By Michael Evans, February 24, 2024
How to reach 10x higher heights as an author
I tried building a skyscraper for my stories.
It was a natural instinct.
For years I admired the authors towering above me. Their rankings, their reviews, their sales.
I wanted to look the same way.
Big, tall, and beautiful.
Okay, actually, I told a girl I had a crush on in first grade that she looked like the Empire State Building and she started crying…
Me and Skyscrapers have a lot of beef.
I tried building a skyscraper. It was the best thing ever until it all collapsed.
And today, I want to save you from the $10,000+ in losses I suffered. I want to save you from the pain of watching the passion I had for writing crumble away under the pressure of tons of ads, deadlines, and endless administrative tasks.
But first, what the heck is a publishing skyscraper?
Skyscrapers rise fast above the earth, prioritizing growth in sales and numbers above all else.
You might be reading this thinking… wait… isn’t this just called smart business?
Not quite.
The illusion of height can cast a shadow over a hollow foundation.
That’s what happened to me.
My first goal was to create a backlist of content so that I had multiple stories for readers to consume.
To me this felt like building my foundation (key words “felt like”).
By the time I started actually marketing my books and trying to “scale” my business, I had written 7 novels in two different series.
I thought I knew what I was doing. I thought the only thing I had to do was figure out a way to get sales and the rest would be history.
I was wrong.
I began running Facebook Ads in February of 2020. I started off with $5 a day. The sales and page reads started rolling in immediately.
I’m making this sound more dramatic than it was. It was “just” 1 or maybe 2 new readers a day.
This felt like a tidal wave.
My story building had a floor! It was one floor tall… but infinitely taller than being stuck at the ground floor like I had been for years.
What’s next?
Obviously, keep growing! I want to look like all the other skyscrapers around me. That means more sales, better rankings, more orange tags, more reviews… more!!!
Naturally, this meant scaling my ad spend from $5 to ~$80 per day.
*Okay* maybe that’s not natural.
That’s actually unhinged.
But you, my friend, don’t have the skyscraper spirit! We have deadlines to hit… competition to race against… we have to build, build, build!
So I did.
And my skyscraper was starting to look pretty nice. I’ll admit no Empire State Building (sorry, Elena… yes that was her name). But at least an impressively sized suburban office building.
In practice this meant my book for first in series was hovering around 5,000 in the store, even going as high as 4,000.
I even was able to scale back my ad spend to $50 a day.
It felt awesome. I was getting sales. They were pouring in! And the ranking… it just looked so good. I didn’t want to lose it.
So I kept spending to keep myself there.
The only issue?
My foundation was as hollow as a skeleton’s heart.
My read-through was low. I wasn’t getting many folks signing up to my mailing list.
And ultimately… the one metric that matters most… I wasn’t making any profit.
Yikes.
The only way out?
Was to take a deep breath, go to therapy, start meditating, and build a pyramid.
But this is future Michael speaking.
Me at the time didn’t know this.
I was building a skyscraper! And I couldn’t dare watch my baby fall. So I held it up. Using all my strength (aka money) to keep it going. My ranking stayed the same, my CPC fluctuated but I gently and obsessively kept nursing my ad babies.
The skyscraper was still standing people!
But then… everything changed.
And I wish I could say it was a big moment or big epiphany.
That didn’t happen. There wasn’t a moment where I looked at my bank account and had $0 left (although we got close on a handful of occasions).
At some point, I just got tired. I got tired of holding what felt like the weight of a skyscraper on my shoulders.
I burnt out. And right as my skyscraper started to break even (just barely, and it was painfully small margins), I decided that it wasn’t worth it anymore.
The day I stopped running the ads — it all collapsed.
My skyscraper crashed on me. And in its wake, I decided to do something different.
I’m never building another skyscraper. Instead, I’m going to build a pyramid.
Pyramids have wide foundations to support their height.
Think of the Great Pyramids of Giza that have been standing for thousands of years.
Even as you try increasing the height of a pyramid, you can’t do so too quickly. You have to carefully lay down each layer as you stack the pyramid higher and higher.
And another trick about pyramids? They can only go as high as their foundation supports.
Not to get too nerdy — but there’s even an equation for what makes a pyramid. The height of a pyramid is directly proportional to its foundation (base).
Although we like to think of building our author careers as skyscrapers, in reality, we are building pyramids.
What looks like “overnight” success is often years of building a sturdy pyramid with layers of foundation you can’t even see. This often means diligent financial planning, relentless work on your craft, and an extensive research and development phase for your publishing business (to borrow the wonderfully wise words of Becca Same).
First, I’m going to share with you the five core elements of the foundation for a strong pyramid. Once you have this foundation, you know you can start stacking levels onto your pyramid (aka scaling your author business). Then I’m going to share with you how we have built Ream as a pyramid.
The Five Core Elements of a Publishing Pyramid
#1: A consistent and defined readership.
This is the most important part of your pyramid, by a wide margin. And it is often the hardest one to form.
What is a consistent and defined readership?
To be a defined readership, your target audience must be able to communicate regularly through word of mouth. The best way to detect if you have a clear target audience (maybe it’s a subgenre or specific fandom) you will want to have an idea of the “watering holes” your readers congregate at.
This might be Facebook Groups, Discords, on TikTok, or somewhere else online or offline.
Once you have a defined readership, you want a segment of these readers (and it can be small… again… this is all about foundations… not height!) to continually come back and enjoy your stories.
Typically you’d want to see at least 50% and ideally closer to 70% or higher of the people who read your first book to read your second book. If it’s serials — you will want your chapter reads after a specific cliffhanger point in your serial (we call this the retention point) to remain consistent to show that there is little drop-off in your stories.
Once you have validated that you have a clearly defined group of readers consistently enjoying your stories you have succeeded in the first element of a publishing pyramid.
#2: A sustainable production process.
This is another essential part of your publishing pyramid.
Do you have a writing process that is sustainable for you? Are you writing for a target audience and stories that keep you inspired and creatively fulfilled? Are you writing at a cadence that is sustainable for you?
And to add another layer onto this, do you have a formatting, editing, and cover design process (either yourself or working with third parties) that allows you to produce well-packaged stories?
The key here is that you get to define what you are producing and what sustainability looks like for you.
“Sustainable” can mean writing 10k words a week during one day and taking the rest of the week off from writing. Sustainable could mean writing 80k words in two weeks and not writing again for 3-4 months (this is typically how I operate). Sustainable can mean getting out one series a year, or one book a year.
Whatever sustainable looks like for you, embrace it, let it evolve, and establish how you can put that into a process for your publishing pyramid.
#3: Neutral or (ideally) positive cash flow.
It’s easy to think… we will stop losing money WHEN we scale our publishing business.
The thing is… this is sometimes true. But sometimes, we have a leaky bucket that only gets leakier and loses us more money. This happened to me!
Before you scale something you should ideally be close to breaking even or making a small profit.
It won’t be a lot of money! But that’s the point.
You are doing something working at a small scale and now can understand how putting more effort and time into your business (thus taking on greater risk) will pay off.
Often times it can take years to actually get to this point.
That is okay! I wish I had taken years building my foundation and lost money and ineffectively spent time at a small scale rather than a large scale.
We all have to pay down our ignorance debt — essentially the core learnings that are holding us back from being where we want to be.
#4: At least one growth lever that works cost-effectively.
Growth is the lifeblood of every business, and growing your readership is one of the most important priorities as an author.
In step #1, creating stories that are consistently read by a defined readership is the foundation of your growth.
However, if you have a kindling fire… how do you throw more fuel on it when you are ready to scale?
This is what figuring out a growth lever looks like.
How can you pull on a lever that grows your business?
There are two kinds of levers.
Repeatable growth levers: these are the lifeblood of any business long term.
Repeatable growth levers are scalable. They might not be “consistent” in that they bring in the same amount of growth over a period of time. But they tend to be levers that get larger the longer you have been doing them.
Advertising is one common repeatable growth lever. As you do advertising for a longer time, you can pour money into it, and ideally grow faster (maybe some months more so than others due to specific stories hitting the mark more or a warmer audience).
Another repeatable growth lever is content. This could be content you create on TikTok, a podcast, or even something like a Facebook Group (totally separate post will be on community as a growth lever, it’s epic and probably the most underutilized one).
There are other repeatable growth levers, but the broad buckets mentioned above tend to be the repeatable growth levers that 90% of authors pull on.
But what is our second kind of growth lever?
That’s where one-time growth levers come in. These growth levers are not repeatable or scalable over the long run but can drive huge bursts of growth. They are also key when your publishing business is in the foundational phase as they allow you to test if certain audiences like your stories and stick with them.
There are TONS of one-time growth levers.
They include:
- Events and signings (could be virtual or in-person).
- Cross promotions and newsletter swaps.
- Discounts or book promotions (think the eBook newsletters)
- Working with influential ARC readers who can chat about your books
- And many more…
To go into detail about every growth lever would literally take me an entire book to write. At some point, I plan to write a book on this called Readers First: the New Rules of Marketing for Authors. But for now, the best I have for you is my Creator Economy for Authors: A Guide to the Future of Publishing book.
With all of this said, although at the beginning of building your foundation you will be mostly focused on one-time growth levers, it is essential that you have a repeatable growth lever to pull on before truly scaling your pyramid. This may take a long time to find, especially one that is cost-effective and that’s okay!
Now onto the last core element of your pyramid…
#5: Relationships with other authors.
This one is so underrated but crucial. If I had had relationships with other authors… I may have realized that my read-through rate was lower earlier than I did.
If I had been an active member of creative communities, I may have gotten personal advice that could have saved me tons of stress and burnout.
Of course, that is the benefit of spaces like Subscriptions for Authors.
But beyond big Facebook Groups and Discords (which are super helpful) it’s also important to have a small group of authors (let’s say 3 to 5) who are all looking to get to the next level.
Think of it like a personal mastermind and/or sprinting group. You don’t need to meet every day or even have official meetings. But knowing you have people in your corner you can count on and learn with together is crucial.
If you all would be interested in us developing a program or tool that helps connect you with authors at similar stages interested in participating in something like this, let me know and we’d be happy to try and help!
Now as promised, I want to share how we have taken this “pyramid” mindset to building Ream.
This will be the high-level details of the strategy and tactics we have used. I WISH I could unveil it all, but that will have to wait for another book I write… one day… far in the future.
First, we developed a radical focus around who we are serving (fiction authors) and what we are doing for them (helping you start and grow your subscriptions).
With this radical focus, we have been obsessively building a foundation for the last 2 years. I would say we are far from done with our foundation, but for the first time over the next year, I can start to think about what “scaling” this pyramid looks like.
Specifically, we have *purposely* avoided creating content in mediums and formats that would drive more traction to our community and platform. Yes, we deliberately have not scaled… all to keep our focus on building a strong foundation and platform that authors want to stick with.
This meant…
- Creating 100+ hours of video content with almost every video being over an hour long. We could literally create 500+ short-form videos from our library and drive much more people to our brand, but we wanted to validate that we had a strong foundation of content people wanted to stick with before doing so. Essentially, we have intentionally avoided any sort of “vitality”.
- We don’t have social media profiles for the company, instead hyper-focusing on our Facebook Group Subscriptions for Authors. We have made that a great space and want to keep fostering it. But in the meantime, didn’t try and build higher by layering on more communities or platforms on top of that until we built one community very strongly.
- Only focusing on helping authors monetize their superfans or warm readers. This is super important, but arguably less important than helping authors find and monetize casual readers and convert them to superfans. But we knew that we had to help authors master one part of the reader journey before taking on more of it (foreshadowing!).
- Creating tons of long-form blogs and books about how to succeed in subscriptions but refusing to create short-form guides and short articles that are more accessible and scalable. We figured if we can’t keep someone around for 3,000 words, why bother creating something that is attractive in 100 words?
This has been an absurd, almost maniacal dedication to building a pyramid.
To sticking to these principles.
But I can say that it has worked.
And here’s the best part.
When you build a strong foundation, your pyramid can be built far higher than a skyscraper with a flimsy foundation. And by ignoring short-term sales rankings, “flashy” press reviews, and all the things that society tells us to care about… we can do the one thing that really matters.
Create a great experience, consistently and sustainably, for people we care about.
What does all of this mean also for us?
As you can probably guess from my last blogs and messages, Ream is evolving in a fun way to start building on new layers to our pyramid.
This year we plan to seriously launch into short-form content, as well as shorter 8-minute YouTube videos about how to grow your subscription (expect this in the second half of the year). We also plan to expand how authors can monetize through subscriptions while continuing to make our content more and more accessible.
But it’s very important we took this time to build the foundation.
And I encourage you all to do the same in your own author business.
After all, I didn’t do this. I burned out. I lost tons of money. And ultimately, I didn’t live my best life as an author or human being during that period of time.
I want different for you.
I want you to build a pyramid, not a skyscraper.
And the best thing? I know you are all capable of it.
After all… we can’t forget…
Storytellers Rule the World