Posted on April 23, by Michael Evans.
As the entire author world blows up talking about generative AI— I’ve been obsessed with studying the human part of publishing.
My mind is blown by the opportunities that await us. I have a feeling yours will too.
It’s a new world for authors and society at large.
And a world of possibilities and opportunities that have been unmatched in history for creative people.
This is part 2 of 3 of my series on community. If you want to read Part 1, why community is the greatest asset for Authors, you can here.
For part 2, we are focused on uncovering just how community will be deeply integrated into the future of fiction, ultimately developing a new way of creating and doing business that I call the community economy.
Many of you may know me as the author of the Creator Economy for Authors: A Guide to the Future of Publishing. I know, a new economy, hold up dude, this is getting weird.
The Community Economy is the Next Iteration of the Creator Economy
First things first, the creator economy and community economy are deeply interconnected. In fact, the community economy is the next iteration of creator business and production models.
To illustrate this, let’s look at the key features of the creator economy-driven business and then compare this to the community economy-driven business.
For the creator economy business, the creator is the center of the world. As fiction authors this means it’s us, our stories, and our characters. Orbiting around this center is our synergy map — the age-old business model of media that has dominated for the last 50+ years since Disney pioneered it. A synergy map is the adjacent businesses, revenue opportunities, and experiences connected to our core brand and IP. In an age of print-on-demand goods, software turning products into composable bits, and near zero-cost distribution of digital messages at scale, building your own mini-Disney as an author has never been more accessible and profitable.
With your IP and brand at the center, a world of opportunities springs out from it— what we commonly refer to as your author amusement park in Subscriptions for Authors. The thesis: in our modern age of technology, most products have been commoditized from t-shirts to sneakers, to shower curtains and bikes (just check out Arts Add which basically has POD options for every good in existence… thanks Aisling Elizabeth for the recommendation).
The upside, it’s easier and cheaper than ever to create products than ever before.
As authors, we have seen the benefits of this firsthand. We can start our own publishing company without needing a warehouse or spending money out of pocket printing books. They are either shipped digitally or on demand.
In an age where products are commodities, the brand is everything. And in an age where we spend more time online connecting with media than ever before, creator-led brands are king.
Just look at Prime, a Gatorade competitor started by the YouTubers Logan Paul and KSI that is selling for up to 5x retail price of most sports drinks… that’s right 5x (just check eBay for people reselling these drinks… yes, people resell drinks now).
The opportunity for author led-brands is massive, especially in consumable products. Think beauty products, cosmetics, etc.
These brands are the next generation of SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses). But how can you grow a business like this on your own as an author? This is where the community economy comes in.
Traditionally, for most authors, common opportunities to expand their product lines are different story formats such as audiobooks and graphic novels, merchandise (everything from swag to t-shirts), VIP reader benefits such as early access to novels, and a space where we can further build relationships with our readers whether it’s in a Facebook group, book signings IRL, or just the comments of a social media post.
The creator economy and author creator is powered by the connections fans have to their stories (and sometimes the author personally).
How does the community economy look different?
The Community Flywheel
Instead of putting the author and their stories at the center— the community becomes the center of the flywheel.
This changes everything.
In this model creation is often led by the author, but can equally and sometimes more so come from the community itself. Recent advances in technology have made this future inevitable. Endless permutations of stories, fan fiction at one’s fingertips… democratized access, and the ability to create for everyone.
All of this is in tandem with hyper-personalized recommendation algorithms that are catered to one’s interest graph, not their social graph. This simultaneously has led to greater genre creation and destruction than ever before as reader tastes and behaviors change faster and niche further than ever (just look at the thousands of hashtags that exist on BookTok).
This does not mean everyone will be an author. But just like TikTok turned over 100 million people into creators of short-form videos— the atomic unit of storytelling will no longer be the individual author but instead the community.
The opportunities this opens up for new revenue streams and business models are yet to be seen. The existing opportunities may not even be that different from those that exist in the creator economy. The truth is we are all still catching up to implementing creator economy business models and mindsets into our publishing business.
I’m here to tell you an even bigger change is coming.
And the DNA of a truly community-based business is different. The foundation is community. And that’s why in our first essay we explored why community is the greatest asset in fiction.
Now we are going to explore how to nurture that asset and put it to work (aka create value for you and your publishing business).
But let’s take a step back for a second… community what?
Community: Defined
Community is a buzzword— we throw it around a lot, and this week at the Creator Economy Summit I heard the head of social commerce at TikTok, among many others, say this incessantly. If I played a drinking game for every time I heard the word “community”, then I better hope it’s chocolate milk in my glass.
Beneath the buzz is the foundation of what a community is — a group of people with a shared interest, purpose, or passion who communicate and have relationships with one another. A community can be at your YMCA, it can be at your church, it can be inside a Facebook group, and it can also extend far beyond that into a more nebulous but equally important term for us which is fandom.
I define fandom as the shared collection of interactions readers have with you and your stories and one another in relation to your brand. There can be fandom around water brands such as the cult following for Liquid Death (yes, this is a real company that sells… water). Or a fandom around an author’s stories such as Britt Andrews (she’s speaking at the Subscriptions for Authors Summit all about building your reader fandom, you can get your ticket here… it’s free but we are halfway sold out! https://www.eventbrite.com/…/subscriptions-for-authors…).
Nurturing Community ≠ Creating Community
Nurturing community is all about leading others, not necessarily creating community. The biggest misnomer I see when authors think of the word community is that the immediate assumption is that one needs to start their own Facebook Group or Discord and start recruiting their own readers inside of their community.
That can be a fair strategy to nurture community. But far too often it proves ineffective.
This isn’t because your stories aren’t amazing. And this certainly isn’t because you can’t be a great community leader.
It’s because communities can’t be created from thin air. They must tap into existing energies, desires, and networks. In fact, the community you want to lead likely already exists.
In the singular “creator” economy, we view ourselves and our stories as the atomic unit of publishing. In the community economy, we understand that our stories are part of a broader conversation and network of experiences.
Instead of competing with other creators, we collaborate.
Why start your own dark romance reader group, when one for subscription authors already exists? (This is true by the way, you can join here)
Creating your own subset and private virtual space can be unbelievably valuable. However, for 80%+ of authors that I talk to, their reader groups are dead/dying, the idea of centering the entire conversation on their books and stories is too much pressure, and the idea of community scares them.
That’s why we need to rethink community.
It’s about us doing more than just collaborating with authors to build groups around our subgenres. It’s about more than just contributing valuable content to other communities that exist in our niche.
It’s about literally adopting the Readers First mindset.
What I mean is that as authors, we have to be readers first. Even if you don’t read books in your genre (or at all), we have to be one with our readers and develop relationships in reader communities as if we are a part of the tribe, rather than some distant story overlord. It’s this closeness that allows us to lead with credibility.
And this also gives us a brand new approach to developing content by deploying the strategies of reading creators — people who create low-friction, high-value content on social media that attracts other readers to watch them. Hundreds of them have book clubs of their own that they monetize in subscriptions with Roxie Reads Book Club and Maude’s Book Club as just two successful examples.
However, just being a part of reading communities and more intentionally engaging and interacting with other authors isn’t enough. That’s not the community economy. It’s just a well-optimized relationship marketing strategy. A great tactic for any subscription author to build a long-standing readership.
But we have to take it a step further.
The future has no gatekeepers.
We have torn down all the walls, and in modern publishing, the reader is the one with all the power.
As authors, we have to arm them. That’s where community creation comes in.
Community-Powered Creation. Fan fiction all the way down?
The next Marvel won’t be created by Disney. But it won’t be created by a single author alone either.
Whether it’s a $1 billion franchise or a vertically integrated community business that provides fans everything from virtual hang-out spaces to merchandise and custom book boxes, the next era of publishing businesses won’t be built alone.
They will be created by and for communities.
In Belonging to the Brand by Mark Schaefer, he discusses how advertising is quickly dying and marketing is being driven by communities that form around brands. This has massive spillover effects from every industry spanning from consumer packaged goods to software. For publishing, readers want a space where they can belong, have a shared identity, and be immersed in story worlds. Of course, the deeper evolutionary psychology behind this is something we covered more in part 1… today I want to talk about what this change in behavior is powering.
In an age where anyone can ask a chatbot to write “in the style of X”, fan fiction has become more accessible and easier to create than ever. Endless derivatives and permutations of the content we love, and endless worlds to get lost in. This behavior is not new, of course. Platforms like Wattpad and AO3 to name a few are dominated by fan fiction that garners tens of millions of readers.
In the video gaming industry, streamers on platforms like Twitch create immersive experiences that foster communities to create and build games in real-time. We see this with the endless proliferation of Minecraft servers and Roblox. Fortnite is now even letting people build their own experiences inside of the game and is allowing any creator to receive a revenue share from the profits made. And Markiplier, a famous gaming creator, is partnering with an indie game that he is a fan of to create a feature-length film based on the video game without any funding from Hollywood.
And this trend extends beyond gaming, indie sci-fi author Johnathan Yanez ran a Kickstarter that funded a short film based on his books, backed and experienced by his community of readers.
As the cost of creation goes to zero (explored in part 1), this effect will only be amplified more and more.
Thus there will be four pillars to community-powered creation:
- The Leader(s)
- The Participants
- The Funders
- The Casual Readers
Let’s break down these four pillars and expand further on the concept of superfans so that you can supercharge your own creative process through the power of community.
Pillar 1: The Leader(s)
These are the creator(s). Often times this is a single author. That’s awesome! Every community needs a leader and you shouldn’t shy away from that. The leader(s) is defined by being the driving vision behind the content strategy and development, similar to a director’s role on a movie set, except that your entire community is sitting in on the production set live. The key feature of a leader(s) is that they are the ones who own the IP produced and garner the profits from the economic activity generated by the community.
In creator-powered publishing, we often think about the singular creator and the community being extant to that creator. However, as we will see with the participants, who the leaders are is much more transient than we think…
Pillar 2: The Participants
The participants are a very specific kind of role in a community but are extremely vital. It is likely that only 1% – 5% of any online community will be true participants, but they are the lifeblood of a creative enterprise. A participant may be someone who ends up writing extensive fan fiction that funnels people back into your canon (main/owned IP). A participant may also be someone who joins you as you build out your franchise and brand as an assistant, community manager, or other significant roles.
This role is often transient with the leader role. Someone may start off as a participant in a creative community and then become a leader as they work with the author as a co-author on new projects (think about how Michael Anderle’s LMBPN and Kutherian Gambit Universe Developed or Lucy and Mr. Score and their That’s What She Said publishing company).
These participants may also come to you with ideas and show a level of participation that warrants them as leaders. Maybe you have an aspiring or accomplished indie game developer in your community who wants to build a game inspired by your story. Or a filmmaker who wants to create a movie. A reading creator who wants to start a book club inspired by your books.
The four key insights here are that:
(1) The best way to get started as an author may be as an active participant in a community that you already love that can help you level up to leader status.
(2) Leaders and participants are transient features. Not every community or fandom will last forever, but even those that span decades may have specific leaders that one day become participants or leave to start their own fandom. Likewise, participants can and often do become leaders. And even further, one can be a participant in one community, a leader in another community, and a participant in yet another community.
(3) Some of the smartest and most enterprising authors will be experts at enlisting and uplifting the best possible participants. An entire book could be written on this as the future of creative collaboration, but increasingly participants will and must be encouraged rather than expected to form out of thin air.
This is where collaborations and working together with fellow creatives is key.
In the coming age, authors will build the brands and communities that define the future of our society. But the keyword is that storytellers rule the world… not storyteller.
(4) Financially rewarding participants will become increasingly popular as the community economy matures. Maybe a fan suggests a merch design that you use in your next drop. They could be compensated with a free shirt or even $20 – $50. If someone begins doing community management or personal assistant work for you, you will compensate them as well. The key difference between the compensation of participants and leaders is that leaders will be the ones profiting from the IP and having the final say in where the content and business development proceeds (of course with tons of fan input).
Pillar 3: The Funder
Even as the cost of creation approaches zero (explored in the last essay) funding will still be a vital part of the creative ecosystem. A funder is separated from a casual fan in their devotion to seeing a project come to life. They are the people who support you on your subscription and potentially support a campaign to develop your own feature film like Johnathan Yanez. What funding looks like will be different for every individual. For some that could mean hundreds of dollars per month, and for others that may be a couple of dollars per year.
With funders, there is yet another overlap with participants in this model. However, leaders are usually never funders in the communities in which they participate (they may be for a short while in the beginning, but if an author is always funding their business then it is not profitable and therefore not sustainable).
The funder is supporting the creative work not to receive a profit as is the case with funders in the traditional publishing model, but instead to see the creative vision come to life, receive extra benefits such as early access, bonus content, and merchandise (among many other options), and receive status in the community.
This brings us to Status as a Service the bedrock that holds your community together. You will likely not want to follow these four pillars to a tee when recognizing and rewarding members of your community. But you will want to adopt a similar framework to reward your readers with status in your community. This gamifies the engagement process and makes people feel special.
Everyone wants to feel that someone else cares about them. By elevating them in your community with limited edition drops, special badges, and other sorts of recognition, you give them a sense of psychological ownership in your work.
This is the most powerful form of ownership there is.
Oxford defines psychological ownership as “the feeling of possession over a target – an object, concept, organization, or other person – that may or may not be supported by formal ownership”.
This is distinct from legal ownership.
When someone feels psychological ownership of something they feel a possessiveness over an object as if it’s tied to their identity. Social networks have employed this strategy better than nearly any business in the modern age. No one directly owns their social media profiles or followers. Yet, I myself feel like I own my own social media profile. Reviews on Amazon are another tactic that can foster feelings of psychological ownership from the author.
Getting this buy-in from your readers is powerful. It gives your community a true sense of shared ownership and mission.
Pillar 4: The Casual Readers
We love y’all. We really hope you become participants and funders one day, but we also recognize that casual readers do support us in many ways. They may not read every one of our books, but they will likely buy some of our books. And for most authors, casual readers form the vast majority of their fanbase (80%+).
Our goal is to continue honing in our stories, product extensions, and marketing messages to get more and more of our casual readers to become superfans (participants, leaders, or funders) and find more casual readers in the process.
A never-ending community flywheel.
That is powerful. And it powers a new future for publishing…
The New Community-Driven Infrastructure for Publishing
I hope by now you know a little more about how to approach nurturing and creating your own reader community. The opportunities of a community-first publishing business are tremendous. It will lead to greater collaboration, enable you to sell direct to your fans, and will contribute a greater and greater share of the revenue in this industry over the next decade.
And this community-first approach to publishing only powers the rest of your business.
However, so much of what makes truly having a community-first approach to publishing hard is that our industry isn’t designed for this… yet.
Right now authors and readers use messy software and piece together tons of expensive, time-consuming tools to try and solve this problem of community-powered publishing. And even the most elite authors in the world are barely scratching the surface of what the community economy presents authors.
The truth is that existing platforms aren’t designed for community-driven discovery. Business operations designed for the community economy are nearly non-existent. And the publishing and reading experience is not crafted in a way that makes the transience between participants, funders, and leaders easy.
The good news is that a new future for publishing is coming soon. A new kind of platform that combines the depth of connection in social networks with the ease of transaction in marketplaces. A new platform with a new culture optimized to be author and reader community first from its business model, strategy, and its internal operations.
I’ll be back soon in part 3 of 3 in this series to share with you all about this community-first future for publishing.
In the meantime, let me know what you think about this one.
And don’t forget…
Storytellers Rule the World