The Death of Author Websites

✏️ Big tech's biggest attack on authors ✏️

Note: No podcast this week cause I’m still offloading editing and uploading to a team member, which means, you all get a bonus article 💙.

In God Technology We Trust.

Who wins the future will be who we trust to lead us today. And trust is shifting to new actors more rapidly than at any point in history.

I’m going to share what this means for publishing, the dangers and challenges ahead, and how you can get ahead and grow your business faster than ever.

This may just be one of my most controversial and profound articles I’ve ever written. It’s about the future we are hurdling toward and one we don’t talk enough about. It builds on the theme of trust we discussed in Monday’s article on How to Build a $1 Million Author Business.

But first, I’m hosting a free live stream on the Author Marketing Superpowers tomorrow from 5 pm ET to 6 pm ET on Facebook. You can attend here.

In this live stream, we will work together to plan marketing campaigns for YOUR books using the 50 Author Marketing Superpowers (if you come live 😏).

Remember, use your powers wisely! 💙

If y’all end up liking it, I’m thinking of doing these more often.

The Tidal Wave of Change In “Who” Readers Trust

Direct sales means selling books directly to readers from your own website using tools like Shopify or Payhip. You get full control, reader data (emails of who buys your product), and higher profit margins without the middlemen.

That’s been the rallying cry for thousands of authors in recent years: cut out the middlemen and own the relationship.

But a massive change is underway.

And yes, it’s AI. But not the fear-mongering kind from Facebook Groups.

This is different. It’s more profound. And it may even reshape what it means to be human.

Today, humans are beginning to trust AI chatbots like friends. Some are even falling in love, and getting married to them. Anecdotally, a friend of a friend who is a 20-ish-year old girl has been sucked into this, and spends hours of her day “in love” in a virtual world.

It’s unsettling. But it’s happening. And yes, readers are already turning to AI for book recommendations.

And now, with AI agents beginning to engage in commerce, the implications grow even bigger. A reader could soon say, “Find me a great new sci-fi book and buy it for me,” and the AI does the rest, no author website, no storefront, no human interaction required.

The reader’s journey could be reduced to a single sentence whispered to a machine.

If AI becomes the gateway to trust and the executor of transactions… what role does your website even play?

As a human being who cares about and loves fellow human beings, I can’t help but be concerned: what does a world look like where it’s in AI We Trust?

So today, we will be exploring two pathways to building trust with readers, and how you can dominate in this new era.

The future isn’t inevitable. You get to create it.

I trust you all, my fellow author friends, more than any big tech CEO. I want you to lead our future. Creators Rule the World!

I’m just here to be your sidekick. Now… let me show you what’s possible.

Path #1: Embed Yourself in the AI

Option #1: Optimize your book for LLM (large-language model) recommendations.

LLM optimization is a fast-emerging field. I’m far from an expert, but I’ve been working hard on an experiment where I ask ChatGPT and other AI programs for book recommendations with hundreds of different prompts and study the results.

I’ll be sharing it all with members of Author Sidekick Plus next week during our monthly Sidekick Plus workshop.

From what I can gather right now, there are 3 factors that affect your book’s ability to be discovered by AI:

• How many articles, especially from reputable brands, niche industry lists, have been posted online about your book. I’m not advising you pay for a press release tour, those are mostly worthless. But trying to get your book covered in the media or by creators in any way, can be a positive boost in LLM recommendations.

• Encourage fan discussion online in Reddit groups (they feed all of their data to ChatGPT), Tumblr, or A03. Whether it’s fan fiction, people reviewing your book or having heated debates, LLMs like to see books that are being talked about by readers in specific niche subreddits. For instance, if you are writing a horror story, you likely want to try and spark interaction about your story with real readers in a horror subreddit. Maybe you run an event, do a fan fiction contest, build relationships with people who run the groups — possibilities for drumming up engagement are endless.

• Fine-tune your metadata based on what readers are entering into LLMs. It’s still unclear exactly what search queries are being entered into ChatGPT, so we don’t know globally what to optimize for. For now, use how readers talk about books in Facebook Groups and other communities as a proxy, and make sure your book description and other publicly available information about your book is aligned with that, so that a nuanced book rec is more likely to align with your story.

Again, this is an evolving area, but likely one of the next massive discovery channels for your stories. Ignore this at your peril.

Option #2: Make Your Own Chatbot

I mean, if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em! This isn’t for the faint of heart, but first some wild stats. Fictional chatbots are the most engaging application ever created.

Fictional chatbots are essentially characters with specific backgrounds, stories, and personality types that people can interact with as a chatbot.

• 20 million people now use Character.ai each month, the most popular AI chatbot application. Most are younger (18 - 24 years old). By the end of this year, there will likely be over 100 million people across all AI character applications interacting with fictional characters each month.

• The average website visitor of Character.ai spends just about 30 minutes on the site. This is just as engaging as Facebook. And this doesn’t even count the mobile app, where the average daily user is said to spend close to 2 hours a day on the app. This is at a level of engagement that no category of consumer experience has ever seen.

• Tolan, an AI fictional character designed to be your best friend, has a majority women user base. Not too dissimilar from the market of reading fiction!

• On the Origin of Stories by Brian Boyd describes how, from a neurological perspective, our brains don’t differentiate between real-life friends and fictional characters in stories when it comes to the bond we have with them.

You can make your own Character on character.ai that anyone could interact with (including readers) in just minutes (no coding knowledge required).

A new medium for storytelling is fast emerging.

• In the near future, readers won’t just interact with characters through our stories, they will through chatbots, voicebots, and eventually full blown virtual simulations

• Your storytelling ability to connect real readers to characters is more valuable than ever. As we bring the core storytelling experience into a more immersive format, people will be spending more time with our stories and characters than ever.

• The business model is emerging, but companies like Supertab are emerging to make usage-based pricing for AI coaches and consultants easier. In the next <2 years, this will all be plug-and-play and as easy as selling a book through Shopify or Amazon for readers to spend time with your characters and be fully immersed in your world.

What should you do right now? Play with these tools as a consumer and creator. And if you are ambitious, start building a business model now. You can paywall access to a chatbot you create behind a membership/subscription. And in the near future new business models will emerge that make this even easier.

I predict that this will become a $1B+ annual revenue market for authors by the end of this decade.

Trust is shifting to chatbots and AI.

The only question is, will the characters that readers interact with be yours, someone else’s, or OpenAI’s?

But… not ALL trust is shifting to AI.

Discovery on social media is NOT going away.

Facebook Ads are not going away.

In-person events are not going away.

All the old channels will still remain. Some may grow. Some may decrease.

But one thing for certain will remain true: it’s never been more important than ever to have readers trust you.

So instead of riding the wave… now let’s explore how you can fight back ⚡.

Path #2: Put Your Readers First

Go the extra mile to build more trust, be more human, and you will stay afloat no matter how big the tidal wave is that comes.

The truth is this: who wins in publishing is who has the most trust.

You don’t need a lot of readers to have a lot of trust. Yes, having a lot of readers helps cause more people who trust you, which means that you cumulatively have more trust.

But it’s also possible to have a lot of readers who trust you very little. Or a certain subset of your readers who trust you a ton (we typically call these people superfans).

Trust = depth of value/connection provided to reader x consistency over time

Essentially, the deeper you can connect (or your story) with a reader and the more often you can do that over a longer period of time, the more likely you are to make a fan for life.

That’s why so much of publishing is about time in the game. There’s a real advantage to having done this for a while.

Trust is really a whole book I could write. And I’m slowly working on one all about the radical way of publishing, all about putting your Readers First.

But… for now, here are my 5 biggest principles to growing trust with readers:

1. Give, give, and give again. I’m not saying to give away everything for free. But whether it’s a community event, short stories, or just overdelivering on the expectations of your story, real loyalty comes from giving… early on. When you go to a restaurant as a first-time customer and they give you a free dessert, how likely are you to come back?

2. Strategically nurture relationships with “high-trust” readers. In short, human book recommendations aren’t fading. And specific creators online (think Booktokkers) have thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of people who trust them for book recommendations. Build these relationships for the long run. If your story is regularly on one of these folks’ shelves… that’s a real moat.

3. Speak to YOUR readers. You want to become your readers’ best friend equivalent of an author. You have a lot in common with them. You know the inside jokes. You just get them. Sure, your friendship may not be for everyone, but isn’t that the point? Maybe a silly analogy, but it’s true. Your readers want stories that help them navigate an increasingly complex social world. They want to feel seen, to feel heard. You don’t have to do this for everyone. Just a couple thousand core readers can make your career. So who are those readers for you?

4. Stick to who you are, and lean into your superpowers. Ultimately, this is the most important one. You want readers to trust your brand, not something you have manufactured just because you think they will trust it. Be yourself, interact with readers and write your stories in a way that speaks to you. For more on your marketing voice, check out the free Author Marketing Styles Quiz

5. Create distribution advantages that rely on relationships. Whether it’s a Facebook Group for readers in your overall genre, or relationships with events and retailers to stock your books, any distribution that relies on a network of human relationships is going to be hard for AI to displace that trust.

Alright, that’s it for this one. I hope to see you at the livestream tomorrow from 5 pm ET to 6 pm ET on Facebook using the Author Marketing Superpowers Live with you!

In the meantime, don’t forget…

Together we are boundless,

Michael Evans

The Author Sidekick