The Storyteller War begins today. It’s Chapter 2 of Ream.
But it starts with our darkest moment.
I am about to share with you the raw story behind both the best and most challenging month in my life.
It’s a story about the future of publishing. A story about the future of building communities and the next generation of companies.
And it’s a story about the future we will create together. One where Storytellers Rule the World.
The darkest moment?
We failed you.
We have some truisms about subscriptions that we stick to hell over high water.
- Trust is the currency of subscriptions.
- Underpromise and overdeliver.
- Consistency is everything.
For the first time in Ream’s history, we didn’t overdeliver.
Specifically, with the launch of Discovery 1.0. It is a great update. You can categorize your stories on Ream with more nuance than anywhere else on the internet with a powerful search engine and For You page to match.
Yes, there were some hiccups in the roll-out, but we worked out most of them in the days after launch.
The truth is that it was *impossible* for us to overdeliver on Discovery 1.0.
Discovery is the single most important problem we have as authors. It is also the problem closest to my heart. We didn’t start Ream to just be a subscription platform (cat is out of the bag there!), we started Ream to reinvent publishing — full-stop. The REAL vision is Discovery 2.0 (more on this soon).
Discovery 1.0 was the foundation for a multi-year bet and network that will compound to be better and better over time.
But none of that matters.
The moment Discovery is live, immediately Ream is not compared to other subscription platforms (which have poor to no discovery) but compared to every platform in the world that has Discovery (every retailer and every serial fiction platform).
To be frank, on day one, Ream’s Discovery is not at the level of platforms that have been around for a decade-plus.
And even if we never claimed that to be the case — implicitly and rightfully so that is the desire.
That’s where the neutral delivery comes in (and based on some experiences with algorithm tweaks etc, even under delivery).
I’m okay not only admitting this reality to you all, but standing strong by it.
Discovery 1.0 is a multi-year bet… not a month’s long project.
But then that begs the question.
What does this mean for the future of Ream? Where are we going and how are we going to get there?
The only way to overdeliver on discovery and stick to our principles is to be the BEST discovery platform in the world.
To be the best discovery platform in the world — we also have to be the biggest.
They are one and the same — there is no difference.
That’s when I brought Emilia and Sean together.
If we are actually serious about Discovery then we have to start playing a different game. We have to go for gold in beating the big river, in truly creating a future where Storytellers Rule the World.
Full stop.
And we can’t do that by just being a “better version of A-Z”. We have to literally change the business model of publishing from the ground up (Discovery 2.0).
If we aren’t serious about dedicating the next 7 years of our life all into this vision, then we should just unpublish the Discovery code and continue making Ream a cute, hyper useful SaaS tool for authors.
We didn’t play to be cute.
We are playing to win. For all of you.
It’s the Storyteller War.
But then what does it look like grow and truly create this future by 2030? A future where Storytellers Rule the World, Community is King, and we put our Readers First? What does it look like to create an all-in-one place to start, grow, and manage your business as an author more sustainably and with more control than ever before?
I see that future. We have the vision. But now we have to go for it with everything we have.
Realizing this has sent me into a three-week quest of rediscovering who we are, confirming our long-term vision, and ultimately starting a war for the future of publishing… the foundation for the true future where Storytellers Rule the World.
My biggest strength is living in the future. As a science fiction writer, I spent most of my childhood literally in future worlds I created. And now we want to create this future publishing world for all of you.
For the longest time, the future we were creating — is the one that came to life today. One where I’m graduating college (in just 3 months!) and working on Ream full-time.
I have spent the last 3 weeks time traveling to the future.
For the first few weeks of the year, I was in Italy with a mastermind of other entrepreneurs from Harvard, Stanford, and MIT. I learned a lot, reflected a ton, and ultimately received clarity. Coming back stateside we chatted with the team, reconfirmed our vision, and laid down the foundation of how we can continue underpromising and overdelivering, bringing consistent updates to Ream, and going for our long term vision where we can all literally own the future of publishing.
We have that plan now.
In about 18 months, we will go live with Discovery 2.0 — and it will change the business model of publishing. And with that — we can all work together to own and grow this future (I mean that literally, just wait).
This is the Storyteller War.
For now, we are focused on what we came here to do.
The first battlefront in our war, building the best subscription platform in the world.
That means you will be getting a huge update to the scheduler soon to make it easier to use, more powerful, and ultra-reliable.
What this also means is that we will be building out the foundation for this future publishing platform by enhancing and taking everything about subscriptions to the next level.
This means:
- Subscription bundles.
- Enhanced emails + newsletter features on Ream (all for free people!)
- Way better community features (who needs Facebook Groups anyways?)
- Audiobooks
- Analytics on story reads comment views and more
This is all the big picture that we will be conquering over the next 18 months.
And you will start to see updates on all of this rolling out in the coming weeks (behind the scenes we have been prepping a lot and building the foundation for some really cool things).
We can’t wait.
But this isn’t just a reaffirmation of our roadmap and the big-picture vision that we all get to create, own, and lead together.
There’s something bigger here.
It’s not just what we are doing but how we are doing it.
How do you arm yourself to fight and win a war of attrition with one of the biggest companies on the planet?
This is the moment where it’s easy to think about inviting in outsiders.
To let the ends justify the means — just like every other publishing company has.
I say *screw* that.
We don’t need anything but ourselves.
Indies will remain indies. Bootstrapped till the end of the day. And that means, doubling down on our team (finally bringing on several folks full time to help these next few months) and elevating the experience for all of you across the board.
That means building out technical support tools so we can fix your issues faster and decrease support wait times.
That means taking everything we do in this community to the next level and expanding the content we create to new formats (like short-form video).
And it means continuing to crank out new features, with the understanding that Discovery 1.0 is a big multi-year bet (and really Discovery 2.0 is the next big bet). And in the meantime, our current battlefront is making Ream, already the best subscription platform in the world for fiction authors 10x better.
All of it is the foundation for something much bigger.
Arming ourselves for the Storyteller War. Arming ourselves to create a future where Storytellers Rule the World.
We will do this together.
I wish we could move faster. I wish we could make it all happen tomorrow. But we will do more than you can imagine. We have done so much with so little, and because of your support, we can take everything to the next level.
I’m so excited. And utterly obsessed until we win.
Welcome to Operation Storytellers Rule the World.
We have 5 values that undergird everything we do. And we will die on top of any hill to fight for these values.
In fact, it was the moment I walked into the Author Sustainability Conference this weekend, that I got a truly radical idea (to be announced when we launch Discovery 2.0) to take our values to the next level.
Ultimately, we want to do something that has never been done before.
Something that in a world that didn’t care about us as authors nearly drove my mental health and life into the ground for good.
I’m tired of the BS games. I’m tired of people taking advantage of us. I’m tired of a business and industry that at a fundamental level tries to exploit us.
It’s time to create a future Where Storytellers Rule the World.
And the greatest weapon we have is our beliefs.
They are…
- Storytellers Rule the World
- Community is King
- Readers First
- First Drafts are better Than No Drafts
- Character Over Plot
I can’t wait to embark on this journey with all of you.
From the darkest night rises the brightest light.
We have learned some very important lessons. And together, we now have the strategy for the next 5+ years of Ream.
It’s going to be incredibly special. And I’m grateful for all of you learning with us. For all of you for sharing your feedback. And for all of you for helping us realize together what is possible.
The best is yet to come.
A future where Storytellers Rule the World.
And in the meantime, all I have to say is thank you. We are privileged and grateful to even consider questions of this magnitude. But I firmly believe if there is any team in the world that can pull it off, it’s us. If there’s any community in the world that can achieve this, it’s y’all.
Let’s do this. Bigger and better than ever before. The fun is just getting started. And I personally won’t rest until our mission is accomplished.
Operation Storytellers Rule the World.
Chapter 2 begins today…
With love,
Michael and the Ream Team