Posted on October 10, 2022
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Curious about how to utilize word-of-mouth marketing to grow your readership? Today we are chatting with Eliot Peper, the bestselling author of Reap3r, Veil, Bandwidth, and other novels. Our conversation spans the history of publishing, all the way to a relationship-based approach to marketing, and the fiction flywheel that includes subscriptions, grants, and other alternative revenue streams to book royalties.
Eliot Peper’s Links:
Website and His Books: https://eliotpeper.com/
True Blue Story: https://truebluestory.com/
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#14 Episode Outline:
0:00 – 2:14 Introduction and Context
2:14 – 8:26 A Brief History of Publishing
8:26 – 11:05 How the Internet Changed Publishing Forever
11:05 – 13:16 What Does it Mean to Be An Indie Author
13:16 – 16:40 How A Cold Email Led to a Publishing Deal as a First-time Author
16:40 – 19:16 The Relationship-Based Approach to Marketing
19:16 – 22:05 The Power of ARCs in Getting Readers to Talk About Your Story
22:05 – 25:05 How and Why Eliot Recommends His Favorite Books Online
25:05 – 27:55 How Eliot Utilizes his Reader Newsletter
27:55 – 33:14 The Role of Reader Expectations in Purchasing From Retailers
33:14 – 41:51 Eliot’s Unconventional Subscription Strategy
41:51 – 45:08 The Fiction Flywheel: Eliot’s Different Revenue Streams
45:08 – 52:04 Multi-Media eBooks and Narrative Responsive Design
52:04 – 54:02 Conclusion and Outtro
#14 Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Michael Evans: Hello. Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Subscriptions for Authors podcast. Today we’re gonna be talking about how you can get your readers to sell your subscription for you. Or in other words, how you can take a relationship based approach to marketing. I call it kind of like the Zen Book marketing approach, but Eliot Peper, our amazing guest today goes into a lot more detail about how he approaches building relationships with key readers that can help promote his books online and how he does this in a way that is really.
[00:00:30] Michael Evans: Fun, authentic, and has helped him build a very unique fiction business that involves a flywheel of revenue streams that doesn’t just count book royalties, but things like consulting projects. He has his own subscription grants and all this funneling back into helping him create more and better stories, garner deeper relationship with his readers, and build a better business focused on fiction.
[00:00:56] Michael Evans: . And I just think it’s such an inspiring model because we, as [00:01:00] fiction authors and non-fiction authors too can get caught up in this trap of like book royalties, Patriots. And he just has a completely different mindset that’s focused on building ultimately relationships and connections with his readers and seeing the bigger, longer term picture of what that can turn into.
[00:01:15] Michael Evans: As always, you can find Eliot’s links in the subscription below if you’d like to check out his books, his subscription, and all the other cool projects he’s working on. Eliot is a bestselling author of speculative thrillers such as Reaper Bandwidth and Veal, which are actually some of my favorite novels. So I do recommend reading them. They’re really fun.
[00:01:33] Michael Evans: And you can also find our links if you’d like to join our basic group subscriptions for Authors, our newsletter, or join the launch list for Ream, our upcoming platform that helps authors run their subscription business and an all in one easy to use interface.
[00:01:46] Michael Evans: So that’s it for me. Let’s get into this conversation where we talk to Eliot, not only about how you can build relationships with your readers, but help you sell your books and sell your description, but also about the history of Bindy publishing. All these really fascinating topics that I think [00:02:00] will really just change how we look at the world of publishing change, how we approach our business, and maybe just maybe help us grow it.
[00:02:07] Michael Evans: So let’s get into it.
[00:02:08] Michael Evans: We always throw this word around indie author and a lot of times I think we have a conception of what it means. We don’t really unpack that, and as someone who’s been around the indie author world as it’s changed so much, I wanna ask you today, in 2022, what does it mean to be in indie author?
[00:02:26] Eliot Peper: That’s a great question. So I think it always helps to sort of zoom out a little bit to answer that kind of question without getting caught up in various definitions that people throw around on the internet every day. So if we stepped into a time machine right now went back you know, 500 years before the printing press how were books written right?
[00:02:48] Eliot Peper: And how were books published and distributed? Well, there weren’t very many books written and not very many, not a high percentage of the global population was literate. So you had a very small group of [00:03:00] people writing books and a very small group of people reading books. And the way that books were produced was basically by copying them out.
[00:03:11] Eliot Peper: At least in Western Europe, you had monasteries where. Monks would spend all day just copying out old manuscripts, and that was the primary method of book production. And so as you can imagine, books were both. Not always accurately transcribed and also incredibly expensive.
[00:03:30] Eliot Peper: By today’s standards, ludicrously expensive. Like you think your car is expensive, try a book, right? So writing played a very different role in society. And when the printing press changed or came around, that changed that dynamic dramatically because suddenly humans invented this way to reproduce.
[00:03:49] Eliot Peper: Writing very cheaply. And that led to wars that led to like hold changes the role religion played in culture. It changed a lot. [00:04:00] And that ultimately led to the thing that we think of as a book today. Right, like a novel or a, a nonfiction book that’s like a packaged manuscript that’s printed out that you can buy that is not like a substantial part of your annual income to access.
[00:04:19] Eliot Peper: And it also led to dramatically increasing literacy rates because books were cheaper. It was easier. Handle them around. And that sort of increased the value of reading within society cuz there was more stuff out there that you could learn from. And then it also led to a bunch of revolutions in the educational system.
[00:04:38] Eliot Peper: During that period though, it took a while for what we think of as modern publishers to. Develop it used to be that you had printers. All they did was print stuff, right, and distribute it. If you had an idea that you wanted to write down and share or a story, anything that would fit into a book you’d need to either [00:05:00] set up your own printing press, which would be expensive to do.
[00:05:04] Eliot Peper: But then you’d have to do the work of like getting that piece of material out there. And then, So what did printers do? Well, if it was expensive to set up, then they’d just start printing lots of stuff, not just their own ideas, right? For example, the founding fathers in the us, a number of them like basically printed their own newsletters and, and distributed them, like self-published all of their stuff and put it out there with printing presses.
[00:05:29] Eliot Peper: Then you have this consolidation because okay, if it’s expensive to set up a printing, Like, you might as well use it all the time. And that led to some really weird things by modern standards. For example, early American book publishers came about before there were any international copyright laws.
[00:05:46] Eliot Peper: So what they would do is send someone to the uk and they would buy off the shelf new books that were selling. Bring them back to the US and then the American publishers would just transcribe them and print them and [00:06:00] sell them. Right? It was just like literally theft by today’s standards.
[00:06:03] Eliot Peper: But that was their entire business model. So they would print them and sell them as if they were theirs with zero royalties to anyone else. Right? It was just like, well, I printed this stack of paper. I’m gonna sell it to you. And so that was how American Publishing got started. And then obviously that led to the development of international IP laws and stuff like that, so that that changed.
[00:06:28] Eliot Peper: But what that meant was in the 20th century, there were a bunch of different book publishers and and then there was a lot of consolidation where, larger publishers were buying up a lot of smaller publishers. But what it meant was because you, because by the, you know, sort of like the middle of the 20th century or the late 20th century, we built this whole system for how books worked in society.
[00:06:51] Eliot Peper: So like you printed them, you had to have trucks that would take them to retailers all across the country. You had to have those [00:07:00] retailers, you have to convince those bookstores to like put your book on a shelf that people would actually see because there are way fewer slots in a bookstore than there are books.
[00:07:09] Eliot Peper: Right. So you have to convince the bookstore to say, Put my book up front. Here’s the new release section. Publishers typically pay for that. So they pay the, the every little bookstore to say new hard cup. This is new fiction, right? That’s often a paid slot. So there was this whole invisible infrastructure behind books and how books worked.
[00:07:31] Eliot Peper: The only way to access that infrastructure was by if you were a writer, if you were an author, was by getting a contract with one of the large publishers that owned the trucks, that owned the printing presses, that had the sales teams that were going out to the bookstores. You could theoretically buy a printer yourself, like buy your own trucks, like hire your own sales team.
[00:07:55] Eliot Peper: That means that now you’re competing with Penguin on equal [00:08:00] footing, and that’s expensive, right? that’s a very high barrier to entry. So realistically, for almost all writers, it meant that that you had to get a contract with a major publisher. Before your book would ever meaningfully be a part of the culture, right?
[00:08:16] Eliot Peper: That people could actually buy it and read it and talk about it.
[00:08:20] Eliot Peper: And then the internet happened, right? So the internet has actually had a different impact on the book world than most people think, in the sense that it’s not, analogous to the music industry where Napster basically blew up the CD business, right?
[00:08:35] Eliot Peper: Record labels had zero income, like it really dramatically and quickly revolutionized music. But in the book world, that’s not been the case at all, basically, because people still buy paper books. So now eBooks and audiobooks are new multi-billion dollar markets. On their own, but they have not cannibalized paper books, which is surprising, right?
[00:08:58] Eliot Peper: You’d expect that if people [00:09:00] started buying more eBooks and audiobooks, that they’d be buying fewer PA printed books. But that’s not been the case like since the internet happened. Print book sales keep going up and ebook sales and audiobook sales have basically created a new whole industry. But there have been some other weird things.
[00:09:19] Eliot Peper: So the way that we buy books has changed. Amazon is now, you know, more than 50% of all print book sales in the United States, and it is like 85% plus of ebook and audiobook. So effectively Amazon by itself. The majority of the American Books business everything else put together is the minority
[00:09:42] Eliot Peper: And Amazon allows anyone to be a publisher. So Random House is a publisher that retails through Amazon, but I am also a publisher and I retail through Amazon and my publishers, like when I’ve worked with publishers on some of my novels, they’ve retailed [00:10:00] through Amazon. So what it does is it’s almost like put us back.
[00:10:03] Eliot Peper: And I guess I shouldn’t limit this conversation to Amazon. There are many other ways in which to write and publish your work on the internet. All of those have really opened up the field again. So in the era where distribution was the hard problem it that world favored consolidation among publishers where writers had to earn entry.
[00:10:25] Eliot Peper: Now, Distribution is not the problem. Distribution is easy. It’s completely commoditized. So, there’s no distribution advantage to working with them. So in some ways we’ve actually returned to like the Benjamin Franklin era where you can all own your own printing press, right?
[00:10:40] Eliot Peper: And so then like in that era, the hard problem is not distribution. The hard problem is getting anyone at all to. Right. Like if everyone’s their own publisher, there’s a lot of things being published out in the world. So your biggest problem is now obscurity rather than distribution.
[00:10:59] Eliot Peper: This [00:11:00] question was, what does it mean to be an indie author? Well, what it really means from my perspective is there are literally different options and publishing paths you can take with your work these days. When I think about being an author, I don’t even think of myself as an indie author.
[00:11:15] Eliot Peper: I just think of myself as an author, as a writer. What that means to me today is that I also have to think like a publisher, that we have this weird historical window where you could outsource. The questions of how to publish your work to a, a company, right? You could say, I only think about the problems of writing a manuscript.
[00:11:38] Eliot Peper: I don’t think about the next set of problems, which is about how to connect the story I’ve created with the right people in the right way. And those are publishing problems. That’s different than saying like, Okay, I’m reaching the end of a critical scene. You know, what is this character discovering about themselves?
[00:11:59] Eliot Peper: That’s a [00:12:00] different set of problems. And as an author sort of coming up in this new age we’re sort of like drawing on the past and moving toward the future I like to think about both. I really relish the problems of writing the, of the actual, the story problems, the ideas, the, you know, all of that.
[00:12:20] Eliot Peper: And I also think it’s critical and I enjoy thinking about how do I take this thing I’ve written and bring it to the right people in the right way? And that’s publishing. So I think when you’re asking. What does it mean to me an indie author? It means someone who thinks about both sets of problems, right?
[00:12:40] Eliot Peper: It doesn’t actually mean someone who always self-publishers. Like for me, I’ve self-published books, I’ve worked with large publishers and small publishers on books, but. At every point along the way, no matter what publishing I path I take with a particular book, I’m thinking like a publisher.
[00:12:57] Eliot Peper: I’m thinking like, Okay, I can do a partnership [00:13:00] with this publisher, but it’s to achieve a goal I have in mind, rather than to sell that acquiring editor a manuscript and then like wash my hands a bit. Does that make sense?
[00:13:10] Michael Evans: Yeah, it makes total sense and I immediately think about, okay. We’re now publishers and now that necessitates us being able to not distribute our work in this digital age. But as you said, we have to get people to care about it. And I think about then all the different paths that you can take to get your work out into the world.
[00:13:28] Michael Evans: I mean, common ways that like authors might think about are advertising. There’s creating content online, there’s like going to physical book events, and things like that. There’s so many different ways. And for you, How do you get people to care about your books?
[00:13:43] Eliot Peper: My approach is really simple. And mostly it’s because I’ve never had anything else work . So my first novel when I started writing my first novel. I was not thinking I am going to be an author. I was not thinking of it as a career path. [00:14:00] What I was thinking was, I’ve always been a big reader and so I read a lot.
[00:14:04] Eliot Peper: I love reading. I love books. And I had an idea for a book that I wanted to exist in the world that didn’t exist yet. I actually looked for a book like this and couldn’t find it. I was basically like, Oh man, this would be so cool.
[00:14:18] Eliot Peper: Like if I saw this, if I knew that this book existed, I would like devour it and then recommend it to all my friends, right? I had an idea for a book I wanted to read, and I was, and eventually I decided, Well, if I have this idea, why don’t I just try writing? . And so, you know, I opened up Microsoft Word and started writing chapter one and kept going.
[00:14:41] Eliot Peper: And I wrote the book. And that book turned into a trilogy. And now halfway through the manuscript of my 11th novel. But that’s how it spelled to me all the way, like I wrote that. For myself, like I wrote that book to satisfy my own taste and, and so my [00:15:00] only hope afterward was that maybe other people shared my taste.
[00:15:05] Eliot Peper: Right. That maybe there would be other people who were like, Oh, I have also been waiting for this book my whole life. Right. And so what I did when I wrote that book is like, actually one of the very first things I did with it is there was a blogger I really like Brad Fell, and I he had wrote a very popular.
[00:15:24] Eliot Peper: And Brad’s a venture capital investor and the book was a thriller about tech startups, basically two college students who drop out to start a software company. And then , they get caught up in this whole international money laundering scheme. So it’s this like thinker thriller.
[00:15:40] Eliot Peper: Right. I had never met Brad, but I loved. Blog and I had actually found it very informative, just sort of thinking how he thought was very helpful as I was working on the novel. And so I emailed, I cold emailed him, was like, I know you like reading science fiction. I know. I mean, obviously you care about the sort of [00:16:00] tech world and I thought you might enjoy this.
[00:16:02] Eliot Peper: And he read it and you know, he, I thought he would never respond. I mean, he’s like a busy guy as you know. I’m sure he gets tons of inbound all the time. Right. And he responded like two hours later and. I’ve read the first five chapters, whatever that was in the manuscript that I sent him. Like, This is awesome.
[00:16:18] Eliot Peper: Like, keep going. For me that was a huge emotional boost, right? Like, I had no idea what I was doing. And so I was like, well, great, I kept sharing sort of like updates with him along the way and he actually wound up a publishing company that he had fund.
[00:16:33] Eliot Peper: Wound up publishing that first book. And so I’ve sort of approached all of the, I guess you’d say audience building or like that, that you know, your, Cause your question was how do you make people care And like that’s effectively how I do it today. Like when my latest novel came out in May. Literally the entire marketing plan for that book was, I wrote the [00:17:00] book, I made it as good as I possibly could.
[00:17:02] Eliot Peper: I did tons of edits. Like I just tried to make it my best possible work that hopefully other people would share my taste and would enjoy that. And then I just, I sent personal. Emails and messages and texts like to people who I thought would love it. And like now that this was my 10th novel, there are people who have read my previous work and like it, and so that’s an easy, I can text them and say, Hey, like I’ve got a new one coming out.
[00:17:31] Eliot Peper: Would you like to read an advanced copy? That’s all I did. Like, I just sent that to people who had of audiences of their own. Just like you two, you have listeners on this podcast. Right? So I, sent out a bunch of personal individual messages asking if people wanted to read an advanced copy, and then if they said yes, I sent them an advanced copy.
[00:17:52] Eliot Peper: And I mean, there were little things, I didn’t want it to feel. You’re getting spammed, right? The way that random, or like many large [00:18:00] publishers would promote a pre-release novel is their PR team would send out basically like email blasts to reviewers or other people saying like, We have this many book, this book is coming out.
[00:18:14] Eliot Peper: Would you wanna read a copy or whatever. But it’s very impersonal. It feels, Spam. I mean, it’s clearly a marketing email and so I receive those all the time because, you know, I blog, I talk about books, I interview authors, so publishers pitch me constantly on reviewing or like reading or blurbing books before they come out, so I know how it feels.
[00:18:35] Eliot Peper: And it sucks. Like it’s not like almost never do I actually want, you know, what they are offering. But I know that if like one of my favorite authors like texted me and said, I have this new thing. Do you wanna read it before anyone else does? I’d be like, Oh my God. Seriously hell yeah. Right. And so then I did that.
[00:18:55] Eliot Peper: You know, I took that a step further. So if a, an advanced reader requested a physical [00:19:00] copy, what most publishers do is they print the cheapest possible thing. It’s not what you buy in the store, it’s called a gal. And they’ll, they’re just trying to minimize costs. So they’ll like print a flimsy.
[00:19:10] Eliot Peper: Sort of like paperback thing and send it out to reviewers. And I was like, Well, why would I do that? Like these people are like, I’m not marketing the book. If anyone’s gonna market the book, it’s gonna be readers to each other without my intervention. So I want those people to feel like this is an awesome experience.
[00:19:29] Eliot Peper: So like I print. Spent a lot more money like printing out and like a first print run of advanced hardcover copies. And then I personally signed and numbered every single one and like personally mailed those copies out to people from my house. And like you could see it and like people would, Okay, so then you receive that and you’re like, Oh shit.
[00:19:52] Eliot Peper: Like I didn’t even realize it was, I thought I was expecting a gale and now I receive like a personal sign numbered hard cover, [00:20:00] like from the author. So like people were sharing that on like social, right? Cause it makes sense. you’re like, Oh this looks cool. It is cool. It makes me feel special cause I got it ahead of time.
[00:20:09] Eliot Peper: So, I didn’t ask them to do anything, but then I would get like tagged on Twitter or whatever, where people are like, Oh shit. It’s like the new Peper book. And like, you know, they’re, they’re excited and sharing it and like that sharing is how we discover new things, right? I discover new books to read because someone I trust recommends it to me.
[00:20:28] Eliot Peper: Could be my friend, right? It could be you guys on this podcast. It could be an author I love who I listen to an interview with them and they recommend a book. Like that’s how we discover our next favorite book. And so that was my entire marketing plan for Reaper.
[00:20:45] Eliot Peper: I have an email newsletter, like I sent that out announcing that the book was out the day it came out. But like that was the entire marketing plan for the novel. So it’s all been based on this feedback loop of there’s [00:21:00] something in the world that I really want to exist. There’s a whole in the world I wanna fill with a story, so I’m gonna make that thing.
[00:21:06] Eliot Peper: And then I. Try to find and share it with people who will really dig it for their own reasons, and then I will rely on them to let the rest of the world know, because that’s just how culture works.
[00:21:21] Emilia Rose: I think that’s also like the most powerful model too the books readers want to read come from other readers, and it’s not the author just like blasting their book everywhere. They’re getting recommendations from people that they trust, and so, yeah That’s amazing.
[00:21:37] Michael Evans: That is the most Zen marketing model I think there is
[00:21:42] Michael Evans: And with that, you also recommend books yourself. I know this cause I’ve been subscribed to your monthly newsletter where you recommend books. For a very long time. And the books that you recommend I like, honestly love, and I’m just curious cuz these emails clearly take you a long time to do, They’re very thoughtful.
[00:21:59] Michael Evans: And [00:22:00] h how do you think about curating other works that you love yourself?
[00:22:04] Eliot Peper: One of my favorite things to do on the internet and like I think one of the best uses of the internet period. Is pointing to things you love, right? There’s enough shit happening in the world. We don’t need more commentary on that, right? Like, we get it. And so to me, one thing I really love doing is being like, Oh my God, this thing meant so much to me.
[00:22:30] Eliot Peper: You should check it out, right? And not everyone should check it out, but if you like this, this or this, you’re gonna love this. And so to me that’s a wonderful use of the internet. It isn’t limited to books. It’s like literally anything. Just like 0.2 things you love, like a blog post.
[00:22:45] Eliot Peper: You just did that very generously just now. You like recommended my newsletter cuz you enjoy it, right? That is such a good use of the. And I love that because I read the internet a lot, right? It’s like I discover things that way. And so [00:23:00] I very much enjoy trying to pay that forward and trying to.
[00:23:04] Eliot Peper: Say like, Ooh, I discovered this cool thing, it’s totally worth your time, right? Because that helps the best stuff bubble up in the culture. I also think that there’s a another lovely side effect of that kind of like specific praise for the maker of whatever the thing is. Whether it’s a meme or a podcast or a book or anything else.
[00:23:25] Eliot Peper: It’s like when you point out what you love about their thing. Like they have no other way to know. Right. If you let them know that by sharing it, like you’re encouraging them to do more of what you love, Right? It’s like this positive system, right? Like it’s a positive sum game.
[00:23:43] Eliot Peper: So I’ve always really loved that. So actually when I was starting out as a writer, I was trying to think, well, you know, I, as a reader, I have authors I really love. And honestly, it’s sort of hard to [00:24:00] track them. There isn’t an obvious, there isn’t an obvious way to know when they have a new book come out.
[00:24:05] Eliot Peper: I mean, you can rely on their publisher’s advertising if that isn’t your way of figur, of finding out, how else would you find out? Unless you happen to be listening to NPR when they’re interviewed or something like that, there isn’t a great way to track this.
[00:24:20] Eliot Peper: It’s sort of like blogs versus newsletters, right? Like blogs are on the open. If you publish on the open web, like there are many pros that email newsletters lack. The only problem is how do you get notified of new posts? No one uses RSS anymore. So now it’s like, that’s the problem.
[00:24:36] Eliot Peper: So books have this issue. So I was like, okay, I wanna try to create a place like on this big, wild, wonderful, like impossible to comprehend internet. Like I wanna create a single. That is the best place to follow my writing. So if you like my writing. You can just be like, Okay, I sort of wanna know when there’s more of that available,
[00:24:59] Eliot Peper: And so [00:25:00] I started a newsletter to be that place, where if you love my writing, this is the one thing, you just have to subscribe and that’s it. You’ll like know when anything important happens. And so that’s what I started the newsletter for. But I wanted to take it further than that.
[00:25:16] Eliot Peper: I didn’t want it to just be, All, you know, cuz like, I feel like the minimum viable version of that as a novelist would be, I send you one email whenever I publish a new book. Right? So if you get like one email every year or three but I was like, you know, I’d sort of love to hear a little bit more from a writer.
[00:25:35] Eliot Peper: I really dig the work of and I know that I find so much joy. And learning and knowledge and inspiration from reading. That’s why I write. I know that I love it when I, when my favorite writers recommend books, so I was like, well, perfect. Like, Most readers who like my work would probably be interested in [00:26:00] books that mean a lot to me.
[00:26:01] Eliot Peper: They might not love all of them. They might only be interested in a minority of the books that I recommend, but if I sort of like let them know the best books I’m reading, like I think most people would dig that. And so that’s why I. Sending the newsletter that way and now I think it’s been like eight years or something.
[00:26:18] Eliot Peper: Which is sort of hard for me to conceive of. But yeah, I mean, basically, I send it out every month and it’s like three books. I love that You might too. Right? And I just explain why I love them. And then I also, you know, if I have a new essay come out somewhere or a new blog post, like I’ll link to it so that you can, if that’s what allows you to follow my writing.
[00:26:37] Eliot Peper: And then every once in a while when I have a new book come out or big project, I’ll send a dedicated issue that sort of like talks about the creative process or the backstory and why I made the. So yeah, that’s sort of the story behind the newsletter and like, honestly, it’s been really delightful because I love hearing from readers and that’s a really wonderful interactive form where I’m sending out.
[00:26:59] Eliot Peper: [00:27:00] A newsletter and people respond, right? And then you have, that leads to a one-on-one conversation, which is really powerful and dynamic and cool same with when I was reaching out with those individual messages for the advanced copies. Many of those led to totally unrelated conversations that were just like amazing, right?
[00:27:18] Eliot Peper: It’s like connecting with people whose work you admire and vice versa.
[00:27:21] Michael Evans: In a literal way led to this conversation because I learned about you. From a friend who recommended me your books.
[00:27:28] Michael Evans: And from there I kind of got caught up into your writing world. And then we ended up communicating over email
[00:27:34] Michael Evans: and I’m like, Wow, okay. You know, I really like this author a lot. And then you responded to me one day and were like, Hey, I have a new book coming out in like a couple months, you wanna read it? And that was like the coolest thing. And I’m like, Oh wow. Like I feel so much closer to this author
[00:27:49] Michael Evans: That kind of leads me to think about earlier saying this word outsource and I thought it was super interesting cuz like authors we kind of like use to outsource are our marketing, [00:28:00] but now, we kind of live in a world in which we don’t have to do that. And that can be part of the defining factors of being indie, but Amazon and they’re kind of dominance over the market, I think does mean that a lot of times we outsource certain things to Amazon
[00:28:12] Michael Evans: and I’m curious.
[00:28:13] Michael Evans: When I say that, like what do you think currently as authors, we outsourced to Amazon and how have you been able to build, you know, maybe a new revenue stream that’s kind of outside of it? Cuz I know you’ve also set up subscriptions, which is what a lot of people come to our podcast to learn about. So I’m curious to just dive more into that aspect of your writer life and business.
[00:28:32] Eliot Peper: mm-hmm.
[00:28:33] Eliot Peper: Okay. Just to make sure I’m clear on the question, what do I currently outsource to Amazon? And then separately, how do subscriptions play a role in my sort of personal business model? Is that
[00:28:45] Eliot Peper: okay? So to tackle Amazon first, I outsource some very clear things to them. I mean, and I would actually maybe frame it a little differently. We can frame it as outsourcing. I mean, like I outsource distribution of all my audio books, of all [00:29:00] my eBooks, like Kindle basically. And then printing and distribution of my paperback.
[00:29:06] Eliot Peper: To Amazon. And then I use a different a different company called Ingram, which is, if you’re interested in books, that’s like the big player no one’s heard of. If you’re not in the books industry, they’re a print services. Conglomerate that basically does a lot of the printing and distribution for almost every major publisher in the us.
[00:29:26] Eliot Peper: But just like Amazon, you can create an account yourself. And so I use Ingram for my hard covers and they distribute my hard covers, but like, honestly, most of the sales of the hard covers are through Amazon anyway, so Amazon’s doing retail there as well. But The reason why you could say my work as an author is very Amazon centric or dependent on Amazon.
[00:29:49] Eliot Peper: Is not really because I couldn’t do it any other way. Like I could do it with Ingram and I could set up Shopify on my author’s homepage and sell directly to [00:30:00] readers. Sometimes I do that. I’ve actually used Stripe payment links to sell, signed hard covers directly to, to readers which has been really a fun way to experiment with like very, very direct selling.
[00:30:13] Eliot Peper: So it’s not that Amazon I mean, they, I don’t wanna like undervalue them. They do have, they’ve done a lot of work to like build the fascia to stitch all of these different activities together. So like that’s, I don’t wanna like undersell that, but like, the real reason is reader expectations. So like, readers are so used to buying books on Amazon that it, you don’t think about it, right.
[00:30:38] Eliot Peper: Like if you’re like, Oh, I have a new book out, and like, you can go order on Amazon. Like that’s, no, that’s not part, that’s no longer a barrier. It’s not a question that will make you evaluate your purchase of the book. Whereas if I sell it on my personal site through Shopify or whatever, Very few. I mean, I know that like we’ve [00:31:00] talked about direct to consumer, like business models on the internet, but you know, obviously that’s grown enormously.
[00:31:05] Eliot Peper: But like not very many people have had that experience, like as a buyer and especially as a buyer of books buying directly from the author on their site. That’s just like a new. Thing. It doesn’t mean it’s bad. In fact, some readers might think that’s especially cool, like when I’ve done the direct sales via Stripe payment links, like that’s part of the appeal for those readers, right?
[00:31:31] Eliot Peper: They’re like, Oh my God, I get to buy it straight from the author. Everything goes to them, and I get a signed copy that they’re mailing to my door. Like, that’s right. That’s like part of what’s special. But like that’s a very small number of people, whereas most people, if you hear about a book, where do you look it up?
[00:31:50] Eliot Peper: Right. It’s not a question. So the fact that Amazon has aggregated so much of the demand for books in the United States, [00:32:00] that’s why I use them. It’s not because their backend like infrastructure is uniquely good or, you know, it’s just that they have all the readers, like they’ve trained people to, to buy stuff from them.
[00:32:11] Eliot Peper: And like they have Kindle, like Kindles are the best ere. and like most people who read eBooks read on Kindle. So like, if you’re gonna, and like if you’re gonna sell eBooks outside of the Kindle ecosystem, now you have to get your readers to like do an annoying bureaucratic process of side loading it.
[00:32:28] Eliot Peper: It’s just a whole thing, right? So that’s why I rely on Amazon so much. It’s not because of the tooling, it’s because of that’s where readers are. Does that make sense?
[00:32:39] Michael Evans: It’s super important to hear you describe it that way and delineate that. I think for all of us, we’re kind of almost caught in that trap where it’s like, okay, like that readers are happy there, and ultimately , we’re servicing readers in, in our business.
[00:32:51] Michael Evans: So they trust that plate and it’s quick and it’s easy and it’s something, it could be useful as a revenue stream. Basically [00:33:00] every author, but not, it doesn’t have to be the only thing. And I know that you’ve also, Beyond Stripe payment links also experimented with other revenue streams.
[00:33:08] Michael Evans: And I’m curious for you, cuz you have a yearly subscription that people can use to support you and your work. What, what kind of caused you to set up that? Cause it’s still, it’s still something quite novel. Not every author immediately goes, Oh yeah, I’m gonna have a subscription. And how has that worked for you?
[00:33:22] Eliot Peper: Sure. So, Okay. I am happy to explain it in detail and I wanna include the caveat that. Like if you were asking me for advice on like how to set up a subscription business for something you’re like putting out of the world, like, do not follow what I do. Like, that’s not like, it is very far from optimal in my perspective in terms of like strategy.
[00:33:49] Eliot Peper: Like if you’re trying to be, if you’re trying to build a business or a career around, Writing things and putting them out into the world or making things and putting them out in the world. Like what [00:34:00] I do is probably not the best approach, like from a subscription perspective. So how does it work? My books work like normal books.
[00:34:08] Eliot Peper: You can buy them, you can listen to them. They’re just like, we just talked about, you buy them on Amazon. In addition to that, I have this newsletter, which we’ve already talked about and. First using a service called Meaningful, and then later switching the same subscribers over to subs when I cause my newsletter predated Subst.
[00:34:28] Eliot Peper: And so I was on MailChimp and then stitching together services behind the scenes. And then when Subs stack came out you know, I spoke to Hamish there, he was trying to recruit me onto the platform, and then I eventually moved over my reader newsletter to subs and they have like built in subscription functionality.
[00:34:46] Eliot Peper: And so I before subs I had. A paid membership or paid subscription. But I don’t follow like any of the best practice for how people would say to like build a [00:35:00] subscription business on the internet. For example, like very common advice is you need to publish a lot, like ideally multiple times a week, right?
[00:35:08] Eliot Peper: And then you need to pay wall. Many of your posts because then people are paying for something, right? Like they’re getting access to, you know, this otherwise inaccessible content and, and so it makes them feel like they’re getting something. I do neither of those things. Like my newsletter is monthly, so it comes at not just, not even, not multiple times a week.
[00:35:32] Eliot Peper: Not even once a week. It comes out once a month. And there’s no pay weld content. There’s no premium content if you pay for the annual subscription, which is $5 a month or 50 bucks a year. It’s not about buying access to something. What it allows you to do is if you love my writing and you want to see more of.
[00:35:54] Eliot Peper: By becoming a paid subscriber, you’re helping me do more of it. You’re literally [00:36:00] underwriting my creative process. So it’s really straightforward. It works much more like NPR than it does like Strat Techy or the New York Times or Netflix. Right. So the idea behind it is, look, I publish books that you pay for.
[00:36:18] Eliot Peper: I also publish a lot of writing for free on the internet, Right. That you can re, or whether it’s on my blog or in other publications where, you know, like where I’ve published an essay or something like that, like, All of that stuff is for free. The newsletter is for free. But if that means something to you, if you value that, if you wanna see more of that on the internet, and if you wanna see more of these books in the world, this is a way for you to pay it forward, to be like, this is the kind of thing I want more of.
[00:36:45] Eliot Peper: I want to vote with my dollar, not just with a like button. And so that’s how my subscription works. It’s very unlike. What, you know, probably what are the highest earning and most popular sort of subscriptions [00:37:00] out there. And I, oh, actually there’s one other way in which it is unlike anything strategic in terms of like building subscriptions on the internet.
[00:37:08] Eliot Peper: Like the content itself, Like if you want to start a subscription, If it’s, if you’re doing writing or podcast, anything where you’re like telling stories or sharing ideas, like the obvious thing, the obvious kind of content that people are going to pay for, that will people will easily pay for is effectively commentary on current events.
[00:37:30] Eliot Peper: Right? That encompasses almost everything. That almost every large subscription is some kind of commentary on current events. That could be a stock market analyst that’s like commenting on like the state of the market. It could be news, right? Like the New York Times, right? Like it could, like any of these.
[00:37:48] Eliot Peper: It’s basically like something is happening right now in the world. and I need your point of view on it, or I need to know more about it. And, and especially if it’s your corner of the world, right? Like if you’re a [00:38:00] neurosurgeon, you’d probably be willing to pay for like the latest updates in like neurosurgery, right?
[00:38:07] Eliot Peper: So whatever your sort of focus is in the world, like many people are willing to pay for like commentary on current events in the part of the world they care about. My newsletter, my, the essays, the blog posts I publish are not that at all. They are intentionally not that like, I never, one of the filters I use as a writer to decide what to write about is precisely that.
[00:38:33] Eliot Peper: I only want to invest time in writing things that have the potential to be at least as valuable 10 years from now as they are today. That rules out 99% of commentary on current events. Right? It just means that’s not what I write about. I try to write about ideas or, or stories that have some inherent meaning to them that help, that help explain something fundamental in the world [00:39:00] that like your grandchildren could find value in.
[00:39:04] Eliot Peper: That doesn’t mean they will. Right. Most of my writing, like most writing is forgotten. So it’s not that your grandchildren will read it and find value in it. It’s that that’s the kind of stuff I like to make. And that’s the kind of thing I like to offer to people in the world. But from my point of view, I have not seen very many subscription businesses built on those kinds of stories or that those kinds of ideas, because they don’t have the obvious urgency that make you reach for your credit card.
[00:39:38] Eliot Peper: They’re the kind of thing where you read it and after you read it, you’re like, Wow. You know, changed how I look at the world. So in retrospect, it was far more valuable than 10 years of a New York Times subscription, but you wouldn’t have known that going in, right? You only know that afterwards. So it has a, a different dynamic in, at [00:40:00] least when I think about reader psychology, those kinds of stories have a different dynamic that might not lend themselves as easily to traditional.
[00:40:08] Eliot Peper: Rules of thumb around internet subscription businesses.
[00:40:12] Michael Evans: I think it’s something that can work. We saw it work for Annie Jones, who was actually recently on the podcast. She has this bookstore called The Bookshelf and she has her two kind of like lower monthly tiers, like one’s like $5 a month and one’s $15 a month, or 20, somewhere in that range that you do get maybe some more tangible benefits for where you’re getting access to a community bonus episodes cuz she runs a bookish podcast, but at $50 a month, which is her most expensive, it’s just, hey, you wanna support an independent book.
[00:40:40] Michael Evans: Come here and she’s had quite a few people do it. So I think there’s a way to combine even both approaches between, with someone who’s providing something very tangible and then someone who’s maybe trying to get you more into the ethos and the idea. I personally love both, so I think think it’s a great perspective.
[00:40:58] Eliot Peper: And I mean for other people [00:41:00] listening, I would also say that in addition to the like monthly subscription, like I’ve also received one off large grants that have, supported Myles. And like that’s a different kind of patronage. That’s a more traditional form of patron that’s like mechi style patronage, right?
[00:41:18] Eliot Peper: And those have made a huge difference. Right. So that’s. Like, don’t feel too locked in, right? Like there are different ways that you can approach this stuff. And then I would also say that if you zoom out, if you know, because if most of your listeners are interested in like, how do I build a subscription content business on the internet? Is that accurate?
[00:41:36] Michael Evans: I think we’re just a group of authors trying to explore new ways of publishing. Subscriptions are the primary focus, but we don’t talk about that every podcast.
[00:41:45] Eliot Peper: Perfect. Okay. Got. Okay. Well, if you’re an author, something that here is a weird aspect that I have discovered only through the practice of being an author, which is I make money off of like royalties, [00:42:00] right? Like one of my books sell. I get a little bit of money for each book and like I also, when I do a deal with a publisher, I get an advance against future royalties.
[00:42:08] Eliot Peper: So like I’ll get a chunk of change and. My royalties have to pay that off just like any other advance before I start getting more. But I’ve also done my own licensing deals. So like for film, TV rights, for for you can, you know, you can talk about like foreign language publishing rights and then also like just non-traditional ones.
[00:42:27] Eliot Peper: Like, for example, there was a company that was basically building a new subscription fiction app where it was like bite sized. Chapters with art and lore, all the sort of like gamer world, sort of like, like world building stuff behind it. And so they like adapted one of my novels and so like I sold them the rights to that.
[00:42:47] Eliot Peper: So like that was a different source of income. Then I also have like the annual subscription of readers who are paying to, you know, in order, to support my creative process. Then I’ve had one off grants. That [00:43:00] do the same thing, but you know, one at a time and on a much larger scale. And then in addition to that, which this has sort of surprised me, I now have a lot of inbound commissions.
[00:43:11] Eliot Peper: So like companies pay me to write things for them. Sometimes that’s, Strategic, Like I’ve had Fortune 100 executive teams who ask me to write a science fiction story that blows up their version of the future for their next 20 year planning session. Right. With their csu. And I’ve also written commissioned essays for like magazines and stuff like that, but like those commissions Are another big part of my income.
[00:43:39] Eliot Peper: And so what’s weird is what I didn’t expect is that they all sort of feed each other, right? Like if I’m hired as a consultant to come on to advise, you know, a company owned strategy, often that’s because the founder is a fan of my books. Right. Or like, heard me give a talk at South by Southwest or something.
[00:43:58] Eliot Peper: But I gave the talk [00:44:00] because I wrote a science fiction novel. Right. And you know, like, it’s this, like flywheel. And so if you’re an author, you, you don’t wanna just think about like the, or I would not recommend. Limiting your perspective on the business you are choosing to engage in solely to royalties against book sales, because that surely will be a part of the puzzle, but it’s not the.
[00:44:26] Michael Evans: that’s an incredible insight and I think you’re one of the few examples of fiction author, specifically fiction that’s between this and most of our audience are fiction authors, which is why I think this is so inspiring because in the world of nonfiction, we all know the people who write the business book and that’s great.
[00:44:42] Michael Evans: And then that ends up being something in that niche that can be. And the conference became, and all these things. And for fiction authors, it sends a bit tougher to imagine what world are you building around yourself, what flywheel could you even have? But you know, Eliott’s definitely done that. And so graciously you [00:45:00] outline that for us, which is really, really cool.
[00:45:02] Michael Evans: And. There’s another thing I really wanted to dive into with you because we’re kind of going up towards the end of the hour and I feel like we could literally talk for hours, but there’s one thing I just that I’m dying When you, when you talked about grants, there’s a really cool project you’ve done related to a grant that you received that’s called True Blue Story, and I just think it’s a fascinating way to reimagine what storytelling can look like on the internet.
[00:45:25] Michael Evans: I want you to unpack that for us and tell us what you learned from that.
[00:45:28] Eliot Peper: Yeah. Okay, so. I wrote a short story called True Blue, and it’s actually quite short. Like I think you can probably read it in 15, 20 minutes. And it, it was a really fun, it’s based on this idea that it’s, it’s an alternative world where groups are discriminated against. In society based on eye color, right?
[00:45:53] Eliot Peper: And some listeners may be familiar with actual sociological studies that, that have looked at this, right? So, [00:46:00] but this is a fictional short story that takes place in that world. And so it’s a really fun, like, idea driven speculative story, right? Like, what if the world were like this? And then that, That’s always fun cuz then when you read that kind of a story, it makes you, when you come back, The default world.
[00:46:17] Eliot Peper: Yep. You might look at it a little differently. So so this was a really cool short story. But short stories are sort of hard to publish. Like you, you can, you know, you can publish them in magazines, but not many. I mean, in the publishing world, the joke is that only writers read short stories, right?
[00:46:36] Eliot Peper: So, short story collections famously don’t. Like, you know, every one will point to like one or two exceptions that prove the rule, right? But basically people don’t read short stories, . And so I was thinking, you know, how could we do this? How could we like push the boundaries on what publishing means?
[00:46:54] Eliot Peper: For this kind of a short story, rather than just like throwing it in another magazine that very few people will [00:47:00] read. How could we do this differently and bring the same kind of creativity to the shape that the story takes as to the story itself. And so I raised a grant and partnered with an amazing designer, web designer and illustrator.
[00:47:17] Eliot Peper: And we wanted to take on the challenge of, okay, like rather than taking the traditional form of like, you publish it in a magazine or whatever, and fitting the short story into. Given that the internet allows you to play with form so much, right? Like right now we’re interacting through the internet and you can read text on the, you can just like do many different things with the internet.
[00:47:40] Eliot Peper: What would it mean to public to create a package for this story on the internet that actually furthers the, the content of the story itself? What would it mean if the narrative, matched, the emotional impact you’re trying to create, the world you’re trying to build. And so and so we got to work and we wound up we [00:48:00] built a custom site.
[00:48:00] Eliot Peper: You can check it out@truebluestory.com. I’m sure you can like link to it in the show notes or whatever. And the illustrator who’s based in New Zealand, she’s amazing, did all of these like physical and digital illustrations. And then the web designer Peter integrated those into the site.
[00:48:16] Eliot Peper: And you know, there are micro animations. It’s really cool. So the whole idea was how can we create an entire, like a custom engineered webpage where the only priority of the entire website is making this story land with the reader? And we actually wound up winning a web design. For the site and the the reason we won the award is that you’ve probably heard of like adaptive design, right?
[00:48:44] Eliot Peper: It’s when you’re reading a webpage and like on your phone, the text changes so that you can read it on the phone. Rather than being the same size and layout as on your laptop. And so that’s responsive design. But we took that a step further in [00:49:00] this story, and we called it narrative responsive design, where we took.
[00:49:04] Eliot Peper: Say our, our illustrate, for example, there’s a scene with a bunch of pedestrians on a city street. So it’s a wide angle scene. And if you’re on a laptop or desktop, that wide angle looks awesome, right? It looks it’s beautiful and it goes across the whole screen. It sort of sets the tone for that next scene in the story.
[00:49:25] Eliot Peper: But if you look at that on a phone and if that wide angle image shrinks to the width of your phone screen, you won’t even be able to see any detail of the pedestrians. You won’t be able to digest the narrative content of the image because it’s too small. And if you crop the image, which is what, So like typically a respons.
[00:49:49] Eliot Peper: Website would either shrink or crop the image, right? So if you crop the image, now you’re just seeing the middle of it and you’ve cut out like all a bunch of stuff. That is [00:50:00] critical for the context that image is setting in the story. And so instead, we actually sliced the image into layers and then created many, many different versions of it for every possible screen size.
[00:50:14] Eliot Peper: That retained all of the key narrative elements. So you wanted the main charact, Like it was okay if a movie extra pedestrian gets cut out on a small screen, but not okay if the protagonist does. Right. Like so we would remove based on the story content of the different components of the image, we would strip those out in order to, you know, condense them for different screen sizes.
[00:50:44] Eliot Peper: And so at, if you look at the screen or if you, look at the website on different screens, you’re still, no matter what kind of screen you look at it on, you’re. All of that narrative punch with the whole thing because it’s costume engineer in this way. And that’s what we [00:51:00] won the design award for, which is pretty cool.
[00:51:02] Eliot Peper: So yeah, if you check it out, I think listeners would probably really enjoy it. And also at the bottom of the, of the story, if you just scroll down to the bottom of the page I wrote up like a making of. Article that like talks about how we went about doing this design, Why we approached it in this way shows a bunch of like images from the creative process.
[00:51:23] Eliot Peper: You can see how rough it was at the beginning before it got to sort of the final package.
[00:51:28] Michael Evans: I definitely think everyone should check out the link. It’ll be an description and the making of article, which I have read is fascinating. So thank you for unpacking a bit of that here for us today. And yeah, what a fantastic conversation.
[00:51:42] Michael Evans: I think there’s a ton of insights. We can all gather from this no matter where we’re at in stage of our career or what exactly we’re writing, because you just have very unique mind and a very unique approach to your career that at least really inspires me. So Eliot, thank you so much for being here today with us.
[00:51:57] Eliot Peper: Thanks so much for having me.
[00:51:58] Michael Evans: Awesome. And [00:52:00] that concludes this podcast today. I hope y’all enjoyed it. I know I had such a fun time talking to Eliot. He’s one of my favorite authors, so being able to actually hear his thoughts on writing and on his own publishing business was quite a privilege. I wanted to mention that if you’re not already a part of our Facebook group, we actually had an amazing conversation inside of it.
[00:52:21] Michael Evans: It was sparked by Christopher Hopper, who is a wonderful and very successful author who was curious about streaming live streaming for authors. And we got into a really interesting discussion. I think it was inspired by our last episode on the podcast with Author Z Knight. It was about how you can get a million followers for your main character and all about just different ways that you might be able to grow on social media and also like really cool things about subscriptions and a old book source.
[00:52:49] Michael Evans: So that’s a cool episode to go check out, but it’s a really cool conversation in the Facebook group that I just wanted to highlight because some of the interesting takeaways were gen Z is really into streaming, [00:53:00] especially video games. So if your books are connected to video games anyways, that could be something interesting.
[00:53:05] Michael Evans: Another interesting takeaway from the conversation of the Facebook group was just that live streams allow you to build a closer relationship with your readers and that live streaming different things like maybe your writing process, your research process could be an interesting experiment. It’s still early days and I still think that author.
[00:53:23] Michael Evans: Are in the beginning of utilizing this kind of medium of interacting and promoting our books. So there’s a lot of caveats and a lot of things that we all have to explore, but the Facebook posts and the thread highlights so much amazing things. So I encourage you to check it out. And I’ve linked kind of a link to the thread below.
[00:53:42] Michael Evans: So if you’re in the group, you can just go straight to it. And if you’re not in the group, you just have to sign up. It’s free and you’ll be able to check it out. Anyways, I hope everyone has an amazing rest of your day. Thank you so much for listen. And in the meantime, don’t forget Storytellers Rule the World.