By Michael Evans, January 5th, 2023.
Main Street is Dead.
At least, that’s what they tell us.
On a recent drive through Santee, South Carolina, I noticed something peculiar. The shopping outlets right off I-95 that I had remembered passing many times growing up were shut down.
I pulled off the exit, driving up to the barbed wire fence around the property’s perimeter.
It was abandoned with graffiti and vines covering the brick exterior.
We likely have all seen this.
Malls closing down or having half their tenants emptied. In the 1980s what used to be a bustling system of 2,500 malls in the United States is now just over 700 and expected to decline by further hundreds in the next decade.
Everything is online now. Everything is sold in the A to Z store.
Small businesses everywhere are dying.
Except, this isn’t the full picture. Not even close.
Membership continues to increase in the American Bookseller Association, adding over 300 new member independent bookstores over the last three years. These stores are more diverse in ownership and location than ever before.
And it’s not just small independent bookstores thriving.
Barnes and Noble, after years of decline, is now opening up 50 new bookstores in 2024. This is bolstered by their new strategy of empowering individual local store managers to make purchasing and event decisions based on their local communities.
And this isn’t at the expense of online sales either. E-commerce, despite growing more slowly, is at record levels with more eBooks, audiobooks, and even print books being bought online than ever before.
The real reason we have seen a rise in traditional Main Street businesses is simple: consumers want community now more than ever, and by empowering individuals to build community around their passions, small businesses across America are thriving.
In short, the big box retailer model that propped up malls was built on a broken system. Back when the suburbs were the Wild West, the rise of a new institution — the mall — and the massive corporations that leased the most square footage won the day.
Except, your loyalty wasn’t to the individuals at these institutions, it was to the pricing and convenience of having everything in one place. Except, the convenience and freedom of having a car to travel to these places soon became a headache with traffic and an aging road system.
The internet came around and was more convenient than ever. And with the rise of the Big Box retailers taking over the Wild West of the internet, we have seen a new kind of institution take power — online book retailers.
They hold power over both merchants and customers — the largest one in the world even dictating with limited transparency how much authors get paid per page read.
The thing is the convenience of the big box retailers is going the same way as the malls.
They are cluttered with ads and endless product recommendations (traffic). Their once-heralded convenience has now been commoditized with one-click checkout available on almost every online site along with new discovery channels, better UI, and better payment systems across the board.
You know what I’m about to say next.
It’s the rise of a new age of publishing. One where authors sell directly to readers, one where individual readers and authors are empowered to create and run their own independent bookstores online.
Yes, except… it goes even deeper than that.
And the opportunity is even bigger.
The internet is a natural extension of human interactions. We are a networked species and having a digital highway for information to travel on is just as natural as hiking paths through the woods or more industrial highways to communicate and interact with one another.
In this way, looking at how cities are designed and communities in IRL (in real life) come together will help us better understand what the rise of Creator Street really means.
Authors are building towns and cities rather than small businesses renting space in strip malls.
We love our small businesses in strip malls, by the way, this is just to show that there is something MUCH bigger going on here.
If our interactions on the internet bear resemblance to other communication technologies and transport systems, then the Internet itself is not a city.
It’s a multiverse with laws of “physics” that allows worlds to come together and form with life on it.
Now who rules these worlds that form on the interwebs?
Storytellers. Of course, it’s storytellers.
Our founding principle at Ream is Storytellers Rule the World, and we believe the world opens up when we give Storytellers the power to rule their own worlds.
In the current model of retailer-led publishing, it’s akin to being a citizen of an autocratic state. They force onerous terms on us, extract untold portions of the revenue, and mercilessly control the relationships we have with each other.
We can do better. A lot better.
And this is the rise of Creator Street.
The next industry-changing publishing platform will be akin to a nation with a set code of laws or a multiverse with set physical principles that enable and empower specific kinds of interactions to thrive.
In this way, the internet does not have one set of pre-determined physical laws.
It is a set of guidelines, interfaces, features, and incentives that operate similar to that of the laws and regulations of a nation.
As people on the internet, we get to decide what nations we want to participate in way more freely and easily than we can in the real world. Our mission at Ream is to build a multiverse that allows fiction authors and readers to thrive. That focus is important.
As authors and readers continue to migrate away from the old autocratic model of retailer-led publishing, there will be new democratic processes and systems that empower storytellers more than ever before.
These new systems won’t rule over every interaction and own all the land of the nation or multiverse.
Instead, they will give authors the ability to rule their own land — to build their own cities and towns.
This is where the true power of online community comes in and the opportunity for authors.
The internet has brought on the age of amplified individuals. These individuals with high impact on the internet are who we call creators. In this age, where both attention and trust has shifted from real-world individuals, institutions, and communities to ones online, we are seeing the rise of a new main street.
This is what I call Creator Street.
And the time has come for you to start building your towns and cities. For you to truly rule the world as a Storyteller.
What does this look like?
Just as great land, jobs, and more are what bring people to migrate to real-world communities, great stories with ample opportunities for entertainment, self-actualization, and insight will be what bring people to digital communities and opportunities to achieve status, identity, and belonging will be what keep them there.
And inside your internet town, you can create your version of a Main Street with businesses owned and operated by yourself, your team, and fellow online creatives that you partner with.
This is where we can truly see the opportunities that Creator Street brings.
Now remember, these are opportunities that will play out over the next 5 – 10 years as new technologies, systems, and multiverses/platforms make this kind of migration away from autocratic systems to ones that authors own and control easier than ever.
What does Creator Street look like?
It empowers an entirely new class of small businesses to be created online. Businesses that in many cases compete with, supplant, and open up new markets beyond what the “internet malls” of online retailers have allowed.
These businesses are often creator-led and at the very least creator-inspired, just as the small businesses and bookstores thriving in local towns draw from the communities they inhabit.
I divide these new businesses into three main categories, but I anticipate that we will see many different kinds of businesses rise in this new age of the Creator Street, including many that I cannot predict or even imagine at this point in time.
Creator Street Business Vertical #1: Curated Shops and Retail
This category is defined as shops that sell clothes, even books, and other goods. Think of it as fashion stores and other retail shops you’d find walking around a typical town square.
There will be three ways these businesses form, with some Creator Streets resembling cities in the amount and depth of these retail businesses they have and others looking more like cute, quaint small towns (in fact, most will look more like small towns, and that’s a beautiful thing. There’s tens of thousands of small towns in America but only one New York City).
- Goods produced in-house by the creator. These will likely be the rarest kinds of businesses and are akin to the kinds of hand-crafted goods we see from authors like Deanna Roy/J.J. Knight or clothing or print book shops operating at scale where off-set printed are used. I estimate these will be the rarest kinds of businesses in the retail category of Creator Street, but will still be impactful.
- Goods printed on demand by third-party suppliers and branded by the creator. I estimate this will be the second most common type of retail business in Creator Street and the second most profitable. This is what we see today with print-on-demand merchandise utilizing companies like Printful. These are great businesses, they are even scalable, but they require a modularization of products and experience that is not always the best or most cost-effective for consumers. This may change in the future as 3D printing technologies proliferate, but that future I estimate is still another ten to fifteen years away (if not more). What’s more likely to happen in the medium term? Herein comes the third option, and what I believe will be by far the biggest category of this vertical.
- Creator-Curated Retail. This is when shops are set up on Creator Street that source products from other producers, which could be other creatives or small businesses. The creator would get a revenue share of what is sold in the store and could have options of hundreds of thousands of goods to choose from. In an age where we are flooded with choices, the discovery of all kinds of products from trusted parties (individual creators and communities we love) will be paramount. This is a type of business that isn’t exactly possible for authors and creators today, but many are working on bringing this future to life.
With this view of what Creator Street Retail businesses could look like, let’s now move on to our second vertical.
Creator Street Business Vertical #2: Restaurants and Consumer Packaged Goods
You can own a virtual restaurant? Yes, and this will quickly become more accessible and easier to start for all types of creators in the future. In short, this business vertical is all about consumable goods. These are categories that operate with much lower margins than retail, typically require more complicated networks and platforms to produce, but can have a higher lifetime value from a profit perspective from authors due to immense repeat purchasing.
The best analogy is thinking of all the places you eat out in your Main Street town and imagining them inside Creator Street.
These new-age businesses typically have five distinct groups of people take part in them:
- The consumer of food/product (likely a member of your community)
- The supplier of the ingredients
- The distributor (who delivers the ingredients to the manufacturing places)
- The manufacturer. In the case of ghost kitchens that produce food for digital restaurants, this is excess (or under-utilized) kitchen space and labor in existing restaurants.
- The creator. This is the brand behind the restaurant and likely the leader of the digital community (aka the owner of Creator Street).
I imagine these businesses will take on three distinct categories.
- Creator Owned Ghost Kitchens and Consumer Packaged Good Brands. Examples of this include Mariah Carey’s Cookies or the numerous beauty gurus on YouTube with millions of subscribers who have come out with their own make-up lines. These are typically larger creators with massive online communities that can afford to sign nationwide distribution agreements for specific ingredients, cosmetic products, and food products. This will likely only be accessible to the top 0.1% of creators… so what does this business model look like for folks not equivalent to the NYC of creators?
- Creator-Led Franchises. This will be an entirely new age of food businesses and CPG (consumer packaged goods) businesses. And this is where I believe most of the Creator Street-type businesses will be started with a truly disruptive effect on existing brands. What this will look like is existing modularized structures, ingredients, and formulas for products but with the ability for individual creators to apply to open up their own digital franchises. Instead of location customization (how franchises were catered to individual communities in Main Street), Creator Street franchises will have branding customizations and slight product and experience enhancements that will make the experience feel native to a specific Creator Street. I believe Creator-Led Franchises have the potential to disrupt every existing category of business whether it be beauty, fast-food, ice cream, or snacks. It’s not easy to start a creator-led franchise today, and in many verticals, it is next to impossible. But this will be shifting in the future (we’ll make certain of this). Imagine a restaurant on Uber Eats and DoorDash in cities across the world themed specifically for romance readers or sci-fi readers?
Now onto vertical #3…
Creator Street Business Vertical #3: Service Providers
This one is the hardest one to imagine, but also in many ways the easiest. Think about the massage therapist, the salon, and all the other services you access on Main Street. Creator Street similarly will have service-based businesses for inhabitants of their communities.
The difference is that these service-based businesses will rise to meet the needs of a digitally native population, and likely won’t have much, if any, overlap with the services provided by Main Street businesses.
For nonfiction authors, we have seen this most prominently with services such as consulting, education, and more. Of course, fiction authors do offer consulting services too, but in much less frequency.
So what do services look like on Creator Streets that are owned and led by fiction authors?
I posit they fall into three distinct categories.
- Digital experiences. These experiences recreate common entertainment venues we’d experience on Main Street in the real world but open it up with more digitally native experiences. Think about virtual book clubs, movie screenings, and group gaming sessions. This is all about hanging out and experiencing online activities and events together. Most of these experiences are accessible and possible for most authors to utilize today when building out their own Creator Street.
- Wellness services. This is the category I am most excited about. Loneliness is on the rise, more people struggle with anxiety and depression than ever, and for many, fitness and personal health are continual struggles. Whether it’s online fitness classes for readers, sessions to chat about second marriages, or other common life experiences that bring our readers together — enter in-person services have the opportunity to be reimagined and reinvented with the power of community. I also imagine there is ample opportunity to collaborate here. Instead of you as the owner of the Creator Street running the fitness club for members of your community, an entrepreneurial reader of yours can do so with your support. Most of these wellness services are possible today, but will only get easier in the future as software evolves and more pioneering creators test out what works and doesn’t.
- URL to IRL. The last category is URL to IRL or taking online activity and community into the real world. Most obviously this will be available to the New York City-sized creators who have the audience and size to operate real-world conferences and potentially even create small towns in the real world such as Missouri Star Quilt Company has done by turning a small town into “Disney World for quilting”. For the 99.9% of us with small digital towns rather than New York City-sized online communities, I believe this will take place with a similar franchise model. AirBnBs or entrepreneurial hotel chains can partner with groups of online creators to customize the branding of specific experiences to be authentic to the online (or URL) world created by the creator. A recent example of this is what AirBnB did by creating a Shrek-themed AirBnB in Scotland. I imagine we will see this model proliferate with creators driving discovery for these properties and receiving a revenue share in return for slight customizations of the experience. Even more, we may see this form around specific subgenres of fiction, providing vast collaborative partnerships among wide variety of authors. Which brings us to our last point…
Your brain is probably buzzing after reading over this vision for how the rise of Creator Street will change what we think of as the business of publishing forever.
This rise will take much of the next decade and beyond to play out. And it will be transformative.
But there is one last important point. Maybe, the most important point of this entire essay.
Storytellers Rule the World, but storytellers don’t rule alone. We rule together.
Just as no city, town, or even nation operates in complete isolation from the rest of the world, the Creator Streets we build and pour our passions into are part of an interconnected web of other Creator Streets, some larger, some smaller, some closely related to ours and some entirely different in culture, experience, and identity.
The point is that by working together — we have more to gain than by working alone.
In an age of amplified individuals, it’s not actually about us as individuals at all.
It’s about empowering communities of our readers, and us empowering ourselves as a community of creators.
It’s why Storyteller doesn’t rule the world, but Storytellers.
Many of the business models I mentioned above would be impossible if operating alone in the vacuum of your own creator street. But the beauty comes when we can work together, collaborate, and realize that unlike in the physical world, where living in two towns at the same time is a challenge (although not impossible), inhabiting multiple Creator Streets at the same time is the norm.
With this, I hope you enjoyed this last essay from me. It was the big finale, culminating in a ton of ideas that will likely shift how you think about this industry. I’d love to hear what you think about this vision.
In the meantime, you will hear more subscription advice from me as always, and you will also be receiving a memo from me soon. It’s the last message from me about Ream’s Discovery 1.0 update before it goes live and a very important one.
It’s about how we think about our content guidelines, content moderation, and creating a safe space for all readers and authors on the platform. You’ll notice that the ideas shared in this essay will form the foundational principles of how we approach building a better multiverse for authors… so that all of you can rule the world as storytellers.