The Great Lie of Book Sales
✏️ Reader Hourglass > Funnels✏️
If your goal is to sell books, then your publishing business may quietly be breaking.
Thinking of our marketing as a funnel that starts with capturing reader attention and ends with getting a book sale is toxic as f*ck. And no… not because of any slimy/shady sales tactics.
It’s because thinking of your marketing as a funnel is missing HALF the picture… and it’s that second part of the reader journey that makes all the difference.
But before I share with you the missing second half of this picture that will have you rethink your entire book marketing strategy… I need to share a quick-ish update.
Creatorwood is in Beta. And I’m psyched out of my mind.
For those that don’t know, Creatorwood turns books, scripts, and written stories into movies & shows with the Movie Machine in less than a day, AND is a streaming platform that allows indie storytellers to upload your films, sell directly to your audience, and keep 80% of your revenue.
I wrote a free book all about it here.
It’s by a factor of at least 10x the biggest, most innovative, and wild thing I have ever worked on.
Last week, we launched it to a small beta group of 100 storytellers. We are deep in testing, working out the kinks, improving the AI, and improving the design.
I expect a more public launch sometime around mid-September.
In the meantime, you can watch me give a tour of the Movie Machine HERE 👇
It feels SO good to be back in the creator platform game.
Those who have followed my story closely over the last 3 years will know this is not my first rodeo. My mission has always been to help Storytellers Rule the World.
This is the next chapter… and I’m so incredibly pumped. Big life changes for me and changes to this industry are coming imminently.
I’ll save my bold changes to this industry for another article… but for now, I’ll share that next week I’m moving out to San Francisco to work in-person with my co-founder on Creatorwood. And we are gearing up to hire a second full-time team member to help us behind the scenes.
I will also be sharing an update on Reader Meter in the next couple of weeks (yes, that is still happening, but nearly all my time and energy is going into Creatorwood).
I’m so grateful for you all. It’s been one hell of a journey, but I’m so excited for this next chapter. It feels like every 90 days, life speeds up by a ton. And these next 90 days… are going to be the most insane of my life yet – and may just kick off one of the defining chapters in the history of storytelling (now everyone can make a movie or show… no camera, crew, or big budget needed).
Okay… now… back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Why Hourglasses > Funnels
Let me cut to the chase: our entire publishing ecosystem is optimizing for the wrong thing.
What is that exactly?
Book sales.
This is the moment you likely think I’ve gone psycho.
“Michael, that’s the entire point of a book business. We sell books.”
Well, yes??? But only kind of.
Optimizing for book sales is like a Big Mega Corporation optimizing for quarterly profit while damaging society and the environment in the long run. If they were optimizing for MORE than just short-term profit, they would likely realize that they would make MORE PROFIT in the long run if they made different decisions today.
The problem with profit over the long run?
It’s uncertain and hard to measure.
We are more likely to take the short-term cash, whether it’s a bad deal from an audiobook publisher or getting a quick dopamine hit by devoting all our efforts to that next $0.99 sale.
But what if we had a way to measure what would yield us the most long-term profit as indie authors?
I can guarantee you this… the measure would not be getting more book sales. It would be getting readers who are highly probable to buy books from you over and over, and over again, into your ecosystem and build trust with them.
And this is why marketing funnels are so toxic.
They make us think that the goal of marketing is to get a sale. That the process of marketing ends with the sale.
But in reality… the sale is just the beginning.
Reference above this handy, dandy little graphic.
It’s a sideways hourglass. Or, one may even see it as two funnels jammed together.
It represents a fundamental, yet powerful truth in the publishing business.
The Great Lie? That selling books is the goal of our business.
The Hourglass shows us something else. The moment someone buys a story from us, our actual goal is to get them to buy more and more stories from us and purchase more expensive products and experiences from us.
You aren’t optimizing for buyers. You are optimizing for super-buyers.
This insight changes everything about how we do our marketing:
What systems do you have in place to help readers purchase more from you? Do you have only books available for sale or do you go beyond the book to expand your hourglass even more? (hint… that’s what my podcast is all about… just check out this episode here)
How do you identify readers who are more likely to purchase more from you? Is there a specific moment in the reader journey that drastically increases this probability? This is one of my marketing wet dreams: can we feed Meta Ads and other ad platforms data not on point of sale conversions but conversion events triggered deep in the reader journey when someone gets to a specific chapter, etc. I’d be way more likely to pay more to acquire a customer that gets past chapter X in my story if it means that my average read-through rate and profit go up. This kind of stuff with data is what we are building into Creatorwood and exactly what I’m passionate about giving authors insights into with Reader Meter.
What does “reader success” look like in your business? How do you help someone post-purchase to make the most of their reading experience? This is huge for direct authors with post-purchase email flows… not something feasible on retailers… womp, womp.
Okay… so why do all of these questions matter?
Because… the more you get customers to pay for your stories over time, the wider the base of your hourglass. And the wider the base of your hourglass, the more readers you can afford to bring through the top of it (because the more money you make on average per reader, the more effort you can put into acquiring them, therefore the more of them you will reach!).
This blew my mind when I connected these dots.
It’s midnight as I write this. I should be insanely exhausted after our first few days of beta at Creatorwood, but I can literally feel the adrenaline coursing through my veins as I think about the implications of this simple, but powerful reframe for book marketing.
I hope it’s as powerful for you as it is for me. And… I hope it’s refreshing! After all, most people are playing the wrong game. Instead, I want you to play the long game with your storytelling business.
If you want to see me dive more into this Hourglass v.s. Funnels conversation, you can watch this free workshop I did for the Authortube Writing Conference on the 5 Reader Secrets.
I’ll be back soon with another epiosde of the Beyond the Book Podcast.
In the meantime, don’t forget…
Together we are boundless,
Michael Evans
P.S. If you want to get early access to Creatorwood, you can join the waitlist to get into the next wave of beta here. It’s a pretty good way to have your readers pay more for your stories over time as you can turn each one of your books into a show or movie with ease 😉.