Posted August 18, 2022
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Today we chat with J. Thorn about how authors can manage their community, tools and software authors can utilize to build a home for their readers, community business models, and potential futures for author community.
J.’s one of the brightest minds in both the craft and business of writing and it was a privilege hearing his insights. This one’s a real treat!
J.’s Links:
Listen to Writer’s Ink Podcast: https://writersinkpodcast.com/
Join the Author Life Community: https://theauthorlife.com/
Read J’s Books: https://jthorn.net/books/
#7 EPISODE OUTLINE:
0:00 – 1:47 Introduction and Context
1:47 – 3:01 The Changing Landscape of Community for Authors
3:01 – 5:55 Difference between Audience and Community
5:55 – 8:14 Building and Hosting Your Community as an Author
8:14 – 11:27 How J. Thorn Built His Community
11:27 – 18:51 Community Management 101 for Authors
18:51 – 23:05 Why a Community Can be Great for an Author’s Business
23:05 – 27:11 Fiction v.s. Nonfiction Authors: Community Business Models
27:11 – 31:11 The Future of Investing in Authors and Communities
31:11 – 35:30 Fanfiction and CCO Licensing
35:30 – 38:08 Finding Your Path as a Writer
38:08 – 38:37 Where You Can find J. Online
38:37 – 44:50 Show Recap: How Authors Can Build Our Own Creative Future (rant on relationship between tech, stories, and futures)
#7 Full Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Michael Evans: Hello everyone. And welcome back to another episode of the Subscriptions for Author’s podcast. Today, we have J. Thorn with us as a guest, and I am so excited for this one. I have been a fan of J.’s for quite a while, and I ended up meeting him at a conference, like totally unexpected. And I was like, J., and he didn’t know me, but I, I knew him.
[00:00:19] Michael Evans: So. I introduced myself and we had a great conversation, but for those who don’t know about J., I wanna let you know that he sold over 185,000 books through his career. He’s the co-host of the writer’s Ink podcast, which has had some pretty incredible guests like James Patterson, Dean Koons pretty star studded list.
[00:00:36] Michael Evans: In addition to that, he’s also the founder of the author life community, co-authored booked with Joanna Penn and is also the author of tons and tons of fiction novels. He has a ton of experience in building community and really has such an amazing insight on both the past the present and the future of how authors can build and utilize communities for their own businesses and stories.
[00:00:56] Michael Evans: So we’re gonna dive into all that today. We’re gonna talk about [00:01:00] everything. what the difference between audience and community is places that authors can host their community ways to think about managing your community, how you can build a business model on your community, and even talking about kind of some more futuristic technologies.
[00:01:11] Michael Evans: And we have a really good discussion about where this whole world of self-publishing might be headed for authors and how we can work together to bring it there. So super excited for it all. Thank you all for listening. If you’d like, if you’re interested in subscriptions, we also have a Facebook group, a community of authors that’s totally free to join.
[00:01:29] Michael Evans: So I’ll put that link down the subscription, as well as links to J.’s books, his podcast, his author, community, which is also free to join, but you do have to apply. So anyways, it should be really fun. We’re gonna get into the conversation right now
[00:01:42] Michael Evans: what I wanna ask you is you’ve been doing this for over a decade, which is really amazing. And how have you seen the broader writer community evolve and how has your own community as a writer evolved during that time span?
[00:01:56] J. Thorn: Oh man, that’s a huge question.
[00:01:58] J. Thorn: So, I mean, I guess [00:02:00] to put into context for folks who are a bit newer to the space you know, I was there when Kindle direct publishing rolled out and I was there when the first generation Kindle with the full keyboard was launched. And, and I was watching folks who were in the trad pub world who were getting rights back and publishing onto Amazon and, and just making, killing.
[00:02:19] J. Thorn: And, and I say all that, because like it feels like decades ago, but that was like 2009. Like, yeah. I mean, it was like a little over 10 years ago, but it’s not like 50 years ago. And so I think it’s a good reminder of just how quickly things move. And I think humans have probably always felt like in the modern era that time moved fast, but I feel like now the rate of acceleration is, is increasing and we’re all feeling that, so, yeah, it’s a bit, you know, it’s a bit of a whirlwind.
[00:02:49] J. Thorn: Yeah. I, and I’ve been thinking about our, our conversation. I’ve been looking forward to it and I know you wanted to ask about community and I thought.
[00:02:56] J. Thorn: Maybe a good place we could kind of start, might frame this [00:03:00] conversation is talking about the difference between audience and community, because I hear those labels used synonymously and they’re not the same.
[00:03:08] Michael Evans: I think community in itself has become such a buzzword that it’s become a bit meaningless and audience is kind of easy to define. It’s just anyone who’s consuming, anything that you create at some point. So it’s kind of like the widest net, but there is a difference between audience and community and for you, how do you think about.
[00:03:26] Michael Evans: Qualifies someone as a community member and most of all, how do you funnel people from audience to community? Cuz that definitely seems like the magic we’re all going for.
[00:03:35] J. Thorn: Yeah. So, I mean, this ties into your, your opening question about, you know, what’s, what’s changed I think very early on there weren’t really author or reader communities not online.
[00:03:46] J. Thorn: Right. So like you have. Yet audiences and, and that’s been the traditional model of all entertainment. I define an audience as someone who’s paying attention to what you’re doing and, and the communication channel between you and an audience [00:04:00] is two way, but it’s usually one to many with a response, right?
[00:04:05] J. Thorn: So it’s like if I’m an author or a musician or an actor and people are following what I’m doing, I can broadcast messages to them. And to many, many people and they can respond and I can read those responses. That’s an audience, right? But a community is very different in that a community allows the audience members to talk to each other.
[00:04:26] J. Thorn: That’s the big difference. Right? So if, if I have a, if I have, you know, 40,000 followers on TikTok, which I don’t but if, if I did like, you know, they’re, if they were routinely talking to each other, that would be more of a community, but if they’re just interested what I’m doing, that that’s an audience.
[00:04:42] J. Thorn: We have to start with audiences, and I’m not necessarily saying that an audience is better than, than a community or vice versa. They both serve different purposes. But I think in terms of where we’ve come since 2000 late, two thousands to where we are now, we all started as audience members.
[00:04:58] J. Thorn: And then those [00:05:00] audiences slowly usually through social media would become communities. And so that’s sort of the bifurcation that we have now is that we have you know, if you have an email list or you have a social media following, you have an audience, but unless you have a specified place, even something as archaic and simple as a Facebook group, then you don’t really have a community.
[00:05:20] J. Thorn: And. Just knowing those differences and knowing as a creator, what you’re trying to accomplish is really the most important part. Like I said, it’s not about one being better than the other. It’s just about being intentional about which one you’re trying to build. Yeah.
[00:05:34] Michael Evans: That’s really, really good insights.
[00:05:36] Michael Evans: And you know, for, for you, when you mentioned that a Facebook group is archaic and simple, I’m curious because I think for many of us that is. What we think of as community that that’s like, we’re maxed out there.
[00:05:50] Michael Evans: So what are different ways in which you can actually build and, and host your community?
[00:05:54] Michael Evans: Because Facebook groups for authors at least definitely tends to be almost the default.
[00:05:58] J. Thorn: It is, and, and [00:06:00] I’m I don’t like Facebook. I’m not gonna lie. And I, and I realize that, you know, depending on the genre, like if you’re, if you’re an indie author and you’re writing romance, then you almost have to be on Facebook.
[00:06:10] J. Thorn: Like that’s. That’s where most of the readers are, that’s where the, where the groups are being formed. So I think it’s important to, to recognize that the reason I call it archaic is because Facebook groups were really one of the first places where online communities really thrived. Like if you, if you go way back, you know, you had, you had online communities via what were called bulletin boards way back in like the, the late nineties and the, in the two thousands.
[00:06:35] J. Thorn: And, and those were And those, those were okay, but it wasn’t until Facebook came along, like even my space was more of like an audience versus a community. And that, that, and that was the predecessor to Facebook. So Facebook was really the first opportunity for people to be able to sort of self group and, and communicate with each other.
[00:06:54] J. Thorn: So I call it archaic in just the sense that it was, it was there. It’s been there for a long [00:07:00] time, but it’s still very fully functional. And I think there’s a lot of good reasons why people would be. in, in Facebook groups. So yeah, I, I, I don’t want people to get the wrong idea that that, you know, you shouldn’t be in Facebook, but I think what’s happened now in, in sort of what we’re calling web two, the, the social media era of the internet, and then what’s coming next web three, which is more of sort of blockchain and crypto and, and things that scare authors as I talk to them.
[00:07:26] J. Thorn: We’re definitely sort of in a transitional moment now where there are a lot of other options even web web, two options, you know, there the Facebook group is sort of like the default for authors, but there’s places like mighty networks and circle and even slack or Microsoft teams. There are an just a limitless amount of tools that are available now that are pretty easy.
[00:07:48] J. Thorn: They’re simple to set up. Some of them are free. That allow you to to build a place for your community to congregate. You don’t need that with an audience, right? Like if you have an email address and you’re building an, audience’s [00:08:00] basically all you want, but if you’re building a community and you want your audience members to engage with each other, then you do need some type of location for that to happen.
[00:08:08] J. Thorn: Totally.
[00:08:08] Michael Evans: Yeah. And for you, cuz you are a community owner yourself or a community leader, I should say. You run a community that many of our audience may be familiar with. It’s called the author life. And for you, how have you thought about building that community? What tools have utilized all of that? Give us a little bit of a low down.
[00:08:26] J. Thorn: It’s relatively new. So the community launched about two years ago. Right, right. As the pandemic was hitting, which was terrible timing on, on a number of levels, but it started out I had done. Starting in 2017, I started doing client work. I started doing author services developmental editing, book, coaching mentoring that kind of stuff.
[00:08:44] J. Thorn: I did that for a number of years. I mean, three, four, probably almost five years. I did one on one client work and I started to notice the same problems. I started to hear the same things that people [00:09:00] would say. I. And I was paying attention to that and I realized that there are only so many people I can help in a one-on-one mentoring situation.
[00:09:08] J. Thorn: Like it it’s, it’s fantastic. It’s, it’s the best learning opportunity. I think if you have an hour a week with somebody and, and they’re teaching you something, but there’s only so many hours and there’s only so many people and I thought. If I take a lot of what I’m hearing in my one on one client work, I can build a place that addresses some of those on some level.
[00:09:28] J. Thorn: I mean, I’m not saying that a community would replace a mentor, but there are a lot of things, a lot of problems that can be solved that are common, that that other people have. And, and that was sort of the Genesis of a community. I started creating material. Sort of like online classes or modules that would address some of the very common problems that writers would run into.
[00:09:49] J. Thorn: They were things like, you know how do I stay motivated? How do I, how do I manage my time to complete a novel, what do I do if my spouse or significant other. Doesn’t support what I’m doing. Mm-hmm , I [00:10:00] mean, everything from marketing to mindset to family situation. And so I started with a WordPress site and a membership plugin, and I just started building this, this stuff.
[00:10:10] J. Thorn: And originally had sort of like an internal gr like an internal bulletin board within that, that WordPress site. A few months after it launched, the engagement was pretty low. And I asked the people where would you like to engage? Cuz there didn’t seem to be a lot of engagement inside that, that walled garden and they decide on slack.
[00:10:29] J. Thorn: And and so since then we, we, we still have the modules and the content, everything inside the WordPress site for members, but we do all of the engage. Via slack. And and that that’s been great. I brought Crys Cain on shortly maybe six months or so into, into that. And she’s been with me since she kind of focuses on the content and I focus on the community management, but it, it started as just a a homegrown self-built WordPress site.
[00:10:53] J. Thorn: And then. We, we put the community into slack and for the people who were there that’s what they wanted the most. They didn’t want [00:11:00] to be on Facebook because they felt like there were too many other distractions within Facebook. And so slack was sort of like a dedicated place where they could go and talk about the author life.
[00:11:08] Michael Evans: I love that. We actually just met Crys the other day. We did a, a fireside chat with everyone in our subscriptions for authors community. And it was really great to meet her. And I was like, oh, well, We’re talking to J. Just this week, which is really cool.
[00:11:21] Michael Evans: That just a few days later, we’re here with you and you know, you talk about community management and this is something that was actually brought up for the listeners like two weeks ago when we were interviewing Michael Chatfield.
[00:11:32] Michael Evans: And he talked about that. When he was running his community, he started his subscription business and very early on, like his first hire before he was full time outside of like an editor designer, like his first hire in his team was a community manager and they helped him run the community. So that was something he outsourced as an author.
[00:11:50] Michael Evans: You’re obviously not outsourcing this. You’re doing it yourself. So what are your advice to authors who are managing and running their own reader community?
[00:11:58] J. Thorn: Well, yeah, I’m jealous. I’m [00:12:00] Michael. Cause I, I, I think that’s hard to do. I think he’s probably got a special skill set there, or he’s really great at managing people.
[00:12:07] J. Thorn: Because I think a community manager is, is a really difficult position to outsource mm-hmm . But I will say it depends on what type of community you’re building. Like if, if the community is personality driven, I almost feel like the, the, the, the founder or, or the public face of the community kind of needs to be the community manager.
[00:12:24] J. Thorn: I, I’m not gonna name them. But there have been other author communities I’ve been in and and the founders are just nonexistent and. It’s kind of a disappointment, like, cuz in a way it’s like I wanna be, I wanna learn from them. And, and I understand that like we’re not gonna have, you know, private DMS every day, but I, you know, if I’m joining a community based on a personality, like I kind of wanna see their presence.
[00:12:45] J. Thorn: And for me it’s discouraging when, when that doesn’t happen. And so as a community manager for the community that I started. I, it’s a daily thing for me. Multiple times a day, I check into the slack group. I I’ll reply. I’ll, I’ll thumbs up something I’ll, I’ll [00:13:00] post. I can’t respond to every single post, but I’m in there daily and, and people know that and they, and they have said, so they’ve said that matters to them.
[00:13:07] J. Thorn: So I think, you know, for me, it’s worked really well to be that community manager and. And I don’t, I think I would have to hand the site off to somebody else. Before I would put someone else into the community manager position.
[00:13:20] Emilia Rose: I actually feel the same exact way. I do have an assistant who helps me manage my community because I’m just on so many different platforms right now, but I’ve heard from readers too, that like. When they see me in there, they like really, really appreciate me, like responding to their questions or just like even just liking their like, comment, like that is so valuable to them.
[00:13:43] Emilia Rose: And it’s, it’s kind of crazy, but just like, just like liking the comment means everything.
[00:13:48] J. Thorn: Yeah. And like, that’s, that’s good that you’ve recognized that Emilia. Cause I think you, if you ask people, that’s what you would hear. Yeah. Like that’s, you know, that’s what they’re looking for. For me, anyways, in, in my situation, I always feel like that’s the reason [00:14:00] why people will join a specific community.
[00:14:02] J. Thorn: Cause there’s tons of communities. Right. There’s tons of massive Facebook groups. If you just want the information. You can join any one of those, but if you’re going in a personality dependent community, you kind of wanna engage or at least at least feel like they’re in their occasion.
[00:14:16] Emilia Rose: I come from like I, when I started publishing, I published on Wattpad, which is like this free serial website.
[00:14:22] Emilia Rose: And they had like inline commenting and just commenting within the chapter. I think the, one of the reasons why I was able to grow my community so quickly was because I was engaging with as many people within that chapter, within that story as I could. And so people saw that and so they wanted to come back for more and they wanted to comment more so they could like talk to me.
[00:14:42] Emilia Rose: And it just, from there, you could just like explode or you could grow very quickly.
[00:14:47] Michael Evans: I’m listening to all this and I’m, I’m following along. It sounds, sounds great. But I then am also remembering the distinction between audience a community and thinking, well, an audience mm-hmm is when people kind of are talking kind of [00:15:00] a, more of a one way conversation with the creator.
[00:15:02] Michael Evans: And then community is when you actually get the fans start talking and y’all are kind of emphasizing the importance of talking to that creator in the community, which is awesome. But how are you getting the fans to talk with each other? How do you actually kind of. Nurture those relationships between readers
[00:15:18] J. Thorn: I, I I’d love to hear Emilia’s.
[00:15:20] J. Thorn: Thoughts on this? I will, I will be completely honest and say it’s hard work. Yeah. It’s and it’s not for everybody building a community. Like, I wanna make that clear, like if, if you’re listening to this and you’re like, oh, that is not something I would enjoy. That is totally fine. you don’t have to do it.
[00:15:36] J. Thorn: Like because if you are not a hundred percent into it, if you’re not completely engaged yourself, if you don’t enjoy that activity, it’s gonna be really hard because what I discovered at the beginning phases is I, I was pushing the Boulder up the hill every single day. Like I was prompting people.
[00:15:52] J. Thorn: I was asking people questions directly. You get a there’s sort of a flywheel effect that takes place, but it takes a [00:16:00] while. And, and it takes the community manager or the, the founder. Engaging on a regular basis. And then naturally those community members will start having the conversations with each other.
[00:16:12] J. Thorn: But you, as the community manager or the, or the founder, you kind of have to set that tone. Like you, you have to demonstrate, you have to model that behavior. So if you’re only showing up once a week and you’re just clicking a like button here and there mm-hmm, , you’re not gonna get a lot of engagement in, in the community members because that’s the, that’s the tone or the expectation that you’ve.
[00:16:31] J. Thorn: Emilia. Have you, have you had that
[00:16:32] Emilia Rose: experience as well? Yeah, mine is like the exact same I it’s, when I started, like I had to ask questions. When I was posting chapters on wa after every single chapter, I would have an author’s note. And I would ask a question to drive engagement, and I had to do that every single chapter until people started just to like, engage with each other.
[00:16:51] Emilia Rose: So that’s definitely it. I have 100% agree. Something else I did just recently, I know I have a couple really, really active people in my [00:17:00] Facebook group. And so. Somebody asked a question and I knew another audience member would really love the question. So I just like, said like, oh, Hey, I, I bet like she has some information you might think was cool.
[00:17:13] Emilia Rose: And so then they started having conversation together, which is really cool. So just like kind of finding the people that you think would really like an idea and just kind of looping them in.
[00:17:22] J. Thorn: Yeah, that that’s great that you, you sense that because that’s that’s another skillset. I think a community manager or founder has to have is you have to have the ability, you have to be a connector.
[00:17:31] J. Thorn: Like you have to be able to see Michael, you’re really good at this. I knew from the, from the moment we met, you are natural born connector. You, you have to be able to find. People who, who don’t have a connection, but you see something that ties them together and you have to facilitate that, that connection.
[00:17:47] J. Thorn: And so you can do that in an online community as well. It could be as something as simple as Amelia say, like, you know, you, you tag someone and be like, I don’t know the answer to this, but he does. And then you tag that person and now you’ve. You’ve made that connection in [00:18:00] a very simple way. And I think part of that too, is just embracing the idea that just because you’re the community manager or the founder doesn’t mean you have all the answers.
[00:18:08] J. Thorn: Yeah. So there are many times within the community. I’ll be like, I have no idea, but, and I tag somebody I’m like, but ask them, you know, and that’s that’s just a really authentic way to, to grow those connections between community members.
[00:18:22] Michael Evans: I think this is all fantastic insights. And like, honestly, there’s probably dozens of ways to do this.
[00:18:28] Michael Evans: So if you’re like listening and like, you know, I have this idea, like test it’ll probably work cuz you know, there’s no like one set way to run a community. But when we talk about running community, You know, this might sound like really exciting to people. It might not sound exciting at all to some others and that’s all.
[00:18:46] Michael Evans: Okay.
[00:18:46] Michael Evans: But what I’m really curious about is the why behind running community from a business perspective, you know, there’s certain kind of. Business models that we know you can run when interacting with an audience specifically on social platforms, there’s things [00:19:00] like CPM, which is a cost per mill. This is famous on YouTube, where for every thousand views you get, you know, a certain number of money and ad senses.
[00:19:08] Michael Evans: So that, that makes it something that. Ooh, makes sense. If you’re building an audience on like Kindle limited, you know that for every page read, you’re going to get about half a penny, which adds up if you have something like a million pages read. So all these things, like when people are actually interacting with your work, it’s like, oh, well, okay.
[00:19:25] Michael Evans: This all makes sense to me. How is a community leading to that? And what business models. Can a community kind of offer that might look different than an audience driven business model.
[00:19:36] J. Thorn: Yeah. Great question. And let’s be perfectly honest here. I mean, we’re all authors we’re, but we’re business people.
[00:19:42] J. Thorn: Right. And you don’t go to a dentist and expect them to, you know, work on your mouth for free and you don’t go to a mechanic and expect that to be free. So there absolutely needs to be some compensation for. Founder or the owners of the community or the people who organize it. And I think most people understand that but compensation can take different [00:20:00] forms.
[00:20:00] J. Thorn: So when I started out What I was when the author life started, it was a paid community and it was it was a subscription model. And, you know, whether you’re an author or a content creator of any kind, you know, that the subscription model is like the holy grail, right. That is sort of like the it’s.
[00:20:16] J. Thorn: It creates a baseline revenue for you. It’s fairly stable compared to say royalties, Or affiliate deals, which, you know, are, can spike, you know, you get a, you know, a new release and you get a lot of money and then it might be, you know, and then it tails off, whereas a subscription model for a community it’s nice steady growth.
[00:20:33] J. Thorn: So that’s one model. Another model is a community as a and I hate this word because I feel like internet marketers have, have given it a negative connotation, but a funnel you know, a community can be a funnel towards other. Products or services or productized services that, that you offer that are of higher value higher ticket price with the understanding that not everyone in the community is going to purchase those or hire you, but that is sort of where the trust is [00:21:00] built.
[00:21:00] J. Thorn: So if you think of different layers of trust, when you have things like podcasts and YouTube and social media, those develop an initial layer of trust and someone might be listening to your podcast for a few months and. Maybe they decide, oh, I’m gonna join this community. And then they’re in the community for a while.
[00:21:16] J. Thorn: And then when they see a product or a service offered, it’s a no brainer. They know like, and trust you there’s, there’s no risk involved. So that’s, it’s a bit of a delayed co compensation model, but I think using you know, having a community as a way to seed. You know, future events or, or products is also a great way.
[00:21:34] J. Thorn: And that’s kind of where we are now. Crys and I decided a few months ago that we were gonna make the community free. We were charging $40 a month for it and given the current world situation and inflation and a lot of Just a lot of uncertainty that was hard for many authors to, to make that kind of financial investment.
[00:21:52] J. Thorn: So we decided to make it free. It’s free, but it’s invite only and you have to fill out a small application to get in. So we didn’t just open the floodgates. But now [00:22:00] Chris and I, we, we feel much more comfortable of going to the community and say, Hey, we’re, we’re hosting a writer retreat, this, this for this weekend, it’s $500 a person there’s only 10 spots.
[00:22:11] J. Thorn: If you’re interested, here’s the information, knowing that 90% of the people won’t go, but 10% might. And, and those 10% are like, Hey, this is great that, you know, there’s some good old school reciprocity there I’ve been in this free community. And now there’s an opportunity for me to learn something and to.
[00:22:27] J. Thorn: Keep the community alive by buying it from the, from the, you know, community manager, so to speak it, it all kind of works. But yeah, it is a business model. It’s gotta serve something. I mean, if you’re, if you’re doing a community because you love it, that’s great. It’s probably more of a hobby and I don’t think that’s necessarily what we’re talking about or what your audience is.
[00:22:45] J. Thorn: Your listeners are interested in. Yeah,
[00:22:46] Michael Evans: we’re interested in helping authors make a living writing books and doing their dream of storytell just as you are. And someone who has a tremendous experience in that. So I I’m right on this wave, but there’s a few things here that make me like, [00:23:00] just.
[00:23:00] Michael Evans: My head spin a little bit, because it’s like, as someone who’s doing, non-fiction, let’s say, especially someone who’s offering like business related content, someone who’s pretty famous on this on YouTube is Ali Abdal and this kind of like free content into community, into higher paid ticket items that only a small percentage of people will buy, make sense.
[00:23:20] Michael Evans: But a lot of times these courses are. Hundreds of dollars that other people are selling. And, you know, a writers retreat is a relatively high ticket event and these are great. You’re providing a ton of value and that’s an awesome thing. It’s a great, great business model, but for a fiction author, you know, books are $15.
[00:23:37] Michael Evans: The print and shipping eats into that. eBooks are like five, we’ll say, give or take audio books or whatever audible decides. That’s a whole other conversation. So with all of this, you know, Fiction’s business model. It seems like you’re just, if, and I know this word, we hate funneling, but you funnel people into your books.
[00:23:57] Michael Evans: That sounds nice, [00:24:00] but it, what you’re doing and having these higher ticket items from a non-fiction perspective is also quite nice. So how can fiction authors maybe reimagine their own product offering to have. Different sorts of, let’s say price points for different customers, willingness to.
[00:24:19] J. Thorn: Yes. Honestly, Michael, sometimes they can’t for nonfiction, you’re solving a problem.
[00:24:25] J. Thorn: You’re someone has a pain point and you have the solution. It’s, it’s much easier with nonfiction. I will acknowledge that right off the top, but I don’t think we can say fiction in general either. I think there are certain genres in fiction where a community is much more appropriate. There are some genres of fiction where the, the readers don’t want to be in a community.
[00:24:45] J. Thorn: So I found, I found this out firsthand. I’ll give you an example. Few years ago along with Zack Bohan and my buddy we were writing a ton of postapocalyptic sci-fi. And we tried a number of times to do different things, to like create a community. I’ll spare you the [00:25:00] details cuz none of them worked.
[00:25:01] J. Thorn: And, and in the end, what we discovered is that it was the wrong move for that archetype. So the people who read postapocalyptic fiction are typically people who like to like live alone in the wilderness. They’re like preppers. They don’t, they’re not followers. They don’t want to be part of stuff.
[00:25:19] J. Thorn: They wanna they’re like the lone Wolf. So here we are like, oh, come, let’s build this community. And these people are like, no, we . Just write the books and we’ll read them and that’s good enough. Right. So I think you really have to know your genre. Like I know, like in romance, I, I joke all the time. I, I wish I could write romance because the romance writers are so savvy with this and I see so many innovative stuff when it comes to romance around merchandising and special editions.
[00:25:48] J. Thorn: But not just that like romance romance writers can get away with, like, they can have like a reader’s retreat. They can do like a, an I L book club they can do, they can do so [00:26:00] much more than other genres can because those readers, like. People who read romance, read a ton of romance. Like they can’t get enough.
[00:26:07] J. Thorn: Right. And so there’s, there’s sort of this Sensable desire. So I think when you’re thinking about like a community for fiction and how does that work into the business model? I think it’s highly dependent on the genre of fiction that you’re writing. I agree.
[00:26:20] Michael Evans: It’s beautiful insight. And, you know, as a sci-fi post Apoc writer myself, I can definitely attest to the.
[00:26:27] Michael Evans: The differences in, you know, we’ll call it like your ideal reader for specific sub genres. And I mean, that’s also beautiful though. And you know, I think in many ways, if you’re someone who wants to create a community, if this is something that like, you listen to this and you’re like, this sounds so amazing.
[00:26:43] Michael Evans: You can then write with that kind of community. Into your core intentions. Like I wanna write this specific story and match a specific group of people who I know are gonna wanna be brought together. And I think that can be really powerful romance. You’re right. It definitely has that. More inherently built into [00:27:00] it, but stories they’re meant to bring people together.
[00:27:02] Michael Evans: And it’s been doing that for thousands and thousands of years.
[00:27:06] Michael Evans: However, we did talk about all the changes that have happened over the last decade and as someone who is at the forefront of fiction, for those who don’t know J. Thorn’s co-authored books with people like Joanna Penn, he has plenty of non-fiction books himself.
[00:27:20] Michael Evans: He’s quite a thinker on fiction and quite a thinker on. Where do you envision the future of community headed over? Let’s say the next decade. Yeah.
[00:27:30] J. Thorn: I don’t know about the next 10 months in the next 10 years, but I’ll I’ll give it my best shot. And I’m intentionally not gonna use any web three terms because people will tune out.
[00:27:39] J. Thorn: So I’m gonna talk in where I see it going without using lingo. That’s gonna frighten people because. You and I have talked privately, Michael, we, we really see that this next wave of technology is gonna change so much of how we live our lives in the same way that the internet did 30 years ago.
[00:27:55] J. Thorn: I’ll give you a few examples. I think in the next couple years, we’re going to [00:28:00] see the mass adoption of authors. Fractionalizing their royalties with readers. So what that means is you could let’s say that JK Rowling is your favorite author, and she’s going to publish a new book. And she says, you know, if you, if you pay $5 into this book club, we’ll call it a book club.
[00:28:20] J. Thorn: Then you’re gonna get, you know, 0.0, zero, zero, 4% of the books, royalties for life. And now if you think about that, about what that does, right. That incentivizes. Her to sell that membership to her, her most voracious readers, the readers now have a financial incentive for that book to do well. So they are gonna, they’re gonna tell people about it because the more books that that are purchased, they’re, they’re gonna make some, some money in it.
[00:28:45] J. Thorn: That’s never been possible before and that’s already happening. And I, I think, I think we’re gonna see that on a, on a mass adoption scale. I almost, I almost see it as like if you go to a marketplace, a book marketplace, you might have like, you. Download the ebook buy the paperback, [00:29:00] invest in the author.
[00:29:01] J. Thorn: Like it’ll just be seamless. Right. And you’ll, you’ll be able to, to, to do that if you want. And so I think that’s a big one in turn there. Another big one that I I’m really. Is starting to happen now is involving with communities. So right now, if you let’s say you purchase an online course or you pur purchase a membership into a community, what happens when you no longer need that course or you no longer need the community?
[00:29:25] J. Thorn: You’re kind of stuck with it. Right. The, the data on online courses is horrible. I think it’s at best guess, like 12 to 15% of people finish an online course that they buy, even the one that costs hundreds. Right. So imagine now if you buy the online course and you finish it and you’re like, all right, I learned what I needed to learn, or you spend six months in a, in a community.
[00:29:47] J. Thorn: And you’re like, okay. I feel like. I feel like I’m good now. Like I can lead this community instead of just being out that money. What if you could then turn around and sell your membership or resell that course to [00:30:00] someone else who needs it. And the original creator gets a percentage of that resale and you get a percentage of that resale.
[00:30:07] J. Thorn: So, I mean, that’s just a, a very simple. Pivot, right. It’s a, it is a simple paradigm shift in how we look at online content specifically in memberships now, like the ability to resell a membership or a course and still have the creator benefit is again, something we’ve never had before and that that’s starting to happen.
[00:30:27] J. Thorn: So I think just those two things alone for authors and readers are gonna just fundamentally change the landscape.
[00:30:33] Michael Evans: Yeah. That’s. Mean that at the surface, it’s like kind of mind blowing. It’s like what? And I think it’s worth saying as well that, you know, currently the infrastructure that exists, although you could mop together solutions like this.
[00:30:44] Michael Evans: A lot of it is still in the works. We need to kind of see these things out a bit more in terms of the underlying technology and how authors can make use of it. But this idea of being able to involve your audience [00:31:00] more directly in your work is something that you know, is certainly. On the up trend.
[00:31:06] Michael Evans: And I’m curious what you think specifically, because you know, someone like Emilia started off on Wattpad and Wattpad now for those who don’t know, it got acquired by this company called Navr.
[00:31:17] Michael Evans: I might be mispronouncing that and I apologize, but it is kind of shifting the company to think more and more about how they can monetize fandoms. And that’s a really interesting question. And for, for authors who are. Kind of building a community of readers. You know, some authors don’t have to build a community, just happens.
[00:31:36] Michael Evans: Like for instance, Harry Potter is something that it’s really easy to point to because there’s so many readers, there’s so much fan fiction about it online, you know, 50 shades of gray have the same sort of thing. And. How do you think about fan fiction in this context? Because for authors who are building communities, it seems like fanfiction can collide quite easily with
[00:31:54] J. Thorn: this is a whole, this could be a whole nother conversation in and of itself. And this isn’t a web three term, but I have to mention [00:32:00] CCO or CC zero. So it’s a creative comments licensing. It’s happening a lot right now in, in the web three space. And what it basically means for authors will get it this way.
[00:32:10] J. Thorn: Imagine publishing your book into the public. That’s what CCO licensing is. And the immediate sort of traditional conservative response is like, what? No copyright, like anyone can take my book, but if you think about it you think about fan fiction and, and you, and you look at what’s happening in the world.
[00:32:28] J. Thorn: We’re moving away from. IP in copyrights and trademarks and, and this is controversial and some people aren’t gonna get it and that’s totally fine. But if you imagine, like, if you, if you wrote a book and you have put a CCO license on it, and then you allowed people to do whatever they wanted with that, they could write their own stories in the world.
[00:32:48] J. Thorn: They could modify that they could they could write a script and sell it to a movie studio. All of that, all of that rising tide lifts your boat, right? Because you’ve created the source material. So it’s a [00:33:00] different way of thinking about it. And I think the technology is gonna make it much easier to do that because right now there’s, there’s no.
[00:33:09] J. Thorn: There’s no easy way to track where, where a piece of IP is created and how it gets transformed, but that’s, that’s coming. Like that’s the technology that’s coming. So I I’ll give you another example in the music world. In the music world, let’s say you’re you are a keyboardist and you write this little jingle, right?
[00:33:28] J. Thorn: You can license that jingle into, into sample packs and other musicians can take your little jingle. They can modify it, they can change it. They can build it in like rappers do this kind of stuff all the time. Right. It’s above the board. Legit licensing. Right now once, once the, once that keyboard gets paid for that little jingle and they sell it, they don’t see any more revenue, but the technology is gonna allow us to track that.
[00:33:51] J. Thorn: So imagine every single time someone uses that jingle, that that keyboard is created. They get a certain percentage of the royalties from that forever. Like, that’s the [00:34:00] kind of technology that’s coming and, and I can see that I can see that coming in the publishing space. I think UN unfortunately I think a generation of authors are gonna have to die off to get out of the way because people, my age and older are not going to accept that.
[00:34:13] J. Thorn: And that’s okay. Like that’s not the world they came from. But I do think sort of this crowdsourced opensourced open IP model is the future. And and I’m, I’m excited about it.
[00:34:24] Michael Evans: Yeah, that’s, that’s so fascinating. I think there will be a future where authors will be able to license their characters and even other things like artificial intelligence and kind of emerging mediums will make taking these characters in IP, utilizing the skill sets of other people and other technologies to build on it.
[00:34:43] Michael Evans: And reach so much more people with these kind of core assets. So I think it can be a very beneficial thing to creative people because you know, right now, as indie authors, we’re sitting on an industry that’s worth several billion dollars and that makes thousands of people’s livings, but we don’t have a, quite an easy way to [00:35:00] tap into the larger multi hundred billion dollar entertainment industry.
[00:35:03] Michael Evans: And I think that’s, what’s exciting to me how we can actually get these incredible creators to. To benefit from this without needing, you know, managers and, you know, millions of dollars in Hollywood investments and all these things. So I think that there’s a bright to future ahead. But when you talk about all these things, I, I keep thinking about the word, like multiplayer.
[00:35:24] Michael Evans: And, you know, there’s this kind of saying of like, you know, business is a multiplayer game, yada, yada, yada, but writing really can be multiplayer. And I wanna kind of end off with this kind of question of how have you viewed throughout your career kind of this multiplayer aspect of writing. Cuz I think as writers ourselves, we kind of.
[00:35:42] Michael Evans: It’s an isolating task, you know, kind of necessarily when we’re writing, we’re not necessarily talking to others yet. You’re someone who has co-authored books, you run communities with other authors, you have community readers. I mean, you do so many things in which you’re collaborating with others. So, so how do you view that and how do you think authors can unlock that power for themselves?
[00:35:59] J. Thorn: For [00:36:00] me it’s a blessing and a curse. Like it’s, it’s a bit of my undiagnosed ADHD and that I can’t just do one thing but a lot of my friends are the same way, you know, like. Just many different interests many different projects. And, and to be fair, like there, there are some authors who just get up every day and all they wanna do is sit the computer and write, and they love that and they’re successful at it.
[00:36:20] J. Thorn: And, you know, I look at Lindsay brokers sort of a good example of that. I think she’s starting to take her foot off the pedal a little bit now because she’s been doing this for years, but Lindsay’s a machine like she just cranks out book after book, after book and she, she never. Straight from that, like, that was kind of her thing.
[00:36:37] J. Thorn: Like she had a few podcasts here and there, but she mostly wrote the books and published the books and that was it. And she was hugely successful doing that. So part of me, part of me says like, well, yeah, like, I, I love that variety and I wanna do something different, but the other, another part of me realizes that not everyone.
[00:36:55] J. Thorn: No, we’re not all wired the same way. And, and if what you really enjoy is sitting down and [00:37:00] writing the story and that’s all you wanna do, there’ll be a place for you. It, it might be a different path and you might, you might have to, you might have to find different people to support you in that way, but like, there’s nothing wrong with that.
[00:37:10] J. Thorn: I, I think it’s. What we’re all on is this sort of journey of self discovery. We’re all trying to figure out why we’re here and what we like to do while we’re here. And, and so the more, the more validation you can get, the more positive feedback you can get on that, then that’s what you should chase.
[00:37:25] J. Thorn: And, and not just because some Yahoo and some podcast told you, you should be doing it some other way.
[00:37:29] Michael Evans: Yeah, no, that’s beautiful. It’s, it’s all about finding your passion and the way you love to do it. And the beauty in writing is that there’s really no right or wrong way to create a story. And there’s readers out there likely for you and there’s people who are going to help you create better stories that there certainly will be readers out there for you and the toughest part and the hardest part, but the funnest part.
[00:37:50] Michael Evans: Is just writing. So all the fun stuff that we talk in this podcast about business and, you know, the future and where things are headed, it’s important to keep in mind, but, just write great [00:38:00] stories. Utilizing these things can really help you break out above the noise.
[00:38:03] Michael Evans: But. J., this was incredible. I encourage everyone to check out J.’s links to the author life, to his own books and site. And then also to the podcast that he runs with another group of incredible authors called writers, Inc. Jealous of the guests you’ve had, but jealous like the best way, cuz you have an all star guest list.
[00:38:21] Michael Evans: So if you wanna see someone interview someone like James Patterson or hug Howie you know, he’s someone who’s done that and we are so privileged to be able to speak to with you today. So, so thank you J.. And I hope you have an amazing rest of the day. Oh,
[00:38:30] J. Thorn: thanks. You both. I really enjoyed our conversation
[00:38:32] Michael Evans: Hey everyone. So thank you so much for listening to this podcast. We wanted to come in the end and we do this in a lot of our podcasts. We just share our thoughts in the end about it, but this one we wanted. Take some special attention to, because J. He’s futurist, he’s a very innovative person writer, but he offered some perspectives that I know some of us may find controversial.
[00:38:51] Michael Evans: And our idea here isn’t to go and say, oh, J. Is wrong or this one’s right. That’s not what we’re trying to do, but we do wanna spark a [00:39:00] larger conversation that we can all be a part of. So, you know, thinking back to the podcast and some of you may have skipped this point, which hello, there was things talked about like, Writing will involve readers investing into it in the future, or IP will lose copyright.
[00:39:17] Michael Evans: That will kind of put things into the public domain and allow others to license it. I think these are all super interesting ideas. I myself like was like, oh, we can license characters. And these are all possibilities that we can imagine. And that technology may make possible. And I don’t wanna think about in like nerdy terms like blockchain does this, and this is what makes this possible, because I think as writers, we all know better than anyone that what we can imagine can become our story, can become our experience.
[00:39:49] Michael Evans: But I think that also means that when we hear someone’s version of an imagined future, that may not be comfortable to us instead of trying to shut down. Instead of [00:40:00] trying to be like no and pushing against it entirely. And also instead of just blindly following it and saying, well, this sounds really cool to me.
[00:40:07] Michael Evans: I think there’s an interesting space for reflection to actually figure out what future excites you and inspires you. And I think when we talk about the future, we use the word. As if it’s like gonna be one thing as if publishing is one thing, but today we have traditional publishing, we have self-publishing and there’s a million worlds that exist in each there’s authors who make living in Kindle Unlimited.
[00:40:27] Michael Evans: There’s authors who make livings on platforms like Radish there’s authors, who are just wide there’s authors, who sell direct there’s authors, who don’t even write books and engage in storytelling in different ways. So you can already see it now that like there wasn’t just one future there’s. And I think this will always hold true.
[00:40:45] Michael Evans: And I think when figuring out about the future that you want, you don’t have to sit here and think that, oh, every writer who doesn’t adapt to a specific version in the future will just die. That was never true. Never will be true. And I think if we, as writers can [00:41:00] work together, To build things, to build communities and spark conversations.
[00:41:05] Michael Evans: We can continue to make this vision for the future happen together because we probably all don’t really. Like the vision that Amazon’s at right now. Like I haven’t met a single writer who goes, yeah, that that’s exactly what I wanted, Amazon. That was perfect. That, that was it. You know, let’s give away all of our royalties and Amazon ads, you know, Bezos, please take all of the money that we profit from and invest it into selling TVs.
[00:41:29] Michael Evans: Right? Like maybe that wasn’t what you were imagining. Wasn’t what I was imagining. However, We have an opportunity when we come together to actually change that, like Amazon doesn’t actually rule the world. People can buy their books elsewhere. And yeah, that sounds like a lazy argument. And to a certain extent it is.
[00:41:47] Michael Evans: I think that Amazon has great, great power. They hold so much data and it’s a big struggle, but if we just believe that other people control their future, and that technology is this immutable wave that comes. Where, where is the [00:42:00] story in that? There is no story. So I think we should actually try and put ourselves in the driver’s seat. And actually as authors come together and do things and Emilia faced this first hand was becoming a platform that wasn’t a great home for her Paton. Although it’s a company that deeply cares about creators.
[00:42:18] Michael Evans: Was not built by or for authors. It was something that didn’t have the feature she wanted. It didn’t even allow her content there. And that was a future in which she imagined that she could be censored. She could be de platform and she wouldn’t have a space that her readers would be able to enjoy her stories in.
[00:42:34] Michael Evans: That’s pretty dystopian. That’s not a future she wanted now. What did she go and do well today, we’re working on something that may help to change that and will help to change that for herself. And it’s called Ream and this is our platform subscriptions for authors. And it’s something that may be useful to you, but.
[00:42:52] Michael Evans: I think even more than that, I hope it inspires you because one thing that Emilia is not doing is doing this alone. [00:43:00] She’s working with her husband. She’s working with me, she’s working with our community of hundreds of authors to bring this vision to life. We’re all doing this together. It’s amazing. It’s super cool.
[00:43:10] Michael Evans: And we’re gonna see what happens, but if it seems super intimidating to go up against Amazon alone, Like as an individual in that whole big future, that’s bearing down on you. It’s pretty tough. But as a storyteller, we have the magical ability to be able to share our ideas, share our thoughts in the world and bring other people together around them.
[00:43:29] Michael Evans: So as a storyteller, all of us collectively as storytellers, I think it’s important to thoughtfully engage in these conversations and go, this is one man’s vision, that’s my closing remarks on this. And I really appreciate J. For the courage to share these conversations because what’s even worse is just not having them.
[00:43:46] Michael Evans: I agree.
[00:43:46] Emilia Rose: Sorry. There’s not really much else for me to say that pretty much summed it up.
[00:43:51] Michael Evans: Kind of ranted. I think it’s important. It’s important. I, I think about this stuff all the time. I deeply care about us as authors and really [00:44:00] communities being able to build their own future and not have, you know, what we’ll call it digital colonialism.
[00:44:06] Michael Evans: I don’t know what history will say about this era, but it’s not an era that I imagine. And I think that there will be room for all of us as authors and yeah, there’s never gonna be just one future. I know which,
[00:44:17] Emilia Rose: but it’s cool to think
[00:44:17] Michael Evans: about. It is cool to think about. It’s cool to think about. And we really appreciate y’all being here with us and listening to us and giving J. A chance to be part of this conversation.
[00:44:28] Michael Evans: We promise to keep this mostly focused on subscriptions. That podcast was also mostly focused on community subscriptions, but we aren’t afraid to continue pushing a conversation forward. And we aren’t afraid ourselves to go out and try and build a future that we think will be useful to the people we love and care.
[00:44:42] Michael Evans: So anyways, thank you for listening. We’ll see you all next week. Happy writing everyone.