The Wall Street of Words

✏️ The 3 Laws of Attention Markets ✏️

I have a confession to make 🫢. I’m an attention engineer. Following are my confessions… the secrets I’ve learned… as an attention engineer for myself, everyday creators, and the largest social media brand on the planet.

By the end… you’ll know how to engineer attention in your favor more efficiently and powerfully using tactics from top investors on Wall Street.

First, I know I haven’t posted a Beyond the Book episode in a while! I have 6 episodes to release and am working on getting them out (and building a team to help me do so).

The reason for the break is simple: sometimes you have to go slow to go fast.

I had a big reflection at the end of my first 90 days back in the industry. My conclusion:

• Despite progress faster than I imagined, I’m not moving fast enough

• Despite doing lots to bring storytelling forward, I’m not taking big enough bets

• Despite working as hard as I can, I need to work with the best people I can imagine to keep moving forward faster, better, and stronger

To remedy this, I’ve been setting up the foundations of a new technology platform to help authors go beyond the book.

I’ll still be doing Reader Meter, but I’m also now working with some of my friends from Harvard to do something to expand indie storytelling into a brand new frontier.

It’s my biggest and most innovative bet yet (time to have creators take control of Hollywood).

More will come in the following months on that… but for now… back to our regularly scheduled programming.

And one note on making the impossible possible. So much power is unlocked when you adopt a high agency mindset. I highly recommend reading this article.

It might take a while for it to sink in, but everyone in my life whom I’ve compelled to follow a similar path has completely changed everything within years. I’ve now been instilling this same mindset in my closest author friends through Readers First, and it’s just so insane to see the results.

It’s unbelievable how much you are capable of. Focus on first principles. Create a vision big enough for other people to live inside. And just freaking go for it. I believe in you.

Now time for another edition of the Author Sidekick ✏️

The Wall Street of Words 🏦

Earlier this week, I was hanging out with my friend who runs a quantum computing hedge fund. A lot of my friends work in finance (either private equity or investment banking).

Ew gross. Finance bros (and gals too!).

I get it. I get it. But do we seriously think that, as authors, we have nothing to learn from one of the biggest industries on the planet, full of some of the most brilliant minds?

When I’m chatting with my friends, we often talk about the similarities between the creator economy and the world of finance.

For me, one concept has completely changed my view of publishing and allowed me to understand why some stories sink and others rise to the top of the charts.

Attention Markets = are ecosystems where people’s attention is the primary scarce resource being competed for, bought, sold, or exchanged.

In these markets, creators, brands, platforms, and advertisers all act like traders or investors, trying to acquire, hold, and convert attention into value (money, influence, or impact).

The Subprime Attention Crisis is an incredible book that highlights the dangers and opportunities in this parallel. The truth is, we have designed media explicitly to act like a financial market, commoditizing attention and user connection.

I spend a lot of my time thinking about how we can bring more agency, individuality, and ultimately humanity into our ecosystem. But I also spend just as much time thinking about how as individual creators we can win in attention markets.

This insight inspired me to add this superpower to the 50 Author Marketing Superpowers Card Deck:

In short, Author Investors are like buy-and-hold investors in the S&P 500. You build a portfolio by consistently publishing stories for a specific audience. You ride out the ups and downs, and over time, your advantages compound as you reinvest your gains, like growing readership that feeds into each new launch.

On the other hand, Author Day Traders are like stock traders. They place bets on emerging trends and take advantage of gaps in the market. They move fast, find what’s hot, and publish before the rest of the market catches on.

My take? Learn both. Use the long-term mindset of an Author Investor to build sustainable momentum, and the short-term tactics of a Day Trader to accelerate growth.

But here’s where it gets even more interesting. This is just the foundation.

What really changed the game for me was discovering the 3 Laws of Attention Markets. These are core principles that every great investor, publisher, and creator follows, whether they realize it or not.

Once you understand them, you’ll start seeing your publishing strategy through a new lens. You’ll know exactly where to put your creative energy and how to turn both short-term spikes and long-term effort into meaningful results.

The 3 Laws of Attention Markets

Folks who understand these laws and utilize them powerfully are what I call Attention Engineers. I won’t be surprised if this becomes a job title at companies in the near future 😆.

#1: Insider Trading is how you get an edge on where Attention Markets are headed. And guess what? It’s legal!

Insider Trading is when someone has non-public, material information about a company and makes investment decisions based on that. In America, this is illegal unless you are a member of Congress.

Unlike the Stock Market, insider trading in attention markets is completely legal.

What does this look like in practice?

It means having an insider track on reader desires, ad formats, or trends, before they have been widely distributed to the public.

Essentially, you can win by investing in these trends early, first, and in a unique way. Story Gap is a related concept. You can read more on that here.

Sometimes this information is obvious: it’s a specific page flip trend on TikTok that you catch onto early and know that you can create videos based on it before a ton of authors catch on.

Maybe it’s understanding how to use AI tools to more cheaply translate your books, allowing you to dominate foreign markets with less competition.

As with all insider trading, this advantage is not permanent. Eventually, the public catches up, the supply of content matches demand, and there is no extra advantage in investing in a specific area of an attention market. But for those who are early, rewards can be large.

So… how can you acquire insider information on where publishing is going?

• Have a close group of author friends that you regularly meet and trade notes with.

• Utilize your unique Author-Market Fit. What genres, reader preferences, and more do you have special insight into due to your own experience? Leverage this!

• Pay attention to what readers and authors post online. Notice when someone has a unique insight or novel strategy they have used, and ask yourself why it worked. Sometimes it’s a fluke, sometimes it’s because they actually are onto something before others are.

I can’t promise any insider information on the publishing market, but I can promise you that if you go to a conference like Author Nation (which I will be in attendance at and even renting a Barbie House to host a mastermind… not a joke) you will meet folks and have small conversations in the hallways that give you a real edge.

#2: Seeing patterns that others don’t in data allows you to make better storytelling and marketing decisions. This can lead to exponentially better returns.

In financial markets, quantitative traders develop algorithms to detect where they can get an edge in the market. Then they use various forms of options to exploit that edge, turning a tiny insight into a large gain.

Authorship isn’t that much different.

Every attention market has asymmetrical returns. Small improvements in your story’s retention rate, conversion rate, or positioning can lead to exponential increases in sales. As an example, a TikTok video with 80% retention versus 70% retention won’t perform 10% better. Oftentimes, it performs 10x better.

The same goes for paid advertising—an ad with a 3% click-through rate instead of 2% can deliver a significantly better return, because it allows you to scale your budget more profitably.

So, how can you use data better than others to optimize your story and marketing?

Step #1: Identify what marketing activities you are doing and track their performance. What Facebook Ads are getting the highest CTR? What newsletter headlines yield the highest open rate and CTR? What TikTok posts get the most views and what was your retention on each video? All of these analytics are available to everyone using these platforms for free.

Step #2: After documenting, now think about why your current marketing performance is what it is. Why did a certain ad perform much better than others? Why did 50% of your audience stop watching your TikTok after 5 seconds?

Step #3: Lastly, based on your hypothesis of how you can improve your performance, now take an action to make that improvement!

So many of us just do the same sh*t every week. Rinse and repeat our content schedule. Jam out some boring templated post from Canva. I mean, that’s cool… I guess. But if your marketing is not getting you the results you want, you need to look at the data (aka your performance) and try to find where your alpha can be.

Great investors don’t keep investing time in a losing stock. Are you doing that with your author business?

P.S. I’m building a fun tool to make this entire process easier called AuthorHub.

#3: There are hacks that allow you to leverage new or underutilized platform features to grow faster.

I call this growth hacking. An old maxim I learned when I was working as a full-time strategist for MrBeast is that growth hacking is 50% of the battle when it comes to gaining an audience. Is it really 50%? Maybe not… but it can certainly be a bigger factor than most realize.

I’ve spent literally dozens of hours dreaming up platform exploits and growth hacks. Some work tremendously well… some less so.

But they all have the same principle.

There’s a little-known platform feature that few people care about, but if you use it, you can grow faster.

Examples include:

• Instagram Reels Trials feature

• Recycling old short-form video content after 6 - 12 months

• Language localization on social platforms (YouTube has the most advanced feature set here, but you can set up local profiles on any platform)

Every platform has its own exploits if you look deep enough. It’s about experimenting and doing everything you can to gain a little advantage where everyone isn’t looking.

In the world of finance, this most commonly happens with firms like Citadel buying order-flow from trading apps like Robinhood. They then make money off buying or selling the stocks for several pennies extra compared to what investors on Robinhood are getting. Shaving a little profit off the top… but at scale, it leads to billions of dollars.

We can’t all be Citadel. But we can all look at the little features of platforms and the attention markets they capture to grow faster. And that’s why we call it growth hacking.

And that’s it for this one!

I’ll be back with more podcasts, a free Marketing Styles quiz (finally publicly launching soon… I’ve been busy perfecting it), and some other fun stuff to help you sell more books!

In the meantime, don’t forget…

Together we are boundless,

Michael Evans

The Author Sidekick