Today I’m going to cover a recap of my experience at the Ream Stories subscription summit, which I just attended in Boston. I had a tremendous time. If you ever get the opportunity to go to a Ream Stories event, I highly recommend it. They are a very talented team and it was a great event and I want to talk a little bit about what I learned while I was there.
I’ve been wrestling over the direction that I’m going and what my strategy should be for a while now, and I’ve been having some trouble figuring it out, but I feel like I have come away from this event with a tremendous amount of clarity, and that’s one of the best feelings ever. I just, I really needed that, and so yeah, the subscription summit delivered in spades.
First of all, like I said, it was just a fantastic event. It was a great time getting to know new people, meeting people that I had run into in the industry and never really had time to chat with. Getting to chat with them, that was fantastic. Like I said, I came away with clarity, a ton of new ideas for what I kind of want to do from a career perspective.
I wanted to give sort of a brief overview. The amount of stuff that I learned filled up many pages of notes, and so I can’t really unpack all of that for you in this video, but I wanted to sort of highlight a couple of things.
The first is that there was a surprising cohesion in all of the people who spoke. I did have the privilege of presenting at this event, and I think everybody was kind of surprised to realize that most of the people presenting presented about the same sort of thing, and it was all around sort of this core idea of the super fan, that cultivating a super fan or somebody who is really invested in your worlds and your work is worth more than selling to dozens of other people. As authors, what we should be trying to do is write books that attract superfans, and if we can do that, that’s going to give us the best chance of succeeding as an author, the highest amount of longevity.
The second big takeaway was that focusing on reader experience is always the right move. My big takeaway is that I have books that people like, and I have the beginnings of community, but I’d really love to be able to deliver a better reader experience, because while I am a writer, in my heart, I’m really a reader, and I wish that other authors had given me a better reader experience. I wish that there had been more for me to interact with around the stories that I loved, and so I’ve started to think about that, and started to plan for how I can do that, how I can deliver a better reader experience.
Finally, the third big takeaway is that perspective is everything. There were people there from all stages of their careers, all different levels as authors and perspective authors, and it was really good to interact with all of those people, but one of the most important things was just that perspective really matters. You can be someone who sells a lot of books, and if your perspective isn’t good, you’re going to have a miserable time of it, and you can be someone who has not yet sold any books, and if your perspective is good, you can be having a great time, and I think that is just a really important takeaway, that cultivating the proper perspective on this whole thing is one of the most important things you can do.
There was a specific quote that has been rattling around in my head that I hope to use to drive my actions moving forward.
“People don’t want to be notified. They want to be noticed.”
When I heard that, it was like a gut punch because I cannot tell you how much I resonate with that. I definitely like engaging with people, but so often, I find myself growing frustrated with social interactions online, and it’s because I realized after hearing this that it’s because I feel like there’s a cheapness to it. But I was also able to see an example of someone, Chris Hopper, who is an author who is fully present whenever he interacts with other people, and I saw that, and I was like, man, that is what I want to do.
That’s what I want to be, right? I want to be the kind of person, not even as an author, just as a person who notices people because I remember so many times in so many different situations feeling like I was invisible, feeling like I wasn’t being noticed, and that’s hard. It’s really hard to be in that place.
So anyway, I’ve come away from this subscription summit with just a lot of good information and sort of a new lease on understanding how I want to interact with people, not only around my world, but just in general. I want to notice people. I want to be present, and I want to treat people with the attention and respect that they deserve, so that’s what I took away from the summit. Like I said, if you ever get the opportunity to go to a summit of your own or any event put on by Reading Stories, you should definitely do it.
YouTube Video Link: https://youtu.be/PFmLyjW7m8Y
Thanks for reading and watching.
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