Posted on July 20, 2023
Ever wondered how a content marketing guru can successfully become a bestselling mystery author? Join us as Joe Pulizzi shares his invaluable insights on leveraging content, securing long-term reach, and nurturing author communities, and get ready to unlock your own creative potential!
Joe Pulizzi’s Links:
Joe’s book: https://www.joepulizzi.com/the-will-to-die/
Creator Economy Expo: https://cex.events/
The Tilt: https://www.thetilt.com/
#41 Episode Outline:
0:00:00 Introduction
0:02:09 Writing a Fiction Novel After Selling Your Company
0:08:28 Leveraging Content Marketing as a Valuable Asset
0:21:41 Securing Long-Term Reach: Safeguarding Content Strategy with Email Marketing
0:25:24 Nurturing Author Communities: Strategies for Building Strong Bonds
0:30:51 Streamlining Success: Focusing on Key Priorities for Authors’ Content Strategy
0:35:57 Mastering the Art of Minimum Viable Audience & Planning for the Inevitable Exit
0:41:19 Conclusion
#41 Episode Transcript:
Michael Evans: This is gonna be a fun one. We’re chatting today with Joe Pulizzi, a suspense and thriller author, and the founder of the Tilt and Creator Economy Expo. He’s been in the content marketing space for decades and actually ran the Content Marketing Institute so he knows his stuff when it comes to marketing online, and it’s gonna give us a lot of advice today about how we can market our books as authors and his first fiction book.
What you just published about a little over a year ago has sold 10,000 copies, so there’s a lot of great stuff to learn here, specifically how he is able to make use of the upcoming tools and strategies in the creator economy and how he has been able to build a strong community of people who are interested in his nonfiction and parlay that.
Into a fiction audience, which is super [00:01:00] interesting. So we’re gonna learn a lot today from Joe, and I’m super excited for this conversation. But before we officially get into it, I just wanna say hello. Thank you for listening to this podcast. We have had a lot of fun episodes recently and been actually jumping back and forth between doing subscription workshops where we really dive deep into someone’s subscription and learn a lot together and interviews with some incredibly successful and interesting author.
So this is well as interviews with an incredibly successful and interesting author, and we hope you enjoy it. If you’re not a part of the Facebook group, you should definitely join. It’s facebook.com/groups/subscriptions for authors. It’s totally free and a place where you can learn from over 2,800 other subscription authors.
We’re gonna get into this episode with Joe now. I’ll see y’all I the other side.
Michael Evans: Joe, I’m very excited to have you here today. You know it go, you go back in marketing and entrepreneurship and the creator space, you basically are the person who founded so much of this. I mean, you literally run Creator Economy Expo, but before Creator Economy Expo, there was [00:02:00] Content Marketing Institute.
And when you sold that company, You published your first fiction novel. What, a first move after selling a company. Talk to me about that experience and why that was your first thing you really did.
Joe Pulizzi: It’s, it’s actually, thank you, first of all. It’s, a pleasure to be on talking to both of you.
It’s actually quite a, Personal story. I was able to sell the business, as you said, content Marketing Institute sold in 2016 State until the end of 17. And c m I, we were targeting marketers. We had a big event called Content Marketing World. It’s still, I believe, the largest event to content marketers in the space.
And I said, okay. This is about the end of 17 and I’m talk, people are saying, what’s your next move, Joe? What are you gonna do next? I’ve been, I was an entrepreneur for 10 years. This is sort of my thing. I was known as the content marketing guy and I was like, I didn’t know what to answer. And finally I talked to my wife about it and she’s just like, say, you’re doing nothing.
Isn’t that the greatest thing ever? Just say nothing. And so I started to do research on like doing nothing and got this started reading up on taking sabbaticals and what is the sabbatical and you know, sort sort of like a transition between one moment and the next and a cleansing, if you will.
[00:03:00] So I absolutely said I was gonna take a 12 month. Sabbatical, if you can do it. It was one of the greatest years of my life. I would highly recommend it. And in January of 2018, I did no electronics January at all. And that was every I, I put my, didn’t have my phone on me. I didn’t all email all, and I’m pretty big on Twitter and LinkedIn.
I was like, nothing. No social, just went total cold. Turkey got. Pretty itchy the first couple weeks. But after that it was wonderful because, I mean, I could just be present. And that’s kind of what a sabbatical teaches you to always be present in the moment. And I loved it. I a great year, my wife and I and the kids, we spent a lot of time outside.
And so then as I’m coming out of that sabbatical, I’m trying to think of, you know, what am I, what am I going to do next? And I, one day I was talking with my wife and, and I said, you. You’ve never read any of my books, have you? And up to that point, I wrote six business books that some of them did fairly well.
Yeah. And she said, yeah, I, I read every one, I read the acknowledgements page of everyone. But that’s, so she didn’t [00:04:00] read anything else. And that’s fine. She’s not a marketer. What does she care? But she loves thrillers and loves mystery novels. And I said, you know what I would like to do? I would like to write something that you would actually read.
And enjoy. So I started at the ends of 18. I started to tinker around with the process of writing. My first novel ultimately was called The Will to Die toughest thing I ever did career-wise. It was a real shift moving from writing business topics, which I mean, I’ve got two business podcasts, I.
write articles all the time in business. It comes natural to me. But building a world, if you will and the character development and the dialogue, that was a whole new thing for me. And so it took me quite a long time to get into the rhythm. We could talk about some of the missteps or the things that I went through, but it took me till October of 2019 till I had a final, final, final draft.
And we launched that out as a podcast. Actually, I wanted to do something different that nobody had done before. And I’m like, okay, I’ll release every chapter as a podcast episode and built audience that way. And so launched the whole thing [00:05:00] in December of 2019 ultimately. And then in March, on March 8th, 2020, which is an odd date.
That was the launch party. Which is funny. Some, some people at that point didn’t show up because they were already getting a little skittish, and of course a couple days later the whole world shut down. but anyway, so, that was the will to die. And I’m actually, I loved it. I loved the process.
I learned that at that point that I wanted to be a novelist and I got involved in Creator Academy Expo and some other things that we could talk about if you want, but Yeah. Yeah. But ultimately I’m starting to get into the groove and I have to get into a, to a groove to get into a rhythm to start doing this is, is to write my second novel.
Michael Evans: And that’s your goal this year, right?
Joe Pulizzi: I just turned 50, yeah. I just turned 50 and I announced to everyone. I’m a, I’m a goal setter and, and when I set a goal so I keep to that goal, I tell people. I have a newsletter audience and people on social media. I said, okay, by the time I’m 51, I will have [00:06:00] published my second novel.
So I’m already getting into the rhythm. I just published epic Content Marketing version two. So that came out in March. I’m working on, I have a v i P community, and we’re working on a book called The Content Entrepreneur. We’re doing that right now. That should be put to bed in about a month. I’m close.
I’m getting to the point where I’m gonna be able to spend some, some serious time on this and I need to set aside mornings. Mornings is when I feel the creative spirit and spending a couple hours before anybody does anything, so it’ll, I’ll. I usually do about six to eight in the morning, and I’ll set up my writing time Monday through Friday and, we’ll see where the characters go.
I wanna write a sequel, but I say that now that I want it to be a sequel, but as you both know, sometimes that’s not where it takes you. It might take me in another direction. So I’m excited to see where that will go.
Michael Evans: Mm-hmm. Wow, I’m so excited that, what a cool story. I think. Very, very relatable that this is something you, you found and fell into.
And it wasn’t like you had this like 50 year plan to become a novelist, but you’re here now. But I do wanna ask you, I mean, you know more [00:07:00] about content marketing than pretty much almost anyone. Just
Joe Pulizzi: I’ve been around a number of years, so yeah, this is, yeah, it wasn’t, when we started content marketing wasn’t a turp.
I started, we started using it in 2001. Nobody knew what that term was. And then it, it became popularized probably in oh nine and 10. We launched Content Marketing World in 2011, and that was still building momentum and content marketing is a thing was, has been around for hundreds of years. That’s not a new thing, but the term itself and content marketing directors and content marketing managers, that’s all happened in the last decade.
so I’ve been to the before times. Yeah. And now the after times.
Michael Evans: No, and you’ve built the community of people who like are the center of it, and now you’re doing creator economy expo, and there’s a problem that I want to get your insight on Sure. That I think a lot of our listeners have, which is.
In the specific fiction author space. The most common way I would say that new leads are driven is through advertising. And it’s definitely viewed as an expense. And actually for most authors, I would say their basic biggest expense, even higher than production expenses. I know many [00:08:00] authors who spent 50% of their net revenue on advertising.
Sure. So that’s, that’s kind of the business. Meanwhile, Content marketing and the creator economy. Especially how, like you said, like you have to view content as an asset, not as an expense, but something you can invest in. That is, that is a huge shift in just everything in terms of how I think a lot of our listeners view it.
So I’m curious you, as you approach, being a fiction author, how are you taking this mindset where content is an asset and actually using content marketing to market? Your books, so great.
Great question. First of all, there’s nothing wrong with advertising, but as you say, it’s expensive. And when you do advertise, whether you’re doing it in book pub or whether you’re doing it on Amazon or whatever the case is You have to deliver some sales.
When that happens there’s an immediacy to that advertising campaign, short term. Not that it can’t be an investment long term, but mostly it’s not. Mostly we want to see a reward from that as soon as possible. With content marketing, it’s a marathon. So if you look at advertising as a sprint, content marketing is a marathon.
You’re trying to build a long-term relationship with a group [00:09:00] of people, so, I’ll just tell you my story and then we can sort of pick it apart. I mean, this is, yeah. From a, from a business standpoint standpoint I launched. Basically a content marketing blog in 2007, that in three years we had, I think, 30,000 email subscribers to that email newsletter.
Associated with that blog, I blog three to four times a week about how to, how to build an audience how to drive revenue from your content marketing, how to measure it, all those types of things that marketers would be interested in. And then fast forward to 2013, 14, we had 200,000 email subscribers.
That’s the asset engine that drove the entire business. Just to give you an idea of what we’re talking about, content marketing world was a 6 million AME event just by itself. That’s driven by the email subscription database. That’s because we got Optin profession from this group of people. We deliver regular, consistent content, valuable content, hopefully helps ’em with their jobs, with their lives.
In some ways they keep opening that on a regular basis and then a small number of those. Decide to go to the event and spend a thousand [00:10:00] dollars or 1500 or whatever it is, once a year to go to Content Marketing World. That’s the business model, and that’s a, it’s a very traditional business model for a lot of content creators out there.
Whether you’re a blogger or a podcaster, you have one core thing that’s yours, TikTok channel, Instagram. You build an audience around that. Hopefully you move that from what we call rented land, which is social media channels where you don’t have any control over to something that you have more control over, which is.
Email would be my first preference. Podcasting is okay, but email is where you get the data and you can do something with, so that’s the model. now fast forward, I’ve got a pretty decent audience on the business marketing side, and then I want to go and just do a novel and I’ve got nothing.
Basically, you’ve got nothing. You’ve got friends and family that will buy a book because they support you. but how do you leverage that audience ongoing? So I thought a little bit ahead and as I started writing the novel in 2018, I was like, all right, let’s end of 18. I can’t, I’ve got this expertise, I’m known for something, but I’m going into this separate area.
So, so I [00:11:00] had this idea where I’m going to write a novel, but I’m going to keep it in the marketing space so it’s relevant to this current audience. So I could leverage, cuz I’m always like, and this is why I and I have some friends that are authors on the fiction side and they write a lot of different types of books.
They’re not necessarily known for anything. It’s say, oh, okay, this one is a carpenter, and it’s, it’s said in Canada. And this one is about we’re gonna do a romance. And it’s, it’s said in Australia or whatever. It’s all, everything is different. I don’t know how To work with that kind of business model from a content marketing standpoint, because the expert needs to be known for something.
Doesn’t have to be a non-fiction type thing. It could be fiction, but you have to have like Grisham has done really well, or Patterson books is known for a particular type of writing, and specific audience of particular needs. So great. So I’m like, how do I do that coming from the business world?
So I said, okay, I’m going to do. Thrillers, mystery novels, small town mystery novels, but the protagonist will be a marketer so I can leverage marketing. I always, I thought of it weird [00:12:00] when I, it didn’t really come out that way, but if you read The Will to Die and you’re a marketer, you will learn stuff.
Like you will learn stuff about marketing and publishing. That’s so cool. And content marketing from it because they’re in a pitch meeting and things are happening and they always bring in ideas about branding into it while people are getting killed. So I thought of, okay, how do I leverage that?
I said someday maybe I can. Build out this marketing thriller category, by the way. Not a thing. As you know, there’s no marketing thriller category. There’s financial thriller category. Sure there’s small town, but there’s all sorts of things, but there’s nothing around that. It’s like, well, okay, maybe that’ll be where I can differentiate myself, what we call it in, in my Content Inc.
Book. Coming up with a content tilt. How do you differentiate and break through all that? Clutter out there. In this case, all the novels, the more books than ever before that are out there. How do you break through and build an audience and then monetize that audience? So, I decided to we were going that direction.
The book started going that direction and in January of 2019, I started the Joe Pulitz Random Newsletter. I made it a little bit broader than I normally do, still about marketing and stuff, but more about [00:13:00] personal stuff that I was covering, and specifically I built that newsletter as my author newsletter.
and I, that’s every two weeks. I still have it today. I just wrote episode, or I just wrote Issue one 13. Wow. And I’ve got 10,000 subscribers on that. So not nothing like what I was doing before, but still 10,000 subscribers that are by big supporters are my super fans that I deliver something of value to them every couple weeks.
And that’s my first go-to for. My marketing. So instead of going out and advertising, that’s, that’s who I would go to to say, Joe’s got a new book out, would support Joe. Do it this way. Or I also pull, and I did this for The Will to Die. there’s about 85 people from that group that sort of became my champions and they.
the, read an early release of the book. They did a review on Good Reads and Amazon, and they shared it with all their friends and a lot of ’em were in book clubs and they used the wilted I as a book club, which I never knew how big book clubs were. But now you YouTube probably did. But as I started getting into the set, I’m like, oh my God, if you can crack the book club scene, that’s powerful [00:14:00] stuff.
So I started to do that and so that’s my. as an author, that’s my content marketing strategy. What am I known for? What can I do different, better inspire in a different way than any other person I feel I have this angle of this world that we can create in this marketing space, if you will, that there’s not a lot of competition right there.
And then I’ve built, been slowly, continuously building that audience. And this is where a lot of authors that I talk to struggle. Hundred, I haven’t missed an issue in three years, four years. So every two weeks I write a pr about a thousand words, four or five different topics. So you have to keep those communications going.
Once you stop, you may lose that subscriber forever. So I would keep going there and that’s where I’ll build it up. So the will did, I did okay. I mean, from what I can tell, it probably sold about 10,000 copies. Which I’m thrilled. Yes. I mean, it’s nothing like what, what I, it’s not, it’s nothing like what I’ve been, what I did on the other books that I’ve written probably combined have probably sold about 500,000 combined.
Wow. And, and this is from, yeah, writing my first one in 2008. Get content, get Customers, [00:15:00] which probably sold about. A thousand copies and then managing content marketing. Then Epic Content Marketing took off right time, right Topic. That was 2013. Then Content Inc. On the heels of that, that did even better than Epic Content Marketing.
So these are all building up to something. Now I’m going in the different directions saying, okay, here’s how do I move? All those marketing people that have limited time, but still wanna read novels on occasion, but would be interested in the marketing thing. And I’m, and I know my audience, who I think of is they’re marketers.
They love to read novels and they have limited times. I write very short chapters. at least that’s what The Will to Die was. And so that’s my content marketing initiative is to build that audience on the, on the email side. Now, well, I still, let’s say the new book comes out. Am I still gonna leverage Book Bub and Good Reads and all that?
Yes, probably will, but I’ve got a really good start now cuz I’ve got 10,000 people to go out there and the odds are I’d get a good number of those. To not only purchase, but to review and to share. And so that’s where, at least the model right now. And, and we’ll see where it goes.
Emilia Rose: [00:16:00] So I think that’s so cool. You mentioned launching a, I’m assuming it was a fiction podcast with The Will to Die.
Joe Pulizzi: Yes. It was the audiobook released as a podcast. I hadn’t seen it been done. Nu you probably, you, maybe you two know that maybe somebody else did it, but I’m like, what if we marketed it out as, and I just trickle it out there as a podcast.
Cuz I’ve been podcasting, for over 10 years now and it’s very easy to do. And so what I did is I, Kyle Tate read the audio version, Tate’s fantastic narrator. He read the audio version of The Will to Die and as he would deliver them to me, Produced. I would release a chapter through I set it up as a podcast and we would release that out and I would get subscribers that way and so, the hope was, and it worked out fairly decently that people that would then listened to that then said, okay, good.
When’s the print coming out? Greater Print came out a couple months later. We went, had the party, did the whole print thing. You know, we got a couple Good, you know, we were number one in a couple categories on Amazon for a week or so, which was great. And in the sub, sub sub thriller [00:17:00] category that you could say you made it number one I was a religious thriller.
I.
Emilia Rose: Oh wow.
Joe Pulizzi: So basically, here’s another thing that a lot of people don’t know about, but maybe you do. Like if you do K D P for Amazon, which I don’t know if I’m going to do again, but if you do that they give you 10 categories that you can request that you go under, so they don’t automatically do it.
And I looked at the most obscure thriller categories. So, because we have, we had some L G B T Q themes in the book. So there’s a category under that and a thriller. There’s religious themes in it, a funeral, home situations, church situations that happened in the book. So I’ve got that under the thriller category, and that helps.
So we ended up being, financial thriller was another one. So we ended up being, I think on four or five subcategories, the number one book for a few, because there’s just, I’m looking for less competition.
Michael Evans: They do limit it to three now breakout.
Joe Pulizzi: So it’s, you know, I’m just trying to figure it out as, as we go.
so anyways, release that as the podcast and then got the, the momentum and then sort of basically the, the book was my [00:18:00] marketing starting in December and then going into March. I’m releasing those chapters every week. Yeah, as podcasts and then building that audience as we go, getting them to subscribe to the newsletter so we get that long-term connection, which is great.
And then release the book the first week of March in 2020.
Emilia Rose: That’s really interesting because there are authors who have done this before, but I would say the majority of authors haven’t even like considered putting their audiobooks in a fiction podcast form and releasing it week by week.
Usually it just, One big drop through Audible or find a way, and, but I’m actually shifting to that model currently and it’s really cool. I haven’t launched yet, but I didn’t even know you have done that, so that’s really interesting.
Joe Pulizzi: Well, yeah, let me know how it goes. I’m super curious because I mean, you’ve written so much, you already have this audience.
I wonder how they would, I mean, you could use it as a building, a new audience. Type thing as well. you know, it’s interesting. I don’t know if I would do that again, because now that I have the audience, so you’re gonna go and you already have an audience and you’re [00:19:00] going that direction, it would be, it’d be interesting to see how that would work.
Emilia Rose: Yeah.
Michael Evans: I feel like you’ll find a new audience, Amelia, cuz you know, listeners are a lot of times different from readers like habitual listeners. It’ll be a different kind of person. Some people just won’t touch a podcast and other people. You know, love podcasts and don’t get books and podcast forms, so it’s new for them.
Joe Pulizzi: and you’re right Michael, because if I’m giving an advice to somebody, so basically let’s take an e-newsletter. Let’s say an e-newsletter, and you want that e-newsletter to grow subscribers, what influencers do you work with partners of yours to. Promote your e-newsletter to their audience.
You don’t go to podcasters.
Michael Evans: Yeah,
Joe Pulizzi: you do it to other newsletters. If you have a podcast and you’re trying to promote a podcast, you do it on other podcasts. It’s always audio for audio, video for video, text for text. So it makes it really easy decision. So that’s why it’s kind of weird when you go audio, but I.
But obviously in this case, the Will to Die had an audio version, a full audio version. So basically you could go week to week and get it for free if you wanted to, and just listen to the whole thing or just wait till all 43 42 chapters were [00:20:00] released. Or then you could buy the audiobook as a, as a separate, which a lot of people did.
It’s funny cuz they just didn’t want to read through all the, just go through all the separate chapters. They just wanted to read the whole audible thing. So That’s strange as well. So if you wanna sell more audible copies, you could consider doing a podcast release of them, and then at the end it’s like, Hey, now it’s all done.
Go ahead and you can buy the full thing with three bonus chapters at the end. Yeah. On Audible or wherever you get. that medium, that message. So there you go.
Michael Evans: Putting the bonus chapters in the end would, I think, be a the thing that gets a lot of people to push over the edge.
They’d be, oh, I’m missing out on something. I have to go there. Yeah.
Joe Pulizzi: And I did that. Exactly. And it worked really well for us. Cuz when the newsletter had two different bonus chapters that we released, there’s a, there’s some diary scenes where. Will Pollett, who’s the main character in the Will to Die.
His father used to write in a diary all the time, but already passed away, so Will learns about his father from the diary. And I left out, I removed a couple of those diary scenes from the final edition [00:21:00] and those became bonus chapters. Hmm. So that, and then I then basically said, Hey, and if you just subscribe to the newsletter, you get which is the most important thing.
It’s so funny. It’s like, I want everyone to buy the book and read, and that’s all good. But I really wanna subscribe. I want them to stay as a subscriber because if they say as a subscriber, then you can monetize. I don’t wanna say, I don’t wanna be like unfeeling about it. That’s a person, that’s a relationship we can build.
Yeah. But that’s a relationship that can be fruitful monetarily for a long period of time if you deliver value ongoing instead of just one time. Yeah.
Michael Evans: I mean that’s, that’s what subscriptions for authors is, is all about. Which brings me to a point you mentioned earlier, which was rented land and don’t build homes on rented land is.
I think you are saying, has anyone else said that besides you? Cuz I attribute that meant to you.
Joe Pulizzi: I don’t know if I coined that or not. There were a lot of, Sonya Simone from Copy Blogger said some things like that as well. You know, where we were all saying at the same time when everyone, and this was before Facebook, so when Facebook was really the only game in town, we were all looking at it and say, oh.
It’s right now. This is in 12 and 13. You’re getting all this [00:22:00] organic reach right now and you’re loving it, but just wait. It always happens. They’re gonna take it away. It’s like make the plans now to Yes, go ahead and build on those social media channels that you have and dedicate to them, but you’re gonna have to have some strategy to move that.
To something that you can control. Email in this case is what we’re talking about. And lo and behold, it was at 1314. They changed it up. Buzzfeed had destroyed buzzfeed’s entire business model at the time because they had almost all their audience on Facebook and Twitter. And then as Facebook said, oh, you can have 40% organic reach, and then they went down to less than 1%.
Less than 1% of 1%. It’s like, wow, that killed their business model. So they had a whole executive meeting and they said, okay, we need 1 million email subscribers. That’s our goal this year. And so Buzzfeed’s been in the news a lot lately, but they saved their business model in 14 and 15 by moving from social to email.
Not saying that they didn’t, they didn’t, they stayed on social. They, after they still had a strategy, but they didn’t. You don’t just le this is like, well when you’re starting a product or a service and your only distribution is through eBay or [00:23:00] Amazon and nothing is direct cuz then you’re at the whim of those companies and whatever change they have, it’s the same thing with your authored content.
It’s like, that’s why I mean I like Amazon. We all are sort of in Amazon’s world, but. if I can figure out a way where I don’t have people go to Amazon where there’s a lot more competition, I could just have them go to my landing page. That’s what I want. More than anything else. So that’s what I think as authors as we should strive for, is keeping them outside of those social media properties.
So anyways, move from Rented land Pick the ones that you can dedicate to minor LinkedIn and Twitter. That’s what I focus most of my time on. But I know I wake up every morning thinking, well, they might. Kick me off the platform. They might change their algorithm, their private company.
They can do whatever they want. It’s not gonna be around forever, hence MySpace and whatever the, what was the one that Twitter bought? That was the music one. The three second videos or whatever.
Michael Evans: Oh, vine Vine.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah, that’s, you know, vine died. I know I had a lot of, lot of creators when I wrote Content Inc.
In 2015, we were featuring a lot of Vine creators and they were of [00:24:00] course devastated when that thing, and then the same thing’s happening to Twitter right now. There’s a lot of creators that the algorithms are changing. We don’t know what Elon’s doing, depending on how he feels when he wakes up and what changes he is gonna make.
Well, as an author, don’t put yourself in that position, so hedge your bets, diversify from that standpoint.
Michael Evans: I know someone who spoke at Creator Economy Expo both years that you’ve run it. Jay Klaus, big fan of him, and I assume you are as well. Yeah. He has a term that he calls the sovereign Creator, which I think is really, really apt about just, yes, use the platforms, but if you can have your business where at the end of the day, you know, the income that’s coming in from direct selling and.
You have your audience that you can also directly contact. If the platforms take you down, the platform’s got a business, whatever happens, you’re gonna be fine. That’s that’s right. That’s where you wanna get to. I’m curious for you shifting kind of conversations to something that is also very important in this whole creator economy books, no matter what you’re doing, superfan, that’s where a lot of this comes from.
And community is something that you talk about in epic content marketing and superfan kind of directly in [00:25:00] tandem.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah.
Michael Evans: And I’m curious, so many of our authors. We talk all the time about community, so they, they understand it’s important, but the idea of like what is a community really is still something that I think we always need more clarity on.
And then truly how to build a cuny because you’ve got in people to travel across the world to your events. That’s a community. If there is any, like, that is definitely one. So how do you do that? Not saying authors wanna run, you know, a thousand person conferences, but how do you really build a community?
Joe Pulizzi: Well first of all, if you can do an event, events help.
If you as authors will get this, once you meet a fan for the first time, shake their hand and talk to them. They’re a fan for, they’re become, they become a super fan. For the most part. So how do you recreate those things as often as possible. An in-person event is a way to do it. Other thing is replying to their emails that they send.
If you can do, like, I do little shows on LinkedIn on occasion where I’ll have people comment directly to me and or I’ll do something on Riverside or Streamy yard or whatever the case is to, so to, to get out there and to talk with people as much as possible is, is really important. [00:26:00] Now what. I have an idea that I’m gonna launch for the next book or we’re working on it, but what we did for launching Creator Economy Expo, I was, I asked that question.
I’m like, okay, I’ve done the content marketing thing. I’m going in this new content creator, individual content entrepreneurs, what we call it. How do I find the super fans there that can help build this? We can help them, but they can help the entire business. And so we actually launched an NFT program and we called them.
C x never ending tickets. Yeah. And we launched it before we launched the first event and we had it limited to a hundred. And we said, if I can get people to spend a little bit more money, and the price at that point was about $2,000 for the whole thing. They’d spent $2,000, a regular ticket was like 400 bucks.
If you buy a never ending ticket, you get Joe v i p access to, we have A place in Discord. Where they can reach me at any time. We get together for regular meetings, ev every two months we get together. I bring an expert. Last one we did, I, Jay Klaus on Jay talked about some of his challenges.
You get v i p party at Creator Economy Expo. You get this access to this [00:27:00] book project. So everybody who’s, we have like 40 co-authors for the next book coming out. Those are all people in our, in my v i p group. They bought access into that. Those are our super fans that are helping. So they wanna be involved in everything and they are.
So it’s really crazy. we created the token for them to do that. I’m not saying that authors have to go out and run N F T, you could do this through a membership.
Michael Evans: Yeah.
Joe Pulizzi: I would limit it at first. And Jay’s a really good example of this. Jay did a membership and I think he limited it to 200 only.
If that’s right, Michael, maybe you know better than I do. And then when somebody drops out, if they don’t wanna pay the monthly anymore, then he’ll bring somebody off the waiting list in and he keeps that at 200 and something that he can do. I think any author can do that. You could do 50, you could start with 50, a hundred, whatever.
There’s a number associated with that and that number that you charge people, you should feel a little bit uneasy about. because we know, I mean, you’re charging 99 cents to $30 for your book, somewhere in between. That’s what some of ’em giving away for free. But if you go out with a $500 number or a thousand dollars number, you are [00:28:00] finding your super fans.
Who are willing to pay. It’s not everybody, but it’s a small group of people. Now. What’s great is, is when they commit to that, they’re invested in you. They want to see you succeed, which is why they’ll do your views, they’ll get you involved in the book clubs that they’re at. They’ll do all the things. So that’s my community for, for c x, for Creator Economy Expo.
That’s really, really helped. We had that token and that’s worked really well and I’m thinking about for the next fiction novel, I wanna do something. Specific to that, I have some haven’t worked it out yet, but I wanna do some kind of membership, some kind of token, something where they get a bunch of stuff ongoing or for six month period of time where that would be special bonus chapters.
That would be special calls. About the book afterward that it’s just for them. Maybe that would be I would invite them to a book launch party that only they can go to, whether that’s online or in person or whatever. Well, those are the types of things that we’re trying to think of, but I think you have to structure community.
It doesn’t necessarily just happen. It always happened to run our events because the events build community. So great. you’ve got that [00:29:00] flagpole on the ground that you can build community from that. But if you don’t have that as an author, you have to build that. So build the membership thing, build the token project, build whatever it is, and absolutely limit it.
And you can sell that easier. This is only limited to the first 50, and then we’ll see where it goes and go six months and then you can open it up for another 50 or whatever the case is. So that would be my recommendation, and that’s worked really well for C E X. We had, I think 50, some of the 75 never ending ticket members were at Creator Economy Expo.
And so a good portion of those are now authors in the book. It’s amazing. And those people are, I would consider all of them my friends now. So not just super fans. I mean, they can all call me, text me, and so some authors are a little bit stand out like maybe I don’t want that. So that’s fine.
Then do your membership group, do a circle group or whatever group it is, so that there’s an arms limit of technology that they can’t, get to your cell phone or whatever and be human with them and then they will pay you back so many times over if you do something like that.
But you have to structure it, I think.
Michael Evans: Hmm, oh, that’s so good. I mean, literally, the biggest author on [00:30:00] Ream right now her name’s Kay Webster. And she has a membership very similar to what you’re describing in terms of very high ticket tiers that are limited in terms of the number of people who can join like 25 at a hundred dollars a month, tier, et cetera, goes all the way up to two $50 a month and doing that model very, very successfully.
And someone else who I wanna talk to you after this podcast, Christopher Hopper about, is doing the same thing. So, so cool. But. I wanna ask what if someone is doing what you’re doing? They’re trying so hard to build this community to, you know, I’m gonna go on and do, I’ve talked to writers who are doing weekly zooms, who are, you know, writing live streaming their writing process, like they’re putting so much effort into it, but they’re not getting, I’m going to use this word engagement cuz this is the word I see people They’re not getting engagement that they feel is sufficient. So in essence, their community building efforts feel futile at the moment, what would be your advice to that person?
Joe Pulizzi: Well, first of all, only do stuff that you wanna do. Life is too short. if you’re thinking you should do things because you have to, to build your audience.
I’m against that, [00:31:00] especially at my age now. I’m like, don’t only do things that bring you joy. And I believe if, if you write out of a place of joy that’s enough. That’s enough for, yes, you want an audience , but you’ve done something meaningful. Okay? Your au then your audience, hopefully your audience will pick up on that.
So that’s the first thing I would say. I would probably do a cursory content audit. And what I mean by that is, so let’s say you’re an author and you’re doing all these things. you’re doing some writing things, you’re taking some calls here, you’re doing some things on TikTok, you’re doing Twitter, you’re doing a newsletter, you’re doing podcast here.
Whatever you’re doing. An author’s probably doing between 10 and 15 different things. Yeah, that’s a lot. And what that probably means, and this is not always the case, sometimes it’s just bad timing, bad luck. Sometimes you’re bad writing, but it’s all kinds of, maybe, maybe you just don’t have it. I don’t know.
But let’s say you do list out your 10 to 15 things. 10 to fifteens too much. Especially when you’re starting out. If you haven’t built your, if you’ve built an audience, if you’re James Patterson and you’re doing the thing, you can do 15, 20, 80 things. You’ve got a team, you’re hiring people, you’re [00:32:00] everywhere.
I mean, how many co-authors does James Patterson have? These, he outsources all this kind of stuff. It’s amazing the process that he has. Course, but he didn’t start out that way. He started out doing very few things, and by the way, this is what every great media company does. Everybody thinks, oh, they just started out as the New York Times and they’ve got a newspaper and they’ve got invents and they sell products and they’re on all the social channels.
No, they just started with the newspaper. So author, you’re just gonna start with a couple things. So I would go to those 10 to 15 things and say, and be honest with yourself. Take a couple weeks and there’s some things that are just wasting your time that you shouldn’t be doing, that you’re not doing amazingly well.
So what are you not doing amazingly well? This taking up too much time that you probably should put on the back burner. I would probably say half of those things get down to five or six things, maybe fewer and say all right. If I’m gonna write the book, that’s one thing I’m writing. I’ve got a newsletter, it’s another thing I’m writing.
The other thing I’m gonna do, I’m going to make sure guest writing or guest posts is important so you can pull from other writers or whatever you’re gonna do interviews. However, you’re gonna get your word [00:33:00] out and you’re gonna help your other authors where you’re helping each other. That’s maybe three things.
And then let’s say you’re gonna be doing Instagram reels is kind of your place where you’re building an audience. All right. Be great at those four. Be amazing at those four. For now as you’re starting you may be pushing if, if you don’t have an audience built yet. It’s gonna be very tough to build a community.
So focus on building that audience first. Focus on getting a couple hundred people. Subscribe to your newsletter. Yeah. I wouldn’t even sniff at building any kind of community or doing any membership thing till you get 500 or a thousand people. I. Signed up. It’s too hard. You don’t have enough.
You’re only gonna have a small percentage of those people become super fans and be part of a community. It’s too early. So you have to make sure you build that audience, deliver that audience, keep them loyal by delivering amazing value over a long period of time. And then later you can add that in. So that would be my recommendation.
And of course every situation is different and it all depends, but in most cases, and this is every content creator, when I go and I do, if I’m, if an entrepreneur, content entrepreneur calls me and says, Joe, I’m broken. I can’t figure out the model. I’ve been doing this for a [00:34:00] year. Nothing’s working. They’ll do this model with me, and I’m like, oh my God, no wonder you’re doing 20 things.
And none of them are great. They’re all okay. Yeah. Which, okay. Does not pay the bills. So figure out where you can get rid of 16 oks and before Amazings. And Jay Klaus says this all the time, I love Jay. Yeah. So Jay says, okay, what’s easier, get an All A’s and five subjects or an a plus and one. It’s, so that’s the call to action for every author.
Yeah. Be great at one thing, be focused and great at one thing. You will build an audience and do that, and once you build what we call minimum viable audience, then you can go expand and do all the other things and build communities, and do the token gating and do everything else.
Michael Evans: Ah, I love that word.
Minimum viable audience. That’s something that. we always jump the gun. Cause I think we’re so excited to do all these interesting things of, we, we see it even in our Facebook group. People who are posting awesome things we’re doing. Just yesterday Ash Ashley, who I love you if you’re listening to this, she’s awesome.
Incredible person, friend of mine from the community and she like made puzzle pieces for her readers that she’s sending them as like swag when they join the membership. Wow. And that’s really cool. And they’re custom made puzzle pieces. [00:35:00] But if you’re listening to this, Ashley, has an audience, she’s done really well on serial fiction platforms up to this point, and now is investing into her community in an incredible way.
And I think that I think that the point that you just said is really important and I’m really glad you, you just mentioned that. The last thing I wanna talk about is something that. We don’t often talk about his authors because it’s so far out, but you’re someone who’s actually experienced this, which is quote unquote like an exit.
And I’m using quote unquote because for content entrepreneurs, for more traditional businesses that you’ve sold, you know, there is a more of a traditional exit opportunity. But in this content entrepreneur world, exiting is a, a new term, but you talk about this and as authors. you suggested you should go into your content business thinking about potentially what your exit looks like, because you’re gonna have to exit some point, which is very true.
We all end
Joe Pulizzi: whether we want to or not. At some point you’re gonna exit your business.
Yeah. We don’t wanna talk about it, but someday you’re not gonna be doing what you’re doing.
Michael Evans: Yeah. It’s it’s very true. How are you approaching that for your author career?
Joe Pulizzi: So it’s, I’ll tell you right now, it’s [00:36:00] more difficult for fiction authors because it’s so much more built around the individual author.
But this is the way that I approach it. First of all, build your assets as the author. I’m Joe Pulitz, the author. I’m gonna keep building my newsletter. I’m actually switching over from MailChimp to another provider for the newsletter. We’re doing a whole revamp of the site cuz I wanna start focusing more on my novelist career and those types of things.
So that’s great. Then as you build that out, you will get to a point where you build an audience that you can create something. And that something does not have your name tied to it. So let’s just talk. Let me go back and talk about the business stuff and I’ll get, and then we’ll talk about how yes, authors can do it.
So Joe Pulitz is doing a lot of stuff in the creator economy. Joe Pulitz starts the tilt.com. The tilt.com is a two time a week newsletter for content creators. The tilt.com is not associated with Joe Pulitz. I push it. I’m the ambassador. I’m an influencer behind it, but it’s not my name, and that is a, becomes a sellable asset.
I can sell that to any other company that wants to have that. They want a newsletter like that. They [00:37:00] like the name, they like the website, whatever they want the traffic, they can do that. Then I go ahead and say, okay, well let’s create Creator Economy Expo, another asset that we built that’s not associated with Joe Pulizzi’s name.
So again, anything associated with your, with your name, it’s very hard to do. Joe Rogan had to do a syndicated deal back, work it around to Spotify to, because that is the Joe Rogan show. Joe Rogan has to be on that show. But does Joe Pulizzi have to be writing for the tilt every week? No. Does Joe Pulizzi have to be the host of Creator Economy Expo?
No, not long term. Somebody else could do that. So that’s what I want authors to think about. And it’s tough if you haven’t built an audience yet. So if you haven’t built an audience yet, write your novel. And then once you get your first novel out, write your second novel. Because your second novel markets your first novel.
We all know this, right? But then as you build an audience and you build these things like email newsletters and you, you start to figure out who your audience is and when they’ll come together, you could create, let’s just say the wilted Eye takes place on the west side of Cleveland and Sandusky, Ohio, and I was born in Sandusky, Ohio.
It’s right in the middle of [00:38:00] Ohio, right on the lake. I could do a Sandusky, small town murder conference, whatever, right? You could do an event that people are interested in. you could create a fiction event with other people that are talking about the same things that you were talking about, but get them all together.
Like Amelia, you might come together and so maybe you’re already thinking about, it’s like let’s do something around romance and in a specific category. And you might work with 12 different authors. You own the conference, but you’ll work with all the, and you can all create a fan conference. If you do that, maybe you’re, it sounds like you might be already thinking about something like that, then you could take that ultimately and sell that to a publisher.
You could sell it to somebody who’s targeting the audience, those readers. So you could do a lot of different things. So again, it would, I would just say Focus on what you’re focusing on. You’re, you’re a content creator, you’re a novelist. Tell your stories, but then start to think about as you build this out, entities that do not include your name, that you could sell them off as small little projects.
Could be online, could be webinar series, could be a podcast you’re, that could be a show like you’re doing right. This show that your subscriptions for authors, this [00:39:00] is wonderful. You two are critical to making this thing happen. But three years from now. You might have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people listening to this.
Are you kidding me? that somebody wouldn’t wanna buy this? Absolutely, they would because there’s so many, there’s so many big companies out there that are trying to do what you’re doing that just can’t bring it together cuz of corporate politics or they’re just not creative enough, or they’re thinking more about advertising and their product services than building, than thinking about content marketing.
So that’s where there’s a huge opportunity more than ever before. So any authors, I would say, First of all, build your audience, do your thing. Build your, once you get a, once you build your audience and you can think about those community efforts we talked about, and then you can say, I don’t wanna do this forever.
How can I start building something that is outside of myself? But when I, it leverages my capabilities and my audience. Today and then you’ll become a content entrepreneur. And there, there it is. There you are. And, and all I believe authors already are. It’s just a little, it’s just thinking about the model a little bit differently.
I don’t think a lot of writers, and this is the problem with any content creators, we don’t think of ourselves as entrepreneurs first. And that’s what we are. [00:40:00] You are an entrepreneur. You are setting off on a business by yourself, and you’re just doing it from a content first strategy. You’re saying, I’m gonna build my content and build my audience, then monetize that audience.
So you’re doing the same thing as New York Times and Huffington Post and every other media company out there. It’s just, you think it’s different because you’re a novelist. it’s not different. You, you’re still running on content business.
So there you go.
Michael Evans: No, this was Joe, this was incredible.
And the last thing is, where can we find the tilt? Creator, county Expo shares all the links. Because I know, I mean, I’ve, I’ve literally been in person to your conference, so Emil has as well, we’re, we’re all fans, but for those who might be listening are like, I gotta check out more. Where can we go?
Joe Pulizzi: Thank you.
So first of all, joe pulitz.com. You click on the Books link, you’ll see my books, you’ll see The Will to Die. Go there for everything. The tilt.com. Anybody interested in this type of strategy? The tilt.com would be great. Newsletter. It’s completely free every Tuesday and Friday. We do a little how to and then we do the news that would affect content creators every week, so you could subscribe there.
And then Creator Economy Expo our annual. Conference, [00:41:00] cex.events go there and we’d love to see in person, we’ll talk about these types of things. Obviously Amelia, you spoke and did a fantastic job. And so we talked to authors about how they can build their strategy long term. And, and then I’m gonna add Joe Pulitz J O e P U L I Z Z I on all the socials.
So there you go.
Michael Evans: Wonderful. Joe, this was incredible. Thank you so much for chatting with us. Thank you both. It’s been a pleasure.
I hope y’all enjoyed this episode with Joe Palui. He’s such a smart and such an accomplished guy who shared, I think a lot of really interesting tidbits today. So if you enjoyed this podcast and you wanna learn more about how to grow your subscription, then you should definitely check out our free book called Subscriptions for Authors.
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