Posted on April 22, 2023 by Michael Evans.
Part 1 of my essays exploring the future of publishing and the new way authors can prosper more than ever…
Our industry is being disrupted. For us authors, the game is changing… forever.
By the end of this post, I’ll share with you how you can win in this new publishing age.
But to start, we need to unpack where we came from to understand where things are going…
Our industry is built on one core interaction.
Readers paying to experience stories.
Specifically, this interaction is powered by 4 components:
- Creation — the story must be created (normally on a computer)
- Discovery — the reader must know about the story
- Distribution— the reader must have access to the story
- Community — the readers must be able to share the experience with others
In many ways, stories are the oldest technology we have as humans. Our ancestors first started sharing stories ~50,000 years ago. Soon humans began coordinating on larger scales, shifting from hunter-gatherer tribes to farming civilizations with vibrant cultures, art, and traditions.
Stanislas Dehaene in Reading In the Brain argues that stories played a role in our species self-domesticating. What happened when humans became domesticated?
Instead of spending 24/7 worried about navigating and surviving in the natural world, a larger and larger portion of our time was devoted to learning how to navigate and thrive in a social world. A social world filled with other humans.
This is where stories come in.
According to Brian Boyd in On the Origin of Stories, fiction stories serve a core survival purpose in helping us to navigate simulated situations and empathize with other humans. And there is something specifically unique about reading. As Lisa Cron of Wired for Story explains, the act of reading/listening to prose fiction gives the reader a direct view into the mind of the narrator/main characters. In no other popular storytelling form are we so easily able to step into the mind of another person (or alien or werewolf), deeply connect with them, and learn what their view of the world is.
No matter how much publishing changes, the core value proposition of reading won’t. Readers like to read because being on a journey with another character experiencing conflict and growing as a person helps them to better navigate their social worlds and live better lives.
For some readers this manifests in a feeling of escape, other times it is to cope, other times it is to learn, other times it is to be inspired, and sometimes it’s a combination of all of these feelings. This is where understanding the core idea of a good life underlying your genre comes in. The Anatomy of Genres by John Truby is a fantastic read on that.
But the big takeaway is this…
Social technologies and customs can evolve quickly (thanks to stories compelling us to believe and create different social worlds) but our brains evolve slowly… on a time scale of tens of thousands of years.
So if the process of reading in our brains isn’t changing, then what really is changing in publishing in this oncoming revolution?
First, we have to look at what changed in the last revolution. And it all starts with the birth of the printing press.
Modern book publishing didn’t exist until there was a way to distribute written words without having a scribe write them by hand. The famous Gutenberg Press was one of the early iterations of this technology.
In 1445 one Gutenberg Bible sold for 30 Florins. This amount was equivalent to ~$3,900 in buying power at the time. Imagine if every book at the bookstore cost a month’s salary to purchase.
Over the next several hundred years, the average cost of book printing decreased by over 1000 times to just a few dollars per book. But in order to achieve these economies of scale, books needed to be manually shipped throughout the globe and printed in large quantities. This brought on the rise of mass print media, where the distributors (Ingram and the like) and publishers (financiers) had the leverage in minting new success stories and authors.
The internet has flipped that paradigm on its head.
The cost of distribution has decreased by yet another 1000x. This means in 500 years, we have seen stories become 1 million times cheaper to distribute to readers. And the internet makes this faster than ever — allowing millions of readers across the globe to receive digital books in milliseconds.
This has led to the rise of one mega digital bookstore named Amazon and the near death of box book chains throughout the United States.
But bookstores didn’t die. In fact, since 2009 the number of indie bookstores in the United States has been steadily rising each year. And despite the struggles of big chain bookstores like Barnes and Noble (B&N), recent moves by B&N to focus more on empowering individual store managers and communities has led to them opening up 30 new bookstores in the US in 2023.
How did physical bookstores survive and thrive in a digital age where the product sitting on their shelves could be delivered cheaper, more conveniently, and oftentimes faster to hundreds of millions of readers?
The answer is community. They leaned into their humanity, they empowered individuals, and they created spaces for people to come together around shared passions.
The enduring quality of the print medium combined with this resilience in indie bookstores has led to large traditional publishers finding ample opportunities to deploy their cash (they essentially function as investors in the book ecosystem) and continue to profit even amidst the massive disruption of the internet.
But what about the new age of authors? The indies?
We are the digital pioneers. We slung our stories, journeyed into the Wild West, and carved out new publishing markets out of thin air. We found niche markets that weren’t scalable enough for publisher investment and served readers from dark romance to urban fantasy that publishers didn’t even know existed. We did so by writing fast and being scrappy, using digital tools and the power of zero-marginal-cost distribution to sell our books to 1 reader or 1 million with little to no upfront capital investment.
This has led to thousands upon thousands of fiction authors making a full-time living writing stories.
Many of them do so by writing to these specific underserved markets.
Now, there are more full-time creative writers than at any point in human history.
This is a tremendous triumph.
But we are at a tipping point.
In the old age of publishing, authors grew by leveraging the distribution networks of big publishers. In the internet age, authors grew their readership by leveraging the discovery networks of social media platforms and retailers.
The blue oceans have now turned red.
Once hungry readers starving for content now have endless options to choose from. And the next paradigm shift in publishing will accelerate this trend by 1000x.
This is when the cost of creation goes to zero.
Powered by generative AI and new software tools, we are just years away from the dawn of what Sequoia Capital calls personalized dreams. Hyper-individualized, on-demand media, that knows our tastes and preferences better than our best friend.
In the new publishing age, two of the four core components of our business now have marginal costs of zero: distribution and creation.
Right now you can use an LLM (large language model) to produce millions of words 10x faster than a human alone could. And you could distribute those words to millions of people online for a cost so low, it’s essentially free. The quality of these words, right now, may be questionable to many. But aided by the right human prompts (which takes great skill) generative AI can already have impressive output today. And just imagine the difference as the exponential growth curve of this new technology platform continues.
What does this mean for the future of publishing?
Just as bringing the cost of distribution to zero enabled new markets to open up as previously underserved readers could now receive books more tuned to their preferences — bringing the cost of creation down to zero will enable a flood of new authors to enter the market.
For those imagining 10x the number of people writing books and feeling scared for your own job… I have a more optimistic take.
There is room for all of us.
And making it easier to create will disproportionately give underrepresented voices and groups in publishing greater power. We all know how hard it is to express ourselves and write books when we have a full-time job, a side gig on top of that, and a family to take care of.
The truth is writing a book is expensive. Not always in dollars — but certainly in time. Not everyone has that privilege. New creative tools will continue to give more people the privilege of seeing their creative vision come to life whether in movies, books, video games, and music.
This is already happening…
ByteDance (the owner of TikTok), maybe the world’s most successful artificial intelligence-powered media company, also owns an app called CapCut. It’s used to create great short-form videos easily across online platforms and has 400 million downloads to date. In recent months, the weekly downloads of CapCut has even surpassed that of TikTok.
Democratizing the power of storytelling by bringing down the cost of creation to near zero means more voices will be heard, stronger relationships will be forged, and new revenue opportunities will open up for storytellers.
Yes, new revenue opportunities.
The next paradigm shift in publishing will create more value for authors than ever in history. And in 25 years, we will have more full-time creators than ever before.
Now, I’m finally going to tell you how you can become one of these authors.
But first, I want to share why there will be more revenue in publishing in the future.
It’s because the cost of creation is going down to zero in hundreds of industries beyond publishing.
This paradigm shift is a global industrial revolution.
As humans have more free time, and existing jobs become automated, we will continue to see a shift towards work and activities that give humans a sense of meaning and purpose.
This shift won’t come without struggles. And recent moves in the global economy that aggregate more power in the few instead of the many worry me deeply.
But as humans have more time and expendable capital to spend on the things they care about, we will see the money that flows into publishing and authors increase steadily. This will happen in every creative field.
As we remember — stories are core to what makes us human. And the fundamental value that stories provide in our lives is helping us connect and navigate a world filled with other humans. That value only increases as the world gets more complicated and difficult to navigate.
But how these stories are created and distributed has changed forever…
This brings us to the two final components of publishing we haven’t analyzed yet: discovery and community.
Discovery is the process of readers being aware of new stories they want to experience. Whereas community, as defined by me in my book Creator Economy for Authors: A Guide to the Future of Publishing, is a shared digital space led by an author(s) where readers can form bonds with one another and the author. More broadly, community is intricately tied to an author’s fandom, which is the collective of interactions and shared experiences fans have in relation to your work.
There’s a reason we are analyzing these in tandem.
They are intrinsically linked.
Although discovery can happen through advertising and through algorithmic recommendations, the discovery of books has always been heavily driven by word of mouth. The reason is simple: when we love a story that helps us navigate our social world better, we want to make that story a bigger part of our world.
This is why, according to Jonathan Gottschall in The Story Paradox, that some of the most powerful people in present-day hunter-gatherer tribes are storytellers.
Storytelling has always been designed to bring us together as humans. And it’s why fiction is uniquely powered by community. We can see this today in the largest disruption to book discovery: the rise of #BookTok. Videos posted by readers with that hashtag have received over 100 billion views on the platform. And this doesn’t count the inevitable hundreds of billions of impressions on bookish content that have taken place on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook.
As it becomes easier and easier for us all to share our voices and creative expressions online, the power of this new class of booksellers, what we deem reading creators, only grows more powerful.
Today the most powerful communities dictate the future of the publishing industry and the stories that rise and fall. And these communities are increasingly created and led by authors. After all, we’ve already learned that one of the most powerful tools to bring humans together is storytelling. This is how our brains are wired — and this wiring won’t be changing regardless of the whims of our social world.
So the good news my author friend…
Your stories are still the engine of value creation in the publishing industry. Specifically writing great stories that connect with a community of readers, make them want to share your stories with others, and create a desire for them to need greater and greater narrative immersion into your worlds.
However, HOW we value these stories is changing.
As the cost of distribution and creation both near zero, no longer does the quantity of work one produces have an inherent value. Why should a 800-page book be priced at $20 if someone could produce a book of similar quantity for $0.00001?
This doesn’t mean books become worthless — quite the opposite.
It’s the business model of publishing that is changing forever.
With endless content accessible at the click of a finger, content in and of itself is commoditized. Attention simply for attention’s sake is precisely what the large internet platforms want. They run off ad models or consumption based models that compete for greater and greater time share in the lives of readers and viewers.
This has created a perverse incentive. To get paid more as authors we have to create more. Yet the skill of writing fast… is not a competitive advantage as the cost of distribution goes to zero.
But the way our stories make our readers feel?
That’s our advantage.
The relationships we have with our readers?
That’s our greatest strength.
And our creations?
They are the vehicles that enable us to foster these connections at scale.
The future of publishing will be dominated by community-centric authors. Focused on going deep with their superfans and using emerging technologies and millennia-old human psychology to expand their product lines, serve new segments of their readership, and create more value for themselves and their readers than ever before.
And this is where the business model innovation comes in…
How can we divorce quantity of output from our revenue as authors when our books are sold in a transaction model that prices our creations per book and in some cases per page read? How can we survive when all our readers pay the same amount for each book and we are forced to price our work at attractive levels for new readers and superfans alike?
Well this is all changing now.
Enter the subscription model. Or when a reader pays an author a recurring amount (usually each month) to support their creative process and receive exclusive access, benefits, and connection to that author and their stories.
And the key to the subscription model is that it is built on the membership economy. Or the idea that as humans we seek to be part of tribes and affiliate ourselves with brands and people that fulfill higher order psychological needs such as status, belonging, and identity.
In short, subscriptions are all about community.
And in the new age of publishing, community is our greatest asset as authors.
Instead of the single transaction in a book sale, subscriptions are about the forever transaction.
Instead of every reader paying the same price for a book, readers can subscribe to different membership tiers that give them access to different levels of experience.
Instead of having your income tied to the quantity of work you produce, subscriptions success is defined by the quality of the relationship you have with your readers.
Instead of focusing on reaching more and more new fans with every passing day, you can focus on retaining your existing readers and creating experiences that produce additional value for them such as merchandise, consumer packaged goods, and other media formats (and as creation goes to zero across industries this becomes easier and easier for us authors to do!).
And most of all, it finally gives us authors full control. A direct relationship with our readers. A community that we get to lead and control ourselves. And a future, not where publishers or technologies rule, but storytellers.
After all, if community is our greatest asset, that means our ability to create connections and build relationships with fellow humans is our greatest superpower. It’s the leverage that only we have. And that superpower is what will catapult authors to build the brands and communities that change the world of tomorrow and enable more creative people to make a living than ever before.
And it’s already happening.
In the last year in Subscriptions for Authors we have watched the community grow from zero to nearly two thousand authors interested in pursuing this model and pioneering a new path forward for publishing. We have helped many of you go from zero to thousands of dollars per month in subscription revenue, all while bringing the joy of fandom and connection to readers across the globe.
And this is just the beginning.
We realized that there was one last missing ingredient in the puzzle. As amazing as it sounds to create a community, build a membership for your readers, and generate subscription revenue as an author — it is really challenging.
That’s because existing platforms and technology solutions are expensive, cumbersome, and not made for the needs of us authors and readers.
That’s why we built Ream. The subscription platform by fiction authors for fiction authors that gives you a space to forge direct connections with your readers and generate a sustainable income as an author. It’s easy and simple to use and looks almost as beautiful as the stories you will be sharing inside.
We’d love to have you along with us and as an author you can create a free account and get started publishing and connecting with your readers on the platform. You can join Ream here.
This is a call for optimism. A call to be excited about the future as authors. Not because magical AI overlords will solve all our problems. But because our humanity and our unique human experience has the ability to change and impact the lives of other humans like never before.
“Those who tell the stories rule society.” — Plato
The future of publishing is storytellers building their own worlds.
The opportunity is bigger than we can even imagine.
And it’s one that empowers communities and the storytellers that inspire them. An opportunity to make the roots of the beauty and meaning in fiction the beating heart of this industry.
An opportunity for us all to work together as authors and empower one another and the readers we love.
And that’s why we like to say…
Storytellers Rule the World.
P.S. If you want to learn from Emilia Rose, a six-figure subscription author, and Michael Evans, the author of this article, how to supercharge your community and subscription as an author, we have an awesome accelerator that is open for a limited-time. You can join here.