I’m going to Author Nation this year, and the founder and driving force behind one of the biggest writing conferences in the world talks about WHY this event can’t be missed if you are looking to take your author career to another level.
PREFER to 👀? LINK TO YOUTUBE INTERVIEW
PS. There was so much good info! Part two will drop next week.
AF: What makes Author Nation different from other conferences?
JS: Having been in this industry for 10 years now, and seeing how it’s changed and what’s going on, and understanding how it works — we’re really trying to create a place where two things happen:
* One, we’re actually being forward-thinking and proactive and changing how the industry will work. If you’re not happy with how things are, change ’em.
* But also being realistic about how difficult it is, especially if you’re striving toward earning a living as an author. Once you understand how difficult that is, what can you do to change the probabilities?
We’ve never been the kind of group that says:
“Oh yeah, come and buy our magic beans and you’re just gonna have success and it’ll be wonderful.”
That’s not the truth.
But what we can do is look at how things work and say, okay, what are the main failure points in author businesses? Then either educate you to go around those points or do things as a community to stack advantages toward our community.
That’s how I think and how we’re approaching the show, and why it’s structurally different than other events. It really is kind of a system.
AF: So, having raw talent isn’t enough to be successful in the author world?
JS: Talent’s the floor, assuming it’s a good product, because bad products won’t sell no matter what. It really is luck, and there are so many factors you can’t control when it comes to algorithms and word of mouth.
And then we complicate it further by having situations where people say, “Well, this is what I did, and you do the same thing, you can be successful.”
I’m not saying those authors are lying, they do honestly believe that their success is repeatable. That’s survivor bias. But there are too many factors that can’t be controlled.
AF: So what should authors take away from that?
JS: Don’t beat yourself up because you’re in that fat tail, (Authorial note: Joe explains the Power Law Curve in our talk, and most authors are in the big tail and not the tall head of success.)
Understand that what gets you to move from the average result to an above-average result isn’t your average cost of advertising, or how much you spend on marketing, as more often than not it’s a threshold event driven by your audience that you’ve built.
AF: And what creates that threshold event?
JS: It has more to do with a rinse-and-repeat cycle. The more you launch your books on Amazon, the more that you go to live events, the more that you do whatever it is that you’re deciding to build your brand around.
(Authorial note: then I asked Joe Solari about a podcast episode I heard him on.. Self-Publishing with ALLi - Why Recipes for Publishing Success Dont Work. This is what he dives into next.)
And this gets us to the artificial cultural market study. I think we should all be talking about it all the time. It demonstrated that if you took the same books on Amazon and took them to a parallel universe, it would come up with a different number one book right now.
It’s about how the audience interacts with that data set. It has more to do with word of mouth and what’s driving a popularity market.
I’ve seen a lot of times where authors will huddle up and try to case-study a successful author. What if we did all these things? What if we imitated the writing style, cover, whatever?
We’re all gonna make covers like her now and we’re all gonna write psychological thrillers.
But her success will lift the whole genre and may make some other people lift up, but it’s not like her audience sees your book, if it looked identical and was written similarly, as an equal substitute. It’s not like one pound of sugar is equal to another pound of sugar.
It has more to do with the audience’s personal connection with those brands and the story world and the characters.
AF: You mentioned Matt Dinniman and the wild success of Dungeon Crawler Carl. What did he do that made such a difference?
JS: It was a long time before those books took off. A lot of people were not willing to do the things that Matt was doing.
He went to a lot of live events. He was going to things like Dragon Con, but also anytime he would go anywhere that he traveled, he would do local book events. He would call up an independent bookstore and say, “Hey, I’d like to host some of my fans.” Maybe in the beginning, two to five people would show up.
But he would keep doing it. And doing it. And doing it.
Now he’s massive. Live Nation is running his events because they’ve gotten so big. But here is an example of how he goes the extra mile: They canceled his New York event, and he got on Facebook and his group and said, “Well, I’m here in New York and I know there was snow and they canceled the event, but I’m gonna hang out at this bar, whatever day, from two to five. Meet you there.”
Now he didn’t have to do that, but he understands.
AF: Does this lead into why it was important to create Reader Nation as a part of Author Nation?
(Authorial note: On the last day of the conference, there is an enormous mass signing event on the Saturday, where fans can come and buy books and get them signed.)
JS: One of the things we’ve invested heavily in and are focused on is the sister event, Reader Nation, which is a live signing event.
People have asked, “Well, why are you doing this?” There’s kind of this disconnect. “Well, I thought this was about authors networking and authors learning about business.”
Yes, it is.
Our approach is, how do we make this thing the most effective event possible? Our hope is that over time many authors will come to our show, they’ll get that first part, which is the author education and the networking and all that cool stuff, and then they’ll stick around and participate in the live event, and they’ll come home not only with their head full of information, but they’ll have paid for their trip through selling books.
(Authorial note: Is this not genius? But I’m still terrified of live selling. Maybe next year…)
AF: You’ve changed your thinking about where book sales are going. How so?
JS: If you asked me five years ago where book sales were going, I would’ve pointed you at things like direct sales. I was an early adopter of stuff like using Shopify and Kickstarter.
But then what I observed is there’s this really crazy thing going on in the world, and that is that new readers, younger readers, are coming into the marketplace buying physical books at live events.
AS PART OF THE AUTHOR NATION KICKSTARTER COHORT, I’M RUNNING A KICKSTARTER NEXT MONTH! SIGN UP TO BE NOTIFIED.
AF: One of the practical things that interested me most was your print-on-demand system for the event.
JS: My wife Suze and I are the owners of the show. This is how we do stuff. We are creative people, we love solving problems.
The value is created between what I call the reader-writer relationship. If there’s not a writer creating story and there’s not a reader who’s prepared to give some money up for that story, it doesn’t matter—Amazon, us, the whole thing collapses. That’s the keystone relationship. The symbiotic relationship that drives everything.
Our event lets writers sell directly to readers. But they need their books.
(Authorial note: I told Joe that I can’t even imagine hauling all my books to sell on a plane, paying for the extra baggage… etc.)
All those people have to get the books there. That’s a problem for you as an author, especially if you’re coming from out of the country. And the hotel is not really thrilled with thousands of boxes showing up from Amazon.
So once we knew we had the store and were going to have to collect taxes, the next thing was to open our store up earlier so you’re not just selling books on the day, you’re selling books weeks ahead of time. The orders come in and get delivered to one place.
We look at all of the orders that come in ahead of time and we get those printed.
The whole idea is solving problems. That’s how we add value to this whole community.
Joe blew my mind with this interview. He graciously spoke to me for over an hour! Part Two dives more into how an author (like myself) can get the maximum out of her first journey to AUTHOR NATION.
It’s this November.
If you’re going, drop a comment and let me know!
