Audience is Everything
The new publishing paradigm is here.
Note: If you found any value in this article, I’d love it if you shared it with your author friends. It took a long time to make and rounds up so many essential marketing concepts for authors into one easy-to-understand framework 💙.
You likely believe the most valuable part of your publishing business is your stories.
You probably spend most of your time thinking about your stories. The next chapter. The next book. Editing the last one.
The truth is you may be inadvertently f*cking your future publishing career by focusing on the wrong thing.
What?
I know. Here I am, someone who loves books and storytelling more than anything (I’ve written 12 sci-fi books myself) telling you not to focus on writing books.
Don’t worry… I’m not telling you to stop creating stories. The world needs your stories now more than ever.
Instead, I want you to focus on something much more fundamental.
In the age before the internet, before anyone could publish a book, video, or any other piece of content at the press of a button, stories were scarce.
If you created a story that a gatekeeper loved, you could get published and have your intellectual property (IP) blasted out to the masses.
This is where the myth of published IP being valuable comes from.
We wrongly believe that published content has value, because in the past published content was relatively scarce, and getting published meant easier access to large audiences.
Getting published now means nothing (no offense). Like as a friend, I am super happy for you!
But who is listening when you publish a story? How will anyone know? And scarier yet even more importantly, if they did know, would they care when they are barraged with hundreds of other content options?
The good news is we can make readers care about your stories – the ones you are working on now and the ones you will publish forever in the future.
And it all goes back to one word: audience.
Your audience is everything.
Audience is why big stories continue to sell, and why authors who already have an audience sell new books by just putting their cover up on Amazon (John Grisham’s publisher put a literal blank book cover for pre-order on Amazon and it became one of the top-selling books immediately).
With an audience, your IP becomes extremely valuable.
And with an audience, your IP becomes the gateway for immense new opportunities to create products, community, and other experiences for readers that extend well beyond the book.
But here’s the thing, an audience is NOT followers, email list subscribers, likes on a post, or even paying customers of one of your series. These are all proxies for an audience. Things we measure, but things that are imperfect and flawed and if optimized for in a vacuum can leave us sitting with just an expensive list of reader emails laying waste on our hard drive.
Your audience is something much simpler, yet harder to quantify.
Authors whose primary focus is building and nurturing audience are what we call Readers First Publishing.
What Audience Really Is
Audience = the collective of people who trust YOU to deliver them a specific product or service that has value to them.
The key operative words being TRUST and SPECIFIC.
1,000 mailing list subscribers are cool. But do they trust you?
What have you done to gain their trust? To understand if your readers trust you, the best indicator is if they want more stories from you. I created Reader Meter to help you determine exactly that.
With the power of Reader Meter you can see exactly where readers stop turning the page on your stories and in future iterations of the software, you will even see the profile of that reader (aka what books they normally read). This way you can see what areas of your story are most and least engaging to specific kinds of readers so you can better fine-tune your marketing and storytelling for different audiences. You can join the waitlist for Reader Meter here.
And specific is equally important. You can have 1,000 subscribers on your mailing list, but what are they there for? Or are they all there for different reasons? If they are there for wildly different reasons… then you don’t have an audience. You have audiences (plural). So how do you know which audience to double down on and grow? How do you know which audience to continue serving?
This is of course the long way of sharing why sticking in a few connected subgenres or having a consistent voice, style, or meta-arc (overarching character journey) to your stories is helpful in attracting a specific kind of reader and audience to everything you create (I also touch on this in detail in the 3 Laws of Reader Satisfaction, you can read here).
But it still doesn’t answer the big question.
If audience is everything, how do we create an audience for us and our stories?
The trick is that you won’t be creating an audience. You will be tapping into existing audiences that have shown trust for related products and services to your own AND THEN reaching those audiences and building trust in the specific products and services you offer.
All of marketing can be boiled down into that sentence.
And I’m going to show you the three ways you can reach existing audiences at scale and build trust with them. But first, I want to give you Readers First Publishing laid out in a simple way that allows you to take action to start building trust with existing audiences and transform them into YOUR audience today.
Readers First Publishing: Marketing One Step at a Time
As we battle to build our audience (at least it can feel like a battle), it’s easy to have the goal of reaching $10,000 in revenue or thousands of mailing list subscribers freeze you.
Paradoxically, the bigger the goal when getting started out with building our audience and the more that we put on our plate, the harder it is to move forward.
Dream big. Take action one step at a time.
Plans are often futile in the world of Readers First Publishing.
Why? Readers First Publishing is about putting your readers first before your stories, revenue, or other goals. Putting your Readers First, means thinking about your readers at every step of the publishing process – from your pricing, to your marketing, to the way you package your books, and the ways you interact and engage with your readers.
The authors who have the highest standards for putting their Readers First are the ones who grow the most in the new publishing paradigm where there are endless options for stories and very limited time that readers have.
But how do you actually put your Readers First, especially if you don’t have a massive audience of readers yet (like 95%+ of us)?
#1: Identify existing audiences that may be a good fit for the experiences you are creating for readers.
Genre is where we go to most often and are the buckets that book retailers often box our books into.
However, you can break free from convention and define existing audiences based on fandoms that have formed around existing audiences and media or even personas (for instance, I can write stories for founders of technology companies).
You can even mix and match these by tapping into audiences that enjoy one genre AND another OR who match a specific persona/interest.
#2: Experiment with different ways to reach readers in these existing audiences.
One step at a time is key. You may realize that the existing audience you are tapping into is not the best fit for you. You may at times realize that the way you are reaching that audience is not effective.
The idea is to approach this as an endless process of experimentation.
Readers First Publishing means NOT assuming you know everything about your audience.
Toss away your big fancy marketing plan. Relieve yourself of the pressure to take on the world and be everything and everywhere all at once. Focus on one reader at a time and continue iterating on how to message and reach them better.
#3: Track what is working. Double-down where you are growing your readership in a cost & time-effective manner. Stop what isn’t working.
You can track what you are doing in a spreadsheet.
List each marketing activity you do (post on a social media platform etc.)
Then list the new sales that come from it and/or the new mailing list subscribers or any other target output you are tracking.
Then track how long it takes you to complete the marketing activity and/or how much money.
Now, once you map this out with other marketing activities you are doing you will see where you are able to get the most positive momentum as efficiently as possible.
In fact, I encourage you to pursue this yourself through a simple challenge – The Readers First Challenge. For 30 days you do one small step each day to grow your audience and track what is working and why or why not. You will learn more from this simple process than most courses you ever take or grinding on the same old tired marketing plan wondering why it isn’t working for months.
The key in this all is momentum. Audience begets more audience.
But remember the key in all of this: audience is a specific group of people who TRUSTS you to deliver them a specific experience.
Sales, mailing list subscribers, and other metrics are all proxies for trust. Thus, Readers First Publishing is more alchemy than science. You will never know exactly how many readers are in your audience. But the process is powerful because it moves you in the direction of readership faster with as little pain as possible.
Now what are the specific marketing activities you can do to tap into existing audiences?
Well, everything you can do fits into one of three Reader Growth Engines.
These growth engines are based on a very simple principle: you can’t create an audience. You must grow your audience from audiences that already exist.
Think of this like you own a shop in the real world.
You can set up a store in the middle of the woods where there are no roads and no homes around you.
No matter how great what you're selling is do you think you can get anyone to come there?
You can if you go to where people already are and let them know how awesome your shop in the woods is. You can then use billboards on the side of the road near the woods, ads in the local newspaper, and even flyers in the nearby mall, letting everyone know how amazing your herbal potions are.
Now people may just flock to your little shop in the woods from lands all over!
Your book is the little shop in the woods.
Many authors start sharing their book with the world but their “billboards” are tapping into the wrong audiences. They may be in places they think have large audiences but actually have eyeballs that neither trust nor engage with what they are seeing.
Imagine spending months and hundreds of dollars for your billboard in the woods, only to find that your billboard is in English and is in the middle of Paris? Worse yet, imagine that billboard isn’t even in Paris, but in the French countryside where barely anyone passes on the highway each day?
The majority of authors who I see market their books are stuck in the above problem.
That’s why once we understand Readers First Publishing… and that we have to go to where our readers already are first to grow our audience, we can start to really have fun.
The following three Reader Growth Engines are ways you can tap into existing audiences to grow your readership. If you were to do the Readers First Challenge yourself, each day your activity would fit into one of the following three growth engines:
Collaborations
Paid Advertising
Content
Let’s break each one down 👇
Reader Growth Engine #1: Collaborations
Collaborations are when you work with someone else to tap into their existing audience utilizing the trust they have already nurtured with those readers.
There are endless ways you could do a collaboration. Here are some of the most common tactics:
Newsletter Swaps
Anthology
Shared worlds and co-authoring
Cameo of a character in another author’s story
Book reviews posted on social media
Joint deal promotions (i.e. $0.99 book promo)
Facebook Parties and Joint Livestreams
Co-create product, merch, or another experience that goes beyond the book for your readers
The people authors typically work with in collaborations are:
Other authors
Influencers and reading creators
Podcast hosts & YouTubers
Bookstore owners and local literary leaders
The goal here is to create a “Dream 100” of the top 100 people whose audience you’d like to tap into and start from there!
What people get wrong about collaborations:
You work with too few people who have small or low-trust audiences.
So many authors do newsletter swap after newsletter swap and wonder, why aren’t I selling books? You get newsletter subscribers, but when you check to see the average sales rank of all the books from the authors featured in the swap, you realize that none of them are selling. Yikes.
They may have newsletter subscribers, but that’s a telltale sign that they may not have a lot of paying customers – and therefore are unlikely to result in new paying customers for you.
Likewise, if an audience is low trust or just small in number, that’s okay! I just know you will have to do dozens of these to begin to make a measurable impact. But each collaboration is a good, small test to see if you are reaching the right audience and allows you to fine-tune your messaging.
You don’t work with people who have big enough audiences.
Focusing on 3 high-impact collaborations with large creators can be more impactful than dozens of small ones.
When you don’t have a massive high-trust audience, it can make others who have large audiences you’d like to tap into difficult to work with.
A later essay will dive into how to shortcut this problem. If you aren’t subscribed to receive weekly essays from the Author Sidekick, you can here 👇
You make collaborations too generic and tap into someone’s reach but not their trust.
It’s one thing for someone to have an audience who shares overlap with yours. But just blasting out a message about your story doesn’t mean you have tapped into the trust that the creator, author, or whomever you are working with has nurtured in their audience.
How can you make it a more obvious fit for an audience to read your book? Character cameos (when another author features your character in their story with permission), collaborative writing projects, and authentic book reviews are solid starts at achieving this.
The biggest opportunities in collaborations:
Underutilized audiences.
These are audiences that you believe have a high likelihood to enjoy your stories but receive book recommendations less often.
These include lifestyle or education-focused podcasts that don’t talk as much about fiction but have an overlapping audience with the one you want to create.
Non-book-focused events.
And creators that make content for broader audiences (such as a basketball creator recommending a young adult basketball story to their fans).
Social hacking.
This is when you use the likeness of another creator to tap into their audience in an authentic and fun way.
I’ve done this a ton in the past. In fact, in an upcoming episode of the Beyond the Book podcast (you can subscribe on YouTube here) I’ll share all about how you can social hack your stories into virality.
One great example of a creator social hacking to reach an author’s audience recently was Nerdforge’s video of creating special edition leatherbound books for Brandon Sanderson and then gifting them to him. The video has gotten 4.7 million views in just 2 months. Insane.
Long-term genuine relationships.
No hacking or attention arbitrage can make up for real genuine long-term relationships.
Collaborations are something you can do over and over again for years to come. Play long-term games with long-term people.
Help out the storytellers who are creating stories for similar audiences as you. It’s a small world. And what you give to others comes back in mysterious, but awesome ways.
Reader Growth Engine #2: Paid Advertising
Paid Advertising is when you pay to reach an existing audience, typically targeted based on interest. This method is far more scalable than collaborations but comes with the downside of money out-of-pocket (sometimes making a bunch of experiments in Readers First Publishing expensive).
Here are the biggest paid advertising channels for authors:
Meta Ads (Facebook & Instagram)
Amazon Ads
Paid Newsletter Promotion Ads
Sponsoring Creators
Pinterest Ads
Reddit Ads
Google Ads
In-Person Events
Here are how authors typically utilize paid advertising:
Grow their mailing list by giving away a freebie.
Sell their first book in a series (typically at a loss) and make a profit as readers purchase more books in the series
Sell a boxset with multiple books
Retarget existing customers with new releases
Authors can have paid advertising direct customers to existing eBook retailers or their own websites. There are pros and cons to each option. But I am a huge proponent of direct sales for authors (I will have to dive into how Readers First Publishing intersects with direct sales in a future edition of Author Sidekick 😉).
What people get wrong about paid advertising:
Your free stories have to be better than everyone else’s paid stories.
This is crucial. Too often I see authors give away a story in a Facebook Ad or make a book permafree that isn’t their best book.
Paradoxically if you are going to use free as your strategy, you should be giving away incredible stories for free (even your best stuff).
Test more than you are comfortable with.
So many people fail with advertising because they don’t test enough. This isn’t about spending thousands of dollars (please don’t, I’ve been there and it’s not fun). This is about trusting the machine learning powering Facebook, Amazon, and most other major ad channels to reach your ad to the right audience that is most likely to convert to your offer.
The key here is then to adjust your packaging so that you are able to get as much traction as possible with the right readers. Test more images. Test more copy.
One winning ad can help you scale and drive most of your revenue for weeks and months on end. But it sometimes takes dozens (and even more) iterations of image and copy to find that winning ad. You likely aren’t testing enough.
You just need one paid ads channel to reach a tremendous scale.
Stop trying to master all the ad platforms. If you are writing a story that a sizable amount of people would be interested in (a whole other essay will come in the future on finding story-market fit and helping you determine the potential market size for your story) then you likely just need one ads platform to reach scale.
There have been authors who made decent livings off Bookbub Featured Deals and CPM ads. There are authors who have made six figures a year and more off Pinterest and Reddit Ads. And at this point, thousands have made six figures from audiences they have tapped into using Facebook and Amazon Ads. You just need one paid ads channel to grow a sizable audience.
The biggest opportunities in paid ads:
Sponsoring creators.
Creators are one of, if not the most, under-utilized advertising channel in publishing. At some point, I’d love to write a full guide on sponsoring creators after my learnings working with the largest video creator in the world.
In short, BookTubers, BookTokkers, and Bookstagram have people with massive, high-trust existing audiences that can be paid to advertise your books for you.
Hint: for paid subscribers of Author Sidekick Plus, your first bonus will be a sheet of 1,000 top creators and influencers you can work with to market your books, sorted by genre and target audience.
Capture a greater Reader Lifetime Value upfront.
Ads platforms have gotten more expensive, and often those who can spend the most win. For Facebook, Pinterest, and Reddit ads in particular there’s a huge opportunity to “liquidate” your advertising cost by making more money than it costs to acquire a customer upfront.
This is challenging when you are selling $4.99 eBooks. But when you go Beyond the Book to reimagine your reader journey, endless possibilities emerge.
For a hands-on example of how to do this for your stories, watch this podcast episode between me and Maggie Beeler on turning her Cocktail Book for Readers into a Multi-Million Dollar Brand.
Reader Growth Engine #3: Content Marketing
Content marketing is when you create free content (videos, images, blogs, and other posts) that is designed to tap into existing interest groups and reach new audiences on content platforms.
Interest groups are how the machine-learning algorithms that are responsible for recommending hundreds of billions of pieces of content to billions of people each day on algorithmic feeds mutually categorize users and content. If a user and piece of content both fall into the same interest group and that piece of content engages (typically by increasing time spent on the content platform) people in that interest group, it in turn is more likely to be shown to more people in that interest group.
I could probably write a book on content creation. Once again, a future article will be coming here on the Author Sidekick all about the foundational principles for great content creation for authors. I even wrote this Guide to the Future of Publishing a while back which touches on this concept.
Here are the biggest content platforms for authors:
Facebook
TikTok
YouTube (Shorts and Longform)
Twitch
Instagram (stories, reels, and images)
Threads/X/Bluesky (short-form text)
Here is how authors typically utilize content marketing:
Posting about their books and new releases
Updates on their writing progress and behind-the-scenes content of book boxes, special editions, and more
Posting about industry news and books in their genre they are reader (I call this “reader lifestyle content”)
Posting general content to people who have interests that overlap with your story but aren’t explicitly reading (ex: James Blatch posting military aviation videos on TikTok → he writes military aviation thrillers)
Posting parts or even their entire books for free on serial story platforms, YouTube, and other content platforms
What people get wrong about content marketing:
People don’t want to be sold, you must engage them first.
Put your Readers First. Heck, put yourself first. Do you want to sit and watch a boring ad on your phone? No… you don’t. You want to be entertained. You want to be provided value that enriches your life today without having to click off the platform.
How can you help your readers in your content & build trust so that they go seek out deeper experiences from you on their own? Again… it’s not about selling your books here. It’s about growing your audience.
Be a creature of the platform.
Start creating content where you spend the most time. There’s a 99%+ chance you regularly use one of the platforms that I mentioned above.
Don’t try to create at first where everyone is trying to tell you is the new “hot thing”. Focus on where you already spend time – there is likely more than enough audience there for you.
They try to hack the algorithm.
Readers First means that serving your readers is the key to publishing success, not appeasing an algorithm. Algorithms are designed to serve the wants and needs of users.
Any imperfections in this feedback loop are not long-term solutions and trying to exploit them does not help you get better at the thing that matters most: putting your Readers First.
With this said… growth hacking can be fun. I’ll talk more about this in a future article… just ONLY focusing on growth hacking is a recipe for disaster.
The biggest opportunities in content marketing:
Creating non-bookish content that overlaps with your target readership.
Authors have deep expertise in the areas they create content in. There are increasingly big opportunities for authors to create content targeted at a broader audience who share a passion for the interests covered in their stories.
Imagine instead of marketing your crime mystery books on TikTok by talking about your books themselves, you instead created videos covering cold cases… and then linked out to your books in your profile & mentioned it in some of your videos.
Think of yourself as a creator first.
YouTube is storytelling. Instagram is storytelling. Every content platform ever is storytelling. The beauty of these platforms is stories that match the medium and audience can achieve incredible distribution at zero cost through algorithmic discovery.
If you were to start a profile on a content platform that you actually wanted to watch, what would it be? How would that build a similar audience to the one that wants to read your books?
Your best content is your paid advertising.
This is the biggest hack here, and it’s why I encourage nearly everyone to create content first, before jumping into paid advertising. If a video featuring your book performs well organically, then that video likely will perform really well with a paid ad.
You can use content platforms as a testing ground. If a post you made for free leads to sales, that’s incredible. Reinvest those profits into running paid ads and watch more sales come in. Wohoo!
Putting it All Together
The good news with all of this is that just like collaborations and paid advertising, similar foundational principles undergird all content platforms (I am interested in writing an article that goes into detail on this, let me know if that’s something you’d be interested in by commenting on this post).
Once you get good at one social platform, you are more likely to succeed on others.
My favorite thing about Readers First Publishing is that experimentation one step at a time helps you build the foundational marketing skills and reader instincts to succeed in every marketing channel.
Thus, if you see that Facebook Ads aren’t for you, you can apply the winning copy and images to future collaborations you embark on. If you build relationships with some incredible authors through collaborations, you can lean on them to help give you advice in creating content or paid ads. It’s all one big, happy flywheel.
The enemy is stagnation. The enemy is standing still right where you are.
Move forward, one step at a time. Put your Readers First starting today. Readers First Publishing is about growing your audience now and making it your top priority. It doesn’t require you to write five books. It doesn’t require thousands of dollars or endless knowledge.
It just requires getting started.
You will learn over time more about your readers. You will learn from your readers more about what your stories need to be. And you will learn from the entire process how to be a better storyteller, marketer, and publisher.
Most people don’t put in the work.
For the few who do put in the work, most don’t systematically track their marketing activities and analyze why certain things are working and why certain things aren’t.
After an experiment in the Readers First Challenge there are four possible outcomes:
Double-down. This is working and you should do more of it.
Change your targeting. You should be tapping into different existing audiences. You have now updated your thesis about the kinds of readers that are best for your stories.
Change your story or write a new one. You have a great way to reach an existing audience who you want interested in your stories, but something about your story isn’t resonating with them to build trust. Either edit and revise your story or write a new one (hint: Reader Meter is designed to help give you the insights to help in this process).
Change your tactics. You either aren’t getting enough reach to a trusted existing audience or your packaging (blurb, cover, and other promotional materials) isn’t resonating with them. Adjust your packaging and your method to gain reach (collaboration strategy, advertising platform, etc.).
You could experiment for months and even years at this. The key is to always be searching for momentum and having fun. What is the Readers First Challenge if you aren’t putting the most important reader, yourself, first?
Beyond the Audience
So now you have the insights to begin building YOUR audience today, one step at a time.
But this is just the beginning.
Audience is Everything is about something even greater than building trust in readers to sell more books consistently.
It’s recognizing that once you have built trust with a specific audience, you can create products, services, and experiences for them that extend well beyond the book.
In short, audience is the core of your story empire. And around it are all the different possibilities for things you can create.
Your stories (especially in book form) are not the core of your business.
Your audience is.
Your stories are one way to build trust with your audience, generate revenue, and even grow your audience.
But your stories are just ONE WAY to do this.
You can build an audience of readers who share the same specific desire for the types of stories you write NOT by writing stories.
You can do this by creating content.
Creating your story in different formats that serve other needs for your readers (for instance, story letters to make your mailbox fun again).
By making merch, swag, or other products that serve that existing audience and are tied to the genre, their passion, or other specific problems your readers have (not your stories).
By creating education and coaching services to help your audience with related issues they have in their life (relationship coaching, etc.).
Readers First Publishing means understanding the world of related products and services that your readers desire and pressing publish on anything that will build trust and solve their problems (not just stories).
The truth is this: audience is everything is not just for authors but for every business in the world.
If you can master building YOUR audience that trusts you and shares a specific passion or interest, you can serve their passion and solve problems your audience is likely to have through a variety of means.
Thus… the entrepreneurs of the future are audience builders.
And as storytellers, you have a better opportunity to grow an audience than nearly anyone in the world.
It’s why we are at the beginning of really exciting times in publishing. And if you want to join me on this journey and get step-by-step guidance on Readers First Publishing and going beyond the book to grow your audience and income as an author, you can join the Beyond the Book Accelerator waitlist here (launching in June).
I hope you all have an amazing rest of your day! I’ll be back Wednesday with a new episode of the Beyond the Book Podcast.
In the meantime, don’t forget…
Together we are boundless,
Michael Evans
The Author Sidekick
P.S. Please message me with your questions and what’s on your mind in your author life. A majority of my article ideas come directly from talking with y’all 💙. Shout out to the amazing Michele Matthews for inspiring this one.
What a great article! And I was a bit shocked to see my name in your PS, but I'm glad I could inspire you to write this. What is the Readers First Challenge? I haven't heard of it.