Posted on May 15, 2023.
Russell Nohelty rose to Kickstarter fame after successfully funding over 20 publishing projects on the platform. Today we chat with him all about building a direct sales ecosystem that works for you, how to create a sustainable subscription, and where subscriptions fit in with other revenue streams for authors such as crowdfunding. This one was a lot of fun!
Watch the 2023 Subscriptions for Authors Summit for free: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPzDkhC3gbo&list=PLdPLFc4z-u1aMu0kP0TeeHmyL8VMphdwV&pp=gAQBiAQB
Russell’s links:
Future of Publishing Conference: https://thefutureofpublishingmastermind.com/
Russell’s Website: https://www.russellnohelty.com/
#31 Episode Outline:
0:00:00 Introduction
0:03:17 How to Brand Your Books When You Don’t Fit into One Subgenre
0:07:54 How Russell Began Selling Direct
0:21:09 The Flaw in 1000 True Fans
0:24:38 Having a Subscription that is Sustainable for Your Business and You
0:34:40 Does a subscription cannibalize other revenue streams?
0:43:39 How Readers Engage in Community and How to Build One That Works for You
1:05:21 The Future of Publishing Conference
#31 Episode Transcript:
Michael Evans: [00:00:00] Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Subscriptions for Authors podcast. First, wanna apologize for a brief hiatus. It’s been about a month since we posted a podcast episode, but we’ve released a lot of awesome content. One of one is Descriptions for Authors Summit. We released all 12 sessions in the summit for free, and I’ll link it down, first link in the description.
Michael Evans: Where you can find the whole playlist on YouTube. Some incredible sessions from people like Christopher Hopper, Emilia Rose, Brit Andrews. Ah, the list goes on. It was just like a star started, incredible conference. And you can watch the whole recording. You’re free online. We also launched re, which is a subscription platform by fiction authors for fiction authors.
Michael Evans: And if you’ve been wanting to start your own subscription, Really, ream is the best place to do it. I won’t talk too much in detail about Ream right now. I want to get into this podcast episode, but we’ll have a bonus episode coming out this week, all about Ream and how we built it and why we built it, and it should be a really fun, insightful story for all of you.
Michael Evans: [00:01:00] But now I wanna get into this amazing podcast episode with none other than Russell nte. He’s. Of Kickstarter incubator fame and works a lot with Monica Leonel, who we had on a past podcast episode talking all about going wide. She’s known to, in fact, kind of toying the term aggressively wide, which is really fun.
Michael Evans: She is brilliant, and Russell is just an incredible person, one of the most smart and innovative people in publishing. And this conversation is gonna be all about building a publishing ecosystem that works for you. We talk about how Russell has been able to gain traction at in-person conventions, how he’s branded what is sometimes an unconventional amalgamation of stories because he isn’t writing in a specific subgenre.
Michael Evans: Maybe not writing in a narrow like market as an author. So how do you brand yourself when maybe the things you write go across multiple subgenres? There is a coherent style he has, there is a coherent brand. So we’re gonna talk about that and. We also talk [00:02:00] about how a subscription can work with other revenue streams so that you can do a subscription and a Kickstarter and not cannibalize that.
Michael Evans: A really interesting conversation, one that doesn’t have any easy answers, but getting Russell’s advice on it and then Amelia’s advice on it. Two incredible people who have some really, really interesting insights there. And then lastly, we talk all about using social media and building a community of your readers in a way that is sustainable and.
Michael Evans: Isn’t taking away from you isn’t becoming too stressful. So this is, this is an amazing episode. I want to thank Russell for coming on and I want to get into this one right away, but wanna share one more thing, which is that on Thursday we have a very big episode releasing in just three days with Becca Sign, and this’ll be the official opening episode for the third season of Descriptions for Authors podcast.
Michael Evans: That’s right. We’ve actually already filmed all of our episodes through. Basically the end of August at this point, and we’re gonna be sharing with them one each week so we can’t [00:03:00] wait for it. Becca sign’s gonna kick us off and that’ll be cleaning out Thursday. So if you haven’t already followed this podcast, subscribe to it on YouTube.
Michael Evans: Do so cuz you’ll wanna be notified when that one comes out. Okay? And now for me, we’re gonna get into this awesome podcast, the Russell Naughty.
Michael Evans: Russell, it is amazing to chat with you. We met in person at 20 books and just your vibe, everything. You’ve got a wonderful mind and I wanna dive into it and your journey in publishing today. But I wanna first start with how would you describe the books you write?
Michael Evans: Because what we really wanna chat about today is building a community, especially if it doesn’t fit into a narrow sub genre. So how would you describe
Russell Nohelty: your. So I’ve been thinking about this a lot cuz I was, I used to call it mythological fantasy, and then it was like action, adventure fantasy and thriller fantasy.
Russell Nohelty: But then I read a lot of manga and anime and I was like, this is ridiculous. I write isai, like I clearly write [00:04:00] zaki books. Like they’re all like portal fantasy books and like, it’s a huge genre in, in manga and, and and and anime. All of my favorite books from from, so Isai is basically portal fantasy from Neverland to Oz to to Wonderland to all of the books that I carve, all like, they’re literally all portal fantasy books.
Russell Nohelty: And I, and so I realized that my, literally every big series I’ve written God’s verse, Chronicles obsidian, Spindel Saga, IBA Jones, most of my standalones. Like there’s some element of portal fantasies. So I can pretty much, now it took 40 books, but I can say now that in general I write is a Kai.
Michael Evans: I love it. That’s okay. So, so that’s what you write. And in terms of the community you’ve built and how you sell your books many people may already recognize the name because you’re infamous for the Kickstarter incubator and a ton of books and non-fiction for writers that you’ve written [00:05:00] with Monica Leonel.
Michael Evans: So I’d love to talk about what your business looks like. What are the revenue streams? What are you focused on? Like, I don’t think you’re the guy who’s grinding Amazon ads late
Russell Nohelty: at night. No, I don’t run. So if you look at my. , it might be different when this goes live, but as at this moment, I have zero books on Amazon that are fiction books that are not comics that came from comicology or non-fiction books.
Russell Nohelty: So all of my money comes from direct sales, like literally a hundred percent of it. I had a couple of series that I’m rebranding. I have a couple of series that are exclusive to Kickstarter. I had several books that just weren’t selling, and so I pulled them as exclusives from my website.
Russell Nohelty: But yeah, if you look on, on Amazon, you’ll say, how does this human being make a hundred grand a year? Because there’s nothing there. Like if you look at like, there, actually there are some anthologies that I’ve been in, but yeah. It’s a combination of Kickstarter. So there’s two sides. There’s fiction and non-fiction.
Russell Nohelty: On [00:06:00] fiction. There’s Kickstarter there is my website sales and. Then there are some contract writing work that I do for other people. Generally those are the ways that I make that make money in fiction in non-fiction. I work with, I work with Monica on our business writer mba, and I work with Ryan Z at book sweeps to do viral builders that I used to do.
Russell Nohelty: And between that, there are course sales, there are keep speaking engagements and there’s like contract work for running ads for other people. So though I don’t run ads for my own books, I do run ads for other people. And I do a lot of like building email lists for authors is kind of the thing that I was known for before I was known for Kickstarter was these like viral builders and helping authors build their mailing list and their platform.
Russell Nohelty: So, honestly, there’s something around I usually [00:07:00] track about eight different kinds of sales that I make a year, and one that I didn’t bring up was conventions, which I do a lot less of, but I, I started making my living at conventions and then moved most of it online to Kickstarter and these launches.
Russell Nohelty: And so for my whole career, I’ve like never made money on retailers, ever. I am so surprised that anyone can do that actually, because of how little the ROI is on any one sale. Hmm. That is,
Michael Evans: especially when it comes to, like, if you’re selling a print book on, on a retailer, it, it’s even lower than the margin there, but, okay.
Michael Evans: Okay. So there’s a lot to dive into here. First, I almost wanna start in the beginning because I haven’t heard you talk too much about your convention days, but a lot of authors in our group in the descriptions for authors Facebook group, they’re sending physical like goods out to people, whether it’s.
Michael Evans: Merchandise stickers, like people are getting into trying to connect with their fans physically. And you got out in the world [00:08:00] and did that. And I’m curious what your convention days were like, and it seems like that was kind of how you built your initial fan base that could help you on Kickstarter, but let’s, let’s talk about
Russell Nohelty: that.
Russell Nohelty: Yeah, so in comp, so I started in comics. And in comics, the, the stack, so like every industry kind of has a stack of the things that they have to learn and be good at fiction, non-fiction comics and the comic stack is Kickstarter and conventions. You just, that’s what you did. You did Kickstarter and you did conventions.
Russell Nohelty: And if you didn’t do those two things, like you weren’t going to be successful. And by the way, it’s been now 11 years and that’s still the model. Like it almost killed the, in the entire comics industry. When we went in the pandemic, only about five to 10% of comic sales come from digital, which sounds probably incredible being as like, 80 to 90% of the independent book industry comes from digital.
Russell Nohelty: So it’s almost the exact opposite with comics. [00:09:00] And in comics, like you are told, go to conventions and and, and get sales there. But at conventions there’s a problem. Conventions are generally artist first places. People are going there to get art prints, to meet artists, to get sketch covers and to get commissions.
Russell Nohelty: And as a writer while I have drawn some books and I’ve done original art and, and when I had much far fewer books, I would do original art pieces at conventions or this thing called free crappy drawings. Generally the way that I found to succeed was you just had to have more product.
Russell Nohelty: And I think that what I learned there was every. Industry, every person has an unfair advantage. The problem is that most people are not utilizing their unfair advantage. They’re stuck. Thinking about other people’s unfair advantage. So fantasy authors [00:10:00] who wish that they were romance authors because of, because their audience is bigger.
Russell Nohelty: Or writers who wish they were artists because they could get a higher page rate, or writers who wish they were editors because then they wouldn’t, they’d be getting more per book and they wouldn’t have to like, be making $5 or editors who wish they were writers because then they’re not exchanging time for money anymore.
Russell Nohelty: And so all of these people have like a, a small sliver of the, of, of, of, of the whole picture of what it takes to be successful as a creative. And I found that as a writer I could hire people and then make money at conventions much faster. Not having to sketch or make commissions or any of those things that would just have more on my table.
Russell Nohelty: And so the conventions are hard. Like I’ve been chronically ill for a long time and it’s hard to stand up behind a table and smile. And when I [00:11:00] was an assistant, they used to call it give good phone. And like that was being able to answer the phone and. Traditionally, I talk like this before I was on stage.
Russell Nohelty: Like I don’t generally like modulate my voice when I talk on camera because higher octaves and registers are more excitable and they just sound better to the ear. Across the tininess of a speaker, I tend to modulate my voice a lot more and add excitement to it, and you can like hear it in my voice.
Russell Nohelty: This is my normal voice. And then this is my like phone voice where I’m trying to like get people excited. And so I learned how to do that at conventions, how to get people excitable. And writers are traditionally atrocious at this. Like they are atrocious at showing excitement for the projects that I know they are excited for.
Russell Nohelty: And so at conventions what it taught me was how. approximate the actual excitement you have for a [00:12:00] project. Like, I’m not saying fake excitement, like I know you are excited and passionate about it, but being able to do that and then being able to talk about the book very succinctly because people are only gonna be, have your attention for three minutes, maybe like three to five minutes.
Russell Nohelty: So all sorts of stuff from, from value stacking to bundling, to just simply knowing numbers and understanding advertising. If you already do that, like conventions will be great for you because what are you doing when you’re doing an ad Well, you’re targeting, okay, so targeting is picking a convent. And then you are putting together creative.
Russell Nohelty: So you have creative, you have a backdrop, you have all of these things to make people stop. Then you’re trying to drive traffic from the convention floor to your table. And then you’re trying to, so imagine that being as like someone has now stopped, when they pick up a book, they have clicked, and then when you tell ’em the thing and they buy, that’s a conversion.
Russell Nohelty: And so all of the same [00:13:00] data points that, that everyone talks about online sales, it’s the same. It’s just also talked about differently, but it’s the same like process. It’s the same things you’re trying to do. They just map differently. Which was one of the things that Monica taught me about Kickstarter was how to map the things that publishers and writers.
Russell Nohelty: No onto the things that are on Kickstarter, cuz they’re the same things. And I’ll bet you guys talking about subscriptions. It’s like the same process. It’s just a different way to do the process. Hmm.
Michael Evans: Okay. Yeah, I’m with you completely. And when you bring up Monica, I wanna do a plug for the podcast that Monica did with us.
Michael Evans: It’s called KU Versus Y is a False Debate. I’ll link it down in the description. It was a wonderful podcast. And coming back to the sales funnel that you’re kind of describing, the in-person sales funnel, i r L and then digital and these similarities. When you started to [00:14:00] bring your sales funnel and start to take it online to a site like Kickstarter, how did that process go and when did you decide I’m going to do a Kickstarter?
Michael Evans: Cuz you started this way before it was cool.
Russell Nohelty: Yeah, so I was doing comic book crowdfunding in 2011 and it was even not super cool in comics to do it in 2011. It really got that way around 2016, 17. It got like, it started to really heat up in comics, and the experience the first couple times was terrible because my pricing was bad, and I didn’t really know how to talk about it.
Russell Nohelty: But when I went to shows and saw what people actually wanted to hear, the third one that I did, For Iba Jones, the first volume, I won’t say it was easy, but like I already had a fan base. I already had creators that trusted me, that believed in me, and I already knew what people wanted to hear.
Russell Nohelty: And that is the real advantage of being at a convent at a show with when you’re online, [00:15:00] all you have. Let’s make 10 different versions of this creative and then run them all against each other on a m s and see which one wins or Facebook and see which one wins. When you’re in, in front of someone, you can literally watch their eyes light up and what makes them buy.
Russell Nohelty: It’s just such a easier, more comfortable transition and then you can move that online easier. So in a lot of ways, like doing conventions made the crowdfunding and doing the online stuff easier cuz I didn’t have to, I don’t split test. Like I already split test like with my audience, with everyone.
Russell Nohelty: Like by the time a book comes out, I’ve already run a thousand split tests because I’ve talked to it a thousand times. And then now that I’m mostly working in series that I’ve already like had success with, it’s just rerunning the same things. And I do think that one of the things that people have problems with, online is they, when they run it, when they run something one time, they’re [00:16:00] like, oh, well I can’t ever do that again.
Russell Nohelty: And what I learned really from non-fiction was like, you run the same webinar a thousand times. Like you just, you run it constantly. Like you say the same words and you get it. You, you, you change one sentence here and one sentence there, and you see if it converts slightly better. But like the process is just, once you have something that works, you just keep doubling and doubling and doubling and doubling and doubling down.
Russell Nohelty: And which is why series are so successful. And which is why like when you do a series rebrand, it’s usually like more successful than the first time because you’re like, oh, well I really failed at like, conveying what the series was about. And so coming to crowdfunding after you’ve done five or six different covers when you’ve talked about it a thousand times, makes things a lot easier.
Russell Nohelty: And that trepidation that people generally have about crowdfunding usually comes from the fact that they think they’re going to get egg on their face and people are going to laugh at them. But like, I’ve literally been laughed at, [00:17:00] like to my face, I’ve been told my books are terrible to my face. So like, I don’t, none of that bothers me.
Russell Nohelty: And the quicker you can get past that part of it, the more you can, the faster you can say, oh, well, like, You are objectively wrong because these 10,000 people like my work. It’s objectively good. It’s subjectively your jam. And some things are not objectively good. I’m not saying everything is objectively good, but the more you write and the more you make stuff, the more you’re like, oh, I understand what, what taste-wise is, objective goodness is.
Russell Nohelty: And once something hits objective goodness, then it’s just subjectively finding people who think it’s your jam. And all of that was stuff that I was taught at conventions. And I was also taught things that might not be conventionally successful. Like my book Gerkin Boy and the Dollar of Destiny that I [00:18:00] drew.
Russell Nohelty: And if I showed you, you would laugh at the fact that this has sold better than 99.9% of books.
Emilia Rose: I relate to that a lot. Like what you were saying earlier with you kind of, you went out to conventions and you already had an idea of what people wanted because they told you.
Emilia Rose: And so when you wrote the book, you knew exactly what to write or when you made the comic book, you knew exactly what you needed to be in there. And that’s like, at least for me, I relate to that a lot because that’s exactly what I did with subscriptions. Like I was writing a book and letting my fans like, comment on each chapter and tell me exactly what they wanted to see.
Emilia Rose: People doing the early access model and subscriptions are kind of doing exactly what you’re saying. Like they’re, they’re going out to their fans. They’re like, Hey, what do you want? This is what I’m going to give you, I might change it next chapter. It might, be a little bit different based on your feedback.
Emilia Rose: And so, . That’s very
Russell Nohelty: relatable. Well, so one of the things I think that is a problem for people that do [00:19:00] subscriptions on that, I think you’re a hundred percent right, but when people are online, people consider every person’s opinion to be equally valid. Yeah. And when you’re do, when you’re at a convention, you very quickly say, oh, , like, you just spent a hundred dollars on my work.
Russell Nohelty: So like, you should probably join my mailing list cuz you’re like more And also like, what do you specifically want to hear? So that I, you give me a hundred dollars next year as opposed to when you’re in front of someone. It’s so easy to be like, oh, you just don’t care. Like, I’m not going to take your opinion seriously because, and not because your opinion doesn’t matter, but your opinion doesn’t help me further my brand in front to the people that actually need to hear the message that I’m giving.
Russell Nohelty: And when you’re on, when you’re, when you are doing like Wppa or something like that, like it’s so easy to get. or like whatever, even if you’re doing like KU or something like that. Cause those people are not [00:20:00] really paying for your work. They’re paying for a subscription to everything. Yeah. When someone is paying for your work where there’s crowdfunding or direct sales or, or, or or even like if it’s someone who’s actually a verified purchaser, like those people matter more because they’ve given you money.
Russell Nohelty: So you want to wait their opinion better. Now the problem with that is if you’re super, super, super niche and you like want to expand out of that super, super, super, super, super niche and you’re only listening to people inside that super, super, super niche . Yeah. Then like there is some balance there. But yeah, I think you’re absolutely right where like when you have actually people buying your work, you can say okay, but like.
Russell Nohelty: Are you a good steward for the message to get delivered to more people like you? Or am I going to move away from the people that actually like my work by doing this thing?
Michael Evans: [00:21:00] That is a really key insight and I think many authors, some of whom make really decent incomes don’t have a full grip on that. They, they’re not that understanding of their audience.
Michael Evans: And I’m curious for you, Russell Direct sales, let, let’s start diving into that because you used that word a hundred dollars and it’s an interesting number to use because Kevin Kelly, I’ll links the article below. It’s like canonical about the 1000 true fans model and it basically states if you get a thousand people to pay you a hundred dollars a year, you’re gonna make a good living as a creative person online.
Michael Evans: And that’s, you know, something that is true, but if you’re in kinda unlimited, that would mean you’d have to get someone to read like, , I don’t even know how many pages from you. I don’t even wanna do that math. Like thousands and thousands of pages from you, which means you’re writing a lot to try and get a KU reader to pay you or effectively get paid a hundred dollars per reader through ku.
Michael Evans: So knowing that that would be difficult to do every year in direct sales, how are you able to make more money per reader? How is this model more profitable for you? Like outline this, especially for [00:22:00] someone who’s like, I don’t even know how you’re doing it.
Russell Nohelty: Sure. Okay. So before this, I have to talk about the fatal flaw in Kevin Kelly’s.
Russell Nohelty: Thesis because there’s a fatal flaw in Kevin Kelly’s thesis, which is the idea that someone will either spend $0 or a hundred dollars, and the fatal flaw is you need to talk to a bajillion people to drill down to some people who will give you $5 to some people who will give you $20 to some people who will give you a hundred dollars.
Russell Nohelty: And when people generally analyze that work, they are doing it with like, so Kevin Kelly is mostly talking to like entrepreneurs who do tech. And so those people are, they’re people are spending, you know, if you get ClickFunnels, you’re spending $2,000 a year. So yeah, a hundred dollars is. probably the lowest offer that they’re going to have.
Russell Nohelty: But for creative people, like the funnel works so that the top end is [00:23:00] probably higher than a hundred and then the bottom. But there are going to be a lot of casual readers who are only going to ever give you $5. And most people that are doing this are like, oh, I just need to find a hundred people. So if there’s a hundred people on my mailing list, I just have to figure how to give, get all of them to give me a hundred dollars.
Russell Nohelty: But it’s really like, no, you need probably 10,000 people on your mailing list so that a thousand of them will give you $5 so that a hundred of them will give you a hundred dollars. I mean, that math is not a hundred percent accurate, but like there’s. There’s this thing that works in tech where if you’re buying a bike, yes, getting someone to repair to, to give a hundred dollars to like repair my toilet once a year, probably like that’s gonna happen.
Russell Nohelty: There’s probably gonna be some repair that I have to do in my house that if I gave someone a hundred dollars, like that will be an easy win for me. But the amount of reward you have to give to get someone to do a hundred dollars [00:24:00] in the creative industry is just considerably more. So I think it’s probably more likely someone’s gonna give you $20 a year, and then that $20 a year can be scalable as opposed to a hundred dollars.
Russell Nohelty: But there are people who will give you a hundred dollars a year, but those people will probably be needing services from you, not products from you. Does that make.
Michael Evans: Yeah, no, I think it’s, it’s interesting, especially when thinking about subscriptions, right? Cuz you say like all these different price points and these are literally different tiers someone could subscribe to.
Michael Evans: I’m at $5 a month, $10 a month.
Michael Evans: There’s authors who have people subscribe at a hundred dollars a month. So you have all these different sorts of tiers. And I’m curious for you, what would be your sorts of, I mean literally like when you’re on Kickstarter, your tiers, when you’re thinking about setting up your subscription, which I know you’re in the process of, what are you thinking about in terms of your tiers and segmenting, the sorts of things, products and services you’re offering for, you know, different customers, willingness to [00:25:00] pay and their passion
Russell Nohelty: for your work?
Russell Nohelty: Sure. So it’s, it’s interesting cuz I have two different though parallel careers. One for fiction and one for non-fiction. And the way that. Segment them is very different. So I’ll talk specifically about fiction because that’s what I’m working on right now with subscriptions. And the first question I ask is, how many spoons do I have?
Russell Nohelty: I am chronically ill, so like I have less spoons than the average person. I’m also 40, so I have less spoons than the average 20 year old. Just in general, like someone who’s 20 is gonna have significantly more spoons than me. Now, I also have way more product than a 20 year old. Like there’s, unless you have been working and writing like world class books since you were born, there’s just no way you have more product than me.
Russell Nohelty: Just don’t, like, I have great product and I have just so much of it that when I go to Kickstarter, , I can do like [00:26:00] $250 to get all of my work. Like that’s how much it would cost to get all of it digitally. Not even all like, physically, digitally. So my bigger tiers usually, so I can do like an actual subscription where like people just have access to my back catalog and like they have a lot of stuff they have, like they can access a lot of things.
Russell Nohelty: My question is more like, how much can I sell this for without diminishing what I make on Kickstart or for these additional tiers? Or like making the audience who paid for it full price for it irritated. And also how do I make something that doesn’t have the ability to download it is one of the big things.
Russell Nohelty: So the first thing I say is, how many spoons do I have and how can I make sure that while I’m scaling this up, because I’m not gonna have a thousand people giving me a hundred dollars a year like tomorrow while I’m scaling this up. It’s still valuable to people, [00:27:00] but it’s not my whole life because I just, I have so many other things that I do.
Russell Nohelty: I need it to not be my whole life. And then in that, I’m like, okay, so I’m gonna be writing a book in my big universe that I have, I can probably without much effort allow somebody to name a character every three months. Yeah. I will also have to make back story, short stories, other things for this world.
Russell Nohelty: So like probably without much additional effort, I could allow somebody to like, Some segment of the universe at least, or some parameters for me to write this story. I can, at least, I can give people in my audience a voting stake in the world building that I’m doing. I can ask them what universe they’d like me to work in.
Russell Nohelty: I can do certain [00:28:00] things like that because the afterburn of that is what they get, but the work is what I already have to do. So I am not interested in making a subscription where I have to do a lot of excess work because I don’t have a lot of excess spoons, and most of those spoons are used. Doing most of those spoons are used in the non-fiction part of my business because like, that’s the new thing.
Russell Nohelty: That’s the one that makes me significantly the most money at this moment and what we’re doing the most interesting stuff with right now. So I spend most of my time there. I’ve realized I should, like, I should maybe talk about spoons. I don’t know if you guys even know what I’m talking about. You guys may just be like, he says, I don’t know.
Russell Nohelty: It is got a utensil metaphor, but like, do you guys know what spoons are? So I can I think you
Michael Evans: should describe spoons because I, I’m with the metaphor, but I’m not fully
Russell Nohelty: with [00:29:00] it. Emilia, you know what spoons are? Spoons? I do not . Okay. So this is just shows you how much chronically ill stuff that I like.
Russell Nohelty: So the, the idea is that every day you have a certain amount of energy and the energy is related to spoons and every activity takes a certain amount of spoon to do. So let’s say showering takes a spoon and eating breakfast takes a spoon. And the more intensive the spoon is, the, the activity is the more spoons that it takes.
Russell Nohelty: You have a finite number of them. If you run through all of them, then you start to have to use knives. Now you can use a knife when you need a spoon, but it’s very dangerous to do so and like it will. Potentially harm you. You can use forks instead of knives, but it is not as effective a utensil for most [00:30:00] things.
Russell Nohelty: So the idea is you need to conserve your energy so that by the end of the day you have excess energy to carry over to the next day. You guys might understand the profit first mentality better. So profit first is you take 10% off your revenue and that’s your profit, and then you have to be able to deal with the other 90%.
Russell Nohelty: I’m trying to develop an energy first mentality, which is I take 10% of my energy and reserve it. For just excess stuff so that so that I can only work with 90% of what I wake up with. So I always have something left over in the day. Now you can get spoons back throughout the day through like resting and such, but the idea is the amount of energy you have is finite.
Russell Nohelty: And the more chronically ill you are, the less spoons you have and the older you are, the less spoons you generally have. Does that make sense?
Emilia Rose: I love that. Yeah, it does.
Michael Evans: I think it’s actually a really good way of thinking about things, cuz as [00:31:00] writers I feel like we’re so, like, readily sometimes not caring about our energy.
Michael Evans: So a lot of times we can just do these things and get ourselves involved in situations or take on projects without reflecting on that. And then we get burnt out or realize that this isn’t working and then we have to reanalyze it. And if you can kind of maintain a, a stable base of energy, Hopefully creative energy that can keep you fueled and loving what you’re doing.
Michael Evans: I think that’s a, that’s some great advice. But thinking about your subscription and the back list, I immediately was thinking about Emilia and how you do your subscription, because you have a lot of your back list available on your subscription that people can obviously access, but at the same time, that back list, you could buy a la carte on a place like Amazon or Barnes Noble name the retailer.
Michael Evans: So I’m curious on what Russell was talking about. What would be your answer to that?
Emilia Rose: I’m not sure the, the way I, I started using Amazon [00:32:00] because I wanted to basically like grow my income, but right now I’m using it mostly for discovery. Like I want people discover me through Amazon. If they buy, like buy all my series there, that’s great.
Emilia Rose: But like my offer is you come to me and pay me monthly subscription and you get access to all my books and you can read them as much as you want. And you, not only that, but you also get like, kind of like a, a community with it. So I know like a lot of people don’t like offering their entire back list.
Emilia Rose: And I know some people might get mad that like, Hey, I paid for your entire back list, but you have this offer that’s like $5 a month. But it’s a personal thing for me. I, I like that my readers who are paying me monthly can get access to read everything I have. But I also really liked what you were saying with.
Emilia Rose: you’re, the whole like mentality going into your subscription is you are already doing the work. You just want to give people, who are paying you monthly, kind of like options or [00:33:00] to be part of your world. And that’s exactly what I do too. Like I, I don’t wanna do anything extra. Like I hate bonus scenes.
Emilia Rose: I hate writing them. I, if any of my readers are listening, I’m sorry, but I hate, I hate writing bonus scenes and I hate doing all this, like, extra stuff that I don’t wanna do. And so that’s why my model is early access. It’s like early access. I’m writing the book anyway. It’s going to be released somewhere, but you get it first and you get to be like, part of the journey of me creating it.
Emilia Rose: So, I’m like really behind the early access model if no one can tell. So I love that for you.
Russell Nohelty: Yeah, I saw yours is like, if you pay certain amounts, you get like one, one episode ahead, two episodes, three episodes ahead as you like go more and more extensive. Mm-hmm. , which is kind of what Web Tune also does, like you pay coins to get further access.
Russell Nohelty: Yes.
Michael Evans: Yeah. And then at higher priced here is not only for you Emilia, but many other authors. There’s [00:34:00] more, more like kind of physical goods involved, right. I believe at like $25 a month you’re offering like an art print and then once it gets higher there might be book boxes and other things involved. So, you know, there’s a way to kind of bundle a lot in, and one of the benefits I like about a subscription is that if there is a fan who regularly wants to support you, no matter what that level is, once you subscribe, you have to make the choice to unsubscribe.
Michael Evans: You don’t have to make the choice to pay again, it’s just your charge. So it makes the friction. much less for a fan to continue supporting you and for you to also continue delivering them that content. So yeah, it’s interesting and, and thinking about your Kickstarter, cuz I think it’s an important conversation to have like, and an open one.,
Michael Evans: I don’t have an answer here, but it’s a very valid concern and one that I want to touch on. Hmm. Am I cannibalizing my audience if I start a subscription in terms of one of my offers on a Kickstarter, that that’s an important point. And I don’t know, Emilia, if you have any thoughts on that or even me just [00:35:00] repeating it, Russell ha gives you some extra thoughts on that, but I think that’s something we should really dive into well,
Russell Nohelty: so.
Russell Nohelty: I’d love to hear what Emilia has to say, but for me, the op the things are, what Emilia said about Amazon was like casual reader building. And I’m totally with the casual, like everything you said. Like one of the big things that that Monica and I talk about is like using retailers to build casual readership that then funnels into direct readership.
Russell Nohelty: But I do wonder if there’s like crowdfunding and other things that like cannibalize each other once you’ve gotten a direct reader. and I think that it also matters if you are planning on continuing building the universe because like for me, a big part, like I write fantasies. So like a big part is like, If there’s 50 books in one universe and I’m gonna write one continue supporting that universe, then like, yeah, go spend $50 to read their whole back catalog and then keep paying me money to make more books [00:36:00] in that book.
Russell Nohelty: I want you to read more books in there for a cheaper price. But when you have like five different universes that you, and some of them you may not be supporting, I just, it’s a tough distinction when you’re offering something. So what I have done starting in this campaign that I’m running right now is I no longer offer my entire back cat log.
Russell Nohelty: as like a, a tier. I will offer all of the books in a universe at a tier, but I will not offer like my entire catalog. So eventually I do plan on offering like that kind of thing that we were talking about, but I’m also working on upsells and cross sales and sales pages for, for things to direct.
Russell Nohelty: And so , I’m not quite sure what that means as far as like subscriptions go. It’s funny because there’s so many ways to do direct sales. Yeah. And like part of it is like, how do I personally create an ecosystem that works for me? [00:37:00] Yes.
Michael Evans: That, that is the answer. Like that, that’s the what we’re trying to figure out.
Michael Evans: Right. And I think it’s also great that you said personally, right? Because none of. Subscriptions, Kickstarter, direct selling, however you approach direct selling, there’s not like a one size fits all answer to that, oh, you should do this one thing. And that that’s what it is. It is what works best, your business.
Michael Evans: And I think thinking about how different parts of this ecosystem can be symbiotic, so to speak, and can work and build off each other and not hurt each other, both from your energy standpoint, but you’re also business, your reader relationship standpoint is really important. So it’s ultimately an individual answer for the authors listening in terms of if you’re planning on doing a crowdfunding campaign or directly selling a la carte in your website or subscriptions, you know, how do all these things play together?
Michael Evans: This is something that I am thinking a lot about cuz I don’t have like, I don’t have like even my own ideas of like different sorts of things that are working for people. I’m trying to figure this out myself. But mainly [00:38:00] I think indirect sales, a principle that I always like to follow is trying to meet your readers where they are.
Michael Evans: And as long as your energy isn’t being depleted completely, having more optionality and different packaging for your readers to be able to purchase and buy things might not be a bad thing. You might have some readers who want to subscribe to you, who want to be a part of your community, who want to support you regularly, and other readers who are like, another subscription will make my mind explode.
Michael Evans: But I’m willing to pay you $30 for the special edition of your book a la carte on a Kickstarter or on your own website.
Russell Nohelty: Yeah, I don’t know. I’m curious Emilia, have you ever thought about doing chatbooks for yours? I’ve, that’s one, that’s one perk that I’ve thought about doing for a subscription that is completely different than a thing and also part of the afterburn of writing a book.
Emilia Rose: I have like played with the idea. I just, I don’t know. I have a lot of ideas for my subscription, but. , it’s like, for me, it’s really hard to just like keep [00:39:00] my rewards the way they are without deviating too far from what my readers are used to. And so like, I tend to add rewards slowly and over, like an extended period of time.
Emilia Rose: So I haven’t added something like that at the moment. But what I have done is I write like I guess it’s sort of related. I write like short stories every single week. And so those are exclusive or were exclusive to my subscription for a long, long time. But my readers who are on my subscription kept asking for like, paperbacks of them.
Emilia Rose: And I was like, if I put, if I make paperbacks, I’m going to put them on Amazon just to like grab a couple more casual readers and see if they can sell a little bit. So that’s sort of what I’ve done. That’s kind of related, but it wasn’t like a. Specific reward for my subscription.
Russell Nohelty: So I just completed or I’m currently doing an [00:40:00] audiobook for a for a short story collection.
Russell Nohelty: And how I did it was I took the, the short stories and then I wrapped it in a brand new story that is just for like, the totem of the books. So, oh, even though the stories happen in many different universes over the course of like the book, the actual story happens inside My God’s Worst Chronicles universe,
Russell Nohelty: so it’s like 10,000 words of new stuff. And then the idea is it’s set during the apocalypse, which is like a big event in the universe. And it’s about this woman who breaks down her car and finds this farmhouse that has a radio station in it. And she broadcast these.
Russell Nohelty: Short stories that she finds in the world and then uses that to kind of build this community of other people. And so the short stories are all from my catalog, but the actual book is of her as she’s building this community of people. [00:41:00] I
Emilia Rose: love that. Oh my god. I’m obsessed with that so much.
Emilia Rose: That’s so cool.
Russell Nohelty: And it’s so cool. Cause although I told the person I wanted her to read it as if she was reading the audiobook narrator, I wanted to read it as if she was like an OnAir personality. So it’s great. It’s gonna be like two different experiences. I’m, I can’t wait to hear how it comes out and the like, I might do this in two months when this is done and be like, I hated everything about that experience
Russell Nohelty: But everything up until now was like a way to be able to have someone have an experience with like an anthology, but have a different experience. when the totem comes out on Kickstarter. And I am actually going to release that only on Kickstarter, I think, and then have it as a bonus if you buy the whole series or first or whatever subscription is gonna come.
Russell Nohelty: Yeah, cuz people ask me, we’re doing, I’m actually doing this for a non-fiction book that I finished last year, which was I’m, I, I know people are gonna ask me for the physical copy and so I’m doing a Kickstarter, one time physical printing, and then it will be exclusive to our membership community.
Russell Nohelty: [00:42:00] And and like when you bundle it in with other stuff. So that is one good way. Not this is a Kickstarter podcast, but like if you’ve got subscriptions or things and you don’t wanna necessarily have a direct sales store to give somebody like a one-time chance. In fact, Joanna Penn’s doing this wait, I don’t know if it’s actually gonna be.
Russell Nohelty: But I do know Sky Warren did this last year with her book. It was like, you buy it on Kickstarter or you don’t buy it. That’s, that’s the only place that it’s available. So I like, I’m trying to figure out ways to have this kind of, those kind of experiences. My friend Ben Bishop does this thing called Bishop Box, which is, you subscribe for at least $25 a month and every three months you get, he draws Ninja Turtles and stuff.
Russell Nohelty: So when you get like a box of like, again, the afterburn of his like creating stuff. Oh
Michael Evans: yeah, no, that’s amazing. And I really like to the, the distinction as well between if this is gonna be a one-off project, you probably don’t want to have a [00:43:00] one-off project inside of a subscription if you don’t intend on continuing something after that one-off project, because then people are subscribing to something that is a little bit questionable.
Michael Evans: But if you’re on Kickstarter or using a crowdfunding platform to store, which Kickstarter is a great one, then. And, and that’s certainly a great strategy. Well, this has me thinking about another experiment. I know you’re in the process of right now, Russell, which I wanna, I wanna gather your thoughts on this because I know that you started a community on Circle, but more than that, I’m interested in your thoughts around, we’ve been talking about casual readers and super fans and direct selling, really being, creating a space for those real core fans to support you and sell to.
Michael Evans: How do you think about community, digital community specifically in that sort of context? Because some people talk about paid community, free community, those platforms like Facebook, you know, where should you have a community for your super fans and your casual readers? Do you combine them together? How are you thinking about community in all
Russell Nohelty: of this context?
Russell Nohelty: Okay, so I’m gonna say the most controversial [00:44:00] thing I’m gonna say on this podcast is social media doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter. Like people. People do not go to social media. People who read books very rarely go to social media to actually engage with that author. There’s so many people who buy books.
Russell Nohelty: I am one of them. Like I, I don’t want to engage with like my favorite authors on social media. Like I just want them to give me a book. I will buy, like if Melissa Albert put out 12 books a year, I would buy 12 books. I would go to her like signing events. I would like watch her like do like give me information on that book.
Russell Nohelty: And even though we are like, we follow each other on Twitter, like it don’t care if she ever tweets. And people are so outmoded into this idea that like I have to have a reader group and I have to have this thing and I have to have this thing and like email doesn’t matter. And it’s like if I get one email a a year from Stephanie Garber telling me there’s another car of all book.
Russell Nohelty: [00:45:00] Like I will go and buy it. I will spend an excessive amount of money to buy multiple formatted copies of it. But I have never talked to Engage or have had any reason to ever want to talk to Stephanie Garber outside of the books that she wrote and saying how much I love them. She would not even know, except, unless you listen to this podcast, how much I love her work and how much her work has meant to me.
Russell Nohelty: Cause I just, except for in private messages, I don’t talk about. And so I have a circle community. I have a couple of social media profiles, and again, and again and again for now, I’ve been doing this for over a decade. I am constantly reminded how little people who actually buy your work interact with you on social media.
Russell Nohelty: They want to have an experience with you in a book form. My wife buys so many books. She loves so many books. She is not on social media. Like if you don’t have, I, I do [00:46:00] think that every human needs to have a a, a email list because my wife will sign up for every email list. She’s who I use to be like, what do I need?
Russell Nohelty: Because she’s like a Luddite when it comes to like social media. Like she doesn’t barely has a LinkedIn profile and she’s like, I want you to email me. When is this time for me to buy things? like, and that’s true for I think 99% of people. And I think it is this odd, weird thing that we live in now where like people think that, that, that, that readers want to interact with you.
Russell Nohelty: And while there is a small subset that do, like, I just don’t think that is the truth. I I, so I do think it is important for me. Because of just the scale of how I’ve grown to have somewhere on social media that I am. But I constantly am like, how do I cut things? Which is why I have a circle community, which is like, I want to just interact with [00:47:00] people I like.
Russell Nohelty: So like come here and interact with me and that will be cool. But like, I honestly don’t expect readers to, I would love me to be proven wrong and like every reader I’ve ever had be in this community. And then when I say go buy things, they all buy from that thing. But it’s just not true. It is not true. You will never be able to convince me that it is true that people that you, that you must have a social media presence and be completely active on there.
Russell Nohelty: Because I look at my metrics every time I do a Kickstarter campaign and almost nothing comes from social media. Almost no money comes from social media. It is a nice to have. But it is not a necessary to have. Necessary things include having a way to show how much you appreciate your readers. Yeah, I think putting out new content, being the kind of person that like is fun to be around and people want to have an experience with.
Russell Nohelty: But even at shows, [00:48:00] so many times the people that spend the most with me come up say, hi, how have you been? Spend a hundred dollars, and then walk off two minutes later. And like, I’m like, and it’s always the people that like either you have to like convince them in a hundred ways to spend a dollar.
Russell Nohelty: Or the people who don’t spend any money, who sit at my table for 30 minutes and I’m fine with that because like whatever, those people will just buy anyway. And like I’m there to have an experience. But like your community should be an experience that you associate positively with. Yeah, because that is the number one thing.
Russell Nohelty: That is the most important thing. If you do not associate positively with the experience you are having online and in person, then readers will be turned off and think that animosity you have towards the platform is actually animosity towards them and they will be turned off.
Emilia Rose: There’s so much, especially like with TikTok right now, there’s so [00:49:00] much many authors, like you have to be on TikTok, you have to be on TikTok, you have to be on social media posting all the time. And I personally don’t go on TikTok at all. And I’m like, it’s fine for me. I don’t have to be on social media to have this community that I have and the community that I do have through my subscription or I have a Facebook group that mostly my assistant posts in, but sometimes I’ll jump in there.
Emilia Rose: like those groups, the majority of people don’t comment. They’ll see it and they’ll, they’ll enjoy the content that I have on my subscription or wherever, but they’ll, they won’t comment. They won’t like, but they’re still in my subscription. They’re still enjoying the material. And like, ask me, like, personally, I don’t interact on social media.
Emilia Rose: I don’t like things, I don’t comment. Even though I might like scroll past something and be like, wow, this is so cool. I won’t do any of that. Cause I don’t, that’s not the type of person I am. Like, I don’t want to comment on things. I will, but I don’t want to. I, I don’t like, I don’t know, interacting on [00:50:00] social media for me is always like, so, ugh.
Emilia Rose: I, because I feel so, so awkward. So I don’t, and so I feel like a lot of readers are the same way. Like they don’t want to interact on social media. Some, some do. There’s a lot of people who do. But at least the readers that I found that have given me like, The most money or like paid a crazy amount of money for something on my direct store through my subscription.
Emilia Rose: They don’t interact on social media and sometimes they don’t even interact within my
Russell Nohelty: community either. Yeah. I had somebody, I have people consistently spending 500 plus dollars on my Kickstarters, and I don’t think I’ve ever talked to more than like a couple of them now. I very much, and I in the same way, like I have never, I think maybe one time I like direct, like did a at mention of like Halsey and she’s like my favorite, like, I listened to her books, her, her her, I bought her book.
Russell Nohelty: I listened to her albums [00:51:00] like literally like 20 times a week. And like I would, you would never know. And so as a, to bring this success to bring this to authors like. I have no doubt that like Halsey appreciates her fans. I’ve gone to her concerts and she’s talked for like, she’s stopped the concert dead to like talk about how much her fans mean to her.
Russell Nohelty: But if she judged how much I appreciated her music and my wife appreciated her music by how much we talk about her music online, she would think that we don’t care at all. And that is not the truth. And there is, there are many more people that are like that than actually are the opposite and say, interact with Halsey all of the time and love for music.
Russell Nohelty: Now that’s not saying, there are not people that are like that, but if you only. The delta of who actually engages with [00:52:00] you as who actually likes your work? It is, yeah. That’s, it will be. And, and, and way smaller. I’ll give you an example from our membership community for which is there are people who show up to every call.
Russell Nohelty: We have every month like clockwork that by every one of our programs that have never said one word to us, they show up and they just sit there silently. And when I literally am like, I’m trying to think of a Charles, that’s, cuz that’s not any of someone that I’m thinking of. Like, do you have anything to say?
Russell Nohelty: They just are like, Nope. Nothing to say. And, but check clears every month. And like there are even more people who don’t interact at all, don’t even show up on the calls. They listen to the things or. They will, people come into our our like Facebook group and they’re like, I’m like, have you read the book?
Russell Nohelty: And they’re like, ask a question. Like, have you read the book? Cause you should check out this chapter. And then I like, how it usually works is I’ll be like, have you read the book? And then I’ll give them an answer to their question. And then they [00:53:00] almost always say, yes, I’ve read the book. How else would I know about this?
Russell Nohelty: Like, private Facebook group. But like, they’ve never inter and then they go away and they never interact again until they launch it. And how many campaigns have launched that? Like when I reach out to them to like do a cross promo, they’re like, oh my God, I’m obsessed with your work. Like, I love, I’m like, Literally never, like the amount of people who are like that are like 99 out of a hundred people say like for every one person who interacts and then also buys my work, there are 99 people who buy my work and do not interact with me.
Russell Nohelty: Yeah. And that I think is maybe the numbers, the percentages don’t bear out in that way. But like even my mailing list is 99% people who don’t buy my work . Like it’s, and they are almost a hundred percent of people who don’t interact with my work. Like there’s maybe like of the people in [00:54:00] our in our like non-fiction community that get our emails and.
Russell Nohelty: like when we were like, Hey, who, like, tell us what your word of the year was. We did, like, we got a hundred responses. I think five of them were in our community. Like, and we’re like, what? Where’s the, where’s the 300 people who have given us like hundreds of dollars and they just are there enjoying. Yeah.
Russell Nohelty: And so I know this is a long divergence from like your original question, but like how I think of community is I want to show up for them consistently and I want to give them something unexpected that they will love when I do. Now that could be a. sometimes. A lot of times I’m like, Hey, I have this new book series, and then they’re like, cool, I’m going to go buy that series.
Russell Nohelty: I’m like, thank you, bye. I’ll talk to you in a couple months when I’ve read the series and enjoyed it and never told you how much I liked it or reviewed it or done anyth [00:55:00] other thing except buy the next time. It could be like a backstory of the series. It could be like some inspiration about that I found that I thought would be meaningful to them.
Russell Nohelty: It could be that I just put something into a scene that like I’m like this one human in my community will love this, and like I’m putting it in for just them and then having an openness so that when I interact publicly people, the right people will say, . Yes. I want part of that. I read a book or something.
Russell Nohelty: I don’t remember what it was. I heard at one point about a concept of the attractive character, which I don’t know if your, your audience will know, but it’s the idea that we can highlight the parts of ourselves when we’re in public that will be most attractive to the right person to [00:56:00] come find us. And we can kind of nip off the parts that people don’t like so much about us.
Russell Nohelty: And if we do that then, and we give people a place to congregate, like they will congregate there, but it does not have to be like 25 engagement posts a week or TikTok or like whatever. At some point you will be successful enough. I have friends, I have other authors who are successful enough that they have to be on TikTok.
Russell Nohelty: They have to be on TikTok cuz like they’ve exploited every other platform to the maximum amount. Like there’s just nowhere left to go. They’re like, I would give Facebook any amount of money they asked for, but like, if I give them any more than this number, like there’s literally no return. And they’ll do that with every platform and they’re like, okay, like where else can I grow?
Russell Nohelty: Well I guess I gotta go to TikTok because there’s just, there’s nothing for me anywhere else. And that is when I think, but like there are a hundred authors in the world who are like that maybe a [00:57:00] thousand that like have capped out on their ad spend on their community and all of that stuff. And otherwise I think that when I think about community, I want to give a positive experience.
Russell Nohelty: I want, no matter how small my community is, I want them to say, man, I really like being part of that. I really like this thing and I really want you to join. And the most biggest change that I have made in community is I want it to be easier for people to recommend my books to other people. And this is the most important thing that most authors fail at.
Russell Nohelty: They are, and I’m, and I’ve been one of them for a long time, they make it very, very, very hard for people to recommend their work to other people. And to me, that’s like the most important part of community is giving them a totem that they can interact with other people with.
Russell Nohelty: Because yeah, reading is not about what I do. Giving reading is about what I can do to [00:58:00] elicit an emotion with somebody else, and then allow them to share that emotion, share with other people. . Yeah. That’s like, that’s a very long answer to a very simple question, but no .
Emilia Rose: I was just gonna say, I don’t want people to think that community isn’t important because community is really super important, especially with subscriptions.
Emilia Rose: But I think like, just to kind of like clarify the interaction part of community, it means a lot to a lot of people, but some people just like love being part of the community without interacting. And that’s not like any fault of your own. You can try to get them to interact, but some people are just not going to interact.
Emilia Rose: But that doesn’t mean they don’t love being there and they don’t love having that feeling of like, Hey, I’m part of this really cool community and we talk about these really cool books and I might not participate in this conversation, but I love reading what everyone else is thinking because that’s what I’m thinking too.
Emilia Rose: So community is really important and. The number of people interacting in your [00:59:00] community don’t matter as much as you providing a place where they can interact and you’re giving them something amazing to, to talk
Russell Nohelty: about. Yeah, absolutely. And this is also something that you can bring to, so there’s, we are doing this, this book club, this like, it’s a free book club where me and 11 other authors got together.
Russell Nohelty: It’s called Action Fantasy Book Club. It’s at action fantasy book club.com. And like you get a free book from one of us every month. The rule is we’ve either never had it free before or we haven’t had it free for at least a year. And you get this book and you get a place online where you get, we can have a Facebook group and we have like a little like YouTube thing and we just started it this month.
Russell Nohelty: So like, it’s not very old, but. Basically you get the ability to like get this book, talk about this book and then enjoy this book. And we don’t talk about, I don’t hear a lot of people talking about like free subscriptions like that, but like a free subscriber also is good because they can become a paid [01:00:00] subscriber.
Russell Nohelty: But also if they are a free subscriber, they also have said you are worth subscribing to. And like the reason why, to me, email is the most important thing is not just because I make the most money with it. It’s because people have. Positively ascent assert that they want to be part of that thing that like you are worthy of like following.
Russell Nohelty: Even if it’s so easy to like follow a TikTok or not even follow, I don’t even know if you can follow on TikTok really, or like whatever, like Twitter or Facebook. It’s so easy to like just do that while you’re on the app. But like generally signing up for a mailing list or signing up for a community or signing up for Circle or anything is like you have to go to a place you are uncomfortable.
Russell Nohelty: You’re not there often and positively assert that this is the person you want to follow. And I think that is the crucial element. And then giving people the ability to, as Emilia says, so astutely like talk and give them cool things like [01:01:00] other books, like other movies, like other stuff to like communicate.
Russell Nohelty: But the reason why I started Circle the Circle community was I wanted a place where, I have had for years a place where I interact with them and I wanted a place where they could interact with each other without me present and they could get the sense of community that I have always felt that was only unidirectional.
Russell Nohelty: Now unidirectional community works well, like, I mean, I’ve had one for years and I’ve been a six figure author since 2017. So like you can have that just one way communication. I just chose my project for this year was how do I build something where I am, where I get credit for fostering the community and making it a fun place, but I don’t have to actually be involved.
Russell Nohelty: Like they can have experiences that are that I am not needed for. . [01:02:00] Yeah.
Michael Evans: Yeah, that’s, that’s the biggest thing I actually, I think about a fandom, right? It’s that it’s hopefully your fans interacting. And the one thing I will say, Russell, that I think really sticks strong with me is that social media is not always your friend.
Michael Evans: And I think we sometimes get that cut up wrong as authors. Like they’re tools that are ultimately designed to help advertisers profit and addict people to their feeds for longer, which is a fine business model. But we’re in the business of trying to like deliver awesome stories to our readers and give them better experiences.
Michael Evans: And oftentimes the tools that we use for social media aren’t actually the best tools that we can use to actually connect with our readers, deliver them great experiences. So,
Russell Nohelty: Goes bigger than that. It actually goes further than that because the exact post that you, that people are worried about is that their sales posts get no engagement and like, so they’re like, oh well when I post something, nobody comments on it When I have a sale.
Russell Nohelty: And it’s like people [01:03:00] will commit one action per post. If you are clicking them off social media to go somewhere else, they will literally not engage because they have bought your book. Engagement posts are totally different, but people, to go back to that thing about unfair advantage and people judging the wrong tactic when you were, the reason that some sales posts have high engagement is because those are ads, like those are ads, like sales posts, definition do not get engagement because that is not the purpose of them.
Russell Nohelty: That is why when you run an ad, you can pick engagement traffic. Video view conversion, all of those things, and those things get sent to different people because people that are converting from your ad are not engaging with it. And I don’t want them to, I just want them to go and buy the book or sign up for the mailing list or whatever.
Russell Nohelty: I don’t need them to say, this is cool because this is cool, means, oh well, like I don’t need your pity. Like, I don’t need your pity. I need you to go to the site and buy. And so when you are [01:04:00] thinking about your social media engagement strategy, some of it is about engagement. Like you need posts, like what is your favorite book you read?
Russell Nohelty: What did you read this week? And what’s your favorite trope and fantasy because like that will help you design better books and like get engagement and build a better fandom. But then there’s like, my book is now live on Kickstarter and like people always complain that like those posts are dead. And it’s like, yes.
Russell Nohelty: I mean, Facebook does depress those posts, but also there’s a natural depression of those posts because Facebook is looking for engagement and you don’t get engagement on social posts. You get clicks from those posts because people’s people’s job is to buy from them, not to engage with them or say how great it is.
Russell Nohelty: If someone is engaging on a, on a, on a, on a, on a on a sales post. It almost a hundred percent of the time means they did not buy from it, or they already bought from it. Hmm.
Michael Evans: Yeah. Yep. That’s, that’s a really great, great [01:05:00] insight and something that us as others have to keep in mind. Back to the whole thing of that, there’s a lot of fans who, they’re not gonna all scream and tell you, I loved your book, you know, and, and you’re not gonna always times that numerical data is, sounds tougher to, to actually parse out, like, how much did you sell is more important than how much comments you got on your latest Facebook post, but, I
Michael Evans: I want to now switch it to our last thing that I’m excited for, which is, I know you’re working on a project, something related to the future of publishing,
Russell Nohelty: so yes Monica and I have announced by the time this airs at least our future of publishing conference at the future of publishing mastermind.com, which is a three part. Conference experience. The first part is a virtual conference. The second part is a membership community where you have access to all of our courses, everything we’ve basically ever done and like along with monthly SP speakers to talk [01:06:00] about specific topics.
Russell Nohelty: And then an in-person conference in New Orleans, which is gonna be very highly curated. It’s application only, and it’s specifically about the future of publishing and where we’re going in the next three to five years. And how to ethical, how to ethically exploit these potential things people are not talking about and add them into your business.
Russell Nohelty: So for instance, one of the big topics we’re gonna talk about are like AI and NFTs, which is like a big hot button topic, but like we’re not going to have the conversation that people are having right now like, which is a very. I don’t wanna call it low level conversation, but it’s a very cyclical conversation where the conversation is the same conversation that happens and then like it dead ends with like, well, there’s legislation and then like, you know, unless legislation or lawsuits happen, there’s nothing more to talk about.
Russell Nohelty: So it’s much more [01:07:00] about like, where the industry is going, how we can properly plan for it, and like how you can get in front of trends before they actually will like gobble you up.
Russell Nohelty: One is that it’s a safe space that people feel that like they can express their truth and like have spontaneous conversations and say, oh, all of these people are on the same mission, not like on a hunch. Different missions. And some conferences are so big, like San Diego Comic-Con, where like there’s literally 50 conferences happening inside of every conference.
Russell Nohelty: But like for our conference, this, the particular in-person event is gonna be very small. So we’re specifically looking for people who are forward focused. We’re specifically looking to talk about topics that are generally relegated to one or two. Panels at a show and like then they’re not focused on, and like most people don’t go to [01:08:00] those two.
Michael Evans: And I think you and Monica and also the people behind nnc who will also be, are working with y’all , should be very exciting.
Russell Nohelty: I’ll say that is why we hired Mel and Taja because we saw the experiences that they brought and we were like, that is who we want planning our conference. And we were like, can you do this, but for the future of publishing? And they were like, yes, we can do that. And we’re like, well, then I please do that. And then we negotiated a rate and then we paid that rate. And that was, that’s how we work with just about, I, I work with just about everyone, whether it comes to like hiring an artist or hiring an editor.
Russell Nohelty: I’m looking for someone. I’m like, you, you delivered this experience. Can you deliver this experience for me given these conditions? And they’re like, yes. I’m like, cool. Well then let’s do a thing.
Michael Evans: That’s a, simple, but it’s important and a really good framework to use when hiring and working with people.
Michael Evans: So, no, that’s wonderful. And Russell, this was [01:09:00] incredible.
Michael Evans: I learned a ton I think when listening learned a ton. And I’m very grateful for.
Russell Nohelty: Thank you so much for having
Michael Evans: me. Everyone. You can check out the links and description to, we’ll link to the writer mba. We’ll link to the the conference webpage that’ll be live.
Michael Evans: You can check out the links description. But thank you everyone for listening. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. Russell is a great friend of ours and once again, just so grateful that he came out and chatted with us. Definitely will have to have him back on in the future. For now, all I’ll say is that if you want to get some free subscription insights from us every week. You should sign up for the Descriptions for Author’s blog.
Michael Evans: It’s linked down in the description and we’ll also send you a free book. It’ll be a copy of the descriptions for author’s starter guide when you sign up. So we’d love to see you there for now to buy from me and buy from Sky, sky, sky. Are you gonna say bye to everyone? This is on the YouTube version, but do you have any, anything to say?
Michael Evans: She’s kissing me, so I think that means that to buy from me and buy from my doggy. So [01:10:00] I’ll see you in the next episode with Rebecca. Si in just a few days.
Michael Evans: In the meantime, I hope everyone has an amazing rest of their day. And don’t forget storytellers rule the world.