| Part 3 of 3 in the New Age of Publishing By Michael Evans on May 12, 2023. You can read part 1 here, part 2 here, and part 3 just keep scrolling down below :). I’m about to share with you why my love for storytelling almost killed me. And it’s that same misdirected passion that is slowly destroying our world.If you don’t have time to read this, then let me just tell you the point straight-up: Authors need to own the relationship we have with our readers or else “independent” authors may well go extinct. And when we do own this relationship, we can unlock more value for ourselves, our readers, and our world than ever before. The future depends on this. It depends on us. Storytellers ruling the world, not monolithic platforms and retailers. Not corporate profits. Us. The Sovereign Authors. This is not supposed to be fear-mongering. This is a rallying cry to create spaces online that we own as authors and businesses and revenue streams independent from the whims of third-party retailers and platforms that don’t have our best interests in mind. It’s this same broken incentive structure that nearly ended my life. And now I’m going to tell you how… It started with a dream, just like all of you. Specifically, with a story. Growing up watching science videos on YouTube and reading science fiction novels were my only escape into a future that filled me with wonderment and amazement from a present that filled me with anxiety and dread. My parents had divorced and my dad’s gambling addiction had caused my family great financial difficulties and myself a burgeoning identity crisis as I entered my teen years. Just like all of us I turned to writing to process this hard time. And it was these stories and my passion for creating them that soon became my desire to make a career out of it. I was enamored with the possibilities that the internet provided and the booming ecosystem of indie publishing. It was 2017 and I was 15 years old. I had just published my first novel.A year later, I was more determined than ever to make a career out of being an author. I had just attended my first book signing in Rochester, New York and got to see fans holding my book for the first time. Real fans. Not family members. Not friends trying to be nice to me. |
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| This was what being an author felt like. I can do this. I graduated high school a year early and went to the 20Booksto50k conference in Vegas in 2019. It was life-changing and I walked out of the event with my first author friends, an internship with one of the best-selling authors at the conference, and a newfound hope that I could make it as an author. I published 9 books that year. Rapid releasing them and spending thousands of dollars out of pocket on ads. By the end of the year, my margins were low and I was feeling burnt out and defeated. My books must stink. As I entered college, I started to feel my passion for writing slip as the mounting pressure and anxiety took over. It was then that I started YouTube. In just a few months my channel grew to 9,000 subscribers and generated hundreds of thousands of views. It felt like something was finally working. But then the views crashed just as quickly as they came up… and I felt the pressure again. I was a failure. I wasn’t good enough. And if I wanted to prove to myself that I was worthy… I had to create a story that others wanted. I needed views.It was this insatiable appetite that led me to my darkest moment. It led me to some of the most dangerous places in America as me and my college roommate bought a bus to road trip America and film videos. I figured, if I couldn’t write a thrilling enough story to get readers to keep reading, I’d turn my life into a thriller movie instead. At my lowest, I was filming a video in a haunted forest at night. We had to rush to film another video the next day, and were going so broke that we barely had enough money to buy a hotel room. So we drove through the night. At 3 am, I crashed the car into the median. I had fallen asleep behind the wheel. It took months after this nearly life-ending instant to finally wake up and realize what I had done to my life. I had become an addict for the views. Addicted to the adrenaline of shooting for big viral hits.I had lost my own agency as a creator. And I had let the pressure and the numbers suck the passion that I had from my stories. It was then that I decided that I wanted to change this online ecosystem. An ecosystem that has led to hundreds of thousands of stories just like mine, even if you never found yourself in a haunted forest at night (my mom was not happy with me about that, and on behalf of every mother in the world, please don’t do it). I realized that as beneficial as algorithms can be, they are mere abstractions of human behavior. They reward attention and retention. They reward consumption and time spent. It’s this same mindset that’s spiraling our world from an attention economy turned into an addiction economy that is making us more lonely, anxiety-ridden, and depressed than ever. We must do better than this. And that’s why we have to reorient our publishing industry around connection. But who is this connection to? It’s the connection between you and your readers. Your stories and the people who love them. But connection is leverage… and in order to have leverage over you, the big platforms would rather horde your data, monopolize the customer experience, and cap your earning potential while putting all of us at war for a finite pot of money. What if we got to control the connection instead? What if instead, Storytellers Rule the World? At Ream and Subscriptions for Authors, that is our motto. And for the last two years, I have obsessed about the creator economy, studying how us authors can benefit from existing platforms and ultimately build our own homes for us and our readers. I thought this was impossible.I had seen some YouTubers do this, podcasters, and occasionally the musician. But I had never seen an author do this. Until I met Emilia Rose. She had 2,000 readers paying her monthly to get access to her stories and communities. To support her. She had made $100k+ per year just from subscription revenue. If she decided she never wanted to publish anywhere else, her direct store and her membership would cover the bills for her family and enable her to have creative freedom.A Sovereign Author. A Sovereign Community. To be independent we can’t be mercenaries on platforms we don’t own. We have to fight for and build our own digital empires. We have to know who is buying our books (have their emails), and be able to control what we price our stories at and if we should issue refunds. We deserve to be able to give our readers the privilege of a personalized, curated experience that makes them feel meaningful in a world where, in the words of Christopher Hopper, Automated Communication Saturation is making us more conditioned to ignore notifications and feel ignored by the world around us. This is where selling direct comes in. And no, this is not a call to abandon the eBook retailers and social media platforms. Instead, this is a call to build your own home on land that you can control. As Joe Pulizzi of the Tilt and many others have said before “Don’t build empires on rented land.”In our information age, there is more opportunity for storytellers than ever before. There are more opportunities than ever to build communities that give our readers a sense of meaning, status, and belonging in a world that sorely lacks it. The truth is by going direct you can create more value for your readers than ever. Just look at someone like K Webster, who has achieved tremendous success creating a membership for her readers. This is why I’m so passionate about Subscriptions for Authors and so excited about the future of this industry. It’s about moving beyond the attention economy, which at its worst is a brutal addiction economy, and moving towards a membership economy that has more sustainable business models and opportunities for more storytellers to make a living. This movement is happening in real-time. Every day more of you join us and we couldn’t be more grateful. Together we can create a better future for storytelling. One where Storytellers Rule the World. And if you want to join us inside the Six-Figure Subscription Author Accelerator and get fast-tracked to learning how to build a direct relationship with your readers and a successful membership as an author, you can join here: https://learn.subscriptionsforauthors.com/subscriptions-for-… |