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The official podcast from the team at BookFunnel, hosted by Jack Shilkaitis, Kelli Tanzi, and Emma Alisyn, featuring guest interviews, self-publishing industry discussions, and tips for using BookFunnel to build an author business.
Jack Shilkaitis (00:21)
Hey, folks, welcome to the Book Funnel podcast, where indie authors get real world advice on writing, publishing and growing a career on their own terms. Whether you're just starting out or you're deep into your publishing journey, we're here to help you build your readership, boost your book sales and connect with your audience. Each episode, we aim to bring you insights from authors.
Experts in industry insiders who have been there done that and then some My name is Jack I'm our lead author support specialist here at book funnel and I am joined today as always by my co-hosts Emma Allison and Kelly Tansy and Our guest for this episode of the book funnel podcast a returning guest. You know him. You love him Michael Evans a pleasure to have you back sir. We had you on
last time to talk about author sidekick. I think you had your Kickstarter going on at that point. And that was a great conversation. And we bumped into you at Author Nation. like, hey, we got to have you back on. Right? Because there's more to talk about. And I'm excited for what we're going to get to today. For those in the audience who might not be familiar with you and what you do, just go ahead and fill us in real quick.
Michael Evans (01:14)
Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Yeah, well first let me just say, very grateful for coming back and y'all should listen to this full podcast episode because one, you get to hear more of Jack's voice and he has a very beautiful voice. But two, less importantly but still crucial, I hope to be able to share by the end today the three questions that if you can answer them, you'll be successful as an author. And I can guarantee this 100 % and that sounds crazy.
but here's the thing that I can't promise is I can't answer them for you. So you have your freedom and ability to answer these questions in pretty much unlimited ways. And hopefully by the end of the day, you'll have the tools to be able to answer these questions. But I think the biggest problem that we have as authors is not focusing on the right things and in storytelling in general. So these three questions can focus how you spend your time, how you spend your energy and how you spend your money. But a little bit about me before we actually dive into all the fun stuff is I've been self publishing now for eight years. I
Jack Shilkaitis (01:56)
Okay.
Michael Evans (02:21)
started writing a decade ago. So I've been doing this for pretty much as long as I can remember. For those who might be wondering my age, I'm in my early twenties. So I've been doing this literally as long as I can remember. I published 12 sci-fi books in high school. when I did, when I went to college, I started a YouTube channel, had a live streaming business as well, really weird and random, did like manhunt and scouch hunt in different cities across the country. But many people in the community have come to know me because over the last four years now, I've dedicated myself to
My two biggest passions storytelling and technology. It was a sci-fi author So I love technology and I think I wrote enough dystopian books where I wanted to start thinking about Instead of dystopia what if we tried to like make the world a better place technology and in particular I felt like the world we live in as authors can be dystopian at times and the role we live in as creators and storytellers can be dystopian at times So my mission became like how do we empower storytellers specifically? How do we help storytellers with the world? So my biggest passion is building crater platforms
Jack Shilkaitis (03:06)
Mmm.
Michael Evans (03:15)
that take power away from gatekeepers and algorithms and big tech and bring it to people like all of us here. in college I started a company. It helped authors make a couple million dollars a year in subscription revenue. Really, really fun. And when I graduated college, parted ways with that and ended up working for Mr. Beast. I was the right hand man to the right hand man of Mr. Beast. For those who don't know, he's the biggest creator in the world. He's about to hit a billion followers across all platforms. And my job there was
data, so essentially using data to make the videos go more viral, platform relationships, and new technology. Through that whole relationship with Beast, I loved it, but I'm an entrepreneur and I wanted to come back to storytellers in particular, so I started ⁓ Author Sidekick, which is when we talked last time, and it was just a newsletter and I had a deck of cards, which is totally free, to help authors market their books, and I loved it. But what I really ended up realizing is that
Authorship is bigger than just being an author. It's about storytelling. And my goal has not been to help authors of the world, but to help storytellers of the world. And we might bring up AI later, but I've started a company now that helps ⁓ turn books, scripts, and any written story into movies and shows of AI. And it has a streaming platform where you keep all your customer data, you make it into your revenue. It's called CreatorWood. So I'm all in on that now. We've got now 10 people on the team and it's very, very fun. We launched the public in December, but it, yeah.
Jack Shilkaitis (04:18)
Hmm.
Emma Alisyn (04:28)
It's you? I didn't know that was you!
Jack Shilkaitis (04:31)
Hahaha!
Michael Evans (04:32)
That's
what I do now and I actually am publicly shutting down author sidekick this week So like might be like I'm rolling it up into crater woods like all the blogs still say the same everything's there But I'm not the author psychic anymore. I'm the storyteller sidekick and I think rightly this really cool moment and I've had to do a lot of reflection last six months of like what is the first principles of like marketing story, right? What's the first principles of this business? Because you know if we're turning our books into movies now, then what do we do? Is there a brand new strategy there? And the truth is that
Jack Shilkaitis (04:36)
Okay.
Michael Evans (04:59)
Like at the end of the day, storytelling is about understanding humans, right? That's what it's about. And I mean, there's two things here. One is like, why, if AI is now making movies, why are humans still needed? And the answer is like, because humans understand humans way better than AI ever could. So that's where the human needs to be. Like it's central to the process, right? Because that's where like we can do a better job. If we think that AI could do a better job at understanding humans, then humans can do a better job.
Jack Shilkaitis (05:04)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Evans (05:23)
Why are we even on this planet? So this is the core job of humans, we can understand humans and that's what we do. So that's really what this is all about then. The three questions go back to the one point, which is how do we develop a deeper understanding of humans and spend our time on that? Because the more that we can connect with people, the more that we can understand their feelings, their desires, we can then build stories, build worlds, build incredible experiences for them. And I hope by the end of this podcast that you all
Jack Shilkaitis (05:27)
out.
Yeah.
Michael Evans (05:49)
have some new things to think about, and hopefully some new inspiration along those lines. And I've dedicated my life to helping people like you do it.
Jack Shilkaitis (05:55)
Yeah, and we've had a chance to chat here ahead of the podcast. And I think these three questions, kind of your perspective on AI, I think is gonna be helpful to a lot of folks. Let's just dive right in. Let's get started with these three questions, because we've teased that already. So these three questions that if you can,
Basically, I can't remember exactly how you phrase it, but if you can answer them or how you answer them is gonna determine your success as an author. Maybe you phrase it a little differently. introduce us to this first question, this magic question, right? This has gotta be something so esoteric nobody's ever heard of it, I imagine, right? I'm teeing you up, I am teeing you up, yes. Yeah.
Michael Evans (06:30)
No, if anything, these questions are supposed to be simple and hopefully
take away lot of the complication in the world of publishing because my core thesis is if someone's trying to say something complicated, they're probably selling you something. And that's fine, but in reality, it's very simple. You need to do three things to be successful as a storyteller. No matter what the medium is, books, audiobooks, comic books, movies, I don't care what it is, it's one thing, three things.
with this, can you get people to learn about your story? Which in the case of books is, can you basically get them to maybe click on a book funnel page to see the landing page with the book cover description? Can you get them to just even be aware of it? This seems like, yeah, I can do that, that's a question. That's a question that needs to be answered. The second question is, can we get them to actually buy my story? Can they convert? Do they want?
Jack Shilkaitis (07:15)
Yeah.
Michael Evans (07:20)
Do they want it? Had they now known about it and then said, I want this thing? Usually it's better for them to say, I want it with dollars, but it's also okay if they sign up for free and read it too. Whatever that thing is that they're saying, they're taking action, right? I want this thing, either with money, email, something. The third thing, the third question, and you're gonna be like, this is too simple now, but really all publishing's about this, is now, can we get people to consume experience or story past the retention point?
Jack Shilkaitis (07:33)
Okay.
Michael Evans (07:46)
which is 10 % into it on average. This can change. can tell you examples about beasts and authors and books and all different media formats. It's roughly 10%. But if they make it past the 10 % of the story, they're much, much more likely to finish and much, more likely to be like actual long-term readers who read more of your books, who experience more of your stories. And if you do that, you've now taken someone from, you know, as David Gogran would say, from stranger to superfan. And these three questions that you have to answer.
Jack Shilkaitis (08:10)
Yeah.
Michael Evans (08:12)
I wish I had the answers to these questions for everyone in every case. If I did, I probably wouldn't tell you and I would just secretly write all the books in the world. But what I can say is that your job is to answer these questions in a way, because here's the thing, you might be going, why do these questions matter? But I've spent $25,000 out of pocket on my publishing business in high school.
Jack Shilkaitis (08:19)
Hahaha!
Michael Evans (08:36)
I poured everything I had into it. I worked a full-time job. I was only making $9 an hour. That's insane amount of money for someone to spend at that time of their life. I go all in on the things I do. I took tons of risks. I'll be honest in saying they didn't pay off. I had to learn some really hard lessons when you throw a lot of money at something that doesn't work. My advice comes from a place of I don't want you to end up like me where you're super passionate about what you're doing, but you end up losing the bag.
Because at the end of the day, this is game where if you can stay in it for a long time and be really passionate about it and keep improving and keep getting better at answering these questions, you're going to be successful. But you don't need to spend thousands of dollars to answer these questions. You don't need to spend thousands of hours. And we'll even talk about, don't even need to actually write a full book to answer these questions. But once you answer these questions, you've now built the foundations of a really strong business. And ultimately, I'm a very risky kind of guy. I like taking risks. And that's fun.
But at the end of the day, your job is not to go take a bunch of risks as an author, not to go bet the farm on your storytelling career, but actually to reduce your risk and be really smart about how you're investing your money and your time. And I think too many of us are not being really diligent about this. So these three questions are supposed to be like the ultimate filter for you to actually focus your time, learning, energy, and money on what really matters. Because I didn't do that and you know, $25,000 in the hole.
Jack Shilkaitis (09:54)
Right.
Michael Evans (09:58)
I learned a lot and I've never had a business again where I've plowed that much into it and not gotten much back. But that was a really hard lesson to learn at 18 when I was sitting there going, wow, it's COVID. I lost my job because of COVID and I have no money. I'm completely broke and I don't even know how I'm gonna pay off my credit card bill next month where I was putting my business expenses on. I ended up being okay and I'm sure you'll be okay too. But at the end of the day,
Jack Shilkaitis (10:08)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Michael Evans (10:21)
Like that's not a fun position to get into. So I speak from that place of experience of like, I know what it's like when you don't answer these questions. And you convince yourself that like what matters is hitting a bestseller chart or getting that orange tag or getting book sales. Cause mind you, none of this equation is just about getting book sales. It's about something bigger than that. Answering these three questions. And you can trick yourself into all this BS that doesn't matter. And then end up at the position where I was, where I was burnt out, stressed out and broke, which is not fun.
Jack Shilkaitis (10:48)
Right, right. Let's start with that first question. Like, can you get them to notice it? And I think that you embodied this one very well. Because we saw you at Author Nation. That first day at least, I don't know if you were doing that throughout the entire week, it was very hard not to notice you. Right? Because if I'm remembering correctly, right, you were carrying around an inflatable pencil. Is that right?
Michael Evans (11:11)
Yes,
eight feet tall.
Jack Shilkaitis (11:12)
and you had some kind of fur vest on or something. I don't know if you were rocking sunglasses. Am I remembering right? Or was this another Michael Evans? That's what I thought. And I'm like, hey, there goes Michael Evans. I knew it the moment I saw you. I was like, okay, yeah, he's up to something. But, and not that everything necessarily has to be to that degree. You get attention from people the way that you want to get attention from people as an author.
Michael Evans (11:18)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jack Shilkaitis (11:39)
But I think you embody that one really well. I think this is a step of the process that authors don't, we see this a lot at book funnel. A lot of authors don't think through this step of the process. And we've seen, like we're talking about landing pages. You mentioned our landing pages. And I immediately, Kelly and Emma, you can back me up on this.
And we love you guys, our book funnel users, but how many times have we as author support specialists seen a landing page that clearly you needed to take more time and design the page in a way that's appealing, eye-catching, because either it's gonna get passed over, it's gonna get ignored, right? Or it's gonna get the wrong kind of attention because maybe your cover isn't.
you know, as professional as it could be. Let's say I'm going to put that nicely, right? Or maybe your cover doesn't meet genre expectations. And so you're getting the wrong kind of attention, which is just like, what is this thing? So we see that like on a daily basis. What are the like, how do you, because I think part of it is getting in the reader's head, right? It's to know how to get noticed and how to get noticed, because you can get noticed in the wrong way, too.
Michael Evans (12:41)
It is.
Jack Shilkaitis (12:47)
And that can give you some mixed signals, potentially.
Michael Evans (12:50)
Yeah, yeah, I mean also it's, there's certain things that...
read like wildfire, right? We all want these kinds of books. We all want these kinds of stories. And we have to ask ourselves why. Why do certain things seem to get more attention than others? And I think most of us think that getting attention means being loud. And it's funny because I can be loud too, as you've noted, Jack. And being loud can be... ⁓
Jack Shilkaitis (13:15)
Hahaha!
Michael Evans (13:18)
I'll give an apt example.
If you are walking down the street, New York City is famous for this, but many cities across the world, and even this country too, outside of New York City do this. If you have some guy holding a menu for a restaurant, haggling you, right? He's being very loud. Come in, we want dinner, we want dinner. Maybe it's just me, but usually that kind of loud never actually gets me to want to go inside the restaurant. Normally it's actually a little bit of red flag. I'm like, no, like this is a little odd.
Jack Shilkaitis (13:41)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Evans (13:44)
If you have such good food, why are you telling me to come in? Mind you, that can be little unfair. That's a little unfair. But I have looked at some of these restaurants and it does catch your attention. go, wait, wow, that's actually cool. And what have been the moments where someone stopped you and they're being loud and you thought, wait, I actually want to listen? So mind you, being loud is not the point. You don't need to be loud.
The point is you need to have something freaking cool because no matter how loud you are, if it's not something people want, they're gonna just walk by and be annoyed. But what have been the times that there's been someone screaming with a menu that you've actually listened? That's something to think about. Now, there's two points to that obviously, right? To iterate again, one, you don't need to be loud, right? Like we think marketing is loud like that and that's not actually what great marketing's like.
Jack Shilkaitis (14:11)
That's right.
Michael Evans (14:34)
oftentimes. I can be loud too. But here's the big thing as well. Being loud is only an amplifier. So if you're amplifying something people don't want, let's use a more cross example. If I'm on the side of the street going, hey, do you want like this bag of trash? Do you want this? Like I'm selling a bag of trash. Here it is. No one, it doesn't matter how loud you are, is going to care about your trash. It's not their treasure, right?
Jack Shilkaitis (14:53)
you
Michael Evans (15:01)
Whereas if I'm selling on the side of the street and screaming, if you take this miracle pill, you will live forever, I'll probably be mobbed, instantly mobbed, right? If people believe me, obviously we have to build trust, right? But assuming trust is equal, I would want the miracle pill over the trash. So you want a book that's a lot more like a miracle pill. But part of that comes down to is the other thing, right? Let's keep using this example.
Are you screaming at 5 a.m. in the morning as people are commuting to work? With that, even if you have the best, coolest restaurant ever, please come inside and eat dinner now at 5 a.m. That's a horrible idea, right? So are you actually going to places where you being loud is actually a service? Because that's the whole point of all this. When you are getting in front of people, you're supposed to be doing them a service, right? You're actually supposed to be helping people.
People aren't helping you. It is not about you making money. The goal actually in all of this, noted how I never really talked about like, profit money. If you actually put the person you're serving first, the reader you're telling that story first, the money is actually never even a goal. It's a happy side effect of doing the right thing by them. Therefore, where can you go not to go make money and sell books and chuck things at them, but actually serve them? So a classic example, if we're going to use the real world is, would you rather sign books on the side of a highway?
or at a book convention where there's other readers. mean, it is not even close. Every single person in the world is going to say, absolutely, I'd rather sign books at a book signing rather than on the side of the highway. There's also obvious reasons to that. The side of the highway is pretty uncomfortable. But what's funny is in the digital world, most of the time, basically, the internet's just a bunch of different highways and a bunch of different apps that we hang out in, a bunch of different sites. It's not that much different from the real world. If we use the analogy, most of the time, you're on the side of the highway having cars
Jack Shilkaitis (16:27)
You
Michael Evans (16:41)
drive past you, know, the puddle of mud gets flung on you, I don't blame you and why you hate it. I would also hate it. But if you actually went to like your people in that convention center where there's all the happy readers, the online equivalent, you might be happy. now we have to like that theoretically that sounds really nice. But then what do we actually do? How do we actually find this? And I think there's actually one word or two words, excuse me, but one concept that sticks out to me, which is a story gap.
Because ultimately, I think as authors, we too oftentimes look what's already on the side of the street and go, my God, there's 10 Italian restaurants. They're all doing well. We clearly need another one. It's like, sure, yeah, if you can have unique pricing or unique quality, but is that gonna be the easiest way for you to break in? Think about how loud you have to be when there's already 10 Italian restaurants in the street. When we think about genre conventions and the market as we currently think about it,
Oftentimes we're throwing our book into a crowded street where there's 10 other restaurants doing the same thing, where actually you get to this really tricky situation where you are in the right place at the right time, but there's so much competition that you just have to be really loud, right? You're not sticking in people's minds. There's like, I just passed 11 of these things. I forgot about that one, right? It doesn't stick out at all. Whereas what if you're walking down the street with 10 Italian restaurants, and I'm using restaurants as an example, because hopefully we've all seen and been to restaurants.
and it's an Italian-Mexican fusion. And you go, that's different. That whole street, that's the one thing that stuck out to me. In a way, that's interesting, potentially. Italian-Mexican fusion actually is very good. So these are the types of things that we can think about. then now when we apply it to book marketing, that's where a story gap is. A story gap is an unmet reader desire in the marketplace. Which again, when I say reader desire, we have to understand who readers are and what they want. And then understand where are we not serving them?
The entire growth of the indie publishing market, for the most part, has come off the heels of story gaps. We just don't realize it, right? Because what ends up happening is we're social creatures and we grab onto the genres when they hit these new story gaps and we run with it. Romantic was a story gap. We're gonna put fantasy and romance, jam it together with varying levels of spice, right? It was always done before, but it was doubled down on and...
Now there's been so many books that do that. Amazing. Literary PG was a story gap. How do we combine role-playing games and literature? Now think about how many story gaps exist inside of literary PG. There's like at least 10 plus major sub-genres under there. Think about paranormal woman's fiction. Woman's fiction even in general. I mean, the list goes on. Indie publishing. All of it is dominated by people accidentally stumbling into story gaps. Most of the time, just because they're passionate about something and then end up writing to it. And that's where like, you know, if you get lucky, right? And
you're not like me, right? And you get lucky and you just happen to write a book people really, really want and then you sell really well, like amazing. But if you're like me, which is probably 90 % of you are like me, that didn't happen for you. You didn't just stumble into a story gap. And then you ended up having to be in a marketplace where you're yelling really loud to try and get attention. No one was really caring about you because there's already 10 other Italian restaurants. And you didn't even really know what made you special. So you too were probably not very excited because candidly,
Jack Shilkaitis (19:19)
Ha ha!
Michael Evans (19:43)
I get really excited when there's 10 other guys around you and you all have the menus and you're sitting on the side of the street. It's like, yep, up for another day of work versus like I'm at this Mexican fusion place doing this sick new thing. I'm way more excited by that. So this is where like story gap comes really important and finding story gaps. Like this is where like, I can't give you, I can give you the right question to ask. The question to ask is the story gap. The answer is, my God, there's unlimited ones. There's unlimited ways to come up with story gaps. So I'll give you some good ideas of thinking through how you could find story gaps, but this isn't.
you know, all inclusive and ⁓ there's many, many more ways you can do this. But one way to find story gaps is mine existing books, one star reviews and see what people were unhappy with, especially in genres that are selling currently. Right. Essentially like an unmet reader desire, one star reviews, highly correlative, right? Like if they were not happy because one of their desires wasn't met by this story, supposedly very popular, there's something there. So, you know, if you are an author of a
Jack Shilkaitis (20:33)
Yeah.
Michael Evans (20:39)
best-selling book, don't look at your one-star reviews. It'll probably like, you you'll go into a mental health crisis for a month and like, don't blame you, I'd be in the same place. But if it's not the book you wrote, you can have emotional distance to it and you can mine these one-star reviews. What's another way to do it? Look at social media, right? I think oftentimes we study just in the book space and don't look beyond it. What are book talkers talking about, right? What are people even in general watching on social media, right?
Jack Shilkaitis (20:44)
Hahaha
Michael Evans (21:04)
looking at people like depending on what categories you're talking about. Recently, know, Cindy Gunderson, she's this author who wrote a pickleball romance, excuse me. Genius, I saw that, was like freaking brilliant. Why is that brilliant? We're taking a trope that hasn't really been written about as much yet that's popular in culture and bringing it there. What are other types of romances I think could do well? Run club romance would do really, really well. How would you find a run club romance exists? You could be Gen Z like me and show up to run clubs because you're tired of dating apps or
Jack Shilkaitis (21:15)
Yeah
Michael Evans (21:31)
You know, maybe you happen to find out that like Gen Z women are going to run clubs now to avoid dating apps because they're talking about it online, literally. So that's amazing. You can literally get that data and then go, wait, why has there not been a really popular run club romance yet? This is an amazing story gap, right? I could come up with hundreds just for my own life, right? So part of it's your own life plus online. The other thing is going to reader communities, right? We'll call this like the watering holes. Where do these readers congregate?
Jack Shilkaitis (21:40)
Yeah.
Michael Evans (21:59)
and just reading through their conversations and what they're interested in. And this is where like this gets interesting, because I'm not telling you to look at data or bestseller rankings or reverse engineer what the next bestselling book is going to be. If that was possible, Random House would already be doing it, right? Because they have more money than all of us combined. At least, know, until you write the next great story gap book. ⁓ But, know, the thing is,
Jack Shilkaitis (22:16)
Ha
Michael Evans (22:22)
It's about actually understanding people because that's what our service is here as human beings is to serve other people and help them. Right. If we kind of go with this philosophy, like giving is true having and like, how do we give things and give stories that people want to help them navigate their social situations? Right. Because why have storytelling evolved? You know, from an evolutionary psychology perspective, we tell stories to, essentially
navigate our world, learn about complex social situations and become better people, right? That's what we do this. We do this to escape, but also learn more about the present day. We learn this to like these hidden desires that now are brought up by different things. Like we, we, we fulfill these fantasies through our stories. So it would be absurd to think that like there isn't, we fulfilled every Frieder fantasy, every desire fulfilled and our job is done. Like every story has not been done. But the thing is,
Jack Shilkaitis (23:05)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Evans (23:08)
We can now see when we identify a story gap, how powerful it is, because I say run club romance, right? I don't have to scream it. If I just go to the place where the run clubs are, I might start to get people interested. And I can now get attention to answer that first question. Can I get attention on this? And if you say run club romance and people run away, they're not running towards you, they're running away. Then that's a good sign that maybe that story gap isn't as attractive as you thought, right? But what's amazing is,
Jack Shilkaitis (23:18)
You could whisper. Yeah.
Yeah.
Hahaha!
Michael Evans (23:34)
These story gaps are fundamentally ideas and thesis. You don't have to write a full book to come up with a story gap. You come up with a story gap just by run club romance, make a cover in Canva, hire get covers, you know, you know, whether you're pro or anti AI, there's other technology tools you can use to like make these things without spending like $800 on testing a story gap. you know, let's get my custom illustrated cover for my run club romance. And I'm not even sure we'll sell yet because I haven't even written it yet. But I just want to like post it online and do a cover reveal and see if people are excited. It's like, well.
Jack Shilkaitis (23:47)
Uh-huh.
Michael Evans (24:00)
No, no, no, no, let's start really simple. Like how can we do this really cheap and fast? That would be the part, the last part to that is like taking action. Once you identify a story gap, like you just want to test it quickly and cheaply. Still effectively, like you, but the most effective part about it is not, the color scheme and the cover. mean like, sure. Or like, you know, this was like this exact word. They used a power word in the copy and that power word changed everything because they're such a good copywriter.
No, no, no, that's not really like, like it matters, but it's not really gonna change the trajectory of your book. What's gonna matter is, my God, I want that run club romance if we're using this example, right? So that's really the big thing. And I've been looking at film a lot too. And it's been amazing to see the story gaps there. Cause there's like paranormal romance is something that in film, literally like is almost non-existent because like it's so expensive to make and all these other like soap operas and almost every other genre, billionaire, et cetera, et cetera are doing well. And I'm like, my God, like there's a huge market.
crazy big story gap in paranormal romance that has just not been fulfilled. So that's what's really interesting about looking cross-sectionally. Because if you're only looking at other authors, you're looking at people who already wrote the story people want. So people want something same, but a little different. So you have to innovate. So if you're only looking at other authors, you're not probably innovating. And then likewise, if you're only looking at other authors, they're also probably all just copying each other and also not selling. So you're just looking at all the other Italian restaurants in the street, and you're not saying, what is my fusion here?
Which, I keep going back to Italian restaurants and my family is Italian, I don't look Italian.
Jack Shilkaitis (25:20)
I don't know how we know that you're Italian. If there's some sort of tell that there might be. For those listening to the podcast, he's talking a lot with his hands if you're not here on YouTube. Same thing. Yes, culturally Italian is the same thing. I know that the team has some questions here, but what you said about starting with a book cover, and I think this is actually
Michael Evans (25:25)
I'm expressive. I'm expressive.
Kelli Tanzi (25:32)
you
Michael Evans (25:33)
I'm culturally Italian. I don't look Italian, but we're Italian.
Jack Shilkaitis (25:46)
a good way to kind of see if you're on target. And I like that idea. There's a director, I think his name is Roger Corman, who's known for this, or was known for this, where he would like create the movie poster and come up with a title first before ever like filming a movie. And just to see if the idea was compelling at that level. And there's something to be said for that, especially if you are searching for
like what you're supposed to be writing next and that sort of thing. that's something that other creatives have already done and it's a strategy that has already worked. And I just think that authors assume that they have to kind of do things the way that it's been done before by other authors. And you don't have to. You can break those conventions, you know what I mean?
Michael Evans (26:33)
No. And I think that's
what part of where it like makes this fun is like, I remember like waking up feeling at one point, like writing was a job for me. And when you take a step back and then do some self reflection, it is a pretty horrific job. ⁓ like, you know, if it feels like a job, then like, it's like, I'm showing up every day. I have no guarantee of pay. like
I don't even know what algorithm is going to pull me the next day or whatever. I have an incredible support of community of coworkers. We all feel that way. We all love other writers. But this is really tough job. My boss is constantly putting more work on me. Your boss is you. You have customers who always want more. They're never satisfied. They always want more stories from you.
Jack Shilkaitis (27:15)
There's a lot of pressure.
Michael Evans (27:16)
It is. If it starts to feel like a job, there's way easier ways to make money, kind of. We all know that. So this isn't about necessarily, I want you to make this a single business, but I want you to approach this in a way that gives you freedom to carve out your own dream. And part of the power in this is asking questions that give you the freedom to answer. And I think that too often times we look for roadmaps, we look for step-by-step guides. And I think that's fine. A lot of people are comforted by step-by-step guides.
But if you're anything like me, you've probably felt restricted by these and felt like, this step-by-step guide isn't my dream. And it's like, well, that is so sad because didn't we all try and break away from the normal nine to five path to carve out our own dreams here? Isn't this us trying to buck the system? We're indie authors. So we should be independent and most important, we should be independent thinkers. And the sign of independent thinker is asking the right questions but arriving at your own answers.
For instance, if we're going to say independent thinking in political sense, we're not going to dive into politics here, but one of the core questions of politics is what is a good life? If we all agree that we all want to live good lives, we might have different ideas of what that should be, but that's a really fruitful discussion. That's really interesting to have. And really interesting also because we don't have one government making laws for us, your idea of what is a good life for you and these questions of what a good life looks like for your readers, a life in which they're interested in reading your books, actually buy them and want to read more, that life that you live,
you get to answer. That's the exciting part. You don't have to have some law passed or anything like that. So that's the beautiful thing. But if we're not asking these core questions, I think we can fall into ugly old patterns. And I think those ugly old patterns oftentimes, A, aren't what's best for readers and B, aren't what's best for you. So that just sounds kind of lame.
Emma Alisyn (28:51)
Glad you clarified that because I could feel some people in the audience recoiling when you said run club romance and then you modified it basically and I'm paraphrasing, find joy in your work because this is a tough job. So you're not saying go force yourself to find a story gap in the market that you don't resonate with. That's not what he's saying y'all. Start with what you love and then find a gap there.
Michael Evans (29:19)
and why i mention run club romance is because i literally go to run clubs i'm also a runner so like for me it's something
Emma Alisyn (29:24)
And my 45
year old behind was asking, what was a red club now?
Michael Evans (29:28)
It's such an interesting world. if I was to write, like if I was to write a romance, like a contemporary romance, like I would write a Run Club romance. I don't necessarily have the time now and I would love to read one if someone else wrote one. But I think this kind of gets to like a broader question, which is like the overarching question in all of this, which is like storyteller, storyteller story fit or storyteller market fit, however you want to frame it. But like you are uniquely positioned to tell certain types of stories, right?
And it's about finding the intersection between what do people want and what do you want, right? ⁓ Like for instance, I've got a great friend, he runs a letter company, right? So he creates story letters for people. name's Dave Herguts. And one of his letters, this is pretty funny. I think it's funny because I'm not like the audience, but I also think like the audience will love this. I think it's pretty genius. It's called Chained Letters. So it's gonna be like a BDSM letter written from like your billionaire who's gonna come to your...
Jack Shilkaitis (30:06)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Evans (30:19)
house and he's gonna have a lot of commands for you. ⁓ So I think that's like, I think it's genius. But the thing is, I could recognize that that's probably a really interesting story. And that like part of the story gap there, because there's dimensions to story gaps is the medium, right? Like that hasn't been done before in that medium. So we can take that medium and take this concept of BDSM romance and innovate. So I love that, except I would not be the person to write it, right? Like I probably wouldn't enjoy writing it.
Jack Shilkaitis (30:33)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Evans (30:45)
I might not even enjoy reading it and there's no shame on reading it. I love all types of romance, all types of books, but I'm not the audience for BDSM romance. I'm just an innocent little guy. I'm just an innocent little guy. That's what they say. It's true. true.
Emma Alisyn (30:55)
You
Jack Shilkaitis (30:56)
Sure, sure, that's what they all say. That's what they all say. Oh yeah.
I know you're afraid.
Michael Evans (31:03)
But you get my point, like for me personally, like I'm just being personal, right? But you might be listening to this and I have an author friend who's writing this letter, by the way, and they are jazzed up. Like I won't mention who they are because like it's not my place to say, but like they are so jazzed up to write this. And honestly, I'm excited to read it just because of how excited they are. You know what I mean? Like I'm like, wow, I'm so excited for you. But like that's a beautiful thing for me to see. Like that is what matters. Whereas me, like what am I going to get excited about?
Jack Shilkaitis (31:15)
yeah.
Yeah.
Michael Evans (31:30)
I'm gonna get excited about writing about like a rung club romance or like, here's this new field of science that hasn't been covered yet in science fiction. How can I like create science fiction for that field of science, right? Cause if you're a science fiction author, effectively science is the story gap. You have to find a field of science that hasn't been covered in a specific way or is in depth. Like the Michael Crichton story gap of Jurassic Park was like, what if we make like a archeology story gap, right? And then like every archeologist wants to be like has read Jurassic Park now, right? So like, these are the things.
Jack Shilkaitis (31:33)
Yeah.
ideas, yeah.
And now my
kid, my son wants to be an archeologist because of those movies, right? Yeah.
Michael Evans (32:01)
There we go, right? This
is how powerful story gaps are. They can change culture, right? But I think that it's important to understand what impact you want to have, be self-aware of that, and also understand you're not committing to one story gap forever. This is just one thing. You can change your mind in a year about what you're passionate about, but it's like what's lighting you up right now? Because you're probably not writing this book in five years and thinking about this now. You probably want to write this book now, whether that means tomorrow or next month. So that's the biggest thing. Yeah, if you're not having fun, why are we doing this?
Jack Shilkaitis (32:13)
Mm-hmm.
Kelli Tanzi (32:28)
Well, I just was thinking about, you were talking about like story gaps and you're seeing the story gaps as you go. And I'm just thinking like, I'm just living, you know, like I'm reading the stories too, like in my genre and I'm enjoying them. How do you spend a lot of time or like, how do you focus your brain into saying, there's something there. There's that innovative idea. Like where does that come from where you think, I have this genre that is oversaturated
in, you know, everybody has various, you know, measures of that. How do I become the fusion, right? The Italian-Mexican fusion, where do I see it? Because if that is like hidden in the alleyway, what do you do with that, right?
Michael Evans (33:06)
Part of it's spotting already. Yeah.
Jack Shilkaitis (33:09)
Yeah.
Michael Evans (33:11)
Yeah, know part of it's spotting previous ones that you can, cause part of this is like, once you start to ask the right questions, you look at the world differently, right? Like question is perspective. So now that you're asking this question, you will get better at answering it if you look at previous answers. So what we would do at MrBeast when I worked there, we built an internal app that Jimmy would watch curated social media content on. So like we pull top content from all different platforms and gave to him like what we thought he needed to know basically,
doing all this curation I talked about. Like what if we summed up what the audience is thinking, summed up trends and just gave it to him. And then he spent like 30 minutes to an hour, like looking through this app and looking at the performance to understand like what's working in the market now. Not because let's go copy these videos, but because I want to understand what, you know, story gaps did these videos hit? What did, what made these tick so that I can think and reverse engineer like the next story gap. Like constantly understanding what good looks like is your best.
best way to come up with good yourself. So whether it's in genres you are passionate about or in genres that are maybe extant to you, being able to pick up and understand what a story gap is and go, that's why this book took off because of this, right? And then you can start to realize, wait, like if this was the story gap and then this outcome happened and this was the story gap and then this outcome happened, eventually you'll be able to start to predict the future, which is, ⁓ this is the story gap I've now noticed. Maybe this will be the outcome that happens, right?
Part of this is like that when you can like stand on the shoulders of Giants and look at past success You can reduce risk not by copying but by understanding the questions they ask and the answers they came up with Because it's almost like you know, if you ask the same question you have 99 answers, right? You can start to see if that hundredth answer is gonna be good or not Based off of all those prior answers. So like looking at something like like urban fantasy like I speak in genres oftentimes because genres itself oftentimes literally are story gaps
It's like urban fantasies and this amazing story gap, right? Where you look at like, what if we took like, you know, Harry Potter's essentially like magical, brought it urban and made it relatable to like folks who like live in cities, live in suburbs and like have like, you know, careers, right? What if we made that contextual? Like not everyone wants to be like in a wizard school. Like we don't all relate to that. We're not all in middle school. But like, what if we want to like grow up and still like...
get that amazing vibe, right? Like there's a lot of where urban fantasy comes from, which is like understanding like why did people read that previous story? What story gap did that hit on? And then what's missing? Or how can we continue this and then create a new story gap, right? So part of this is just that like sort of analysis, right? ⁓ And kind of training your brain to think like, not just a storyteller, but like a strategist, because this is strategy at the end of the
Jack Shilkaitis (35:46)
Hmm.
Emma Alisyn (35:47)
Now,
I have a question. You're in the market, you're bringing in all this input, all this information. For those of us who are more analytical, how do you, at what point do you identify the story gap after the number of instances of, know what I'm saying. So you see the readers or the conversation about a certain thing. Like when do you have certainty that like, okay, it's time to go on this?
Michael Evans (36:11)
Yeah, well, I think the big thing is actually making faster decisions, meaning if we decrease cycle time of experimentation, if we are treating this like an experiment, if you decrease cycle time, meaning cost in time and money to actually test if a story gap will work, then these decisions become easier to make because they're not two-way doors. You can test a story gap and then move on, which is where we're talking about, ⁓ if it's as simple as I'm creating a TikTok post that's advertising a book that doesn't exist yet, right?
A really funny example of something that does this is Kwon Mills. He's like kind of a meme channel where he creates like fake romance books that don't exist. He has like hundreds of thousands of followers and they're pretty like, they're pretty crude, but they're really, really funny. But he knows what idea is going to hit. And he actually does write some of these books and sell them, which is what's incredible. So you could literally create a channel that's saying like, I'm going to like create like all these, like, what if this book existed? And then what if it did really well, right? That's like one cheap way to test it. Another cheap way to test it, depending on who you are, is like, what if I like,
create a book funnel landing page and do some cross promo swaps to maybe a short story but that fulfills that story gap and sees what does best. Or maybe it's a I'm going to on my direct store or even with book funnel stuff like Facebook ad traffic and see between these Facebook ads which ones does best because you can test multiple story gaps. All this is to say that with very little expense, we're talking maybe $20 bucks in ads, $25 bucks in ads.
cover or maybe a social media, whatever you're good at, right? Whatever you like to do, whether it's collaboration, social media or paid ads, you can test these things pretty cheaply. I test things typically through paid ads at first. I don't like to talk about things publicly until I have a pretty high confidence interval that we're moving forward here. So I've reduced that uncertainty. But I literally look at ads and mostly just look at CTR. What are they gonna click the most on? And most of the time we think, oh my God, I'll get a higher CTR. I like I changed this color here or changed this thing here. I'm like, screw all that. Yeah, it's fine.
Emma Alisyn (37:58)
haha
Michael Evans (37:58)
You can do that, but that's so boring, right? The key here, the key takeaway is your idea is your ceiling. So if you have a high ceiling, you're going to also probably have a high floor too, right? So you can start to see that immediately, even if you haven't refined it yet. You don't need it to be perfect because you have a high ceiling. You can now work towards that ceiling. But if your idea is not tractable, you don't have a high ceiling. Therefore, all the work you do to try and refine and perfect that idea.
doesn't matter because your idea is the ceiling, the idea itself. So when we bring this back to data, that's one way to think about it. But then still you want to understand what story gap is worth pursuing even moving on to the experimentation phase. And if you are more data oriented, like myself, there's really three indicators here. One is like, if you're on social, what social videos are popping off from other people? If you have all these creators talking about this specific trope or this specific thing that hasn't been covered yet, that's super interesting.
A bunch of people are now talking about this one specific small town, right? This one small town is blowing up. It's going viral on social media. Like, why isn't there a romance book set there? Like, let's do it. And I'm just mentioning romance as a proxy. Romance is also like 70 % of the book market. So I know that most of you watching probably write romance. There's a decent chance. I could be wrong, but probably more of you write romance than any other genre. So if I'm using that as an example, first of all, I love every romance author. It's a great genre. But two, like, it's a good proxy, but you could do this in anything, right?
fantasy especially as well. There's a specific historical time period you want to bring medieval fantasy into. You know what mean? It just keeps going. The next thing is looking at books. If I'm mining books for one-star reviews, it would come to argue that a book that is way more popular, that you identify as something that it missed, that you can now fulfill, is probably better than a book that's way less popular. That story gap probably has a higher ceiling. Because if this book is number 50 in the Kindle store and this book's 5,000, sure, your ceiling now might be, if you nail that,
Story gap, maybe you get to 5,000, but if you nail this other story gap and hit that unmet redesign, maybe you get to 50. Mind you, all of this is a bet and we don't know, but these are signals to look at. ⁓ The last thing to look at is going to be other media formats and their performance, right? So thinking about things like film, games, what is the gross revenue that some of these made? You could see the box office charts. There's lots of estimates of how much games make. Even in the mobile app store, you can see like gross revenue estimates.
⁓ There's like App Figure and like other sites that have a lot of free estimates. So going and checking there and going, like I think this is making this, this is doing this, could be interesting, right? Or Kickstarter, right? Kickstarter has most of that crowdfunding data is public. So you can see which categories are ranking well. If there's like a film that did well, a game that did well that you think could cross over or even another book, right? That you would have a story gap, all that data is public. And you can like, again, understand like, wow.
If this had a hundred K Kickstarter, that's really good for the Kickstarter platform, right? Like unless you're Brandon Sanderson, like that's extremely impressive. To be clear, even a 25, a 10 K Kickstarter is also pretty impressive too, right? To be clear. But like something like a hundred K is like a really strong indication. Like what did this thing hit on? And again, like when we think about story gap, it takes multiple forms. It's not just trope character setting. It goes to format. It goes to reading experience. Like a story gap could be.
the way in which you read the book. The book could be dark mode formatted if it's a gamer type book. So the special edition could be a story gap too. Oftentimes we don't innovate in special editions. We go, here are all the special editions. It's like, well, screw that. We all have gold foil, and we're all going to glam it out. But can you create a story where the story gap itself literally informs the product? So thinking through, again, I used a dark mode book as an example. But that's a pretty cool special edition if you're creating a little RPG book or something in gamer.
Jack Shilkaitis (41:24)
Ugh.
Michael Evans (41:26)
gamer focused, right? And there's a story to that too, because like here's your cool special edition that literally relates to what this book is about. Or like, you know, maybe if it's a vampire book, you have to get the vampire bite in the book. Good luck figuring out how you do that. But go for it. Or if it's a werewolf book, it's clawed with the werewolf. That could be easy. You could just freaking claw it yourself if you got werewolf, if you're a werewolf. If you're not a werewolf, then like buy something to claw it. I don't know. see it. It's like, that's weird. It sounds like that wouldn't work.
Emma Alisyn (41:39)
Ha!
You
Michael Evans (41:52)
But then let's look at Jennifer Armintran's latest book. She did a special edition with Hellmans. Not a joke. Not a joke. She did with Hellmans where it's Chipotle, like aioli mayo or something. It's a special edition mayo with garlic in it. And it's meant to keep away the cravings. It's genius. And the book is scented like it. So they came out with a special mayo and the book is scented like it. So you can buy the special edition book that smells kind of gross. Like who even cares? But
Kelli Tanzi (42:18)
You
Michael Evans (42:19)
But the story is interesting,
right? Because it keeps away the Cravens. It's genius. Because now I'm going... Yeah, we could, Jennifer Amatrot released a special edition. Who cares? Everyone does special editions now. Jennifer Amatrot released a special edition where the book smells like Craven-proof mayo. Absolutely. I care now. I'm now going to have a mayo-scented book on my bookshelf. This is why when we could... The thing that's key here, the key overall learning is...
Jack Shilkaitis (42:21)
my, yeah.
Emma Alisyn (42:25)
It's a little metal, yeah.
Kelli Tanzi (42:38)
You
Jack Shilkaitis (42:39)
What makes it
special, yeah.
Michael Evans (42:47)
people pay attention to things worth paying attention to. And you know what that is, because you already can tell when I'm talking what you want to pay attention to more. Like, I want that Cravenproof Mayo, screw the gold foil, we've already seen that.
Jack Shilkaitis (42:51)
Mm-hmm.
Kelli Tanzi (43:01)
Well, and it's interesting. It's almost like you're filling a gap that you don't even realize. Like you're filling a gap the reader doesn't even realize they wanted. Like who thought I would want this mayo and where they came up with it. And now it's like, I'm intrigued. What is that about? And if I've never read her stories, maybe I want to know, is it actually mayo in her stories? Is it just the scent of garlic? Like it asks me ask questions. It is.
Jack Shilkaitis (43:01)
Yeah.
Michael Evans (43:12)
you want it now
Jack Shilkaitis (43:23)
Right.
Emma Alisyn (43:24)
It makes sense because that's immersive. Yeah.
Jack Shilkaitis (43:27)
Well,
Michael Evans (43:27)
WOLFER
Jack Shilkaitis (43:28)
and there's something special about like truly special about it because everybody's doing special editions these days. And if everybody's doing a special edition, it's not special anymore. You're going to have the fans who are going to buy it anyway. If you're just doing, you know, sprayed edges and gold foiling and what are doing a different cover. Like you could do that and you'll get people to buy it. But yeah, if you really want it to be like special, like special in italics, right?
Kelli Tanzi (43:54)
you
Jack Shilkaitis (43:55)
special
edition you you get a you get a mayo flavor and you sense the book with it yeah
Kelli Tanzi (44:00)
you
Michael Evans (44:00)
In three words that changed my life, changed my life is creativity is cheap. And no, I don't mean that it's not worth much. It's worth everything. But creativity shouldn't cost money. So let's take this special edition example. I know many authors, this is just a good example to use, but this is also true on like when we're trying to do anything, like we should always go for the cheapest option. The most creative option is almost always the cheapest. When someone says they're blowing a lot of money, I go, you are being dumb, mostly because you're not being creative. And if you're a creative person,
Jack Shilkaitis (44:07)
Mm-mm.
Yeah.
Michael Evans (44:28)
What are you doing not being creative? Like, just stop calling yourself creative. You're just a sheep. So if you're going to be creative, right? Okay. Let me go spend $50 per book from China on printing this like gold foil thing. And I'll get super anxiety written about these tariffs and everything, which by you, mind you, like I, I empathy, empathy. But at the same time, like, okay, I spent a lot in these books. I'm going to charge also a lot for these books, but like, where's the creativity in that? Like you're just juicing up like I'll get the fanciest, fanciest thing. Whereas
Jack Shilkaitis (44:53)
Yeah.
Michael Evans (44:55)
What if this special edition, I think InavaramaTron is doing like a special hardcover or whatever, but I don't think it's crazy. A special edition book could literally just be a paperback, y'all. But in this context, right, this is where the creativity is so special. It could literally just be a paperback with the werewolf claws. It could literally just be a paperback with like the werewolf blood or the vampire blood in it. Literally just a paperback where, oh, I have Dows May on it, it now smells. And that sounds like so terrible, like not a good product, but except that's what they're buying. Like you literally, that is the special edition. So creativity is cheap because you've made that experience now where like instead of spending
$30 per book or whatever you're spending, right? You're now spending like $3 per book at scale when you print these things and maybe like getting some mayo that costs like all in five or $6 cost of goods sold. So you're spending like 20 % of what everyone else is spending and still able to charge the same amount, which is where like creativity is cheap. Like you win all around by being creative. And I think that like oftentimes we just don't give ourselves enough license to
Jack Shilkaitis (45:40)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Evans (45:46)
be fun and do weird shit because we're so scared. Because then we go, how am going to do the Mayo thing? It's like, I don't know. I just started a company that's whole goal was to make AI movies. And two weeks before we launched, we didn't even know how we're going to do it. Mind you, I have incredibly smart people working here and we're making a lot of things happen. But that's whole point is you are incredibly smart. I believe in your ability to do tough things. I believe in your ability to problem solve. I believe in your ability to create epic things. And the risk that you're taking doesn't necessarily have to be super expensive or super time consuming.
Jack Shilkaitis (45:49)
Yeah.
Michael Evans (46:12)
just has to be something that you believe you can break the rules. Because again, if we're trying to follow the rules here, why are we independent authors?
Jack Shilkaitis (46:18)
Yeah.
Emma Alisyn (46:18)
And see,
on the surface level, the Mayo thing sounds like a really cool publicity gimmick. But if you dial down into what the reader's really wanting, they've emotionally connected to that world. They are craving something tangible that makes that world real in our real in our world. So I can smell the Garlic stuff, maybe I can hold it like that's valuable. What can you make real for your reader?
Michael Evans (46:44)
Scented books in general, I think is so interesting. And it hasn't really been done as much. And what I've just found going on this journey over the last six or seven months, or no, it's been maybe eight months now since starting Author Sidekick and opening up my mind to what does it look like to rewrite the rules of book marketing, but not me rewriting the rules, but giving you all permission to rewrite the rules. That's really what I'm trying to do is
give you all permission to rewrite the rules of this business is like, I just have endless fun. Every week I'm like, I'm learning something new. Like, it's not like I have all the ideas. I'm giving you like some high level things that are really interesting that hopefully can spark your mind. But like, I just keep getting more ideas. This is another example that just blew my mind on a story gap. Blew my mind. And this happens on a weekly basis where I go like, my God.
Actually three big things happened this last month where I'm like, my God, and I'm deep in this learning constantly. I think that's the big thing here is that like you have to approach this from a humble perspective. So I hosted this like group of authors at a Barbie house for beyond the book. And that actually was the group that like spawned Craterwood. Cause this was like a group of people that like we were determined to like break the rules essentially. Right. So we all came together in a Barbie house in Las Vegas. Ton of fun. And Yelmer.
Jack Shilkaitis (47:37)
you
Michael Evans (47:56)
who like is incredible. He's going to be a legend in a couple of years in any publishing. I know this. He found one of my YouTube videos like six or seven months ago. Didn't even know about me. Like really, like he had no idea about me like before that YouTube video. Decided to like go book a flight from another country. He's flying from the Caribbean to this Barbie house in Las Vegas. Not even knowing really anyone in the author community. Just going all in on like, I want to learn. He liked one of these YouTube videos. And he just like, all right. And then he just got bought into like this whole beyond the book process and experimenting. And I'll tell you for a while.
Everyone flailed. like, what are we doing? This is like TARD, right? And then he landed on something genius, which is boring stories for sleep. Hear me out. This is crazy. What he noticed is on YouTube, there's a few channels telling history stories that have like 18 minute long stories and then three hours of just ambient music. So it's a three hour video, but really only an 18 minute story. And think about like the story gap here. There's lots of books, there's lots of stories, but are any stories designed to help you fall asleep?
Jack Shilkaitis (48:43)
No, I'm sorry.
Michael Evans (48:51)
The answer is very few.
Emma Alisyn (48:52)
That's what fourth
wing does for me. And I stumbled on that. like, no, but it's a little bit deeper because my attention span ADHD, I can't get to sleep earlier. So it's just interesting enough, the full graphic to give me something to think about. So I'm not tempted to get out of bed, but it's just enough that eventually I fall asleep anyway. So it's a balance.
Jack Shilkaitis (48:54)
Hahaha
Michael Evans (48:56)
That is wild, actually.
Okay.
Jack Shilkaitis (49:13)
right.
Michael Evans (49:14)
Yeah, well, I mean you're proving that people are already using books to fall asleep, right? So that's one thing. Second thing is we now are seeing YouTube videos do well focused on helping people sleep through storytelling. But what he noticed is all of it was like history. None of it was actually fictional stories. And that's weird because it's new. So he doubled down and now is like.
There's like all these authors now are creating this boring stories for sleep universe. Ross Prudence like taking a lead on this, like a bunch of awesome people. Where now it's like we have romance stories for sleep and there's tons of different ones there. There's like sci-fi stories for sleep. There's so many different things. And it's like the genre itself is different. Cause when you actually listen to the story, it's like, hey, how's it going y'all? Hope you're having a great night so far. It like actually helps us them to sleep and then tells them a story. Think of it like a bedtime story for adults. So like that is crazy, but think about that market.
This is a whole new genre that didn't even exist until three weeks ago. And I'm privileged enough because I know incredible creative people. Many of you here listening to this podcast that like are doing this. my mind is blown. Recently, I've been thinking through a Craterwood. How can we intentionally like plant story gaps into our technology to like basically help help people succeed more in this new world of film? So one of them is like romance POV, right? So if you're creating a romance film in Craterwood, we're building a feature where
the viewer itself can self-insert and create 10 different characters that the author self-approved to actually have be the main MC, right? Whether it's ⁓ MM, FF, whatever it is that you're watching, the part of the power of romance is the reader going, this is what I see the main character as. Well, now we're literally going to let you choose that in a movie at a click of a button, at least pre-approved versions by the author. So it's not like it's gonna be completely excellent to the author's vision, but it can be like...
They have this skin tone, have this hair color, they're this build, right? Because sometimes this information's intentionally omitted. So now all of a sudden you have a whole new story gap for romance POV films. And it's actually from the POV too, filmed where it's like, literally from the perspective of the viewer, right? So it's like, they are in the story. Next thing is like film RPGs. Think Bandersnatch, but like at scale where like we can have these choose your own adventures very simply and cost effectively. Where all of a sudden literate PG authors can now convert their books to this new medium of film RPG, right? So like.
I'm on an almost weekly basis now, seeing the birth of new story gaps where it's like, oh, this is going to help many people make a living. Just this one idea and us going for it, there will be many people who make a living here. It's beyond just one story. So when you nail this, just to be clear, the potential in story gaps is massive. It's all the storytelling market. And if you think we've captured all story gaps,
then you probably think we can't be creative anymore. But this reason, story gaps, is the number one reason I don't think AI is gonna take over the world in storytelling. Because I think it can recycle old stuff, but it's not gonna do this. It's not gonna do this, it's not. Because this is a core understanding of human nature. Like, what is it that people want? And then how do we work with technology, work with other people to make it happen? But you you let me know when AI comes with great story gaps, and I'll just have AI say the next podcast for
Jack Shilkaitis (51:56)
Mm-hmm.
Right, right. And so we've been here for an hour or so recording and we've talked about all three questions, but I don't know that we've really transitioned to question two yet. And I'm pointing this out not because I'm going to be like, hey, like Michael, you talk too much because no, that's not what I think. But like, but this this whole this is where like these questions are much.
Michael Evans (52:24)
we know I do, we know I do.
Jack Shilkaitis (52:32)
They sound simple on the surface, but they're much deeper. And I don't think that authors give them, I don't think they want to even go deep on them sometimes because there's so much going on in their life. A lot of them are, you know, writing as a hobby. They're aspiring to be full-time or to make income from it one day, whatever that looks like for them. And there's just so much else going on in their life that like the idea of going on this deep dive might be intimidating to some.
But the second question is you got to get them to buy it. And I think a lot of the work to get them to buy it is done in the same kind of conversation you're having here. Like you're putting a little twist on it, makes it look a little new. You're finding your target audience. Like the whole, the run club romance thing. There's, if you, you've essentially like greased the runway for a huge chunk of readers.
just by introducing that story cap, right?
Michael Evans (53:25)
Absolutely, Well,
because here's the thing. ⁓
We do everything based on emotion, everything. And actually this is why, like, I am not a therapist or a psychologist or anything like this, but if you're in a bad place mentally, which we all can be there at moments, right? It is hard to do things because like everything is driven by our emotion. So like that's the first thing, everything is driven by our emotion. So if you make someone feel something, they'll do something, right? And a quote from one of my friends, David Forguts, who's like gone on this beyond the book journey with me for the last.
you know, however long we've been doing this, it's like people will pay anything to make themselves feel something. So with all this said, conversion, it's important, but I think there's something to change our mind on, which like people will say I'm crazy here and that's okay, you can say I'm crazy, but it is a limiting belief to think that you need to develop the product before you sell it. I want to be very careful about how I say this. It's a limiting belief to think that you need to develop the product before you sell it, meaning
Oftentimes we don't want to charge or take interest on something until it's already been made. And this makes sense. This is what I did for her because like, how am going to sell a book if I don't have a book? Right? Very logical question.
Jack Shilkaitis (54:30)
Yeah.
I can tell you how. But keep going.
Michael Evans (54:35)
Jack, tell us how.
Tell us how.
Jack Shilkaitis (54:37)
Authors are doing this right now with the Early Access model, which I don't know if you were going to get around to, but it's like the whole Royal Road web novel pathway. I'm going to write the novel, release the chapters as I write them, sometimes even in rough draft form. And by the way, there's a Patreon if you want to read 60 chapters ahead of everybody else.
Michael Evans (54:51)
Yes?
Exactly. Well, and as many folks know, I did a lot of early access stuff. So lot of things concretized my mind into this.
Jack Shilkaitis (55:00)
Yeah. Sorry, I
didn't mean to do like a hard interruption there, but I'm like, yeah, no, yeah.
Michael Evans (55:05)
No, Jack, no,
it's important because I think there's actually like, that's one way to do it. There's many ways to do this goal, but the goal, the goal should be this. If the overall thesis is those who understand themselves and the readers the best will win and will do really well in publishing, then it would posit whoever can learn the fastest about themselves and the readers will win, which would then posit how efficiently can you get attempts at answering this question because the answer, the question is, okay.
How can you get people to learn about your story? What's the story gap there? Can you get people to actually convert to the story? And then can you get people to really read the story past 10%, that retention point. Okay, fine. If you can answer these questions and then see if you're right, test it quickly, efficiently, and cost effectively, you'll cycle through different answers faster. Because imagine if I said, hey, you're playing a sport, right? And your job in this sport is to shoot ball into hoop, right?
The question in basketball is can you make a basket? And maybe can you defend other people from getting the basket? What if I told you I want you to just stand in the corner, practice, but don't actually shoot, but just practice the motion. We're gonna do this for a year, solid year. You're gonna spend 100 hours just practicing the motion, and then you're finally gonna get a shot, and we're gonna see if it goes in. And if it doesn't go in, you're going to give up.
We'd all be like, that is insane. Like if you know anything about sports, like, I'm not even, I'm not, if you look me, I'm not really an athlete, but like, that is crazy, right? Like we don't allow someone to practice. Imagine if you did the same thing with like reading, like just stare at the pages. And then if you don't get it, I mean, like, come on, you don't learn to read that way either. Everything requires practice, meaning what matters is how we're practicing. So the problem is if there's three important questions in publishing, right? This is the big thing we have to get down.
Jack Shilkaitis (56:22)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Evans (56:41)
Will they, are they interested in the story? Will they buy the story and will they read it? Most of our time as authors is spent on time doing things that don't answer these questions. Either it's just random BS, so stop all that. We all know the BS, scrolling, all of that. Fine, whatever. We all do it, whatever, but we don't want to. But the first principle here that's so fascinating is if you spend time writing a book before you answer the second question of will they buy it? And you write the full book, you've now spent
tons and tons of time doing something without answering this question and getting a shot of goal, which then means to get this practice. You've now, it's like saying, I'm going to go play basketball and shoot the hoop, but I'm going to spend like a year making my own custom shoes. And I threaded my Jersey and now I'm ready to shoot. Okay. What? The guy who just sits there and shoots is going to get a lot better at shooting and you've got to get good at selling to sell like period. You've got to get people to buy. So obviously we're not going to do some big launch.
Because we think launches matter. don't. Launches are bullshit. The books sell from 80 years ago now. Half of the books sold are the backlist. Your goal should not be to have a big launch. It should be to create an epic backlist. An epic backlist leads to better launches over time. That's the secret sauce of publishing. So if we want to create an enduring title, an enduring story, it's like, what are we doing spending years to even try and get it out there? And also, I don't blame you if you've done it three or four times.
Jack Shilkaitis (57:36)
Hahaha
Michael Evans (57:58)
How many times you missed three or four shots? Like this isn't that much. We think, I've spent three years doing this. It's like, you've done it three or four times. You've done the most important thing in your publishing career. Can you get people to buy the thing? You've only tried it three or four times and you gave it a half ass try because you were actually too busy just going back to your comfort zone, which is threading, you know, making your next jersey. No one cares. You can shoot with a shirt off. So the whole point now is then what do we actually do to test this? And there's only one thing to ask first. First, you don't have to test this. You can be saying I'm crazy here and you might.
That's fine. But if you actually want to test this and you go, you know what, Michael, this makes sense. I want to reduce my risk. I want to get better at this skill of actually creating stories that have a high ceiling and validating that they have a high ceiling, right? Validating because we know that they're interested. And the question becomes, how can we validate their interest? And there's two ways to do it. One, do they give me their email? Two, do they actually give me money? One is much more powerful than the other. Money over email, right? Obviously, if someone says they're willing to pay something, they're willing to not. And this is where I've gotten like...
This is actually so simple here. I'm literally just talking about pre-orders. That's all this is. Like if you were to say, this book's coming out in six months, let's pre-sell it. Done. Right? And the radical strategy here that I've done before is literally posted my book on Amazon and switched the cover and description and time if my first pre-order didn't go well. Cause, oh, like, you know, it's just early readers. They'll be happy with what they're getting. I'm swear it sounds crazy, but they're getting a book for me at the end of the day.
But I'm willing to literally change it or refund people if the predator doesn't go well, right? So you can sell direct on your site. You can go, you know, sell even on Amazon. I've literally done this on Amazon. Amazon's super radical. Remember, I'm crazy. But like what an interesting way to go about this because now if I can drive a $5 a day Facebook ad to get them interested in the things they click, right? Oh, ad looks cool. Idea is sexy. And then they actually buy. Wow. Amazing.
I can't tell you how to do all of it in the magic sauce behind the cover and the description and all that. I can just tell you the data and the questions that matter. Now, you don't have to do it that way. Jack brought a great example. Early access. You can serialize your story. Here's the first chapter. Go here. You can use BookFunnel and say, hey, I wrote the first chapter. Go download the first chapter now. Give me your email. There is so many different ways to do this. The point is you should. You should. Because if you can't get people interested,
and then converting to your story through email or payment. Payment's better because it's higher confidence, right, that it's actually going to work.
Why is writing the whole book going to change that? And then the answer becomes, you can write the whole book if you need to write that story. I'm not telling you not to write it. But now you have to go into it and be intellectually honest. I'm writing a story for myself and not for the reader because there's no readers here. I hate to be that harsh, but that's the truth. You have to be intellectually honest. And if you're doing this for yourself, that's great, but it's not a business. It's a hobby. But if you're doing this for a customer and for yourself, you're building a business. Therefore, where is the customer? I pre-sell everything I do.
Jack Shilkaitis (1:00:16)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Evans (1:00:37)
period. Just always have done that now. I will always forever do that. And I am always happy to refund people. For instance, and I literally like man of my word, I did Readermeter and Craterwood. I did an A-B test of two software companies. One was built myself, one was Craterwood. And I kind of already knew Craterwood was going to be the bigger one that was going to go better. And I wanted to go all in on that. But I'd already built a lot of Readermeter before starting Craterwood. So I launched Readermeter, had people buy it, literally spend money on this thing. And I literally refunded everyone.
Like, because I'm not doing that anymore. I'm all in on because Craterwood's a better idea. Not to say that like both couldn't work, but I looked at early data and Craterwood was like remarkable in the performance. Read-a-Meeter was just good. Well, I want to spend my time on the thing that's going to be remarkable. So I doubled down on that and literally refunded everyone. So this is like, you know, obviously an example of software and tech, but the same thing applies to books. In fact, it's much less money in books. Like it's, we're talking like a couple bucks that you're refunding someone. I'm very comfortable refunding thousands and thousands of dollars.
just to literally not even say like the service was there. I built the service in that case too. But just to say that I'm not continuing it because software is a service that they're doing to birds over dive. So I'm not going to continue servicing it. And I'd rather devote my time to the thing that matters most, which is why running concurrent test is valuable too. Because you need a benchmark and a taste of what's possible. You need to have high standards, right? Meaning it's easy to say, oh, well, I've got a few sales. This is good. But maybe your next test is actually going to get 30 or 40 sales, right? Meaning it might do way better on the same.
Like, oh, a $5 a day Facebook ad, I got a 5-cent CPC versus a 10-cent CPC, and the 5-cent CPC actually got a higher conversion rate. Like, that's way better, right? So I want to double down on that one, but you're not going to know if you don't test multiple, right? And that's where, like, I've done this in action. I do this all the time. And mind you, I'm crazy. I approach things extremely radically. So you might not want to go as crazy as me, but I will say I do things efficiently because in very short periods of time, I get a lot done, not because I'm a workaholic, although I am.
but because I actually am focused on what matters for the customer, right? And what matters to the customer is if they're not willing to pay for something, they don't care about it. That's that simple. Like, it really sounds that simple. Because like, what? Like you can't make that happen, it'll never happen. That's the core thesis here. And I know it's radical, but it's something that I firmly believe in. And again, I spent $20,000 out of pocket in my publishing business and it didn't go as planned.
Jack Shilkaitis (1:02:41)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Evans (1:02:49)
In my second series, I wrote six books, rapid released them, wrote them all at a time because I was so confident it would sell. It flopped and I lost $9,000 on that series. $9,000 burned, just burned. I literally would have been better doing anything with it. I wasn't old enough to gamble. I should have just gambled it all away. I would have had a higher return because at minimum I would have gone to zero. That was terrible, but I learned a lot and that was a very painful experience.
where was like, I'm never spending a year of my life again to do something when really the core problem was I literally wrote six books in this series when I couldn't sell the first. They couldn't even get to the first chapter. They weren't gonna buy it. Why? Because no matter how much ad traffic I drove, it was a low conversion. Why? Because they didn't care about the story. Why? Because there was no story gap that was meaningful to someone. It was just a story that I thought was really interesting, but I should have found the story that I thought was really interesting and that the audience found was really interesting. And yes, maybe you're just a genius and can figure it all out without even testing and you just know all the answers.
I pretend that I'm dumb because I pretty much am. I don't know what's happening and I just want to test and see if I am right and usually I'm wrong and I have to get closer to the right answer over time. But if you're a genius and you know all the right answers then like absolutely like just go forward and write six books and you'll probably sell better than me. But you're talking to a guy who's dumb. I lost nine thousand dollars making the wrong decisions and I don't want you to do the same. And if you're you know maybe not a genius or anything like me and have had losses before in this business you'll get scared straight and you won't want to do it again.
And if you're a new author listening this going like this is crazy. Oh my god This is not how I think about publishing. I just want to see my book and hold my book awesome I want to hold you hold your book too But my first book also I got scammed at a $4,000 by a vanity press so like I made a lot of mistakes in pursuit of the emotion of holding my book and Wanting to hit an orange tag so this comes from like a really deep place of like I get your emotions I get where you're coming from you're not gonna feel that way when you're left holding the bag and left holding the book the book will feel really good but you're gonna be left holding the bag
Emma Alisyn (1:04:24)
Ha!
Jack Shilkaitis (1:04:25)
Yeah.
Michael Evans (1:04:39)
But if you do this right, you'll hold the bag and hold the book, which will be great. Or you'll hold a bag of money or hold a bag that's secure, right? You're not going be left holding an empty bag. I was left holding an empty bag and that was really, really hard. again, I don't want you to go through that pain. That's why I mentioned all this. And again, if you are someone who hears all this and goes, nope, this is crazy. Nope, this isn't for me. Absolutely. That's okay. You still have to answer this question at some point though. Are people going to buy my book? You can answer it after you write it. Fine. Great. You still have to answer it. As long as we all agree to answer it.
Kelli Tanzi (1:05:00)
Well, I think it's... right.
Michael Evans (1:05:07)
I believe strategically it makes way more sense to answer it before you write the book because you can de-risk the entire process. There's multiple ways to answer it and I'm not telling you the right way to answer it. Also, to be super clear in all of this, this is the big thing. I'm not guaranteeing success. Meaning you answer all these questions, what we're doing is decreasing the risk that you don't sell. Most books never sell. Ninety percent of books don't even break even. Ninety-nine percent of self-published books are literally barely going to make any profit. You have a ninety-nine percent chance of failure on average.
So what does answering these questions upfront decrease your failure rate to? I think it decreases it by a good amount. I think it makes more sense that you're going to have a well-selling book when you actually go and launch and you actually go and really put time and energy into making it. Is it guaranteed? No, it's not guaranteed till it happens. Then it happens, right? ⁓ That's awesome. But how much does this decrease your risk to failure? A lot. I really believe a lot. I think you're radically more likely to succeed.
Jack Shilkaitis (1:05:53)
Yeah.
Michael Evans (1:06:01)
And that's the whole point of this.
Kelli Tanzi (1:06:03)
Well, I was thinking about that because with, you know, my first series, I loved the story. I loved everything about it and still writing that series, but it didn't have the greatest success because I hadn't actually found my audience yet. So there I know there's an audience for my books. I just had a hard time finding them at first. I just didn't know where to go to get them. And I think that second question is I have the thing that if I get
Jack Shilkaitis (1:06:23)
Mm-hmm.
BOOM!
Kelli Tanzi (1:06:30)
people's eyes on it. They'll like it.
Jack Shilkaitis (1:06:32)
and
the right people's eyes on it.
Kelli Tanzi (1:06:33)
But I need the right people
to find that book. And that's the, I think a trick that a lot of us are like, well, I'm just going to throw the spaghetti at the wall. I'm going to go, I'm going to put on Facebook. I'm going to go do TikTok. I'm going to do, you know, and they're, and they're just trying different things, trying to find. And I think maybe if we could dial down where, okay, so now I know where I know who my audience is, but look, locating where that audience lives, right? Where are those readers that specific?
Jack Shilkaitis (1:06:43)
Yeah.
Kelli Tanzi (1:07:02)
niche or wherever that market to know that once I've presented it to the right people and then they're still not buying it okay where do I go then but like where do I find them first like that's the big question
Michael Evans (1:07:14)
Yeah. So if we're
following the Story Gap framework, we should be actually already seeing previous stories that are doing well or pieces of content that have some level of traction. You can get into much data as you want about it and can reverse engineer how to find people who probably want that Story Gap from there. So for instance, if you are creating a specific Story Gap and maybe a post-apoc genre, right? Which I used to write in post-apoc. Okay.
What you would look at is first of all, like what's my story got in post-pack that's going to get them interested? Maybe I've already written the book, but actually the most important thing about writing a book is this.
The story you love doesn't matter because your success is determined by the first 10 % of your book, your cover, and your description. That's it. At MrBeast, we've learned one thing. Every month, we'd bring the smartest minds together, the smartest minds together in YouTube, and we would mastermind. I'm talking about how to have a better YouTube channel. And we'd come up with one conclusion. The title, thumbnail, and first 30 seconds are not only the most critical thing, but more important than we thought they were last month. Now let's go meet again. We already thought it was so important last month.
Next month, we determined it's even more important than we thought it was last month. Rinse, cycle, repeat. So this story that you know and love, Kelly, doesn't matter. That's not what determines your success from a marketing standpoint at all. What determines your success in the market is your cover, description, and first 10 % of your story, which is the equivalent in YouTube that first few seconds where you get to the retention point. That's what matters. So understanding that, the first thing is two things. One, testing, is mine what I have good enough right now? Is it going to drive traction? So with that said, you should be able to understand
Similar-ish stories, you have a story gap, but you're a gap on the shelf. You're not on your shelf in an island that doesn't exist. You're a gap in the shelf. So where have books around you on that shelf already succeeded? Don't reinvent the wheel. There's only three weeks to gain attention. You either use other audiences and collaborate with people, right? Book Funnel is great for this with cross promos, but other examples of this are going on podcasts, going to signings, right? Who has an audience already that you can utilize? Maybe you have to pay for it. Maybe you just collaborate with them. Then there's paid advertising.
This is classic billboards on the highway or billboards on the internet. I'm going to reach people by paying to reach them. And mind you, people go, where is my audience? Well, if they exist on Facebook, Facebook does targeting through AI based on your creative. it's a trivial question. The question really matters. Again, cover description first time or second, because reaching people who are interested in that with AI now is really easy. And we're not talking about like generated AI and, know, chat GPT if you don't use it, whatever. This is literally how meta works in every other advertising platform now. Targeting is non-existent.
It's all based on the creative and what people want because again, just like Mr. Beast found, everyone knows this. What actually matters is cover description first 10%. You can't reverse engineer it. Again, you can throw it at great Italian store, a restaurant in the middle of Little Italy, but there's so many there, no one cares. So, okay, now let's keep going. Where's the other thing you could do? Social media, organic social. You can create content on social media and reach people that way. Ultimately, the best place to do this are by creating formats that bring people regularly back so that you're able to do this, whether it's like,
teasing different covers, whether it's teasers from your story. CrateWidth, we have a feature where you upload your book if you have a book. If not, you can just upload an idea of your book ⁓ and we can create teasers automatically for you so that you can share on social media and see if they like it. We're talking video teasers of characters. You don't have put your face on it, right? So these are all the things you can do and that you should be doing. You don't have to do all of them. You should probably pick one based on what you enjoy and what you're passionate about. And you should make sure that intersects with what authors have done previously.
If you're in a romance genre that does really well on TikTok, maybe you should double down on teasers. you're maybe, you know, in post-apoc, a lot of people in post-apoc use Amazon ads and Facebook ads. So maybe you double down on like doing some ads, right? Cause they're already doing that. If you like it, right? That's already what people are doing successfully. many, many genres do really, really well in collaborations. like especially fantasy, like a lot of fantasy does really well at signings as well. So these are things to think about too. Again, you want to make sure it aligns with the market and what you like, but you can reverse engineer success already looking at like.
who's done it before you. So, and then you should not be doing a million things. You should be doing one thing. Like for instance, if think about it, like if you're a scientist with a specific discipline, you could ask yourself any question in the world and say like, okay, I'm going to run an experiment on like, will this meteor like fall from the sky or like, can I blow this thing up or can I cure cancer? Right? Like these are all very different ways to approach answering questions, right? Like one's biotech, one's machinery, one's astrophysics or whatever.
At the end of the day, I'm going to bet on the person who gets really good at their field. So therefore, if we're viewing this as a long game, this experiment, if you're doubling down and I'm just going to get really good at social media, this first time it might not work, but instead of switching constantly like a hamster, I'm just going to get really good at testing social media so that I know the variable isn't, suck at social media, but the variable is my idea sucks. That's what you want to validate. Right? The tough part is if we're trying to do everything at marketing at once, we're not going to be great at everything. And sometimes the extraneous variable is not.
wow, I didn't validate my story idea, but wow, I just didn't do this thing right. And that's what we don't want. So the goal is just to keep getting better at it and going, wow, okay, the alpha is all in the idea and the product and seeing how that succeeded compared to something else. But if you're spreading yourself too thin and trying to master everything, you'll be the master of none. So that's why for me personally, I focus my testing personally on Facebook ads. I've been doing Facebook ads since I was 17 years old. I've done a lot of them. I know exactly what to expect.
I know the metrics and I'm comfortable testing in that way. I don't do all my marketing with Facebook ads, but I've literally refined my testing to just one platform. I test nowhere else, literally nowhere else. Until Facebook doesn't exist as a business, I will always test through Facebook, unless it's an idea that can't be tested through Facebook, which is possible, but is also then how I filter through ideas. If I can't test the idea through Facebook, maybe that's not the right packaging and framing for that idea because I'm good at testing it that way. That's when you start to get really good at experimenting because you're understanding where am I good?
at not only creatively, but also tactically, and you can design your idea and packaging all around that. So I'm not saying it has to be Facebook ads. Maybe it's collaborations. I know people like Maggie Beeler. She's incredible at collaborations. She should only be doing ideas that involve collaborations because she's amazing at it. I also hired her full time at Craterwood to basically work with people and do sales and that because she's really good at it. I'm not like the best at that, right? I'm like a crazy guy. I'll spout off all my ideas and I'll go back in my corner, right?
So like, know what I'm good at. She knows what she's good at. She should double down on that for every one of her projects. It should be collaborations 100%. Certain ideas are way better for collaborations, right? Run Club Romance, going back to our canonical example for this podcast, is really good for collaborations. Cause I could go contact Run Club Romances in different cities and like Run Club, Run Club, sorry, not Run Club Romances. I could contact different Run Clubs and do different events with them. Whereas maybe if this is a community that's less reachable in that way, less community driven, less collaborative, it would be harder to do. Like Post-Opoc's a great example of it's not community driven. ⁓
Post-apoc people are like, get me in my house. I'm prepping. I don't talk to people. So it's not like we're going to like go and go to the local preppers meetup and have a book signing. Right. So I mentioned these because like, like, you know, Maggie's way, even if she likes post-apoc and run club romances equally, let's say Maggie wants to write both Maggie's way better suited to a run club romance. I'm actually probably way better suited for post-apoc given how I like to approach testing. Right. And these things are really, really important. So a lot of this takes self-reflection and experimenting. And then again, viewing it like
Jack Shilkaitis (1:13:44)
haha
Michael Evans (1:14:05)
The core question in all of this is, yes, there's the questions and there's the meta question, which is like, I'm sorry, like we're getting here. But the core questions are, again, can you graduate half of your book? Can you get them to convert? Can you get them to keep reading? Cool, great, fine. The meta question is, what am I uniquely good at in answering these questions so that I can get better at answering these questions going forward? It's what am I uniquely good at? Where is my alpha? Where is my alpha? Do I have unique insight into a market? Do I have unique passion to an interest? Do I have unique skill in something? Great.
That is the question, where is my alpha so that you can answer these questions better going forward because the better you answer these questions going forward, the more money you will make and the more book sales you will get.
Emma Alisyn (1:14:39)
Now listening to all of this, I'm actually strategizing because it's solved a couple of problems. I write too many, start too many projects and I don't finish them. I hate social media marketing, but I still need to connect with my readers. I need to send more newsletters. I need to get my open rate up. And I don't know which project to work on next. Creativity is cheap. it's like, I'm just gonna throw them all in my newsletter one chapter at a time. And I'm gonna make it into a game, like a race horse game.
Whichever one gets the most clicks gets the most words next week and then slowly have them narrow it down. And then at that point, okay, this is the one I'm gonna actually write on and publish. I'm like, and then have them share it on social media somehow. make a creative, make a graphics pack. Tell them, hey, share this all over, whatever. Like lean into your weaknesses.
Michael Evans (1:15:15)
That's great, Emma.
Jack Shilkaitis (1:15:16)
Yeah.
Michael Evans (1:15:26)
Yep, also clipping. Clipping is
Jack Shilkaitis (1:15:27)
Yeah.
Michael Evans (1:15:29)
the biggest thing here. We're going to be building this into CreativeWood programmatically soon, but this happens kind of through deals now. But you can have your readers basically create content based on your book and then pay them for it based on the views they get. So like they can become your advertising platform completely. Some fans will do this just out of because.
But like every Hollywood show now is clipping themselves. So like when you see like friends in your feed and all these things, they're hiring like 16, 17 year old clippers to do all of this and like cut up their shows. like what we'll do is you upload your book, you can now clip your book, use AI to like create all these different video scenes. And then other people can like that you allow in can now join the clipping party, create and edit these different scenes the way they want, post it and get paid out based on performance. And typically like a CPM for this is like.
Jack Shilkaitis (1:15:54)
Mmm.
Michael Evans (1:16:15)
$2.50 to $3 per 1,000 views. So way cheaper you're gonna get than like advertising on Facebook. Like $3 CPMs on Facebook on a US market are extremely hard to get. this is like one of the ARBs right now in doing that because like not enough people are doing this. Brands are just starting to get into it now and there's like billions of views to be had there. Because essentially like social is turning into a performance platform. Meaning like if you suck at social and don't like it, like just automate it and you can automate it now just by like.
basically these systems that are coming to do it. And like something like Bobby Lee, like he talked about TikTok and the author community, he's already been doing stuff like this, like UGC factories and stuff like this. Like this is all, know, there's a thousand phones in China, people creating all these UGC things, I swear. And they'll like post through all these different accounts. you know, who wins is like, who ultimately gets these strong questions answered and then triples down on it. Because if you know the people, the right people to get your book, they'll buy it and they'll keep reading it.
you can very quickly buy attention if you want to buy it. And most attention is bought, to be clear. To be clear, whatever you thought the game was, that's the game. But you have to be able to play the game. And you're only going to play the game if you have strong fundamentals. And strong fundamentals are these three questions. So you're not ready to do all that yet. But all this is to say that if you're to scale social media, scaling any of these things is easy, relatively.
Jack Shilkaitis (1:17:32)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Evans (1:17:33)
Scaling is actually the easy part. Most people
I know try and scale something that isn't working, lose their bag, and struggle the whole way through. But if you scale something with strong foundations, you can get to whatever its S-curve is, where it's at the top of what it'll do. Because not every book's going to sell unlimited amounts. But whatever the ceiling is, you can get to the ceiling. Floor to ceiling, the growth of that should be super quick. Ideally, it's super quick. I'm not saying it's overnight, but I'm saying within a span of a couple months, you can take something from the floor to the ceiling of its idea.
And this is what we do at MrBeast, right? Like our videos get hundreds of millions of views very quickly. And it's exactly that same principle. We create ideas with high ceilings, and it gets that ceiling extremely quickly because we built a system that allows us to do it. And that system also gets 10 million new subscribers a month. It's remarkable.
Jack Shilkaitis (1:18:13)
And at the core of that idea Emma, I think the reason why that's I think would work well for you and for other authors too is that it's a feedback loop and You're not investing a lot of energy into the idea and writing the book Before you get feedback into that loop and I think this Michael is this kind of what you're talking about too is like
Emma Alisyn (1:18:31)
you
Jack Shilkaitis (1:18:34)
It's not that you can't go ahead and write the whole book and then present it to readers, but there is a benefit, maybe for certain personality types to a greater degree than others, but there is a benefit in, like you said, Emma, here's like four different stories, the first chapter of four different stories, like just have fun and then see what gets the most attention and then you feed that project more because there's that part of your brain that's looking for that attention anyway and it becomes a positive feedback loop.
Or then guess what you're gonna do? You're gonna go write words. And you're gonna go continue that story. And that's gonna feel good as an author, because telling, writing it, writing and telling the story is gonna feel good. But then you're also anticipating that feedback that you're gonna get. And maybe it's not that you do like, pick whichever one gets the most clicks at first, but like you drop off the one that gets the least. And then that way you kind of, finding what the readers are engaging in. And because they're actively engaging in it,
Emma Alisyn (1:19:24)
Yeah.
Jack Shilkaitis (1:19:31)
while you're writing it that makes the writing process more enjoyable and you wind up with something that they that you know your readers like, right? That you know at least your audience likes.
Emma Alisyn (1:19:35)
Yeah.
And I have like 20 half
finished books on my hard drive, all of them with professional covers. And I always come to this stuck point when I finish a book, what do I write next? I'm at that stuck point right now. I'm not going to ask myself that question anymore. I'm just going to throw it all at my readers, be like, boo, I got 20K on each one of these ideas. Tell me what you want me to execute. Because I want to execute them all equally. So I'm frozen. But I'll let you all decide.
Jack Shilkaitis (1:19:58)
Here you go.
Michael Evans (1:20:06)
And I think as well, you know, this can feel really systematic to people. And I love thinking in systems. But a really important thing to keep in mind is once you do answer these questions, most of your time is going be spent on really fun stuff and actually writing the books and diving in and interact with the readers. The whole thing is, and I've learned this from experience, is we want to spend time on all the fun stuff. And I'm never going to say that like,
getting a cover made and like pre-selling your book is more fun than writing the climax. Like absolutely not. Like, all right, like I talked all about having fun. A of this doesn't maybe sound super fun. I'll tell you what's more fun though, is when you actually have readers excited for it and you're actually able to start building your career. And most of the time that just doesn't Just doesn't happen. And it did not for me until I started really adopting these things. And my third series was my best selling series. It was what's got me to a thousand dollars a month also caused great burnout because
I didn't actually have great retention. just figured out the selling part. I didn't validate the retention, which was really tough because then I wrote three books after I knew I could sell it, but didn't actually validate will people read past that retention point and focus on that. And I missed the tropes of the genre. Didn't have a high retention point. And what should have been making me thousands of dollars a month was only making me like $1,500 a month. And it was like pretty rough, right? But all this is saying that once you get it down, it's kind of a formula. Because if I answered that third question, would have done much better. So that's one thing that's remarkable. But the second thing is that
you never stop. now once you figure out the core questions, you can spend 70 % of your time just doubling down on that series, having fun, writing more books, staying in that thread, and that's like so much fun. But you should still be spending 20 to maybe 30 % of your time at most actually still testing new concepts because what most authors make the mistake of is doubling down on a series, only focusing on that series, then they don't have their next winner anywhere.
So eventually the sales of that's gonna dip, right? It's gonna become a backlist title. And then all of sudden, it's like, what's my next winner? And you're going to see huge peaks and valleys. At Beast, it's such a big business now. There's so many employees. They can't really afford to have huge peaks and valleys. It is essential that they figure that out because there's so much on the line, right? So what they do is think of themselves a little bit more like a media business or a television network.
which you should be thinking about yourself similarly like a publishing company. Because publishing companies, yeah sure there's good quarters and bad quarters, but they're not having 20%, 40%, 80 % dips quarter over quarter, right? So what does a publishing company do that you don't? Well, publishing companies don't act like CEOs, they act like investors. And what we did at Beast was act like investors, not CEOs. We invest in formats, which is the whole thing. We find a format that works well with a thumbnail idea in 30 seconds that works.
We use that multiple times across multiple videos. So we're not taking a new bet every single video. We're actually taking concurrent bets where we're going to do this series the next year, we're going have eight videos in it. Great. And we see it's winning. And we might spend two out of every three videos on winners, right? Ones we already know are working, doubling down existing formats. But we know every format starts to lose its lust. Every format reaches its end. Every series reaches its end. So, or most, for the most part, there's rare exceptions. Rare exceptions. So once this starts to happen,
What are you just going to scramble for the next winner and now test three or four more things? It's like, no, no, no. You should still be spending at beast was out of every three videos, two would be winners. One would be a new one. That was an experiment. So for yourself, maybe out of every three books you start working on two, you know, our winners. Once you start to get the foundations down and you already have winners to our winners, one is a new experiment because then what ends up happening is those winners don't become winners anymore. Cause you finished the series, you know, have now new winners to put in their place. And then you'll be able to start experimenting with new stories in that experimentation time.
So this process never leaves you. And if you can do this process again, like really effectively, you can actually like mitigate like peaks and troughs, always stay at the top. And this is where like authors who do really well for Peter Time then drop off. 80 plus percent of the time it was, oh, I had this one series working, feeding into this other series. Like, you know, I had a lot working for me. But again, every format, every series drops, they drop and they never get back up to it because two things. One,
They never had the experimentation mindset. They never had this process. So they actually stumbled into it, which is great, but then actually lost the bag because again, they couldn't keep up. The second thing is they, even if they had this process, they weren't continuing to do it. So then, you you're not continuing to experiment. So you're going to eventually drop. And that's why like building a long-term 20, 30 year career as a storyteller is really hard. But I'll tell you my incentive in this. I want to help you build a 20 or 30 year career because I know you're going to want to make movies and shows and do all these other things.
And if you have a long-term career, at Craterwood we make literally exponentially more money helping people build real careers than all the short-term stuff that doesn't work out. So that's why I try and give all my information away for free. Everything I know, just here it is, because I want you to win in the long run knowing that my goal is to grow the GDP of storytelling. You're going to participate in this economy. And as long as we are participating in the storytelling economy, we can all win together. Like that's my core mindset of like why I believe this so much because
I want long-term participants in the storytelling economy. And we all can be long-term participants, but we have to have the right mindset. And that's where this experimentation and formats comes in, which is when you're talking about, between books. Yeah, actually, that two out of three mindset is mine. Write two winners, write two books and series you're already working on that you know are going to work because you've already validated. And then take one and get wild with it. And have fun and experiment. And if it works, great. If it doesn't work, fine.
Keep going again.
Jack Shilkaitis (1:25:18)
Right, Well, Michael, it's been a pleasure. We have to wrap up just for time constraints, but we I know we could keep going. The fire hose just doesn't stop with with Michael Evans on the podcast. But but, you know, we got to stop it at some point just for for practical reasons. But I want to thank you for joining us and give you the opportunity here to shout anything out before we wrap up.
Michael Evans (1:25:41)
Well, thank you so much. It's been so much fun coming on. Yeah, if you all want to hear more from me, I've got like a Craterwood podcast on YouTube consolidating under that. So some people may be listened to beyond the book before, but it's now underneath Craterwood. I have a free book for Craterwood. I have like the marketing deck. So a lot of free fun stuff to dive into content wise. And then if you're kind of interested in, in Craterwood itself.
You can upload your book to our platform. We convert it to a script in production Bible immediately and you can download it She might not want to make a movie or show yet. That's fine You'll get a script and production Bible in minutes, which is pretty cool If you want to go forward and make teasers and trailers based on that, which is a lot of people's first step as authors They want to advertise their books. That's great. You click a button You'll get those two and they're really fun And if you want to make a full-length movie or show we also have that as well You can do any and all of it and mind you the same process applies and in movies and shows. It's simpler
because my model there is to create pilot shows, only create the first episode of a season, right? And then release that just like Hollywood does, pilots, and then double down the productions that make sense to keep going with. What's remarkable is that Craterwood doesn't cost that much to use. You can make a full length movie for about the price of an audiobook, just a couple thousand dollars. And trailers are like, we're talking, you know, 50 dollars, depending on how much you make. Teasers could be, you know, 10, 20 bucks a teaser, pretty cheap. So it's not like it's gonna break the bank, but.
It's still very important to be smart with your money. So I think you should still take the same process, apply it there. All the same principles apply for this new world of self-publishing films, which is what I spend a lot of my time on now. But ultimately 40 % of Hollywood IP is book to screen adaptations. I think the people best positioned to win in this new economy are probably the people listening to this podcast. That's all I got. So yeah, you can go to creditwood.tv, check any of that out.
Jack Shilkaitis (1:27:12)
Okay.
Yeah.
Awesome. Well, thank you again, Michael, for joining us. And of course, thank you to my co-hosts, Kelly, Tansy and Emma Allison. As always, could not do this without both of you. And thank you to you, our viewers. If you're here on YouTube, please subscribe to the channel and like this video. Also put in the comments your number one takeaway from this episode of the podcast. It really does help it reach other authors like you.
on the platform. if you don't mind, just take a second to do that. If you're listening to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else, please follow us there and leave a review. It really does help. From all of us here at Book Funnel, I want to thank you for listening and we'll see you all in the next one.