Creator Economy for Authors: New Age of Publishing, #2

By Michael Evans

This is a story about the revolution coming for the world of publishing. A revolution that is already here.

 

We call it the creator economy.

 

It's a shift in power from platforms and retailers to communities owned and led by authors.

 

If the internet made distribution limitless, the creator economy makes creation boundless.

 

It's a wave of opportunity that will enable more creative people than ever to make a living and more creative visions to be realized than ever before.

 

But it will also disrupt the business models and industry we all thought we knew.

Here's what we will learn together on this adventure in Creator Economy for Authors:

1. Diversify your revenue streams beyond traditional book formats and increase the profit from your publishing business.
2. Increase your channels for reader discovery past the expenses and stress of advertising and into the world of creator platforms.
3. Get ahead of future trends in technology and publishing changing our industry forever.

After writing a dozen sci-fi thriller novels and co-founding a creator economy publishing platform helping authors make hundreds of thousands of dollars per year while a student at Harvard, Michael Evans is sharing the inside scoop on the future of publishing... and how you can succeed as an author in it.

 

Praise for Creator Economy for Authors:

 

"Fantastic book! You're such a great writer. It flowed so well." - J. Thorn, best-selling author and co-author of multiple nonfiction books with Joanna Penn

 

"Okay—I LOVED your book." Monica Leonelle, USA Today best-selling author and author of 15+ nonfiction books for authors

 

"It is a book I would want to gift to people who have written their second book and want to move from hobby-author to writing for a living (or at least an income of sorts!). It's a dangerous book that will be unrivaled in its field - due to your amazing honesty." - Joy Vee, best-selling children's book author

 

"LOVED IT. It's so freaking timely." — Cassie Alexander, best-selling paranormal romance author

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ream Press
• Release date: Jun 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9781949458244

Michael Evans

Michael Evans is the author of the Control Freakz Series, a Young Adult Post-Apocalyptic Thriller series set in a near-future United States. He is currently attending high school in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, but he is originally from Long Island, New York. Some of his hobbies include hiking, running, camping, going to the beach, watching and taking artsy pictures of sunsets (it’s honestly a very enlightening activity to partake in), and walking his ginormous, fluffy golden doodle underneath the stars. He is also fascinated with the environment and neuroscience, and his true passion is learning about how the wonders of the human mind and the environment we live in will change with time. The future, specifically his goal of helping to impact the future of humanity positively is what drives him to tell stories. Writing is something that is instinctive to him, and he seeks to express his thoughts on his own life and the world to inspire others to use the power in the voice they have to advocate for positive changes in their own lives and the world we all live in.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION: A CALL TO AUTHOR CREATOR ADVENTURE

This is a story about the revolution coming for the world of publishing. A revolution that is already here.

This movement is what we call the creator economy. At its core it’s a shift in power away from monolithic platforms to small, meaningful digital communities that are owned and led by creators.

In the world of the creator economy, Amazon and other retailers can be great as a top of funnel. But, if authors aren’t focusing on building more and more of their relationship and business with their audience off Amazon, I worry about that strategy in the long run, for a host of reasons which this book will cover in detail.

The end goal must be for authors to give themselves the power and leverage. And the only way to do this is by building a home and deep relationship with your readers. Thus, this book seeks to give you the insights you need to build an author business in the creator economy. Specifically, my three main goals are that by the time you are done with this book:

You will have the insights to diversify your revenue streams beyond selling eBooks, print books, and audiobooks and increase the profit from your publishing business.

You will have the ability to diversify your channels for reader discovery, expanding beyond the expenses and stress of advertising and eBook retailers and into the world of creator platforms. As a result, it is my goal that you not only can have more readers due to greater discoverability but deeper relationships by utilizing the power of building a reader community.

You will have a deep awareness of future trends in technology and publishing that are impacting our industry, and an awareness of the author creator mindset and core reader psychology that will guide you forward toward building the author career of your dreams.

If this sounds like an exciting journey to you, then get ready because in this story, you, my writer friend, get to be the hero. You can be a part of not only benefitting from this future but bringing it to life.

This is the creator economy for authors. The beginning of a wave that promises greater opportunity than ever for storytellers. A wave that will enable more authors than ever to make a full-time living creating stories, and enable many more creative people to support, nurture, and build the infrastructure for these modern-day story empires.

The stakes are high. Despite the promises, great perils lie ahead. A network of platforms that prey on our mental health, constantly convincing us we are not good enough. A sea of open possibilities, but one in which creating safe, inclusive digital communities is both a challenge and a necessity. And a future in which machine-learning, big data, and a new breed of creator-tech companies are hitting the stage with bold ambitions to reimagine our industry.

But at the end of the day, your stories are about you. About the world in which you envision. The experiences you connect with, and the readers you want to bring together around the experiences you are creating. And most of all, it’s about living the life you want to live, and empowering your readers to become the heroes in their own lives, taking one step closer to defeating the monsters in their worlds.

I hope this book can serve as a guide to this uncertain future. A rallying cry for our community to work together to imagine and create a future for our industry. And most of all, I hope it gives you insights and actionable steps you can take to bring your dreams to life as an author.

To quote Joanna Penn, host of the Creative Penn Podcast and an outstanding, visionary author, I aim to give you the insights and tools to build Your Creator Economy.

This book is structured in two parts. Following is a breakdown of what you can expect in each chapter. I find it most helpful personally to get the bigger picture first and high-level strategies before diving into specifics about utilizing creator platforms such as TikTok and YouTube for discovery and monetizing with emerging business models such as subscriptions, creator-branded goods, and even things like custom travel guides.

However, if you’d like to skip ahead to Part 2 of this book, which dives into the more actionable steps rather than the ethos, technology and reader behavior trends, and mindset discussed Part 1, then I am here to support you in what serves you best as an author. Here’s your roadmap to this book:

Part 1: The Foundations of an Author Creator

High-level goal: Providing you the mindset that marks your shift from an author to an author creator, and insights that enable you to imagine and strategize your desired business plan as an author in the creator economy.

Chapter 1: What is the Creator Economy?

Goal: Learn the landscape of the creator economy and the unique principles, problems, and life cycle of an author creator’s career.

Chapter 2: A Brief History of Internet Creators and Self-Publishing

Goal: Receive a background on what has made the creator economy of today and insights into the opportunity ahead for us authors.

Chapter 3: The Promise of Creator-Powered Publishing

Goal: In-depth guide to the technological and behavioral changes shaping the future of publishing and how authors can capitalize on them with creator-powered publishing.

Chapter 4: The Oncoming Drought for the Big River

Goal: An analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of Amazon and other retailers, and why it’s essential for authors to build their own spaces online that they have ownership over.

Chapter 5: The Tenets of an Author Creator

Goal: Learn what separates an author from an author creator and the steps we can take to adopt the author creator mindset and capture the immense opportunities of the creator economy ahead of us.

Part 2: Building Your Author Creator Economy

High-level goal: Learn the actionable steps and insights to help propel you from zero to full-time to author creator empire utilizing the tools, platforms, and opportunities of the creator economy.

Chapter 6: The Author Creator Marketing Playbook

Goal: A guide to approaching your overall content creation strategy as an author, ensuring it maximizes the goals for your brand and sets you up for sustainable, long-term success.

Chapter 7: Content Creation for Authors

Goal: An in-depth guide for content creation on all major social platforms for authors.

Chapter 8: How to Build and Monetize Your Community

Goal: A guide to building, managing, and growing a digital community of readers as an author that helps you nurture your casual fans into superfans of your stories.

Chapter 9: Diversifying and Expanding Your Author Income

Goal: A guide to diversifying and increasing your revenue as an author with creator economy business models, including best practices for maximizing each alternative revenue stream.

Chapter 10: Building a Creator-Publishing Future

Goal: Receive insights on how to partner with platforms and technologies aligned with your interests as an author and a final note on why the future for author creators is so bright.

Additional Resources: other books by Michael Evans in the New Age of Publishing Series you can find at, subscriptionsforauthors.com. On this site you will also find a community of fellow author creators, dozens of podcasts and blogs, and other helpful resources.

As you can tell, this is going to be a whirlwind of an adventure, packed with information one every page. Through all of this, the ethos of being an author creator will be central to our story. And if there’s only one thing you walk away with at the end of this, I hope it’s adopting a creator mindset that will enable you to envision brand new opportunities and give you the tools to capitalize on them.

I hope to share with you why this wave of internet publishing is only just beginning. And how the creator economy for authors will exponentially increase opportunities for everyone, both authors making seven figures a year and the future authors to be.

Throughout this book, we will also be covering real examples from successful authors deploying the strategies in this book to make a living from their writing. All of this is to show that the future of publishing is here now and it’s our time to join it. In fact, most of you reading this book probably already are a part of the creator economy without realizing it. The exciting part is realizing just how much opportunity lies ahead and how some of the biggest struggles we face today as authors can be helped by the creator economy.

It took me over five years of endless obsession, spending tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket, and traveling around the world to learn the lessons I share with you in this book. And the realizations I have had about the creator economy have genuinely changed my life as an author, taking me from some of my darkest moments as a creative to the most hopeful and inspired.

My entire life storytelling has been the lifeblood of my being. When I was in elementary school I read a book a day, devouring anything I could get my hands on from the local library. 

When middle school came around, I started to dive deep into YouTube. I found two video creators, Hank and John Green, who often made videos involving technology and the future. From here I discovered my lifelong passion for imagining futures, specifically those that combine everyday people, politics, science, and technology.

After binging hundreds of hours of videos and reading dozens of sci-fi novels, I decided that I wanted to try creating a story of my own. Inspired by Hank and John Green, who are authors themselves, I finished my first book at 13. It was not my best work, just like so many others who wrote a novel in their earlier years. 

But writing this young adult dystopian novel was the most exciting and joyful experience of my life. I had caught the bug. And I couldn’t stop creating stories. By 15, I had written my next two books and gained some confidence in my writing. 

Instinctually, I reached out to a number of agents. Rejections all across the board. To be honest, I didn’t really expect to get a positive response to any of my queries. But what I also didn’t expect to discover was that I didn’t need them to share my work with world.

I was eating dinner with my mom and brother one day when a commercial popped across the television. There was this hybrid publisher, who happened to be located across the street from the apartment complex we lived in. And they talked about this mysterious thing called self-publishing.

Those two words instantly ignited a fire inside of me. I had no idea what it meant to self-publish a book. But I had always been entrepreneurial, itching to start a business of my own. This was my chance.

So, I began listening to Mark Dawson’s Self Publishing Show Podcast, I read Joanna Penn’s books, and I took a course from Sean Platt and the guys at Sterling and Stone. I got a job the day I was legally allowed to work in my state of South Carolina and saved up every penny I made to publish my first book.

Then the day finally came.

I was still so nervous about my writing that telling my friends that I published a book was a monumental feat for me. The first month I sold a little over a dozen copies to family and friends. Then it was crickets.

This didn’t discourage me though. It was the fall of 2017, right when the indie publishing market was beginning to mature. No longer could you post a book onto Amazon and get discovered by readers. You had to market your books, which meant learning not just how to write great books, but learning how to run a great business.

Speed running through the rest of my self-publishing journey, I realized I needed to build a backlist. So I published 9 books before I started marketing my novels. I graduated high school a year early and made a deal with my mom to take a gap year and give my dream of being a full-time writer a go.

I took courses on marketing, I spent thousands upon thousands that I had saved up from my job on Amazon and Facebook ads. I worked 80-90 hours a week, publishing a book a month, and working furiously to make my dream of becoming an author a reality. 

Things started to work. The page reads started to roll in from Kindle Unlimited, over a hundred thousand a month. I was climbing the ranks, close enough to taste the glorious feeling on my lips.

Then college started. I had gotten into Harvard and the pandemic of 2020 had just begun. Inspired by the YouTubers that I had spent my childhood watching, I decided to vlog my life during my first semester of college. In a span of 10 weeks, the channel garnered nearly a million views and I was making more per month in Ad Sense than I was writing books. And instead of writing a book a month, I was working a few hours a week.

Of course, this rapid growth is abnormal. I had timing in my favor, years of YouTube experience from prior channels that I had started and stopped in fits, and hyperfocus on what videos the audience wanted to watch and how to make it as tractable as possible (aka clickable).

This entire experience rocked my world. All I wanted to do was create stories and make a living from it, and all of a sudden that was happening. Yet, I was burnt out and at the crossroads of an identity crisis. I thought I was an author. How come I struggled to break out for years, slowly slogging up the charts with tears, stress, and lots of lost sleep, and YouTube was something I saw success so quickly at?

Beneath the surface, something even more sinister happened. The dopamine hits from the book sales, page reads, and views had turned into a drug for me. I wanted more. And no longer was the next step about following my heart’s desires, it was about catering to algorithms and getting more of those sweet, sweet numbers I had grown attached to.

I decided YouTube was the faster path to that rush I so desperately wanted. I bought a bus with my friend from college and began traveling the country, filming wild videos such as ordering a million rose petals from China to make a massive valentine or kayaking to an island to ask for an internship with Airrack, one of the top YouTubers.

This journey led to me hitting a rock bottom. The views had crashed, I was anxiety-ridden and obsessed. The life of freedom and creativity that had driven me to pursue being an author left me trapped. I was following trends and chained by the metrics a technology platform continually fed me. A platform that seemed programmed to play into my insecurities and make me feel not good enough.

Over the following months, I started live streaming 20 hours a week with a Sean Parker start-up, who is the first President of Facebook. This exclusive deal I signed with them was all because of my experience as both a sci-fi thriller author and YouTuber. This provided me and people I love who I got to bring onto my team, with economic freedom and the ability to explore creatively outside of the rat race of YouTube views or page reads.

I finally took a step back and realized how messed up this entire internet storytelling thing is.

Technology doesn’t feel like it’s in partnership with authors, musicians, and video creators alike. It feels like it has power over us, a power that in many ways is even more sinister than that of the traditional publishers. And despite the immense opportunities internet platforms provide us storytellers, I was unwilling to accept our relegation as a creative class to algorithms, engineers, and corporate profits. 

I knew there had to be something better.

This is when I began to obsess over internet start-ups. Being in college surrounded by brilliant minds, I recruited the smartest people I knew to join my team as co-founders. We wanted to build a meta platform. A place that stored all of a creator’s data, audience, and content. A true home for the creative class on the internet. 

The vision shifted a lot over our 7 months working on the project. We chatted with venture capitalists, I traveled to MIT and Stanford to recruit engineers. And every day I researched and studied creator platforms and the tools and software being built to support a $100 billion industry that was quickly growing.

But something about it all felt empty.

Our vision was inspiring, but it wasn’t something that we actually had a tractable way to bring to life. And I was hungry to get back to my true passion. Creating stories about technology and the future.

So, we put that project to the side. I returned back to college and I started writing again. This time, I wasn’t sure how I wanted to release my writing into the world. My only focus was enjoying the process of letting my creative soul share the stories with the world that it needed to.

It wasn’t optional. I had to write. I need to write. And I always will have to write.

And to me, the most beautiful thing about storytelling is not to just create it for myself and keep it locked in a corner. It’s sharing it with the world and giving others the same feeling it gave me as a kid. The same hope it gave me when I was lost, confused, and not sure why my parents divorced or why we really had to move halfway across the country.

So I explored options for releasing my work into the world. I looked at traditional publishing. This time attending multiple conferences, paying a small fortune to meet with agents and editors and doing incessant research to learn about the industry, the incentives, and the role of authors in it.

I also started studying emerging forms of self-publishing. Various book-tech start-ups had started to recruit me to join their founding teams, and I had an inside view of what some bright minds were envisioning for the future of the publishing industry.

However, it was books again that changed my life even during this period.

And yes, I mean reading books.

I was feeling uncomfortable at so many similarities I had noticed across cultures, business models, and industries when it came to media and how our minds interacted with it. This was something that had troubled me for a long time. It’s what inspired me to found my first start-up, ignited by the events of January 6th in the United States.

When I discovered a number of books about storytelling, human society, and the brain, I found my entire world open up. Specifically, The Story Paradox by Johnathan Gottschall was particularly enlightening — a book about how storytelling built modern civilization and is now threatening to destroy our species. Finally, all the thoughts that I had bouncing around in my head I could see