This may just be our most important podcast ever. It’s a vision for the future of publishing and how we as storytellers can take control of this industry and win together. It breaks down the 3 elements undergirding this industry and outlines how we can build our own network that empowers storytellers like never before.
An important message for steamy romance authors on payment processing:
Join Ream, the subscription platform by fiction authors for fiction authors: https://authors.reamstories.com/
#50 Episode Outline:
0:00:00 Introduction to the Networked Age of Publishing
0:05:56 Why Ream Doesn’t Have an App in the Apple Store
0:11:50 Owning Your Payment Data
0:16:24 Who Platforms Are Accountable To
0:19:00 Content Moderation for Authors
0:22:47 The New Age of Discovery for Authors
#50 Episode Transcript:
This is how authors can win in the future of publishing. And this will be the single best resource I’m navigating. The future of this industry and a vision that we have for how we as authors can take greater control on it and ultimately create a future where storytellers are the world. We’re going to be covering three main topics today.
The payment relationship we have with the platforms we work with, how content. And content moderation works on retailers, the platforms we work with. And finally, and all, maybe most importantly, how discovery works on the platforms we work with. And what we’re going to learn is that everything has fundamentally changed over the last decade.
A decade ago, mobile was still rising. We were seeing this sort of gold rush. Becca Sime really talks about this, the gold rush of publishing. We were seeing new attention and new eyeballs flooding in constantly. And this idea that we… This is new. It’s the Wild West. I’m not saying it isn’t the Wild West anymore, but what I do want to share is that we’re in a different age now.
Gold Rush is dead. We know that. Publishing has changed. But what age are we in now? I argue it’s the networked age. And the networked age is defined by the existence of a nearly global network that makes content distribution costs throughout the network virtually zero, and discovery costs less.
Unbelievably high, but as we are going to learn who controls that network, who that network is built for, and what the nodes are in that network are the most important thing to understand in this publishing industry. I’m going to share one high, big overarching concept we’re going to keep returning to, and then I want to get into our three big points around payment processing, around content moderation.
And around discovery and how this is going to change and how together we can create this revolution where we can all win as authors, we can build our own network. So let me share that one big overarching concept, which is the concept of a power law. Okay. We all feel this. We all know this publishing is a sort of industry where there’s a lot of people who are trying to make it and who might not be at the revenue goal yet, might not be full time, probably quite a bit far away from it.
And there’s few people, relatively few, who are actually there and might be making tremendous livings. This isn’t because necessarily the publishing industry is evil. This is partially a by product of how social psychology works and how stories move throughout networks. And we’ve seen this in cross media industries throughout time.
What the networked age allows us… Is to see this power law more obvious than ever we can see the rankings on rethos we can see Right before all this before the internet. It was very tough to have visibility into who was winning in the power law and maybe who was at the lower end. For a power law, for those who want a visualization who are watching on YouTube, literally it’s a curve where on the high end of the distribution you have a huge chunk of the value but a very small amount of the people.
And the lower end of the distribution you’ll have a lot of people but a very small amount of the value relatively. This is what we see In publishing, in music, in movies, in tech platforms, in sports teams. We see this in so many different industries. Some people even say that we’re the networked species.
I’m not going to get into that today. I want to talk about the networked age in publishing. And what this means, now that we live in a networked age, where this attention isn’t… Endlessly increasing is that we now have to think really long and hard about what networks were participating in, what our power is in these networks and who’s benefiting from these networks because we want to create a future where storytellers of the world.
And as we’ll see right now, it’s not really true. We’re working hard to change that. Who’s where? Who’s where? Now for an introduction. This is episode 50 of this podcast and just thank you for listening. If you’re into four minutes, I’m guessing you’re going to be bought into the rest. So forgive me for a 30 second introduction into the rest of these episodes.
This is Scriptions for Authors podcast and we interview top authors and subscriptions who are succeeding in the future of publishing. Doing amazing things. Amelia Rose is my co-host in this podcast. She’s a six-figure subscription author, incredible, incredible person. And together we’ve been creating a platform called Ream, which a subscription platform specifically for fiction authors.
And today I wanna talk about some of the core. Reasons that we made sort of big overarching decisions in Ream and this is one of those PSA videos And if you are a Ream author, you should listen to this And if you’re not a Ream author, if you’re just someone who cares about publishing I would love for you to share this with a friend because what I’m about to share with you today is Information that retailers do not want you to know They do not want you to know.
And there are things that me, Amelia, and Sean, Sean Patnodes, our CTO and co founder, Amelia’s husband, sat down for long, long hours researching and figuring out how we can do this better. How we can create a future in the networked age of publishing where storytellers are the network and not ruled by it.
That’s the goal here. I’m going to tell you how I’m first going to tell you what’s going on now, what’s going on now. So let’s talk about these three big overarching things, payment processing. Then we’re going to talk about content moderation, and then we’re going to talk about discovery in a networked age.
And I can promise you this by the end of this podcast, you’re going to learn a lot in under 30 minutes. That’s my promise. Keep this under 30 minutes for episode 50. So payment processing, what is payment processing? First of all. Payment processing is how money moves from one human being to another, or one institution to another institution or human being.
It’s really important. It’s how value is exchanged from a monetary perspective. When we talk about the publishing industry and authors making a living from their work, the payment processing is like a really, really fundamental component of that. It’s like really important. I’m not going to get into the nuances of how issuing banks…
and how money literally moves through card networks because most of the time how people pay for things online are through credit cards or other similar card networks. I don’t want to get into total nuances of that, but what I will share with you is that there’s a payment processing fee tied to any transaction.
Anywhere online that credit card companies and banks, processing and issuing banks, basically charge. It varies, um, but typically 2. 9% plus 30 cents in the United States is a safe bet. Okay? Why does this matter? That is basically the raw cost of doing business. To just exchange value, right now, in the current age of the world, that is the cost.
Okay? I’m not totally worried about 3 to 4, maybe sometimes 5%, depending on the price of your book, value going away to banks and credit card companies. I’m not going to pretend that we can over change the financial system. That’s not what I’m talking about, okay? What I’m talking about is who owns that payment data.
Who that payment relationship is with. And what you will find is that There’s platforms. We’re trying to take a lot of control of that. And probably not to your benefit. The first and easy one to pick on is Apple, okay? And this is going to explain why Reem doesn’t have an app in the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store.
We don’t have a native app. Instead, we have what’s called a progressive web app. I’ll talk about that. What is… This whole Apple thing. If you don’t know, Apple charges basically a 30% tax on nearly all digital goods that run through their store. Google Play is a similar fee. It’s not quite as extraneous. Um, you know, Apple’s really stringent and tough.
But what this means is that if you sell something at Apple, game developer, creator, that’s a 30% fee right off the top. That’s a lot. And especially when you have a platform and a creator and Apple in the mix, it ends up diluting a lot of value for our creators. This is why we’ve seen existing retailers up to this point decide to have their own subscription programs.
Kindle Limit is definitely the most popular. You go on KU, you pay once, and you pay on the KU site so that you don’t have to go into Apple’s payment processing. Apple allows you, if you’ve paid elsewhere, to get content in an app. It’s what’s called a reader app. They allow that. But what that means, though, is that actually paying for something that you discover in the app that you’re using is really tough.
It’s basically impossible and what you see is that if you try and direct people around Apple’s rules to pay using another system to try and save the creator money, you see a drastic drop in conversion rates. And then if you get them to pay in Apple, you might not see the drop in conversion rate, but you see a drop in revenue.
Ultimately, it’s not a great situation, right? Not a great situation. So the solution is doing something completely different, creating a whole different ecosystem. One that is direct, where the author is in control. And we did this by creating an app that you can download directly from us. And the great part is that recent developments in technology over the last really five or six years have made this sort of thing possible.
And Apple and Google have also rolled out support in the recent years. Even support to where now an app downloaded directly from a site like Vreen, progressive web app it’s called, looks exactly like a real app and even can receive push notifications. We haven’t implemented that at the time of recording yet, but just because we’re a small team, we’re working hard, we’re gonna put in push notifications really, really soon.
What does that mean? That means that you can pay inside of the Ream app. No crazy links and sending emails like Spotify’s audiobooks work. You can pay inside of the Ream app without the Apple fee. Just payment processing fee and then Ream charges a simple 10% platform. Easy. Done. Chef’s kiss. That’s great You still might not be wondering the how is this so important?
We’re gonna talk about discovery in a second, but this new networked age requires new tools allow authors to build interconnected networks and one huge part of that is that When an author goes on Ream, readers on Ream, supports an author, and then wants to go discover and find another author, right? If we were in Apple’s payment system, right?
Existing subscription platforms, namely one with a P, a large reason why they haven’t been able to have any sort of discovery and really build that out is because of the friction involved in payment. If you’re in the big P app, you know if you’re in that app and then you find a new creator, you now have to go through a very cumbersome process to try and set up your subscription with them.
That is not great for discovery. That’s not great for discovery, right? So finding new creators is tough there, but if you discovered a creator already, fine, it’s already in there, just like the KU system. But at the end of the day, we want to be able to help authors create interconnected networks that they own and control that can enable discovery to happen.
So that means that payment has to be easy. All around. Frictionless as possible. So that’s why we have a direct network. Talking about what Vreem did here, this is just such important information to know about how these platforms work. So I hope you’re like soaking this in, because this is such like important things to realize.
Because this is huge. This is huge in terms of the future of this industry. And the second part is actually who owns the payment data, okay? So it doesn’t matter just the rails that you’re using, Apple’s rails, Stripe’s rails, whatever the payment rails are using. There’s another even more crucial point, which is who owns that data.
Okay. So, the key concept here is something called the merchant record. Merchant record is essentially the business that’s being paid by that customer, who has that payment relationship. And in the United States, when someone is the merchant record, and this is pretty much internationally too, but I don’t want to say I’m familiar with all global laws, but we can just say almost always the merchant record ends up being liable for use taxes like sales tax, um, and that, okay.
They’re liable for those fees. So, there’s a sort of benefit to having a merchant record, but there’s also a downside. So what’s the benefit and what’s the downside? The benefit to having a merchant record that isn’t you is that if the merchant record is another platform, they are liable for sales tax and VAT.
They handle it not just for you. It’s not even your thing. It’s their thing. They’re the merchant record. They’re the business that’s having that payment relationship. Okay? So, that’s the, the upside. The downside though, and it’s a big downside is that you don’t own that data. You can’t. Data can’t even give you access to it.
It violates PCI compliance. It’s, it’s, it’s a big no no with payment regulations. It’s just not allowed for, for customer safety. Imagine if businesses could just share payment information amongst one another. It’s bad enough when an email list is stolen, but if a credit card list was stolen, I mean, that’s stuff where like the FBI would crack down on, right?
So they can’t transfer that data. But what that means though, is that if you want to leave a platform that you have, is your merchant record, want to leave and take your readers with you. You can’t do that. Like you can, you can, you can migrate. And we try and make that as easy as possible. You have to have them re subscribe to you on the new platform.
Basically enter in their payment information again. That friction ultimately creates control for the incumbent platform. But there’s the downside of if you’re the merchant of record, you have the control, but you also then you owe that sales tax. You owe the VAT. It’s your deal. Now Nexus Laws and everyone’s going to hit it.
That’s a totally other conversation. I’m going to link to a TikTok. I created all about that, but. The TLDR here is that both are imperfect options, but if we go back to the power law we talked about earlier, if you’re an established author with thousands and thousands of fans, you’re probably running a pretty serious business.
And those few people who are generating all of that value deserve to be able to have the control that they want. But also for that long tail that the internet’s provided, the long tail the internet’s created, the ability for more and more people to distribute their work, get it out there. And they might not have the level of discovery because discovery costs are really high.
Might not have the level of discovery that the people at the top of Power Law do, but they still do have some fans. They deserve to be able to have the easiest payment option without needing to stress, right? So maybe manage a great thing for them. One thing is every platform you go to now doesn’t give you an option.
If you’re selling direct, you’re the merchant of record. Even if they say they handle sales tax and VAT for you, you still have to remit and file those fees. So they don’t like, like they’re your fees, right? You’re liable for them. What does this mean for you? This means that you need to be able to have the option to be somewhere that gives you the choice that works best for you at the stage of the business that you’re at. And that allows you to be able to switch if you need to. Which Ream does. We spent months, Sean did this, he’s incredible, building out two payment systems on Ream so that you could be the merchant record if you want and go direct or you can have Ream be the merchant record.
That’s what manages and direct. It’s huge. We’re the only platform that does that and it’s just a change in how publishing works because you then get to control the foundation of your network, what your payment relationship is with your readers. You get to control that and our network makes it easy for readers to be coming from one payment to another payment.
It’s huge. It’s really, really huge. And it is a huge reason why we can win the huge or publishing because we make it easier to support authors than ever. We are able to empower you to create new business models and empower you to have the relationship with your readers that works best for your business.
It’s huge. But there’s one last thing about Ream. One last thing about Ream in terms of the decision we made, which makes us different. We’re a small team. We’re a small team. Why? We’re bootstrapped just like you all. You all don’t get money from investors to build But in this network age, There’s specific investment vehicles that startup companies can go for, specifically venture capital, that requires unbelievable scale and incredible dilution for the founders where you have outside investors owning majority of the company in most cases.
And they’re vying for huge outcomes because they’re putting tons of money in huge, huge outcomes to get that return on their investment. And that is, that’s tough. That’s why you see all these platforms. They try and serve all creators. They try and expand to all media formats and all these fancy things you see because they have to grow so large.
Almost this insatiable desire to keep growing. But sometimes they’re growing at the expense of their core community, who made them who they are. I’ve published 12 sci fi thrill novels. Been doing this for six years. Amelia, incredible senior romance author. Sean, indie game developer. We’re doing this for indie authors.
We’re doing this for the indie storytellers we love. And
We just couldn’t do that if we had to answer to an outside party who might make the foundation of our network Something that isn’t this future vision that empowers you the storytellers with a world vision But the one where they want to rule the world we didn’t want to do that We wanted to have the freedom to create the network that it can empower you and that’s why we built the community first the Facebook Group which now has three thousand seven hundred plus of you in it and we built it in partnership with CUNY because look I’m not going to pretend like I know what’s best the CUNY always I don’t.
But you do. And if I listen to you, and I listen to you, and what’s best for you, we can create a better future for you. And in turn, we can all win together. Future of the worst organizations in the world. That’s what we’re about. And it just is so different. Almost every other platform you work with has different relationships.
You can look up their funding rounds. They usually proudly display it. And I don’t think that’s something to be proud of. I think that’s something to be scared of. When you enter that position, you have to make that money back. And where that’s money coming from, oftentimes it’s authors or expanding beyond authors, right, to neglect them in the first place and.
In a world in which networks are everything and storytellers are the ones who are accruing so much power in those networks, the big value add to society is in empowering you as the author. And that’s what we believe in. That’s why we’re doing this. That’s why everything about the foundation of what we’re doing is different.
Now, let’s talk about content. Content moderation. Content moderation simply is when content is free to distribute but discovery is expensive, you also don’t necessarily want someone to discover something that’s going to be damaging. And trust me, content moderation is a good thing. I don’t think people should be posting unbelievably hateful content online.
Hate raids on authors chats and emails should not happen, right? So we want to make sure that people can be safe and accepted online. But what that’s also meant is that certain people who have certain ideas of what’s safe and acceptable are, promote and kind of force their ideals on everyone else. And this is what we saw with also the big P platform with Amelia.
Amelia, incredible senior romance author. But she had her content taken down on the platform. Steamy romance is the biggest genre in publishing, by a wide margin. We all know that. And it’s something that specifically people come to, to feel belonging. People come to express themselves, to explore things.
And specifically, a lot of the people who are going to it, are people who might not fit into the patriarchal society that we have. That has, you know, a very specific idea of what is accepted in the world of… You know, sexuality. Okay, so I’m not gonna go into complete detail on that matter because we can go on like a hour rant And I can talk and I can get very passionate But all I want to say very very important this topic is that we should empower Creative people to create communities that make people feel heard and belonged for and some of the most important CUNY most important content Is shut out by these platforms.
Why? Apple first of all has very stringent steamy Regulations, okay, they’re not into that. That’s their policy as a company I’m not one to say whether it’s right or wrong But I know my community of authors the community that we care about the community that Amelia is so intimately a part of It’s not something that they vibe with all the time That’s not something that’s gonna work, which is why again We have a progressive web app in our native app in the Apple Store.
Just like a PSA, it’s so important. Tell a fellow author who’s like, Why does Ring not have an app in the Apple App Store? This is why. It’s to protect you. It’s to support you, okay? There’s another thing. PayPal is very stringent around these regulations. Very, very stringent. That’s their choice. That’s what they do.
They don’t like to delineate. from other forms of adult content. And I understand there’s a lot of risks around specific forms of adult content, but I know the steamy romance community super, super well, and I love you all. And I know that what they conflate steamy romance with is not what it is, but that’s what happens.
That’s what can happen. So we work with Stripe, which Stripe processes the payments for something like OnlyFans, works with other big players like that, and is also just very established, a bit more open to the idea of that. So we’ve kind of designed ourselves to have a system where we, can the ability to actually empower you to build the network that could connect the readers who need it most rather than shutting out the people who don’t have homes elsewhere.
And I wrote an article all about this that if you want to really dive deep into the steamy romance payment processing situation I encourage you to go to it, but the core of this is creating a system that allows us to empower you to create the content that brings readers together who might normally not be accepted, and content that might not normally be accepted, and that that’s so important in a networked age because who controls the network controls the life that we’re living, and you all should control that network, and you all should be able to publish the content that you want, so that’s why, that’s why we, So that’s number two.
We covered payment processing, we covered content. Last thing is discovery. And man, discovery. This one’s gonna be good. Okay. Let’s talk about discovery. The most important part in this. People keep talking about direct sales. I love direct sales, but direct sales is not about direct sales. Direct sales is about building your own network.
Your own network. And what that does, when you build your own network, is it gives you greater power. Amazon, off the backs of authors, was able to sell everything. Because books are powerful. When you get the minds and hearts of readers, they’re willing to buy everything else from you. Authors are finding that readers are willing to do that too.
Your core readers are willing to subscribe to you. They’re willing to buy your merch. They’re willing to buy all these other products and access to different kinds of content because they want to support you and they trust you. This is my Storytellers of the World. And it’s also something that can empower the long tail.
Because as we talked about, there’s this power law where a lot of authors have a lot of readers, the few, sorry, a few authors have a lot of readers, and then the rest, there’s a ton, ton of authors who don’t have quite as many. So it’s important to help elevate the income of authors in the long tail. Who are writing for niche audiences, who have smaller, smaller fan bases, but still want to make a living.
That, and it’s important to build a world around what you’re doing. Increase the customer lifetime value and you can do that by building your own network and having the tools to be able to create different products for your readers rather than a system where you don’t know who your readers are, okay?
But then discovery is also a crucial part of this because if you’re just selling direct and there’s no way for your readers to go back and forth between the networks you’re building then you’re still going to always have to leech from these other platforms, right? You’re always going to have to basically make a devil’s bargain.
I don’t want there to be devil’s bargain anymore. I want you to be able to have discovery in an ecosystem that empowers you to fully control your network. Fully control your network. So, what does this look like? First, to go back to the parallel point, every media industry is defined by parallel, right? We already talked about that.
But publishing is different in three respects. But publishing is different in one key respect. There’s an incredible psychological cost to reading a book. So… What I mean by this, actually getting into a book and starting to read it, you know, getting 10 pages in, getting into a serial and getting into the story, it takes time.
To get into a TikTok, it takes what, two or three seconds? To get into a song even, you could probably know if you like a song 30 seconds in, books not so much. The space we have, the number of books we can experience in a year, you know, whale readers might experience 400 books in a year. I’m sure someone can beat that, but that’s a lot.
Songs? I bet most of us listen to 400 different songs in a year. I bet most of us do. I bet most of us watch way more than 400 TikToks if you’re on TikTok. You’re probably watching, you’re probably watching 400 TikToks a week. That’s, that’s probably the average, honestly, right? So when we think about this, the discovery cost for a book is much, much higher.
What this means is that we need to rely on social signals more than ever to reduce the psychological cost. We’re basically relying on any social signal we can have. This is why reviews… Are important book publishing. Do you see reviews on songs on Spotify? You don’t. You don’t. I’m not saying that that wouldn’t be helpful, but it wouldn’t be as helpful in books.
Top charts. Top charts are really, really important in the book space. Not everything, but they’re important. Word of mouth. Book discovery happens in all these other platforms that other creators are creating on because it’s a lower friction way to start to gain trust for your books. It’s wild. Book discovery is intense.
It’s not easy. Part of the problem in this book discovery world is that we don’t network and what this means. is that retailers do. In the networked age, the retailers control all that data. They know who your readers are, they know who’s reading your books, who’s reading someone else’s books, and they can leverage that data.
They can leverage that data in the power of recommendation algorithms, which also are effective and can reduce psychological costs of discovery. And I’m not saying that’s a bad thing for the reader. But it’s tough on Europe because how these retailers gain power is by being able to basically take the people at the top and give them very little transparency into why their business is actually at the top and almost.
Threaten them because any day the algorithm could stop recommending you any day that next hit might not be a hit And then the people at the bottom have this promise. They’re going to somehow jump to the top, right? so you have this promise that they can have the big victory and the people at the top who Actually have churn because there’s what I’ll call vampiric effects that take place where these retailers are highly encouraging people not to stay within one author’s network, but to stay in their network and to Get addicted to different genres and go in between different authors rather than really being a super fan and because they cut this off For you, this means that they’ll put 50 other books in your product page and pollute everything you’re doing They actually take away your power as top authors because storytellers of the world and the power loss so dramatic in publishing That’s the high psychological cost of publishing make the top of the network bigger than ever.
That’s why we see bigger hits now than ever, like Colleen Hoover is a great example, and it makes the long tail extremely long. That’s why we see tons and tons of authors writing in these genres, who some are making good livings, some aren’t, but there’s a lot of authors out there. But what this ultimately does is it gives tremendous power to the retailer because they have leverage in the relationship.
How can we change that? How can we change that? We give you all the data. You know who your readers are. You have the emails of your free readers, followers, and readers. You have the emails of your paid readers. You get to build your own network. You get to be able to power the discovery of other authors.
Because guess what? Readers discovering other books mostly through other readers and authors. Indirectly, right? Because you’re the network. And then you can power that discovery without that needing to, that needing to give away your control, your payment relationship. The freedom to publish the content you want.
And ultimately the relationship of your readers to retailers. You can build a direct relationship with your readers. Where you can not only know who they are, but be able to create deeper connections with them. Deeper nodes within your own network. And the deeper and more strong the nodes are with your readers in your own network, the more powerful business you can build.
Because casual readers in a casual network are so easy to be siphoned off to other authors. That’s why retailers love them. But you want the superfans are only going to support you at a higher level. And be able to increase the lifetime value you get from them. But ultimately, they’re what makes your network strong to power your own discovery.
Through word of mouth and through strong social signals, right? Someone loving, loving a book is a way better signal than someone kind of liking a book. So, By owning that data and by, by having a structure and a system, it allows readers to comment on your stories. It allows you to respond to them easily.
It allows you to build a community. You can tap into these effects to build your own network and work with other authors to supercharge the discovery of everything you’re doing. We can actually take over this industry. The takeaway is that in a networked age, to win as authors, we have to build our own individual networks.
But we need an ecosystem connecting them. We need some tools that connect all of us together. So that we can have our own network, and we have a tool that powers that network, but then we also have a tool that can connect us to these other networks and other authors to allow us together to win in the future of publishing.
That’s what Ream is. Ream is that vision, that platform by authors for authors. And together, we are creating a future where storytellers rule the world. We’re just getting started, and publishing will never be the same. I can promise you that. In this community, all of you listening, we’re part of this vision.
And I want you to share this with others because we need to understand is that we as authors Have the power we have the leverage storytellers with the world We just have to get together and build our own networks to build our own networks And together we can connect them and together we can change this industry.
We’re doing that that is ream’s vision And episode 50 this podcast I wanted to share it with you and wanted to share Well, we’ve made some foundational decisions to build this platform build this community different from really anything else out there where we’re going It’s gonna be so much fun and we’re going there together and you’re gonna take us there because storytellers of the world and together We’re going to build a better future and together you’re going to be able to build your own network.
We’re giving you all those own tools and we’re going to be able to connect your networks to build an ecosystem that allows people to rise up, allows people to connect with their superfans, and allows you to create the stories you love and make a living while doing it. That’s it for me. Thank you for listening to this podcast.
I hope you enjoyed it. Please do share this with a friend. Share this in a Facebook group that you like that maybe hasn’t ever heard about descriptions for authors. Share this in a group chat with your author friends. Share this anywhere you think someone would get value from it. It’s 30 minutes that explains some of the foundations and core pieces of this industry and how it’s changing because in the networked age, the networks have been built, people, we’re all on our phones now.
We all are online all the time. The gold rush is over, and in the networked age, who wins is who owns the networks. And I just showed you today who owns the networks now, why that’s not good for you, and how you can own your own network. So go forth and prosper. Go forth and build. Go forth and create a future where storytellers of the world, we’re here to support you every step of the way.
We’re doing this together. Have a great rest of your day. Happy writing. And thank you for listening.