take in, and the book itself is meant to be something that you can pick up, start reading, and then go, "Okay. Do I want to, do I wanna do this idea today or do I want..."
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So it's very fun in that perspective.
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And what I'm actually realizing, we'll cut this out of the recording, but what I'm realizing is I forgot to turn off something on my notifications, and I don't know if y'all can hear it. We're not gonna risk that.
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So let me turn that off. I apologize. There's, like, too many potential areas that notifications can come through. This is very dangerous. This is a minefield. Okay, back in the slides. I apologize.
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So- Can we clarify something real quick, Michael? To get their coins, they need to actually send an email to hello- Yeah, yeah... Creator Wood dot- 'Cause people could put their email in the chat here, but it feels...
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I mean, we could record the emails you put in here, but I don't want you guys to share your emails publicly. So just sending an email to us that I was here. But you're welcome to leave it here.
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We'll record all of these as well, so you don't need to send an email if your email's in the chat. But yeah, I don't necessarily wanna force you guys to have to send in an email to have all of us see it. Okay.
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We'll go back into it, and apologies. I don't think I'll get any more notifications now. We've, we've surpassed that moment. So
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let's dive into the big picture here because Beyond the Book is maybe somewhat self-explanatory, but it isn't the whole thing. Many of you might not even consider yourselves to be authors. You might be screenwriters.
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You might just be folks who are exploring movie making or you're writers but you haven't made a book yet. So what I first wanna say is that welcome. This is meant for all storytellers, and I think
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it's so natural to think that the end of our story is the book, but it's not. It's just the beginning.
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And there's this awesome quote that Lucas Films had in how they built their empire that I adore, and it's that they wouldn't green-light any film if they couldn't at least make money in five ways from that IP.
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If you think about Star Wars, obviously you have the film itself. Check that one off. Lightsabers, which is one of the best-selling merchandise of all time.
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Think about just, like, I feel like forever, like, as long as humans exist, we will buy lightsabers for a Christmas gift or a birthday, right? It's pretty, pretty remarkable. So the whole idea is that
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for a while it's felt like to build these worlds, to create these experiences, to bring your stories to life in this way, that's for the big boys. That's for Disney. That's for Marvel. That's not for me.
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But we're at this interesting point in history where it's not even just AI, just technology, just the world we live in makes it more accessible to bring your IP to life beyond just movies and shows, but in a lot of interesting ways.
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So another reason that I get excited about going beyond the book is because of the business problems it solves.
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So I'm obviously slanting this presentation a bit towards authors 'cause it's called Beyond the Book, but all this applies across different creator formats. And look, some of you might
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see what I'm about to say and be like, "I don't know if I'm interested in really building a business doing this. I just wanna do this for fun." And honestly, like, I love that.
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You gotta be starting from a place of passion, but many of you might be interested in getting your work out there, making it sustainable, and turning it into a business. And ultimately,
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it's all about building a business model that can support itself over a period of time. And here's the truth.
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If you post a YouTube video, you're gonna get paid, with the video on YouTube, roughly, it depends on the length of the video. It depends on how much ads are in there. Depends on the exact target audience.
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But let's just say roughly $10 to maybe as low as $5. You could get lucky and get as high as $20 per 1,000, 1,000 viewers. That means on an average YouTube video, you'd
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literally be making just over a penny, one penny per person who watches.Look, if you have a bazillion viewers, you're sitting pretty. That's pretty nice. But
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unless you literally have millions of viewers, it's gonna be tough. It's gonna be tough. It's still really cool to get 100,000 viewers on YouTube, but it's not exactly sustainable, right?
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Which is crazy to say that, but it's also true. And in book world it's the same, right?
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Revenue per reader too low because if you're in Kindle Unlimited, folks are not familiar with what that program is, it's a program where readers subscribe each month.
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They pay now I believe it's $12 a month, and they get access to unlimited e-books that are inside of Kindle Unlimited. And then authors get paid out per page read, typically 0.4 pennies, so 40% of a penny per page read.
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Which means that if your book's 250 pages, you might walk away with something like two bucks after a reader reads it. Or excuse me, not two bucks. Sorry. One dollar. I did my math wrong. $1 for a reader to read your book
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ain't bad, but all of a sudden you're gonna start to see how you need a lot of readers, right? A lot of readers to start to make it make sense, and especially every creative hobby typically has a cost to it.
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If it's not just time, it's AI compute. AI compute's a real cost. I would love if we didn't have to spend money on AI compute and running all these servers and all the chips, but that's part of it.
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It could be hiring a cover designer if you're in the book world. It could be any number of things.
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And definitely what's beautiful about technology is it does bring down the barrier to entry, and we keep wanting to do that, but there's still some time, still some investment in there.
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And the issue is if your revenue per reader is low or per viewer, it's gonna be hard to make it work, right? You're gonna need a huge audience, or it might not pay back.
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Second is you can't afford to market, and this has nothing to do with the size of the audience. This is purely the equation on a per viewer or per reader basis. Nowadays, and there are some exceptions to this,
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but marketing is typically an investment that you have to make to get your work out there.
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And whether a studio makes an investment on your behalf, which is what's done traditionally in creative fields, and as a result of them taking that investment, they typically take on all of your rights and the lion's share of the profits.
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That's what they pa- that's what they get for taking on that risk, or you can take on the risk yourself, which would be at a much smaller scale, but, uh, it's gonna be significant as well.
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Even 100 bucks spent on marketing is nothing to snuff at. The issue becomes how can you afford to reach people and have a business model that supports reaching them, right?
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And a good example of this is if I have one film for $5 that someone could buy through TVOD, transactional video on demand, which is roughly a $20 billion market, which is actually larger than most people think.
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Yes, Netflix makes a lot of money on subscriptions.
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Netflix is about $40 billion a year now and growing, but transactional video on demand, meaning people just renting movies on an Amazon Prime or when you sign into your Roku or whatever, right?
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That's a $20 billion market. Okay, so I rented my thing for five bucks. Maybe I have to pay them processing fees and a platform fee. I'm left with something like three to four dollars. Okay, great.
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That means that to make any money, to not... to just not lose money, I need to then acquire a reader or a viewer for less than three or four dollars. That's really hard. Now, it can happen. It can happen.
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But to give you guys perspective on the cost behind marketing right now,
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if you're gonna pay for an ad on Facebook, it's gonna cost you just to get views, impressions on Facebook, something like usually $10 for probably this market per thousand views if you're advertising in, we'll say, higher income countries where people could probably afford to do that, right?
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'Cause in places where there might be cheaper eyeballs, AKA places like India, you're probably not gonna be able to charge $5 for something 'cause that's gonna be much more money for someone there relative, right?
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$10 per thousand people just to see your ad on a platform. If you're gonna be working with a creator, some creators will do things on an affiliate, which is great. These are people who post online on your behalf.
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Those are awesome, and that's great. Most creators will not work on an affiliate. Since they have an audience that already trusts them, they'll typically charge $20 per thousand views. Can you get someone cheaper? Sure.
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Are there people more expensive? Yeah. I've seen ones go all the way up to $300 per thousand views, which is for very niche audiences. And this is not for a thousand people buying your film.
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This is for a thousand people learning about your film. So then how many are gonna convert? And then lastly is clipping, which is the cheapest CPM now.
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There's a barrier to entry here that I don't like, that I'd love to change, but it's a new advertising format that kind of has been born in the last two years, where when you see a live streamer, let's say Kai Cenat or there's a bun-
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If you're not familiar with the Twitch streamers, it's a very interesting niche of the world and of the internet. They're gonna...
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They get themselves out there by spending, many of them, seven figures plus a year on clipping. What clipping is, is you take a long form video, like a movie or show.
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You put it in a Google Drive folder inside of a Discord group. A bunch...
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And this is, this sounds like sci- Like this sounds like I'm making up something 'cause it's just so crazy, but you have a bunch of 15-year-olds in a Discord group or just people from all over the world, right?
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Cutting up this long form 90-minute movie, taking parts of it, and essentially making them into viral memes on the internet that can get views.
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If any of you have been on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and seen shows like Friends, seen shows like How I Met Your Mother,
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this is almost like canonical IP, I guess, over the last 30 or 40 years in television, right? If you've seen these clips and go, "Wow, there's so many of these clips flying around.
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It's almost like I could watch these clips forever."
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The answer is all of that's being paid for behind the scenes, and that payment rate varies, but typically think an all-in cost of $2 per thousand views, sometimes even as much as $3.
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If you're really lucky, you can get it for closer to $1.50 all in.All this to say that everything I've observed, for the most part, outside of the viral Timothée Chalamet campaign, right, whatever, around Marty Supreme, outside of like things going viral,
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all the studios, all the people, everything are investing in their growth. So the question becomes not, "Oh my God, I need endless money to market myself." No, you don't. You actually don't.
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What you need is a math equation that works in your favor because if you know you can spend $5 and get out 20, then do that, and then reinvest that 20 into making 80.
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Now, that sounds like crazy talk, but no, that's really how this works if you have something where you get someone to, to view something and like it, and then keep going on. So it becomes two things here, right? One is
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when you think about film or even books, creating in series just makes financial sense, and a lot of people from the creative sense will be like, "Ugh, I don't want to do that." Don't listen to me. That's fine. Also,
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just know that might not be the best decision.
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You could still probably succeed not doing that, but logically, people will retain more and binge more of your films if they're all in an episodic series or a franchise of movies or shows. That's one. Two is
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what if you had ways to make more money to create a better experience for your fans beyond just the screen, right?
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Then we could actually build a stronger business and invest in growing more, which explains why MrBeast to this day has never made a profit on his YouTube videos. He really does give away all the money.
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That's not hyperbolic, but he also has a great business because he's built something beyond the screen in chocolate bars and Lunchly, which you don't need to start your own chocolate bar company. Please don't.
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And the next thing is it is very tough to differentiate.
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In the film space, there's less volume of films, so candidly, this is something that, you know, as AI kind of makes it easier to make more films probably will be a problem in several years from now.
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But there's such a supply of books. There's way more supply than demand in almost every niche imaginable that actually being able to stick out to readers is hard, and
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creating something beyond the book actually could be a way to differentiate and bring new readers in a lot more easy. So that's what we're going to talk about today.
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These three things is what going beyond the book can solve. It can help you essentially make more money on average per reader.
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As a result, you'll be able to invest more in growing, and because it actually differentiates you, it will be even easier to grow because people will be more interested in what you're doing. This is in the ideal world.
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So now we know what going beyond the book is from a business perspective. Then the question is, how do we do this? And we have a little-- the, the words are bleeding together here, but the idea is that
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your stories can have anything around it, anything, literally anything around it, and today what I want to go through with you is the different things you can do around it. And I've got I think about, let's say,
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20 minutes where what I'm gonna do is share high level ideas, share some implementation on things, and I'm gonna bucket these into three categories, okay? Three categories. So
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we're gonna talk about things you can do when you're getting started,
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things you can do when you're starting to invest more in your IP and grow more, and then things you can do to almost build your own mini empire in Disney.
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So we're gonna talk about these three stages, and we're probably gonna spend most of our time in the beginning because honestly, there's some fun stuff here.
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So the first thing is I want you guys to understand at a high level are that I just talked about the business side of this, but now we're gonna start to have fun because at the end of the day, once you understand the business of this,
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there's not much more to it. The hard part is actually putting your readers and viewers first. So what we want to do is create something that people want to actually have, which is not actually the easiest thing.
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We want to create something that gets people excited, and we either want to do this through creating a story in a format that people want, a product that people want, or an experience, a way to market yourself that's going to engage people.
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I'll give one brief example for each. Imagine you doing a, let's say, billboard, right, in Times Square.
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You can do this on BLIP very cheaply, and you have your book on this billboard, and you can do this for like about 100 bucks, right?
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You have someone take a picture of it in Times Square, and you can even do a little scavenger hunt for your readers where it's if someone lives in Times Square, someone's gonna be there, and you take the picture.
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Like you'll get a signed copy or whatever. That's a way to get your book out in the wild and engage your fans around the community. That's just like one simple idea.
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In terms of products, as we'll discuss, one of my favorite ones is what Maggie's done with Trope Tales, which is essentially a cocktail brand for readers, which I absolutely adore, and it-- Let me just pull it up on my website right now.
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This is what it is. So essentially, she created this website we're diving into right now, folks, and it's
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a cocktail powder mix, like instant cocktail mix specifically for readers. So imagine all the different products you intersect with in your daily life, right? All the products you intersect with in your daily life
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and how you can create versions of this for your readers. And you might be wondering, "How did Maggie do this? Does she have a instant powder mix facility?" No, she doesn't. Instead, she had something much more powerful.
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She ran a Kickstarter, which if you guys aren't familiar with kickstarter.com, CreatorWise is going to be opening up our own crowdfunding, but I still encourage you guys to use Kickstarter as well, and it can be a great place.
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And what she did was said, "Hey, how do I know people want Trope Tales, right?"So she contacted manufacturer and she got a quote for what it would cost to make 1,000 of these drink mixes.
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And then she ran a campaign where her entire goal was to make more than the campaign, uh, th- than it cost to basically print her first batch of 1,000. Of 286 backers, she did over 13,000.
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She was able to print her first batch, and with no money out of pocket, started an actual powder mix drink brand from her apartment. She doesn't own a warehouse, she doesn't own a manufacturing facility.
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What she did is created something people wanted and sold it before they got it. Another example of this in the AI movie space is Novai Callum. He's an amazing creator who
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made a show called King's Weaver, which I'm pulling up right now.
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We all know that making AI movies and shows can have an expense to it, and you can of course choose to invest in your movie or show and hope that it gets an audience, or you can be like Novai, who actually shared their story with the world, and he was able to get $8,000 to back the first few episodes, which is more than enough to make an AI movie or show in terms of the first few episodes.
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If we're talking about a full length, if you're doing something like hiring someone else to do it, it could be a little tough.
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If you're doing it on your own, this is definitely enough to get you there if you're willing to put in the time. So either way, it's this is a great start. This is a really good sign.
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And if you look through it, all they really had here is images of the characters, which you can get when you upload a story to Creator Wood. And then I believe, I don't even know if he put it on this page,
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but I know he also had, like, a teaser, right? Oh, here it is. Yeah. This is the teaser. So you're welcome to go to the page and watch it. But that's it. So it wasn't, it wasn't like, "Here's my movie. Go buy it."
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It was, "Here's the idea of my movie." And also he's very open that it's AI. It's not like he's saying AI first and it's an AI show, but you will see they don't shy away.
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If I do the little word search for AI, there we go. Talking all about how generative AI makes it cheaper.
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And then we have something like epistolary.com, which is owned by one of my great friends, David, who has a feature-length movie coming out [laughs] for his, one of his story letters, his best-selling on ScareMail.
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This is a new way to tell stories through letters.
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So I'm showing you guys examples just so you can see, A, no matter how wild your idea is, you can start to share something with the world and essentially get backing for it, right? Find an audience for it.
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You don't need to take this huge risk doing something, 'cause Michael said it was exciting on a webinar.
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Come on, you can, you could actually get people to support you in it if they also think it's cool, and you get rewarded for your creative energy, right?
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Which is, like, the most awesome and cool thing in the world, that your creative energy. And the next thing is that there's just so many different things you can do. I just showed you an AI movie or show.
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I'm showing you these story letters now, which David also pre-sold to his audience too, and then Novai's... Sorry. Maggie's Trope Tales, which is also pretty cool and it shows you the scope of what's possible. So
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what I bet a lot of you are thinking are how do I set up something like this? And this is actually idea number one in the Beyond the Book, okay? The first idea in the Beyond the Book is about essentially how do
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I set up what I'm calling a ghost listing of your product or your idea, right? And this is where you have a few options. So Kickstarter, like I mentioned, which is totally free to use.
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Creator Wood's gonna be coming out with their own premier crowdfunding feature for AI movies and shows. But another option is just setting up a webpage. Just setting up a webpage and seeing what happens.
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And it could be scary to zip your own website, but I've honestly recently been using tools like Lovable to build out experiments like this, and it is so easy to use. I'll put it in the chat, the website, lovable.com.
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Like, you can just chat this thing and make a website in minutes. I'm, uh, it sounds like I'm overexaggerating. I'm really not. I don't know anyone at Lovable.
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I have no, I have [laughs] no, n- nothing to gain by sharing that, with that. It's just very interesting. So you can actually build, here's what my idea could look like if it came to life. Let's see if people like it.
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Let's see if people think it's cool. Let's see if people are willing to actually pay for it or sign a wait, sign up for a wait list. So it depends on how you're approaching it, Richard. So with Maggie, how she did it was
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reaching out to other collaborators, right? On Kickstarter who had run similar campaigns and asking them to promo her campaign to them. So she didn't spend any money out of pocket marketing it. Y-
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Marketing is gonna take effort or it's gonna take money. It's one of the two. You can hire someone to do it for you or pay a bunch of money in ads, or it can take effort.
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But full-time job is, it, it depends on what you're looking to do. If you wanna raise a million dollars on Kickstarter, yeah, it's gonna probably be a full-time job.
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If you're looking to raise, like, let's say a couple thousand dollars, $10,000, that doesn't necessarily have to be a full-time job.
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And the next thing is that if something has true category demand, people really want the idea. What you should be able to understand is where is my target audience located on the internet? Where can I find them?
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What Facebook group are they in? What Reddit group are they in? What creators are they following? What other Kickstarters may they have backed? And be able to actually very quickly reach them.
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And if you can't map out where your audience hangs out, it's a good sign that your Beyond the Book idea might not be targeted enough.
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Because if we're trying to put our readers first and our viewers first, we have to know who they are and where they are. And if we can't start with that,
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then we might not be ready to press launch on a Kickstarter or something of that nature. And oh, yeah, and that's probably, don't worry about if Woody responds to you.
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We're, we've been experimenting with our, like, AI helper, and he's sometimes right, sometimes wrong. So we're training him up so that you can get very quick answers to questions. But that was incorrect, Michelle.
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So that is the big idea here. So what I'll now do is go back, ch-ch-ch, to our handy slides, and let's start going into some of these ideas.
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So-I'm gonna cover 25 key ones that I wanted to bring out for you guys, and then we'll cover questions, and I think we'll be-- that'll give us enough time. So we already covered ghost listing.
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For book trailers, book trailers is another fun way to go beyond the book or just creating a trailer of, or a proof of concept, which Creatorwise is gonna have a se- feature for that.
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The next one is a character social media account. This one's kind of fun. You can build a following for your character, and you guys are gonna be like, "What are you talking about?"
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But there's actually for years now AI characters that have been getting followings online, and there's this whole niche of Twitch called Vtubing. Virtualtubers, they're essentially like literal...
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In this case, it's usually a 3D, like overlay over someone. But essentially, these streamers are fictional characters and people acting like fictional characters. And what do you know?
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If you can post something on Instagram and get someone to like your fictional character, you probably are in an interesting position to be able to write a story about them.
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Next is the Kickstarter, which we already covered. I wanted to show you some of this stuff as well. Next is the print on demand merch test.
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A lot of you all probably know about these services, but if not, that's what we're here for, right? There's two companies that I like. Printful is my preferred one, printful.com, F-U-L, and then Printify.
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But these are two print on demand services that if you ever have an idea for, let's say, a shirt to go along with one of your stories or a baseball cap, instead of printing it and shipping it and all of that nonsense, that's not the fun part about it, right?
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You can actually design it and have it shipped print on demand directly to your fans. Another one is a world building newsletter.
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Folks might be familiar with Substack and other platforms like Beehiiv, although Substack probably has more discoverability in this aspect. But you can create essentially a newsletter that allows you to
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share something tangential to your world and stories that can engage people. For instance, I know many of you here are writing historically oriented stories and building historically oriented fil- worlds.
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You writing about the history that influences your stories
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is super interesting, and if you can get people online to get interested in these historical stories, and again, they're not gonna be like hour and a half long articles, but a two minute long, three minute long read, that's a good sign that if people want to hear more about maybe this interesting
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niche area of the Cold War that you're doing, then hey, maybe you create more of that.
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And what's interesting is this incentive structure around if people are reading something already and like this topic, let me create more of it, is exactly how even like academic research works.
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The mo- the least commercial field still operates under what other papers are getting cited, what are other people talking about, how can I be part of the conversation and innovate in an interesting way?
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The next one is a fan community as a product. So if you're ever wondering, huh, will people care about the type of stories I'm interested in?
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The answer is, what if I created a space like a Facebook group or a Discord that other people could be a part of that are interested in that topic? Here's an example. Let's say you are creating
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post-apocalyptic survival fiction, which I was doing that at one point, so I love that. I wrote three books in that series.
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A lot of readers who read post-apoc survival fiction are interested in sharing tips from a prepper perspective.
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If folks are not familiar with the prepper community, there's thousands of niche and fun communities in the world. That's a new one for maybe some of you.
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But for folks who are familiar, you'll know that being able to share tips around food storage, and I'm not like thinking the world's gonna end tomorrow, by the way, just so you know.
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I just, I find it very intellectually interesting, and I've since stopped writing those books because it's too depressing for me to think about that all the time when I was writing it.
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Create a community that actually helps people start thinking about prepping, reading other prepping related books, which these were all fiction books, by the way, that were helping people learn. Very interesting.
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You could start that, and then from there validate that people actually want similar stories because the actual death knell in all of this is that
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people aren't that interested in the world you're creating, and that's okay, by the way, meaning don't feel like your world's still not worth creating even if one person wants it.
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But the trick is like what work are you gonna do to put it out there? And here's the thing, you're probably already overwhelmed. You should not be doing all these ideas.
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You should just be doing like one, two, maybe three if you're extra ambitious, okay? Maybe, if you're extra ambitious. Next is the story letter. We already talked about this. That's the Dave Vergots epistolary model.
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Very cool. I have a podcast with him actually that if you wanna deep dive into that in specific, he's very generous at sharing his knowledge, and we can link to it in the comments here. It's a, it's a podcast about it.
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Next is special edition. So a special edition book is essentially how you turn your book itself into a cool product where people just want to hold it. They don't even care about the story.
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That's the best special edition. They just want it. They don't care. And you can do this for movies and shows too with like really cool DVDs, okay? An example of this that I haven't seen done yet
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that I love and I'm like obsessed with is if you're doing a book, let's say like for LitRPG or gamers, something in that space, having a actual dark screen night mode, right?
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Because if you're re- when you're... You know how a lot of gamers will have, okay, I've got the black background for all my apps, all my screens, having your book be like that.
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It's probably gonna be hard to even read, but the whole point is I'll buy the e-book and buy that extra book that's like in this really interesting format.
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I would love if a fantasy book had dragon claws in it, like a dragon clawed book or dragon fire breathe, like maybe there's like a fire breathing on it. You could buy a flamethrower for that maybe. I don't know.
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That's just a maybe a fun excuse to make a flamethrower a tax write-off, which in that caseCan't get mad about it.
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But all this to say that there's so many different ways you can reimagine a special edition, and this is where I'm giving you 100 ideas.
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But if you apply all of this with the framework of putting your readers first and what would excite your readers, there's actually unlimited ideas here.
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This is idea infinity, and that's why there's unlimited things for us to create. Next is the reader event. Doing this in person is a little intimidating. I'm not gonna recommend it, but virtual. Think virtual event here.
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The best I've seen on this is essentially doing conferences, virtual cons, where you bring in other creators to also talk to their audiences too. It's very sneaky.
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It's very sneaky, but in a very smart way, where let's say, for instance, you're creating a romantic comedy film or book. You could invite other romantic comedy authors,
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creators, filmmakers to a virtual con where you can talk to your fans. And in the process, you don't have to really pay any money for it, maybe a Zoom subscription, which is 15 or 20 bucks a month that you'd use it.
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Maybe it's a little bit more, but you get my point. Relatively low cost, and in fact, I personally, if someone actually commits to running a fan conference, will pay for your Zoom if one of you guys does that.
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I, I will be so excited. Just any of these ideas, I wanna see it when you guys do it. I will also be your supporter as well.
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Don't take my, my buying your thing as validation that it's good for a broader market, but I'm here for you. It's very exciting. And you have them talk about, hey, these are things with, let's say, about their story.
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They're talking about the broader genre. They're talking about if it's maybe historical fiction or maybe it's science fiction, they're talking about the tech or the history. There's so many things to talk about.
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You bring people together, you bring people into a shared space, you're gonna build trust, you're gonna build relationships, future collaborations, and hopefully have a lot of fun.
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And what you'll notice about all of this is none of this said cut a huge check or fly across the world. All this you can do from your couch in your underwear if you so choose. I'm not looking.
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Then there's the DIY done with you, done for you. So this is better for nonfiction, does work for fiction too, but certain stories have a sort of
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educational aspect to it, right? I'll use sci-fi as an example here, but you can literally put endless-- insert endless different variations.
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My science fiction books had a lot, especially when I was deep in writing them, tons of stuff to do about technology in the near future. A lot of it was about nanorobotics in specific.
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I was obsessed with the atomic precise manufacturing revolution. I've already lost you because you're-- that's way too geeky, I know. But
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if I was to do something about that, you could do a sort of, okay, maybe I teach a class where people can learn about this. Or
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let's say if I'm targeting people who are interested in a certain aspect of technology, like engineering, maybe you're interested in electrical engineering or software engineering or something in that respect.
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You could write a book, teach people about what that specific field, help train them up hands-on, or if someone reads your book and thinks you're a good engineer, you can do it for them.
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I actually know a science fiction author, his name's Elliot Pepper, who does this. People read his books and then go, "Wow, you're super insightful in how you think about the future in your sci-fi books."
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And he goes, "Thank you. I'm happy to consult for your company." And he makes a living consulting for companies. And Neal Stephenson used to do this as well, and he made-- he did very well for himself.
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If you don't know Neal Stephenson, very famous science fiction author, and to my understanding, William Gibson did the same thing. And I think they still might, by the way.
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When I say did, I know that they have in the past and that they currently do. Very lucrative to extend beyond your fiction in these way.
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And these are, again, fiction authors doing this, going beyond the book in this very particular and very interesting way. Next is like the bookish consumer packaged good. This is Maggie and Shrope Tales.
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I showed you that example. Now we're on this slide where I'm more doing the talking. But what I loved about that example is it's broadly applicable. My--
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what I'll say here, and I firmly believe, is that everything that someone goes to Walmart and buys, like everything on their credit card statement or debit card or bank account statement, whatever you use to pay for things,
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is something a creator, a storyteller, because storytellers are the world. We're the people, the storytellers, that people love being in these worlds.
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Everything that you buy at Walmart could become something that you have your own spin on. And in today's day and age,
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it can either be done through print on demand or doing what Maggie did, which is white label, and you run a Kickstarter to do the print run. And that's just pretty cool. And there's almost endless opportunity in that
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and endless things to think about to build things for a broader audience that can also repeat purchase things too, which is great. World Building Bible is a product. This one is thinking about,
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okay, let's say you have-- this is very obviously to have a world building intense story, so this wouldn't work for like contemporary romance.
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But if you're creating a historical fiction world and it's grounded in history, people are gonna want that. That could be really good educational, very good resources for people.
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The same thing's true for fantasy, not necessarily from an educational perspective, but people love the maps. People love, love maps.
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I actually helped a really big YouTuber create his own maps, which was very exciting, and it was actually really funny to see that that was like the number one thing people wanted.
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Made sense because all of his videos, he likes to talk about maps. Okay, continuing on with some more ideas here, and then we'll pauseI'm here for questions, and you'll get 75 more ideas from me soon because why not?
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Is the author experience package. So this is thinking about-- and this is not gonna be comfortable to everyone. To be honest, this is not that comfortable for me.
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But I brought it because I've seen it and it's worked, and Maggie used to do this too. You can actually get, let's say, a day with the author or dinner with the author if you support them at a certain level.
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You have to be careful because a lot of this will be in person, but you could do phone calls too.
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But when I used to run a membership platform for authors and we'd help people come up with different tiers, one of the tiers we had some people do, and we literally had one person subscribe, was a tier where you'd pay $1,000 and that author would fly out to you if you're anywhere in the continental US and hand you your signed book, which is pretty wild.
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And think about this if you're selling, if you're a rock star, which I'm definitely not, I have a terrible singing-- I have a-- I don't think I have a nice talking voice. I have a terrible singing voice.
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But if you're a rock star on stage, you have that VIP backstage pass. What is your equivalent of a VIP backstage pass for your readers? Understanding that you don't actually have a concert that you're singing on.
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Next is the genre-adjacent product. So this, and this is really important. This whole time we've been talking about extending your stories, extending the world.
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But something that's really important to understand here is it doesn't have to be
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your story explicitly that you're extending, but it could be the tropes and-- of your genre or your target audience that you're then bringing to life through something beyond the book.
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So the genre-adjacent product would be, and you'll see some of these ideas overlap too, right? It's not like you only do one and it's in isolation. But the genre-adjacent product would be, okay, I have a,
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this is a very good hack by the way, a trip that I'm planning, and I'm gonna be planning a trip to name X country for name Y group of readers or fans.
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We're gonna go on a tour to like these six libraries, just I'm throwing stuff out there, and we're gonna watch this movie at a movie premiere and create this like really interesting experience.
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Get a free vacation essentially, which many YouTubers are doing this now. They're basically creating trips to their fans, which is I think really cool, and being able to do that. Now you might be like, "Merkle,
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that is insane. I'm not going on a trip with any stranger." Fine. Don't do it. Instead, create a travel guide, right? There's the high lift and the low lift version of every one of these ideas.
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The low lift version, create a PDF travel guide for fantasy lovers visiting London. What are they gonna see? What are they gonna want? That's a really interesting thing
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and allows you to build trust with a group of people that you wanna create future experiences for. And you don't necessarily-- some of this you can obviously charge for.
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Obviously, a lot of these ideas co- you could charge things for, but maybe you give that PDF away for free. Next is the interactive short story.
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I love these, and nowadays if you're using something like Lovable too, candidly, it's like easier than ever to make things like this.
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But think about something like a visual novel or like a choose your own adventure novel.
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And why I say like a short story is because I think these are a little bit more of a novel experience, meaning I don't know how retentive they are.
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I don't know if someone's gonna come back and want your interactive short story day and day and day and again and again.
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But to do it once and to get them interested in it and to get it exciting, it can be this interesting experience where it's like, what if I had a branching story that had three or four different options, and they had to click buttons to see what they want?
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That can be very interesting. And by the way, although tools like Lovable make this really easy now, which is great, this has been going on for a long time.
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Chapter apps have basically been doing these, for lack of better words, like text message interactive stories. Particularly, it's very popular in romance, and these apps have gotten tons and tons of downloads.
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Now a lot of this has shifted to verticals.
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A lot of the companies that made those apps are now making verticals, and actually Real Shorts, the company that has pioneered a lot of the vertical market in the US, which vertical television for those who don't know, nine by 16, yada yada, watch on a phone, 90-second videos.
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They're very fun. I like it a lot. It's a big market. It's growing. The point is that Real Shorts literally used to be and still h- owns the, an interactive story app.
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Behind the scenes content, this is useful if you can be strategically smart with this. A lot of people candidly, I think... A lot of people candidly, I think
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wonder behind the scenes means I have to share what I'm drinking for coffee in the morning, like you're like a 15-year-old influencer and, "Oh my God, are the girls gonna watch what I'm wearing for makeup to school?"
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Which is a huge genre of content on social media. I don't think your readers necessarily want that. That's probably not what your audience wants.
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But for instance, if you are creating something historical, and you're gonna be in the archives of name X library doing research, that is super cool. I wanna see you in the archives.
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I wanna see, not maybe in a video, but just an image in your thoughts. That's super cool stuff that is also engaging content for your specific audience. Other examples of this are,
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let's say for niches like equestrian fiction or sports romance, right? If you also happen to be a hockey player and write hockey romance, huh. Or hockey player, probably not in the NHL, but you get what I'm saying.
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Local hockey player. I know you're still the star of the team. It's fun.
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It's great stuff to share and important too, and stuff to, by the way, if we wanna AI-ify all of this, I've already told you how to do these interactive short stories with AI.
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It should be stated, but you can do any design with AI. [chuckles] But the other thing you could do is behind the scenes content for your characters
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that is AI, and you could even do this for TV shows because you might notice that Hollywood's new marketing strategy is just shutting down different cities to film their, film their scenes and then have all the pictures leaked of, "Oh my God, the new Spider-Man movie," right?
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That's the whole game, and it's very smart. People love behind the scenes. You can do the same thing with AI and create these sorts of behind the scenes moments with your characters.
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So to, to be clear, you can AI-ify every single idea in here if you want to. I'm not suggesting you need to, I'm not suggesting you have to, but you might want to. Genre community hub. I like this one a lot.
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I like this one a lot, but it needs explaining. SoOne of the things that I love most is a curator.
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I wrote a book now four years ago called Creator Economy for Authors, where I say there's three types of creators, and one of those types of creators was a curator. I don't recommend you read that book.
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It's not really outdated, but I just feel like you should read Beyond the Book tomorrow, and two books to me in one month is too much. But in, in that book,
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I define a curator as someone who creates and basically shares insights from other people, right? Meaning, and they give them credit. They're not saying, "I am this genius, I know everything." But they're saying, "Hey,
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here's five urban fantasy books you should read this month."
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So the genre community hub is essentially a book club or some space where you're curating knowledge and information for people and bringing them together around it. So imagine like an internet, for lack of better words,
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if you're on a college campus and you have all-- you're walking through it and you hear all the different flyers to different events going on, you're effectively creating that for your genre.
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Here's this con, here's this, and you create a site that people want to be a part of. And you might go, "That sounds super complicated." One, you could use something like Lovable to do it very cheap, very quickly.
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Two is this is essentially unbundling what big publishers are already doing, right?
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Book Riot is one example of many different blogs that are owned by publishers, big publishing houses, and they invested years ago into building their own broad-based blogs around all of commercial fiction to attract readers.
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Sometimes it was just YA focused, but oftentimes it was all commercial fiction focused. So you can now niche this down and create the Book Riot for your little... Not little, okay? You're compared to all of Random House,
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you're probably more targeted. Just a guess. Seasonal edition of things. People love seasonal editions. I almost think enough said there. That's really cool. Supplemental short story subscription.
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I'll give you one of my favorite examples, and let's head over to Patreon. I have looked at thousands of Patreon pages in my life, which I don't know if it means, if that's like depressing or cool or a mix of both.
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But Jack Steen is one of my favorites ever. Jack Steen is a horror author. They are epic, and they have this subscription on Patreon where it's basically, they call all their, their readers confession addicts.
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But if we go to their tiers, boop, they've got these options. Long-term resident. First of all, I love the branding, right? You're basically being immersed into a psych ward here. I just adore it. I think it's great.
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This is access to only Jack knows behind the confessions, which is a commentary series, and essentially each confession is a short story
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that is the main character of this story, Jack, who also, the whole kind of concept behind it, is that they are an, I'm forgetting the exact word.
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I don't think it's nurse, but wor- they basically work at an asylum right before, and they're there right as people die. They're basically the one, the last person they'll talk to before they die.
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So they have all these crazy stories, and this is what you're getting here. And what is amazing about this, okay, I will not say because I don't even know if it's fictional or not, okay? I do not know.
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I literally do not know. No one knows. That's the whole appeal of this. But it's framed as if it could be real, and Jack, the author, is framed as a real person writing this to you. This is freaking brilliant.
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This is brilliant, and exactly what you can do to create an immersive short story. Go beyond the book and start making $5 a month from your readers, which that's a lot better than $5 for one movie.
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And will all of your readers join this? No. Will all of your readers join this? No. But the ones who do really make it easier and more sustainable to do this. And also, it just sounds like a lot of fun doing this.
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Like, I'm a little jealous. Like, I really love what I get to do every day helping you all out, but also at the same time, I kind of want to write these.
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This seems so cool, and I think you guys applied to the things you love and what you're passionate about could do something similar. Okay, let's pivot back.
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I've been trying to show some contextual examples, obviously, because I feel like this is a lot to... It's, it's a big new world, right? But let's go back. Slideshow. Great. Next is reader rewards program. So I
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think this one, what I love about it is it's easy, and honestly, is a great way to grow. So how I would mobilize a reader rewards program is effectively like a street team,
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where you encourage readers to either share, not reviews. Reviews is not allowed because that violates Amazon's TOS most of the time. I wouldn't recommend doing that. But think if you post about this book online,
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if you create a TikTok of it or something of that nature, I'll give you and this extra bonus short story or the ex- this bonus novella or this bonus short film for free.
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You're essentially giving your greatest fans who are talking about you a reward. Now, you don't need to make this too official. The best
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fan reward program in the world was super unofficial, and I'm gonna say someone very specific here, Taylor Swift. She has the best fan rewards program in the world.
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If everyone's familiar with Tumblr, you might not be familiar with it because it's, it's still active, but I feel like it kind of had its peak moment like 10 years ago. Maybe people would disagree with me. Alas,
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Taylor has been on Tumblr for a long time, and Tumblr is a platform that really has these passionate fan communities.
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So a lot of her fans were on Tumblr, and she has over the years responded to personally, at least we think personally, we'll never know, but her account has responded to over 10,000.
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She's responded to 10,000 comments from fans. She has. And in her world, this is probably different from your world, but in her world, she rewarded people for fan engagement informally, right?
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Meaning it wasn't like a point system, with a deeper and closer parasocial relationship with Taylor. It's pretty cool. I'm
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respect because people love it, and basically it's if I talk about Taylor positively, maybe she'll share my story. Maybe she'll comment. Maybe I'll be invited backstage, which she would do this too.
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She would literally invite people backstage, do all these crazy things.And people are just in it. You're like, "Oh my God," like, "I need to make Taylor happy. I need to, like, talk about her positively."
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Which is why she posts a new song, a new album, and it's just gonna become viral forever 'cause everyone's talking about it all the time. Next, collaborative world-building project.
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This is essentially anthologies, but in the movie world, in show world, this could be essentially collaborative films where you might have shared characters or locations.
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On Creator Wood there's a feature where you can import characters and project-- sorry, characters and settings across projects.
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We're gonna be making it so that you can make settings and characters public, so you can literally have aspects to a shared world. I love that. Next is the book club kit.
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There's this group of creators, which I used to have this listed, I don't anymore, that I called them reading creators.
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A lot of them are on Patreon, and they essentially make money each month by having people pay them to give them a reading guide to a fiction book that they're about to read, which is pretty wild.
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You can do this for movie watching guides, anything. Really passionate people love diving into things. They love nerding out. They love discussing it, and you can do this virtually, right?
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You don't need to do a book club in your local town, although you could. Exclusive digital bonus.
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Less bullish on this, but I wanted to cover some of the lower lift ideas, although some of these probably don't sound lower lift, but give me a break, some of them are. This one's a lower lift one.
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Exclusive digital bonus, I like it. This is think you want to give it out to fans who subscribe to your mailing list, or you could make it paid.
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The thing that I've seen do best paid is, is this is not for everyone or for the faint of heart, but spicy character art, which I have-- yeah, I've literally seen that do quite well.
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I'm not suggesting that's for everyone. That probably won't work for your story, but hey, go for it. The monster romance people in particular are very particular about their images, but very passionate.
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I used to run a company where I got to see that. I was like, "Okay, this is a business." The other thing that I would say is that you can do things like, let's say it's a book featuring a pilot. It can be flight logs.
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It can be,
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let's say it's featuring, this is mirroring my life, but if you're CEO of a technology company and the story's about a startup, it could be boardroom meeting minutes, which could be interesting or fun depending on how you frame it, but essentially these digital bonuses.
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And this also overlaps the travel, uh, guide idea, which I gave you when we talked about the genre-adjacent products. Lastly, affiliate author network.
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I love this, and this is, like, a little bit more a way to formalize, hey, like, if people talk about your books, why don't they get paid? And then you don't have to pay them. It could be also totally informal.
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But essentially build a group of collaborators who know and trust you and have an audience, and work with them to swap your book, work with them to get your book out there.
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I've experimented with so many ideas before Creator Wood on what if we started a sort of ad network where authors could automatically embed a widget in their newsletter where they could get paid when other authors' books showed up in there, similar to an ad, instead of paying Meta or Amazon for ads.
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You could pay this newsletter provider and essentially have this show up, and this happens, like, on SparkLoop does this for, like, industries outside of authorship or outside of storytelling.
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SparkLoop is basically this for software companies and education companies, so I thought, "Oh, wow, let's do this." So I, I'm very passionate about that one. I've thought a lot about it.
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Yeah, this is about a quarter of what the book covers. I could go into more ideas, but I said I'd lose you at thirty. So we're not at thirty yet, so we'll stop now, and I'll absolutely take some time for questions.
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I've got at least the next fifteen minutes with y'all. I wanna first say the book's coming out tomorrow with the recording, so you'll get it.
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It's illustrated a little bit, not like a ton, but there's some basically illustrations in there that are fun that are, like, space cowboy themed.
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The only reason I don't have my cowboy gear today is 'cause I recently got back to San Francisco from New York, and I've been traveling a lot. But it's great, and then you'll get the recording of this.
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And then separately, I think that's all I got. I'm gonna stop sharing my screen. Sorry if I overwhelmed y'all, but this is a lot of fun for me.
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And what I'd love to do now is open up to either general questions or if you have something specific to your story, because I can obviously-- I can only go so far in this sort of generalized format.
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So I'd love to dive deep with some of y'all. Were you invited to Taylor's house, Erica?
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No, sadly, I did not get that invitation. [chuckles] Yeah. And if I had, I would have-- the NDA would prevent me from telling you about it. Any questions, y'all?
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Or just everything's good? Life's good. Lot to take in, I'm sure. Do we need lick to do this? LLC. Oh, LLC. Sorry, I-- wow. Wow. Great question. Okay, I'll give you my advice here. I'm not a lawyer,
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so I, I recommend consulting a lawyer if it comes up for sure. But for almost all the ideas I mentioned, no, except for
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if you are working directly with a manufacturer to print or ship a physical product, not print on demand, but you're going to do this white label yourself,
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I do think you could incur a level of risk that makes an LLC a good idea. Not necessary.
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It is almost certainly necessary if you're selling something that someone's going to consume or put on their body in the sense of, let's say, a cream or makeup. If it's anything cosmetic, you definitely need an LLC.
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The reason for an LLC really is it's a pass-through structure, right? From a sort of tax perspective, you're still taxed personally.
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But what it really is, it's a shelter for your personal assets where your personal assets remain separate from the business assets, and if the business ever gets sued, you're not on the hook for it.
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So technically, the flip side of this is you don't need an LLC for pretty much any of this.An LLC is technically always a good idea, right? It's technically always a good idea.
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Now, should it be a barrier to entry to get you started? No, because the risk of being sued over a landing page is next to none. The risk of being sued over a Kickstarter is next to none.
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As the risk of s- a lawsuit goes up, it becomes essential. But I... There's definitely benefits to LLCs as well. You can open a business bank account.
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You can get a separate credit line for your business if it's ever necessary. And then the biggest benefit to an LLC is being taxed as an S corp, at least in the United States, because LLCs...
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Or sorry, excuse me, you and your personal taxes are likely paying FICA at, I think the number's 12% typically of your first... I might get the number wrong, but it's about 200K in income.
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I might have the number wrong, but it's something like that, and it might be different if you're married or not.
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Again, I'm not an accountant either, but I know a reasonable amount, and I'm doing my best to not give any misinformation, so I... Double-check me, but I'm gonna try and be helpful. With an S corp, what's useful
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is that you can pay yourself out a salary, right? Which that salary might be... Well, if you're in the States, a reasonable salary would be something like 40K a year. That's reasonable for the most part.
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And then if you make... And this is, again, if your business has scaled.
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If you're then gonna make an extra 100K in movie royalties or book royalties on top of that, you would pay yourself out instead of through salary, through profit in the S corp.
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You still have to pay state income tax, you still have to pay federal income tax, but you don't have to pay FICA on that.
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So you actually save some money, and it can save, for many people, $5,000 or $6,000 a year having an S corp.
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Richard, I totally get not liking marketing. I think the first thing to think about is, like, the best... There's really one simple reflection. Back to this, the author's name.
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But I've recently had the opportunity, and I'm grateful for the trust, to spend $10,000 a day on Facebook ads for a book. On an individual book launch, $30,000 was spent in 72 hours.
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If that sounds like a lot of money, that's a crazy amount of money to spend on a book launch. And I was, like, scared.
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I didn't even know if I'd be able to do it to a certain extent because I'd never scaled a book ad that much that quickly, 'cause we were ramping it up from nothing to that at launch, and that was, like, what this client desired.
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And I, before Creator Wood, used to run, like, a sort of marketing agency for top creators, and he was one of my old clients, so I just took this on just to help him.
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And I was like, "All right, I'll do this for you if you really want this." I had a bunch of different concerns about it. And the campaign went okay.
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From an advertising perspective, I drove over 70,000 clicks to his book on Amazon, so that, that was effective. We got clicks at a reasonable rate, maybe 29 cents even at scale. The issue is
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from the get-go, and it's why I wasn't... I was... This was my core point. I was like, "Who's gonna wanna read this book?"
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Now, I'm not gonna be able to share the book 'cause that would then, that would ruin the confidentiality, but I couldn't figure it out, and they couldn't either. No one knew who would want to read this book,
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and they just thought, "Just market it. The book's here. We'll market it." And I'm like, "Yeah, but that's not how this works. You have to market something people actually want, and you have to know that they want it."
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All this to say, I actually returned 75% of his ad budget, refused to keep spending it, 'cause I just could not keep doing it. He wanted me to. I could not keep doing it.
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He got the results he wanted, but I told him that these results were much, much worse than they should've been because the conversion rate was really low.
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And the conversion rate was really low 'cause no one wants this book. And that's being blunt, and that's probably not true, but there's no clear audience for this book. The packaging isn't right.
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Yeah, no one's gonna see it and be like, "Oh my God, I need that." So what you need to know, the only thing you need to know is who needs to look at your story and be like, "Oh my God, I need that. I need to watch that.
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I need to read that." Who is that person? Tell me about them. Not they're this age and they live in this state. I don't care about that. Tell me about what they're interested in. Tell me about what gets them going.
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I need to know. If I know or someone like me knows, we can help you market your thing.
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01:05:16.468 --> 01:05:24.268
Setting up Facebook ads, all that stuff for people who don't like to do that, people who, like, don't like social media, creating, turning something into something... Uh, taking something and sharing it with the world,
391
01:05:25.788 --> 01:05:33.628
I'm not saying it's easy. It's not. But people are good at that. There's people out there who can do that. But
392
01:05:34.988 --> 01:05:44.268
we've all seen those movies that have huge ad budgets, the best marketing teams in the world behind them, and they flop. And the answer there is simple. No one ever wanted that movie.
393
01:05:45.038 --> 01:05:52.728
Hollywood, because they're secretive and they don't wanna know and don't wanna release things, they only know if something's gonna work until and after they spend oftentimes nine figures on it.
394
01:05:53.888 --> 01:06:05.548
In today's day and age, you don't have to spend any money. You don't even have to spend much time to validate an idea by just understanding first and foremost what has previously sold.
395
01:06:05.588 --> 01:06:19.158
And I'll give you guys the tip that we did at MrBeast. I think success begets success, and if you want to win at the game of creativity, you need to basically surround yourself with
396
01:06:20.068 --> 01:06:27.088
stories that are, quote-unquote, "winners," right? Stories that pay back, stories that sell, stories that people actually love and want.
397
01:06:27.168 --> 01:06:34.268
And there's, like, the sort of cinematic or literary or pompous way of looking at this, which is let's go to the Academy Awards and let's look at those. That's BS.
398
01:06:34.508 --> 01:06:48.428
What you wanna do is look at what the audience wants, right? Look at the data of what's sold. And what we would do is curate using Appify. Appify is this app that allows you to scrape different social platforms.
399
01:06:48.468 --> 01:06:49.678
We would take the top
400
01:06:50.868 --> 01:07:04.920
social posts across every platform and curate an internal app for Jimmy, AKA MrBeast, the most followed creator in the world, would create that for him to watch, and it would be his curated social basically experience.And he wouldn't really watch much social media outside of this.
401
01:07:04.960 --> 01:07:15.470
He has curated social experience of 30 minutes of the most high-performing content in the world, and we'd go directly from that into ideation, meaning figuring out what then, what can we create that people will want even more than this?
402
01:07:16.280 --> 01:07:36.340
That understanding of let me go into Netflix, or let me go to these vertical apps, let me go to Amazon and see what is selling, why is it selling, what are people liking about it, what are people not, and how I, how can I make a story that is going to fulfill the audience even more than these already existing stories, is really your job.
403
01:07:36.440 --> 01:07:47.180
Once you do that and you write that story, the really hard part, you make that story, the really hard part, I'm not here to tell you marketing is easy, but I'm here to tell you you're ready to think about it. But if you
404
01:07:48.300 --> 01:07:52.740
haven't done those first two things or aren't sure, you're not even ready to think about marketing yet.
405
01:07:53.680 --> 01:08:03.900
Because marketing is what you do when you're ready to share a product with the world, when something has product or story market fit. You don't market something that doesn't have story market fit.
406
01:08:03.910 --> 01:08:16.480
There's nothing to market. There's no market fit. Yeah, stratifying an audience is we're in a world of interests, right? On Facebook, Meta, you can't even target by demographics for the most part even anymore.
407
01:08:17.000 --> 01:08:24.970
Everything's by interest now. TikTok is all interest based. Everything is interest based, meaning it just matters what is the psychographic of someone? What does someone care about?
408
01:08:25.320 --> 01:08:36.960
We live in a world now where certain peop- certain, sometimes psychographic and passionate interest is correlated heavily with demographic, but not always. And you really want one core audience you can go after.
409
01:08:37.180 --> 01:08:45.980
The rest doesn't really matter. Can you take a script and wrote, turn it into a novel? Maybe, Steve, in the script into novel thing. We don't really do that at the moment, but we could.
410
01:08:46.020 --> 01:08:53.930
In terms of would you market it, bring in, find financing, investors come in and make the 80-minute movie, that is, like what... I can tell you what we can help with.
411
01:08:54.060 --> 01:08:57.920
One is I'm always here to give you advice, and I'd love to share all the knowledge I have with you.
412
01:08:57.960 --> 01:09:06.200
That's the, the, it sounds silly, but the best gift I can give you is just what I know, and I'll just share it with you on these calls and post on YouTube completely for free.
413
01:09:06.820 --> 01:09:15.400
In terms of how we can help you, y- itself, I think I, I would have to give you an analysis of what your goals are and who you think would invest in it and why.
414
01:09:15.420 --> 01:09:25.100
There's a strategy piece here that I would need to be confident to give you any for- formal direction. But what I will say is that I would be thinking about rather than investors, right?
415
01:09:25.580 --> 01:09:34.520
Although I don't think that's the wrong thought, it's how can we get fans to be interested in this, and based on a trailer, maybe pre-order it, like Novi Callum did. You saw what he did on Kickstarter.
416
01:09:34.680 --> 01:09:48.500
He literally got people to pre-order that movie or that show, excuse me. Similar concept. So I'd be thinking about that, Steve. I'd be thinking about what, who is going to be really passionate and want this film?
417
01:09:49.190 --> 01:09:55.820
And if they happen to be an investor who wants to come in at a higher level or they happen to be a fan, it's the same thing, right?
418
01:09:56.300 --> 01:10:06.600
And that investor too still wants that really solid argument of how you can find people as well. So I think the strategy piece of it is really important. That's my view.
419
01:10:07.160 --> 01:10:18.160
I also was a strategist for MrBeast, so maybe I'm a little biased, but I think that really is what a lot of it comes down to. PG movies are great. So for 10 to 14-year-olds, there's a few things.
420
01:10:18.200 --> 01:10:26.560
One is I would focus on the parents first and foremost, that 10 to 14 is tricky. It's not too... 10 to 14 is actually a hard audience.
421
01:10:26.600 --> 01:10:37.540
Okay, so candidly with 10 to 14, we're just going to assume that they're on social media because they are. Like they shouldn't technically be, but they are, 'cause 13 is technically the cutoff age.
422
01:10:38.180 --> 01:10:43.540
I think at the 10 to 14 age group, I would go to creators that you think they watch,
423
01:10:44.900 --> 01:10:54.580
a line of the YouTubers and TikTokers, and have them be featured as characters in your film, an AI lookalike of them, and reach out to all of them. I'd get a list of 100 or 200, and reach out to all of them.
424
01:10:54.620 --> 01:11:07.480
That'll be the simplest way to reach a lot of them by including these as AI actors in your film. In terms of other things, obviously, where you can reach these people, online, in school, or in clubs and organizations.
425
01:11:08.060 --> 01:11:22.560
I think the 10 to 14 range, there's less nationwide clubs than there could be, but if you're able to, if you're able to somehow break in with the teachers in school and become something that teachers want to show their kids or even introduce them to, that's interesting.
426
01:11:22.660 --> 01:11:30.660
So some beyond the book ideas could be, I wonder if, this is just like a wild thought, but I don't know if the film has any educational aspect.
427
01:11:30.740 --> 01:11:41.980
But in general for you, if you wanted to reach out to a bunch of schools and say, "Hey, I made this AI movie. It'd be really cool if you watched it in class," so it becomes educational experience then.
428
01:11:42.100 --> 01:11:46.440
Just in your instance, like as we're talking about this, we would be happy to do that.
429
01:11:46.460 --> 01:11:53.320
So that's something to consider is, is there a way to turn this into an educational experience where they watch this, they like the show, but there's also another aspect to it?
430
01:11:54.240 --> 01:11:56.980
Otherwise, all these kids are watching YouTubers and creators all the time.
431
01:11:57.660 --> 01:12:08.850
The other option that's beyond the book, which is advertising aspect, I don't know, I'd have to look into a little bit more, but app love it effectively in mobile games is a probably a cheaper way to reach some of these kids, and a lot of them are playing mobile games.
432
01:12:09.440 --> 01:12:21.040
Or you create a map on Roblox, 'cause 10 to 14, Roblox is the most popular game, to my knowledge. Can you create a map or world on Roblox that would get your audience interested?
433
01:12:21.120 --> 01:12:31.760
We did this actually at MrBeast, and it became the number one map. But you could basically create a map, then have these creators play inside of the map, and then launch your movie or show. Something like that.
434
01:12:32.060 --> 01:12:38.400
So I, I don't know. There's a few ideas. Creators love creating. It's great. Okay. Okay, so I appreciate what you're saying.
435
01:13:01.320 --> 01:13:12.432
Well, Richard, I think very important thatIf we're put, if the whole- Michael, for the purpose of people watching the recording, perhaps you could summarize the question before you answer it. Oh, yeah.
436
01:13:12.652 --> 01:13:22.912
The question is, I appreciate... Essentially, the idea is that all these ideas require finding an audience before promoting it, which is marketing that new part.
437
01:13:23.672 --> 01:13:30.562
And then they're discussing that they have a murder mystery, but it has less than 50 reviews on Amazon. "I'm not sure what we're s- what we're supposed to do now.
438
01:13:30.612 --> 01:13:37.982
There's market fit for contemporary murder mysteries in Los Angeles that deals with the pressure cooker aspects." I guess what I'd say, Richard, first of all, is love to see the link to your book.
439
01:13:38.092 --> 01:13:48.132
Second of all, there is market fit isn't data, so what I need to understand is what are existing stories? What are the comp titles that have done well, or movies, et cetera? Let's link to them.
440
01:13:48.152 --> 01:13:56.832
Let's understand when they came out and why and what their tropes are. And then back to that first point, we're not in this business to market things. Marketing does suck.
441
01:13:56.872 --> 01:14:05.512
We're in this business to make things people love, right? And we have to do that by putting them first, and that is, of course, where it always goes back to.
442
01:14:05.552 --> 01:14:15.372
And if I was to tell you like there's this market, there's this market, there's this market, there's this market, that would be like such a sort of like McKinsey way of looking at it. Like, the idea here is
443
01:14:16.812 --> 01:14:25.972
you have unique insight that Hollywood doesn't have. You have a unique perspective that Hollywood doesn't have. You understand people and the world in a way that others don't,
444
01:14:27.032 --> 01:14:36.372
and there is a gut instinct which is like being that, and that creative instinct that comes from it, and it's just channeling instinct strategically. It's this is why people need this story, right?
445
01:14:36.872 --> 01:14:49.072
Why do they need this story? Bang, that's it. Everything goes back from that. You then go, great, there's evidence that people have needed similar stories to this before. Now how can I reach them?
446
01:14:49.352 --> 01:14:55.832
What did these stories do to reach people, right? What are some of the behind the book ideas that I can incorporate? But you already know, hey, there's something there.
447
01:14:56.692 --> 01:15:08.392
And if I was to tell you, "Here's your audience," and give everyone like a templated audience, it would defeat the purpose of it because storytellers rule the world, but who are you creating that story for and why is your purpose.
448
01:15:09.272 --> 01:15:18.792
I can't give you that. But in the same sentence, I'm hearing you've contemporary murder mysteries. Murder mysteries, there definitely is a market for, at, at least at a broad level.
449
01:15:18.832 --> 01:15:28.112
Set in Los Angeles is interesting too, and I think it's just understanding, okay, maybe you already have market fit, and then the question would be what did you do to even market it to begin with?
450
01:15:28.132 --> 01:15:33.912
Because what I also see times is people go, "Okay, I sold a few copies, but what do I do next?"
451
01:15:34.172 --> 01:15:40.462
And you might be in a situation where you have good read-through, you have actually decent reviews, but you haven't actually done anything to like multiply the effect, right?
452
01:15:40.462 --> 01:15:49.672
You have a small signal, but you haven't multiplied that which would then require marketing. But then the idea isn't that your book sold bad, the idea is that your book has a product market fit, just hasn't scaled yet.
453
01:15:50.172 --> 01:15:59.172
So it's hard to know from what you're sharing like what the situation is. Let me, if you're open to it, I'll tell you the name of the book, and I put the website in the chat.
454
01:15:59.812 --> 01:16:14.552
It's called Dishonor Thy Father, and it's a terrific novel, [laughs] if I do say so myself, about... But it has an interesting hook, and the hook is honor killing. So that brings in women's rights. It brings in culture.
455
01:16:14.712 --> 01:16:32.192
It brings in a number of things, and as I wrote to you, it's, it's gotten great reviews from everybody, but we're just not marketing it in a way that, that it's catching on. The cover itself is not fit for the genre.
456
01:16:32.572 --> 01:16:35.932
I don't even know the genre that well and I know it. This looks like fantasy to me.
457
01:16:36.022 --> 01:16:45.152
Thy, like having that font, the sword itself looks like a fantasy sword, and the woman's eyes look like I'm in like some sort of like romantic novel.
458
01:16:46.032 --> 01:16:54.152
So if I look at the cover, I'm not gonna actually think it's what you're saying. Okay. Yeah. All right. Yeah.
459
01:16:54.532 --> 01:17:03.492
When I read the description, "Escape deception murder amid political and r- racial protests in a Los Angeles hospital, female surgeon doctor, Monica Jovette, is brutally murdered.
460
01:17:03.532 --> 01:17:17.892
In the ensuing investigation, Director Michael Tucci finds himself caught rising in his job and his life as he embroils himself..." Okay. Yeah.
461
01:17:17.932 --> 01:17:29.232
First of all, I think you're gonna have an interesting and probably large audience, to my understanding, given this is an honor killing, in Scandinavia, Sweden in particular although Denmark too.
462
01:17:29.262 --> 01:17:40.392
Think, in my opinion, I don't know if, how, where you go with this story, but there's a lot in Europe right now, in many parts of Europe, this is a bigger discussion. Not in a bad way, like great, set in Los Angeles.
463
01:17:40.412 --> 01:17:48.292
People love reading about things in Los Angeles. I think it's a decent description. I would need to read more in your genre to then understand where this falls in.
464
01:17:48.552 --> 01:17:56.312
I think there's some room for improvement, as always, but from an optimization standpoint, your cover is probably what's hurting you the most, and
465
01:17:59.732 --> 01:18:03.912
there's this saying that we have at MrBeast where we would get like the top YouTubers together every month,
466
01:18:05.112 --> 01:18:17.512
and we'd all talk about like how do we get more people to watch and read and consume media, and every single time. I think that this is very timely, though. So I think there is something here, and I...
467
01:18:17.542 --> 01:18:27.832
You clearly have good reviews. Like, that's all really good stuff. What I also- It does take place in, I should say, it takes place in Iran and Los Angeles. Got it. Yeah, I mean, it's timely.
468
01:18:28.512 --> 01:18:44.912
Yeah, I think that from a sort of- And it was based... We originally were inspired by an article about an honor killing that happened in Florida. Hmm. So it's in the United States that- Very interesting...
469
01:18:44.942 --> 01:18:54.892
that sparked the whole idea. We couldn't believe that this was happening. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's very interesting. This is... Another thing that I'd say is escape, deception, murder.
470
01:18:55.072 --> 01:19:10.050
So I like the last two paragraphs, okay? I think they're interesting. They do outline the story pretty well. I get it, but I think it's like sandwiching this. Escape deception murder-If I'm reading those three words,
471
01:19:11.280 --> 01:19:18.780
I'm not really getting hooked into the idea that this is about honor killings, that this is... In a sense, it's you could even... I don't know, like, exactly the context of the fictional world- Yeah...
472
01:19:18.790 --> 01:19:26.260
like, that you have created, but, like, an example would be, like, the first honor killing hits an innocent American family or something like that or whatever. But I'm thrown in.
473
01:19:26.420 --> 01:19:35.980
Here's what happens when a town breaks down, or here's what happens when a family breaks down. Like, I am thrown in there to this story. That's the first sentence, and then it's a mid political and racial protest.
474
01:19:36.000 --> 01:19:51.300
I think that's a strong paragraph. I'd end it off, though, on basically you ended off on this, like, inspired by the controversial issue of honor killings, yada, yada. That's good, but raise the tension even more.
475
01:19:51.980 --> 01:20:01.240
Make it like what's about to happen, right? So, like, you say, "The enigmatic Dr. Tara White could be the killer's next target." Maybe you end it there.
476
01:20:01.280 --> 01:20:09.800
You do a CTA that says start reading now, and then you do the other paragraph underneath it. But, like, this paragraph underneath it isn't really getting me excited to keep going.
477
01:20:10.000 --> 01:20:19.800
This paragraph underneath it is, "Oh, okay." Versus the last sentence of the first paragraph, "The beautiful and enigmatic Dr. Tara White, who could be the killer's next target," that's it. I'm ready to read now.
478
01:20:20.020 --> 01:20:30.520
Like, I don't want to... I wanna read. So that'd be my feedback here. Like, you've got the meat of something interesting. Mm-hmm. Packaging could be a little different.
479
01:20:30.560 --> 01:20:42.480
And I would ask in the marketing is what have you done to market it, meaning from a traffic perspective, what have you done, what have you tried to do here? We tried stuff on, on Facebook. We put up a couple of...
480
01:20:42.660 --> 01:20:55.500
We made a, a trailer, and we put that up on, on TikTok and... But, but it's, there's, it's nothing sustained, and it just seemed like it was, it just wasn't catching anything.
481
01:20:59.640 --> 01:21:05.440
What, and from a, do you have any sort of... In terms of catching, was the issue people would...
482
01:21:06.100 --> 01:21:13.600
It was tough to get views and eyeballs at all on the thing, or they would come to the book, they would come to the landing page and then not convert? Yeah.
483
01:21:13.860 --> 01:21:27.900
Uh, I think catching eyeballs to begin with was where it would start, and it was the, it felt like it was the traditional thing of family and friends bought the book and even recommended it to people.
484
01:21:28.000 --> 01:21:41.240
But nothing caught on beyond that, and I, we put up some seasonal ads when summer would come. "Hey, great summer read. Christmas. Perfect Christmas gift for that mystery lover."
485
01:21:41.420 --> 01:21:54.890
It, it- When you did those ads, were these- Now, they weren't paid ads. It was just putting them out there. Yeah. Then right now we're in a state where unless you're posting,
486
01:21:56.060 --> 01:22:07.380
like, short-form videos, there's not much organic discovery on any social media algorithm for content that's not a short-form video. So if you're posting an image of any kind with no existing audience,
487
01:22:08.380 --> 01:22:12.200
you're not gonna get any views. Yeah. Because think about it from an engagement perspective.
488
01:22:13.220 --> 01:22:33.360
You either go out and find people in the real world, or you find them on the internet, and if you find them by the internet, you have to play in the rules of the attention market, and the only way to win is to be able to predictably grab more attention than your competitors or pay for it, and video is much more engaging than images to the extent that videos have eaten the world.
489
01:22:33.480 --> 01:22:46.980
I would posit that video is the language of the internet. So what I would say is that you basically... I think it's... I'll use an analogy that's like a sports analogy that may or may not be useful.
490
01:22:47.000 --> 01:22:55.300
But think about it as if, I think, to a certain extent, you were taking swings in the practice cage, and you haven't gone up to bat yet and really given yourself a shot.
491
01:22:55.560 --> 01:23:11.040
So then the thing to do would be buying ads, and yes, video is much more dynamic, but what are we talking about in terms of video? I wouldn't immediately go and jump to buying ads or paid ads on Meta.
492
01:23:11.560 --> 01:23:21.700
The reason for this is the game of ads is mostly a creative game, meaning the creative itself, the media itself, and also the media that performs best on Meta is video.
493
01:23:21.820 --> 01:23:31.300
So this actually, when you think about it, you get this really interesting situation where the best thing to do is use TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts to create short-form videos.
494
01:23:31.820 --> 01:23:41.280
Take your top-performing videos talking about your book and then turn them into paid ads knowing that they're already proven winners that will get you sales, so you're not, like, throwing money at anything blindly.
495
01:23:41.340 --> 01:23:49.420
Like, you're risking your time at first. But the answer is Meta will always spend your money, even if it's a creative that won't perform, so you can lose a lot of money very quickly.
496
01:23:49.790 --> 01:23:58.250
I myself personally have spent a little over a quarter million dollars on Meta ads in my life, so I've gotten quite good at it, but I've spent a lot of money and wasted a lot of money in the beginning.
497
01:23:58.530 --> 01:24:07.720
So that's, I'm speaking with someone who has been through the trials. I've made probably well over 1,000 ads in my life. And the truth is that you might hear ads and social media, but they're really all the same thing.
498
01:24:07.780 --> 01:24:13.820
It's just creating content, and then it's how you choose to get eyeballs on it. But the truth is that great content can be repurposed.
499
01:24:13.860 --> 01:24:19.240
So what I would do is create short-form videos designed for TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels.
500
01:24:19.920 --> 01:24:31.860
What I would do first to help you in this process, 'cause it's very intimidating to start creating videos, is create a dream 10 list of here are 10 creators creating for an audience similar to mine, and they're getting views.
501
01:24:32.260 --> 01:24:41.610
So I would scroll through, search through TikTok, spend that time doing it. Once you get those 10 creators, sort their videos by most popular. So look at their most popular videos of all time.
502
01:24:41.980 --> 01:24:50.000
This is what we call outliers, and what outlier theory is this idea that it doesn't really matter what the average performing video is from a creator, right?
503
01:24:50.440 --> 01:24:58.100
You only wanna look at the videos that have outperformed or are outliers. They get 2 to 3X, if not 10X more views on average than what a creator normally would get.
504
01:24:58.800 --> 01:25:09.260
What this then lets you see is verifiably what their most engaging content is. If you put that all in one place and go boom, you're basically now getting
505
01:25:10.480 --> 01:25:21.984
incredible data on how other people have reached similar audiences to the one you want to reach.And you'll start to develop these instincts, 'cause it's how do I do it? They made that video. They made that video.
506
01:25:22.004 --> 01:25:29.724
So then you'll start to understand what your vision is, right? I want to now create something like that, but that talks about my book, that highlights my book.
507
01:25:30.524 --> 01:25:40.784
So then what you want to do is think about the process itself of how you're gonna create. And there's different ways you can do it. You could obviously create these, these AI videos. You can create videos with yourself.
508
01:25:41.184 --> 01:25:48.504
You can create videos with a family member or friend, or even just an AI voiceover and the book in front of you. There's so many different things you could do.
509
01:25:48.524 --> 01:25:51.464
You don't have to include your face or anything you don't want to, or you can be the star of the show.
510
01:25:52.184 --> 01:26:04.224
And what I would focus on is the hook, because we talked about, like, your book cover and then the hook of your description, right? First sentence. That is probably where 80% of the magic is. Almost all of it's in that.
511
01:26:04.304 --> 01:26:15.104
So what a lot of people will do, and this is, like, the real hack to, like, going viral on social media, is you might go, "Wow, this is really hard.
512
01:26:15.144 --> 01:26:20.424
Like, my first video didn't go viral, my second video didn't really go viral. Like, I'm not creating anything that's really getting traction. What do I do?"
513
01:26:20.444 --> 01:26:30.224
And the answer is, 'cause you're creating a new video each time, which is odd, but hear me out. It's typical that you'd want to create a new video each time, 'cause you're going, "I'm making a new video.
514
01:26:30.234 --> 01:26:42.864
It's a new post." But what you really want to do is master one video, because if you have one video done really well and tightly and the hook there, it can get views, and then one video can actually change...
515
01:26:42.964 --> 01:26:48.344
That could be the start of you understand- and getting the audience and getting the whole thing to spiral without spending any money.
516
01:26:49.284 --> 01:26:56.924
So then the answer becomes create that same video 20 or 30 different times, 20 or 30 different hooks until you nail it and you've got it down. It's like a science.
517
01:26:57.124 --> 01:27:03.264
And yeah, that's-- I'll be honest with you, like, out of all the things that are most fun, like writing the book definitely is more fun for me than this.
518
01:27:03.934 --> 01:27:18.244
[laughs] But I personally wrote six books in a series called Conspiracy Chronicles. I spent 7 to $8,000 on an editor and cover designer. At my job, I was making 11 bucks an hour, so that was, like, a lot of money for me.
519
01:27:18.484 --> 01:27:29.884
I spent 2 or $3,000 on Facebook ads, and it went nowhere. I went completely broke on that, and remember feeling horrible. And I had learned so much about marketing.
520
01:27:29.944 --> 01:27:43.564
I'd learned how to do it, and yet here I was completely broke, none of my books selling. And I remember thinking, "I love writing books. I hate this feeling. Whatever I'm feeling right now is the worst.
521
01:27:44.204 --> 01:27:50.984
I will do anything not to feel this way." So then I just started doing weird things, and those weird things were, let me
522
01:27:52.484 --> 01:28:03.564
put my book up for pre-order on Amazon before I write it, before I even start it, and test if that book cover and description will sell if I make a video and make an ad about it. Hmm.
523
01:28:03.904 --> 01:28:12.304
And then I'll start writing it, if and only then if I can actually prove it will sell, because I really didn't like that, 'cause I really felt like I had two options.
524
01:28:12.384 --> 01:28:21.053
Either I let go of the idea of ever reaching an audience, which I think is healthy if that's something one wants to do. If someone wants to... Like, it's not bad either. It's not... It, this isn't a values statement.
525
01:28:21.164 --> 01:28:31.564
Peter said this in a recent podcast, but, like, economic value is just one kind of value, right? Like, uh, meaning, like, your story's still very valuable, and, like, that is true, and it's really fun to work on.
526
01:28:31.664 --> 01:28:39.374
With that said, I wasn't really willing to accept that. I really did want my work to get out there, 'cause I thought it will really be cool for other people reading it. It'll really help them.
527
01:28:39.404 --> 01:28:46.304
It'll really change their view of the world. I really wanted that for other people. So then I knew that I just had to
528
01:28:48.324 --> 01:28:58.604
figure that out and learn and understand what that took first before I started writing, which I'm not suggesting you do, and slash, like, you already wrote a great book.
529
01:28:58.644 --> 01:29:10.314
But the only thing I can do is give you my hardest lessons learned. Great. I app- I think that might be where we have to call it. I really do appreciate it. Yes. Thank you so much. Sorry, Richard. No worries.
530
01:29:10.324 --> 01:29:18.064
We are 40 minutes over time, [laughs] so I think we may need to call it there. No, it's a lot of fun. You get me going on marketing stuff, and I'll be going all day long.
531
01:29:18.104 --> 01:29:26.864
Yeah, and by the way, guys, really appreciate all of you coming. There's a lot of information, and just know, like, whenever I say something about all this, it's my view on how to do this.
532
01:29:26.884 --> 01:29:32.164
There's not one way to make a living at it. There's not one way to approach it, but I'll share with you what I know from my experience.
533
01:29:32.324 --> 01:29:40.144
I wish it wasn't as hard-earned as it is, but it usually comes from a place where I'm like, "Yeah, no, there's a war story behind that one." And I really appreciate you guys being here.
534
01:29:40.174 --> 01:29:49.284
I appreciate your trust, your time. Reach out anytime you have questions. I'm here to help. Jose, I know I missed you a little bit. I, but I know Erica got to you in the comments. Feel free to follow up.
535
01:29:49.364 --> 01:29:57.884
Happy to chat more with all of y'all. Have a great rest of your day, and tomorrow I'll be back in touch with the recording and your free copy of the e-book and audiobook.
536
01:29:58.004 --> 01:30:06.224
Paperback book will take some time to get set up, but all that will be coming to y'all. So thank you so much, and as always, don't forget, storytellers rule the world. Bye, everyone. Great meeting everyone.
537
01:30:06.784 --> 01:30:12.014
Storytellers rule the world. [outro music]