Focus. Focus. Focus.

✏️ I dare you to dream bigger. ✏️

Something I learned in college that has always stuck with me, it’s only 2-3x harder to create something that’s 100x bigger.

We see this in the author industry all the time. Is it really 100x harder to make $500k a year than it is to make $5k a year? Spoiler Alert: it’s not. Your problem? You aren’t focused enough.

I’ve been known for saying the words Creators Rule the World.

I believe this with every bone in my body.

But when I talk to most storytellers that I know, ruling the world is the furthest thing from your dreams.

You’re focused on:

1. Making sure you break even.

2. Making sure you keep up with the million things piling on your admin to-do list.

3. Trying every little thing you can do to market your books (or hiding in fear from marketing at all).

4. Continuing to write and write more and more, focused on word count and production.

None of these are bad things to focus on.

They are great!

But here’s the kicker.

When you simplify what you focus on… you can go so much further.

People have a vested interest in making success sound complicated. For many of us who have never been around people who have grown really fast and achieved goals beyond their dreams, shooting for the stars seems impossible.

• I’ve worked on the Strategy team for MrBeast. He started with just a camera in his bedroom and is now a billionaire in net worth (one of the youngest in the world).

• Some of my college buddies grew their company from $0M to $100M in recurring revenue in 24 months (Mercor is the name).

• One of my author friends (David Viergutz) scaled from near zero to seven figures a year in right around 90 days with ScareMail. You can watch our podcast together here.

What do all these success stories, across industries including our own, have in common?

They had radical focus on doing one thing really really well, and ignored everything else. AND they understood that doing one thing really well can go WAY further than you ever imagine when you focus on the right thing.

These insights are what led me to starting Readers First.

Ultimately, only one thing matters: putting your Readers First.

Readers First isn’t complicated. It’s meant to simplify everything that is thrown at you in the publishing journey and make it as simple as possible for you to share your stories with the world and begin making money.

Here’s the entire process in 5 questions:

1. Who is your audience and what do they care about?

2. Can you get that audience to purchase your story idea?

3. Can you get that audience to purchase MORE from you?

4. If you are struggling with questions 2 or 3, why is that? It is because you either (a) don’t have enough clicks to your offer, (b) don’t have enough sales from those clicks, or (c) once people buy from you once they don’t want to buy more from you. Work to solve that.

5. How can you find A LOT more customers in your audience with little effort?

To me, this sums up how you build ANY business, including a publishing business.

The kicker is this…

How much of your time authoring do you actually spend answering these questions? Even better, are you answering these questions in order… or are you spending your time focusing on something else?

The answer for nearly all of you is that you are spending the vast majority of your time not focused on answering these questions… and certainly not in order.

What good does it do to see if people want to purchase more from you when no one has even purchased your story yet? Answer: it doesn’t do you any good.

There’s a radical implication of this.

Why should you EVER write your story before you sell it?

You writing your story is focused on hooking people so that they want to buy more stories from you.

That’s great… but does it even matter if you can’t get people to open page 1?

Likewise, once you have validated that people want to purchase more from you… how can you scale your readership by 100x without putting in 100x more effort?

The answer is utilizing one of the Reader Growth Engines, which I cover here.

I’m not trying to say this is easy. But… it’s not as hard as you think.

I know your next concern. They were the same ones I had:

• It takes time, even if I’m hyper-focused on what matters, to scale my author career

• It takes money, even if I’m conservative as possible, to grow my readership

You end up in a scarcity trap.

You don’t have enough money. Yet to get more money, you need time. And to get more time, you need more money.

UGH!

It’s quite hard to put your Readers First when your bills and sleep have to come first (and trust me they should).

Then how the heck do you do this?

You must escape the scarcity trap. Your way out is the Infinite Reader Loop.

In short… I will share with you the 3 steps to design a system that with little time and little money can *quickly* scale to giving you loads of money and as a result loads of time. Time to finally write that story. Money to give you the space to invest in your own well-being and business.

Sounds like a dream right?

It’s not.

You just have to unlearn a few things first:

• Traditional publishers are not coming to save you

• The algorithm is not coming to save you

• The best-selling author next door who cracked the mysterious code with their latest ad strategy is not coming to save you

• No one is coming to save you (not even the Author Sidekick)

You can do this yourself. You are capable of SO MUCH. And I’m not asking you to believe me… I’m asking you to get started and prove it to yourself.

Here’s how…

Step #1: Start Your Business

• Set up a landing page using your mailing list or Carrd.co. Here’s my list of top mailing lists for authors.

• Set up a Stripe link so you can accept payments directly on that landing page

Welcome, you now run an online business and you have spent $0 or very little. This takes hours of time (you can do this half-drunk one night while couch rotting to Netflix).

Step #2: Wait, what am I selling?

• So you have the tech set-up… great! Now we need to hone in on your story idea and get AS MUCH CASH FRONT UPFRONT AS POSSIBLE.

• First, identify what story you want to sell and share it on the landing page. Utilize the Story Gap framework to identify and flesh out great premises.

• Then, figure out how you can accept as much money upfront as possible from your customers.

  • Can you pre-sell the entire series?

  • Can you sell a bundle of paperback, audio, and ebook?

  • Can you sell a special launch gift box with your book and other on-genre goodies?

YOU HAVE NOT STARTED WRITING YOUR STORY YET. THAT COMES LATER.

Step #3: Drive traffic to your landing page and see if people convert.

• You can do this primarily by:

  • Paid Advertising (usually Meta)

  • Short-form video content (usually TikTok)

• Start your test small. See if people convert, and then begin scaling up as you get money in the bank nearly immediately. Within weeks, you can scale up to a substantial side hustle and help you start to have money to free up time and mental space to write more.

NOW YOU CAN START WRITING YOUR STORY… KNOWING YOU HAVE ALREADY BEEN PAID TO DO SO.

It sounds insane. But it’s possible. And this is the full process.

Sounds crazy, but authors right now are doing this to start businesses faster and with next to no money out of pocket (I’ll be sharing more specific case studies in the coming weeks).

Essentially… start the whole process with building an Infinite Reader Loop (remember this superpower?).

Regardless of whether you follow these steps exactly, identify what roadblocks are between you and putting your Readers First, and get creative in how you can overcome them without investing time, money, or emotional energy you don’t have.

That’s your focus. And focus, focus, focus, you shall! And it’s simplicity like this… that turns a small idea… into something really big.

It’s not easy, but it’s possible. And I believe in you.

I’ll be back with more chaos soon.

In the meantime, don’t forget…

Together we are boundless

P.S. If you aren’t already a part of the Readers First Challenge, I’d be happy to let you in. It’s a cohort-based course I’m running to help authors go through the exact steps above with guided group coaching, workshops, and more. I’m offering special beta pricing at 50% off. Just reply to this email, and I’ll send you more details.