The 3 Laws of Reader Satisfaction

Your book isn't bad. It's just not engaging enough.

I spent $2,000 on Facebook Ads and no one bought my book (well, not no one… but barely enough people to make it even close to profitable).

This book was one that I had poured my heart into. It was a cyberpunk, young adult, technothriller mash-up with a dose of GameLit.

It was doing everything and nothing all at once.

Based on the measly, but promising success of my first young adult dystopian series, I doubled down on this series. I wrote 6 books before even publishing the first.

My beta-readers loved it. They said my writing had gotten so much better from my first series.

But the “market” said differently. I was hemorrhaging cash and on the verge of a mental breakdown (the title of the first book in this series was also called Breakdown 😂).

I felt SO defeated.

The burnout was hitting me. Instead of the process of writing fueling me, it was becoming a chore.

So I made one last-ditch effort.

I put a book up on pre-order at Amazon with just a cover and book description to see if it could sell.

It did! I spent $5 a day in ads to get 2 sales at $3.99. It was not a great ROI considering Amazon’s fees, but I knew very well that this was just Book 1 in the series. I would be making bank once I wrote more books.

So I wrote 3 books and rapid-released them, increasing my ad budget to $50 a day.

The problem? Not enough people went on to read future books in the series.

All of a sudden, my return on ad investment was barely enough to cover the cost of producing the book. I finally wasn’t losing money, but I was spending 40+ hours a week on marketing + writing while also going to my freshman year of college.

It was lots of stress… for very little return.

In short, I was not satisfied as an author.

For those of us turning our writing into a business, odds are that if we are not satisfied, our readers are also NOT satisfied with our books.

Let’s face it… we are all social creatures. And as much as we all love writing, it’s energizing to see your book get positive attention rather than crickets… or worse yet boos.

And you can supercharge the attention and retention you get from readers by mastering the 3 Laws of Reader Satisfaction.

By the end of this essay you’ll know:

• What each Law of Reader Satisfaction Means

• What YOU need to do to satisfy each Law

• How you can satisfy each law without spending crazy amounts of money out of pocket (and as little time as possible)

• What you should do when you are having trouble satisfying one of these laws

• Why each Law of Reader Satisfaction Matters

Plus, you’ll be able to grow your readership and income in a way that makes YOU happy and your readers happy.

And with an understanding of these laws, you will quickly realize a truth that a lot of us struggle to accept:

Unsatisfying stories ≠ Bad stories

Unsatisfying stories ≠ You are a bad writer

Unsatisfying stories ≠ Unsatisfying for every reader

And most of all, even the best writers in the world routinely create stories that are not satisfying by all 3 Laws of Reader Satisfaction.

Candidly, it’s tough to build a sustainable long-term career in publishing without meeting these 3 Laws, but no one on this earth hits these laws 100% of the time with 100% effectiveness (most of the time, it’s much less than half the time).

So relax, and take a deep breath.

Instead of focusing on sales, more and more income, and hitting the best-seller charts… focus on satisfying these Laws FIRST.

It puts less pressure on you to take over the world on day one.

It gives you permission to build a strong foundation for your publishing business before investing a ton of money that you may or may not have (totally not calling my past self out here… totally).

And most of all, it makes it much easier to overcome both the internal and external villains holding you back from your storytelling dreams by making your points of improvement actionable and easy to identify.

Here’s the 3 Laws of Reader Satisfaction visualized.

Note: for any of our paid Sidekick Plus members who hear me talking on our monthly webinars or folks who hear me talking in classes + podcasts, I may substitute the word satisfaction for engagement. I view them both similarly!

Each Law must be satisfied at a high level in order to have a healthy foundation for marketing a story. The trick is, of course, you will have to do some level of marketing to determine your Reader Satisfaction Rate.

But once we think about our marketing in terms of learning more about our Reader Satisfaction Rate and how and who to boost it with… it changes everything.

Reader Satisfaction Rate = the proportion of readers who move on from one Law of Reader Satisfaction to another. This rate can be segmented by cohort, so that you can view the Reader Satisfaction rate by different versions of your story, different marketing campaigns you run (aka target audiences), and different fan engagement strategies.

Thus, your Reader Satisfaction Rate is ever-changing and contextual based on which story you are analyzing, which readers are experiencing it, and which Law of Reader Satisfaction you are looking to improve.

Not every reader will be satisfied by your story, and different readers have different preferences, leading to certain audiences having wildly different Satisfaction Rates for the same story.

Example: Imagine inviting a group of 100 people who hate Italian food to an Italian restaurant and another group of 100 people who love Italian food to an Italian restaurant. Who do you think will like it more? And just because one group doesn’t like it, does that mean the food at the restaurant won’t taste good to a group of people?

As we will soon discover, the Laws of Reader Satisfaction are all grounded in reader behavior and can be measured.

Here’s what the difference between a high and low Reader Satisfaction rate would look like for a story:

It’s a far better place to be when 10x more readers are eager for your stories, all starting from the same audience size!

The numbers above may be arbitrary, but we will soon discover how these numbers apply to your own publishing business.

For me… my own Reader Satisfaction rate trended way more towards the left side of our image rather than the right side of the image.

For many of the series that dominate the charts and sell for years on end, they look much closer to the second half of the image.

In the coming months, I’ll be sharing an essay all about the Reader Growth Engines. These engines are how you can supercharge your readership and revenue by getting your story in front of more readers with a high likelihood to be satisfied by it.

You can get that article for free, right in your inbox, by subscribing below!

Now let’s get into the juicy part…

Law #1: Make Me Curious 👀

The first law of Reader Satisfaction is all about getting a reader to buy/download your book (aka make them curious 😊).

How to Measure The First Law:

Gold Standard: a view of the total impressions on your story’s cover and description and the total number of downloads/buys your story has. Ideally, you can also segment these impressions by reader demographic (age, location) and interest (genres they have the greatest previous engagement with).

For those with any level of familiarity with Kindle Direct Publishing or any of the major publishing platforms, you will notice this level of granularity is impossible.

But, we can use proxy measurements to get as close to this golden standard as possible. Here’s a list of valuable ways to measure Law #1 (Make Me Curious) depending on your individual context:

• Clicks to the landing page your book sales page is on (Amazon, your own website, etc.) compared to the number of sales those clicks generate (you can tell this by using attribution links… a future article will dive into these deeply!).

• Views on a social media post (such as TikTok, YouTube Short, etc.) and the resultant bump in sales during that time period. Typically this would be measured as the incremental sales increase. Let’s say you normally get 5 sales per day but get 15 sales of a book the day you post a TikTok. Thus, it can be estimated the TikTok resulted in 10 sales.

• Uplift from a newsletter swap, book discount, or other kind of promotion or marketing campaign you are doing on your book.

The goal? Take any marketing activity you complete and do the best you can to measure the following:

• Activity: What marketing activity did you complete (just briefly state what it was so you have context)

• Targeting: Who was this marketing activity targeting? (demographic information if you have it, but more importantly, genre and reading preference)

• Reach: Roughly how many readers saw your description, cover, and/or other marketing material?

• Conversion Event: what action do you want a reader to take? Do you want them to download your free book? Buy your book at $0.99 or $7.99? Buy your audiobook or a specific format or language?

• Conversion: Roughly (and precisely if you can get this data) how many readers *actually* downloaded/bought your book?

• Satisfaction Rate: Now simply divide the number of conversions by the reach of your marketing activity and you have your Satisfaction Rate for Law #1!

The best thing to do is to put all of this data into a spreadsheet and track it. This way you can have a history of every marketing activity you do and its effectiveness.

How to Boost Your First Law Satisfaction Rate (without spending tons of money on marketing):

• If your reach is high and conversions are low: change your targeting first, then your packaging. Targeting is typically the first thing to change. There is a chance you are reaching the wrong readers at first and may find that different readers resonate very differently with your packaging. However, if you try that with 3 - 5 different target audiences and still see a low satisfaction rate, then you can switch up your packaging by changing your cover and description to spark more curiosity among your target readership.

• If your reach is low: change your marketing activity. For more authors than not, THIS is the issue. You simply don’t have enough reach to understand with any significance whether your targeting or packaging is strong. The best way to get more reach FOR FREE is by collaborating with other established authors in your niche (you know their reader lists convert already due to their sales history), by connecting with reading creators with targeted audiences on social media, and by creating social media content and interacting in online communities yourself. It may be a slog at first, but this isn’t about reaching scale… it’s about achieving sustained reader satisfaction.

• Rinse and repeat this feedback loop until you find a high Satisfaction Rate. This is an arbitrary number and will vary for every author, but when paired with all of the metrics below you will reach a magical moment called Story-Market Fit. This is when you have a story you know readers love and you know you can reach them and get them to buy. NOW you are ready to scale.

Why the First Law (Make Me Curious) Matters:

Remember, the goal here is not the raw number of conversions. It’s to as cheaply as possible get an understanding of your satisfaction rate and WHICH readers (aka your targeting) are producing the highest Satisfaction Rate.

Another note here – you can expect very different Satisfaction Rates for Law #1 pending on your packaging (cover and description), targeting, and pricing.

In a vacuum, you may be tempted to play with these variables to maximize your Satisfaction Rate for Law #1 as high as possible.

This is a huge mistake.

Instead, you should be viewing your Satisfaction Rate as a paired metric.

Paired Metrics are metrics that measure the adverse consequences of another metric. In short, paired metrics keep you in check, ensuring that you are not optimizing for the wrong thing and doing something that feels good but is in fact terrible for your business.

In short… don’t be like me and spend a ton of money on advertising to get your sales ranking up but instead ignore the second and third laws of reader satisfaction that are equally as important.

Law #2: Make Me Finish 😍

The Second Law of Reader Satisfaction is the rate at which readers who begin your story finish it (aka Make Me Finish 🤭).

How to Measure The Second Law of Reader Satisfaction:

This one is simple yet nearly impossible to accurately measure.

In short, you can measure this by understanding how many readers who purchase or download a specific story of yours move onto the next story in a series.

Let’s say 100 readers purchase Book 1 and 50 purchase Book 2.

Your reader Satisfaction Rate would then be 50.

Pretty simple!

But there’s a big problem. What if you are having trouble making readers finish like me? I know… I know… we have all been there.

You have to crack the mysteries of the readers’ mind.

How to Boost Your Second Law Satisfaction Rate:

If your Second Law Satisfaction Rate is low, it’s because your story isn’t engaging enough to readers.

So how do we make our story more engaging?

Sometimes reviews can be helpful. Both reviews on your own stories, feedback from beta readers, AND reviews on the stories of other authors. Particularly, understanding the gap between what readers enjoyed about other similar, well-selling stories and what is missing in yours is a great place to start!

But… there’s a huge missing piece from the puzzle.

And I’m on a mission to solve it.

Why The Second Law (Make Me Finish) Matters:

The most helpful data in being able to revise your story to make it more engaging and thus satisfying to readers is understanding exactly where readers stop turning the page on your stories.

Then, instead of rewriting an entire 70,000-word book, you can narrow in on the exact areas of your story that are unengaging to readers and make them better.

This data… makes it possible to write better books, release your stories into the world with more confidence, and ultimately make more money as an author.

And it’s this data that I’m working tirelessly to give you.

Reader Meter, releasing in late 2025, is the reader intelligence platform for authors. It makes it possible to see exactly where readers stop reading your books so you can boost your satisfaction rates and supercharge your income as an author.

You can learn more about Reader Meter here and join the waitlist so you can get early access, a lifetime discount to the platform, and weekly office hours with me.

It’s going to be awesome!

And if you are as excited about Reader Meter as me, I’d greatly appreciate it if you shared the link to the waitlist with author friends. We are going to give every author in the world the power to put Readers First (and help more readers finish… stories… around the world!).

And now onto our last law. Once someone is satisfied with your story and wants more… what happens next?

Law #3: Make Me Care 💙

The Third Law of Reader Satisfaction is all about getting readers to share your stories with others, buy merch and other ancillary products, and become superfans of your work.

How to Measure the Third Law:

This law is all about delineating casual readers from superfans and nurturing more of them.

Just as not every reader will finish your story and want more from you, not every reader is going to care about your characters, series, and world enough for it to hold a permanent place in their life.

But some authors (such as Matt Dinniman for example) are very good at turning casual readers into superfans at a high rate.

To measure the Third Law of Reader Satisfaction requires looking at all the different ways that readers can show their fandom.

• What are your merchandise sales?

• How many new pre-orders do you get on book 1 in a new series?

• How much do your fans talk about your stories online such as in Facebook Groups or in short-form videos?

• How many signed or special edition copies of your books do you sell?

You can compare all of these different metrics to the number of readers that regularly read a particular series of yours (aka they have read through most of your books in a series).

Of course, it’s impossible to get an exact metric here. But the goal is to get a general idea of what types of fan engagement (merch, signed edition, events, etc.) your readers engage with most and do more of the things that are working to help readers show their care and tweak the things (or stop doing them entirely) that are not working.

How to Boost Your Third Law Satisfaction Rate:

• Make it easier for readers to engage at a deeper level with your stories. This ultimately boils down to increasing the opportunities fans have to engage with your stories and encouraging fans to engage more. You can do this by starting and promoting a merch store, responding to readers over email and on social media, reaching out to readers to start ambassador programs for your brand, signed editions, digital community & events… and the list goes on with each of these categories easily costing of a long essay to unpack it (which I may or may not be writing in the future 😏).

• Unleash a superpower for your stories that makes you stand out in the hearts and minds of readers. I’ll be covering this A LOT more in future essays, but this all comes down to creating a memorable brand and remarkable experience for readers at one of the 5 Stages of the Reader Journey. You can do this by being extremely personable and open with readers, creating an immersive world, combining tropes and other story elements in a unique and engaging way (this is a really fun one), utilizing a novel communication/marketing channel, and/or build deep psychological bonds between your readers and your characters. Chances are you will be honing on one of these rather than trying to tackle all of them at once. And where you choose to hone in is all based on your author superpowers (more for a future essay, but this is all about what you love to do and where your strengths lie).

Why It Matters to Make Readers Care:

Look, if you can regularly satisfy the first two laws for a high proportion of readers, you will have a solid career as an author.

But to truly build a transcendent publishing career, you will need to go beyond just making readers want more but making them care.

It increases your revenue as an author (through merchandise, special editions, and other products), and increases your reach to new readers (through word of mouth, reader posts online, etc.). This ultimately creates a flywheel for your business where more readers who care result in more readers which result in more readers who care.

It’s a never-ending loop and a power dynamic that helps explain why so many of the best-selling authors seem to stay there for a while and sell drastically more than most authors (I will be sharing more about this dynamic in an upcoming essay on the Power Law of Publishing).

Now, you can see how the 3 Laws of Reader Satisfaction work together to help you grow your readership and revenue.

So the next time you find yourself thinking, “I’m a bad writer” or “nothing seems to be working for me”, revisit the 3 Laws of Reader Satisfaction and ask yourself, where am I satisfying readers and where am I struggling to satisfy readers?

And once you get your Reader Satisfaction rate to a place where you can profitably and reliably bring new readers into your business, you are ready to scale 🥳 (and the main ways to scale will be covered in my upcoming Reader Growth Engines essay).

I’d love to hear your replies to this post over email and in the comments about how the 3 Laws of Reader Satisfaction has helped you, where you need to work on satisfying readers more, and any ways that I can assist you! I’ll be responding to you all 😁.

And that’s it for this one! Don’t forget to join the waitlist for Reader Meter here. It will be launching later this year and will help you see where your readers stop turning the page in your books so you can write better stories and sell more books.

AND it will even be available for an affordable lifetime fee 💙. It’s going to be a game-changer for authors and give you more power in the storytelling process than ever before!

On a similar note, I’d greatly appreciate it if you could share this article with writer friends, or inside writer communities (Facebook Groups & Discords) if you think they would benefit.

I’ll see you all this week with more helpful insights from the Author Sidekick.

In the meantime, don’t forget…

Together we are boundless,

Michael Evans