Today I talk with Evan Gow, creator and developer of the amazing Story Origin App. This website is the one-stop shop for marketing for authors. If you want to join promotions, manage a swap with other authors, have a landing page for beta readers and more, you NEED to check out Story Origin App.
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TRANSCRIPT STARTS HERE:
Kat
Welcome back, everyone, to pencils and lipstick. I am happy to have Evan Gow with me again. It’s been about two years, but Evan Gow is the guy behind Story Origin. App creator, founder, worker. Hey, Evan, how are you doing?
Evan
I’m good. Thank you for having me on.
Kat
It’s been about two years. We sort of did basics in 2021, but I feel like nobody goes back two years ago in podcast. So could you just introduce yourself a little bit to everyone who’s listening?
Evan
Yeah, sure thing. So I’m the indie developer behind Story Origin, as you mentioned. That means I’m the engineering department, the customer support, the marketing department. Everything you either love or hate about Story Origin is my fault.
Kat
So you get all the emails?
Evan
Yeah, I get all of the emails and I respond to all of them. My inbox is always open. Anyone is always welcome to send me an email straight there on the home page of Story Origin. You can pester me. It’s totally fine.
Kat
I had no idea that you were the only guy behind it. That’s insane. My mind is a little bit blown out. Do you ever get a day off? Do you ever take a day off?
Evan
I try to always clear my inbox every single day, but, you know, other other than that, my time is pretty flexible, so I’m very lucky in that regard. But I’m always sort of working on building new features and things as well.
Kat
Yeah, which we’re definitely going to get into.
Evan
Which is why I think a lot of people think that Story Origin is more than just me.
Kat
Yes. Because since 2021, I feel like the left side of the homepage has doubled almost. At least it was two thirds what it was. At least you were very busy during the pandemic. So let’s talk a bit about what Story Origin is. It’s especially for indie authors, I would guess. But could you talk about where the idea came from and what we use it for?
Evan
Yeah, back when I was I used to write short stories in high school, and then I got interested in entrepreneurship and technology in college, and then I eventually wanted to build tools for writers and get back into writing. Quickly the building tools for writers took over 100% of my time, so I never really got into writing stories or anything. But, yeah, I was talking to authors, just asking them, what tools are you using and what do you have troubles with? And they’re like, okay, I use this for delivering my reader magnets. I use this for creating universal book links. I use a different platform for finding reviewers and putting out review copies. I use some combination of Google Forms and Facebook Groups to arrange newsletter swaps. I use maybe a different service or email and Word Docs or Google Docs for doing beta copies. I got a different platform for my website. I was like, okay. Wow. Oh my god, just stop right there.
Kat
Can you tell that indie authors aren’t tech people?
Evan
It actually requires quite a bit of sophistication to keep your mind wrapped around every different tool that you need to use. And all the different spreadsheets they have, right? Those were just the services I was talking about, right? Like, they also had spreadsheets for tracking their word count, spreadsheets for distributing audiobook promo codes, spreadsheets for whatever else, right? So I’m like, okay, let’s simplify this. I want to make your life simpler. So I’m going to build one thing that does it all. And I think if I had actually told anyone at that point in time, I’m going to build one thing that does all of that, they would have said, Evan, I don’t believe you. And that’s the nicest way they would have said it. If they did not say, Evan, you’re delusional. I just started building stuff and released new features sort of as I built them. It does it all.
Kat
It does do it all. But I would think that most people start with the newsletter feature. Do you think that’s true?
Evan
I think most authors hear about Story Origin for the first time. When someone says, hey, you need to start building a newsletter, get on Story Origin, that’s the place to start. Yeah, that’s how most authors learn about Story Origin. So that’s usually the first thing that they start with is building their newsletter. And I think that that is a good place for many authors to start is with building your newsletter, building an audience.
Kat
Right? So I harp on people all the time about building a newsletter so they can go back and listen to those, specifically my lectures. But the main thing is you can have your reader magnet on Story Origin so you don’t have to use up your website. Okay, this is how low tech I am. I’m an 80s girl, right? So I had a computer growing up, but still I remember the blue screens, like the blue screen of death and everything. So you used to keep it on your website or maybe PayHip, but that will make your website really heavy, which I didn’t understand until somebody had to explain it to me. So being able to keep a lot of just documents and things somewhere else if you have a very simple website, was eye opening to me. It’s like, oh, I can just have it here and I don’t have to go looking for that one media page or whatever. It doesn’t always turn out right either, and it becomes that like bloated out image when it’s just on my media. Maybe I just don’t know what I’m doing. But I would assume other authors also don’t. It’s a nice little landing page. Your reader magnet. What is your reader magnet? You all it’s like your short story or your free book or your couple look at these first five chapters. But then for newsletters, what do people set up a newsletter and what does Story Origin offer for building that newsletter? Because that’s everyone’s question. How do I get more people on my newsletter?
Evan
Right, exactly. Yeah, you can host your reader magnet landing page on Story Origin and like you said, which is where people would come to request that free book for you. And then Story Origin handles the delivery, right?
Kat
Yeah, we don’t have to deliver. That’s awesome.
Evan
You don’t have to handle the tech support when someone emails you and says, how do I get this on my Kindle or whatever that comes to Story Origin. And there’s tons of instructions and stuff and email support for them if they run into issues. So that’s another reason not to do it on your own website as well then also Story Origin and integrates with a bunch of different email service providers. So when you design and send your email through MailChimp or MailerLite or whatever, wherever you host your mailing list, Story Origin can directly send those contact info to many different email service providers. Or you can always just download a CSV of the sign ups you get through Story Origin. But how do you get those sign ups in the first place? Right? So there are two ways that you can do that on Story Origin. There are two different types of cross promotion. There are group promos and newsletter swaps. So a group promo is where you, me, and let’s say 20 other authors all list our reader magnets on a single landing page and we all drive traffic to that single landing page. And so all the readers that come to that landing page, they can select which books that they want from that group promo and they’ll sign up to each of those individual authors mailing list.
Evan
And so you can grow your own mailing list by being a part of those groups. And yeah, those are extremely helpful. I would recommend if you’re just starting a mailing list, you have zero subscribers, joining group promos is the way to get started. That’s really easy.
Kat
A little bit by genre. So you’re finding the correct reader, right? You’re not getting a mystery reader for your cozy romance, right?
Evan
Yeah. So on Story Origin and you can see a list of upcoming group promos and you can find the ones that are in your genre and then just apply to the ones that you want to be a part of. And of course the readers, they are selecting individual books out of that group promo that they want to get and sign up to those authors mailing lists, right? So you also don’t need to worry about getting people who aren’t interested on your list or something somehow, right. They’re coming specifically for you when they sign up to get your book. That is a great way to get started. Of course, you can always also just put up the link to your reader magnet on social media or wherever you want at the back of your book. You can run ads to that landing page as well. Group promos are really easy way to get started though with all that because you don’t have to figure out some complicated ads dashboard or worry about like, oh, now I have to grow my Twitter following to get any views on my links that I’m promoting on Twitter so I can get people on my mailing list. That just seems like more steps, right? Yeah. So group promos are a really easy way to get started. And even if you have zero subscribers, many of those group promo organizers are still more than happy to accept you into those group promos because many of them had zero subscribers when they were starting out, maybe just a couple of months ago. Now they’ve got a few hundred subscribers and they’re like, I know exactly how I felt a couple of months ago when I had zero people on my mailing list.
Kat
Yes. No, a friend of mine was very cautious about. And I said, Story Origin is just one of those places. Like you just go, you apply to the promotion. And he was surprised that pleasantly that they all accepted him. And I was like, I know, because we’re nice people.
Evan
Yeah. It’s very weird to be on a place on the internet where people help each other. Most of the internet is people just trashing each other. But Story Origin has a very nice, very helpful community of authors that are generally all trying to help each other out.
Kat
Exactly. And then once you get a couple, what is the difference with the newsletter swaps then?
Evan
Yeah, so a newsletter swap is a different type of cross promotion. Again, group promos and newsletter swaps are both types of cross promotion. A cross promotion is just basically let’s help each other out, let’s promote each other. So that group promo is a group setting where you’re all promoting a landing page that has all your books on it. A newsletter swap is a one to one type of cross promotion where I’m promoting your book in my newsletter and you’re promoting my book in one of your upcoming newsletters. And so we’re not promoting a landing page that has a whole bunch of books on it. We’re directly promoting each other’s books.
Kat
Right.
Evan
And so that can be I’m promoting your reader magnet, you’re promoting my reader magnet, or I’m promoting your universal book link and you’re promoting my universal book link. So we can increase our sales or we can promote each other’s, review copies, et cetera, right? Again, a newsletter swap is just we’re promoting each other’s books in our own newsletters.
Kat
Yeah, people might be more selective, I guess, with that. But still, I know I always choose at least one person, whenever I go back into swaps. Somebody who has much lower numbers than I because I’ve been there. And I’ve never spoken to an author who doesn’t specifically seek out lower number authors to swap with just because we’ve been there before and because it’s still an audience. They still have people who are not on your list who might be interested in your book or your reader magnet. I’ve just never been denied, I guess, and I’ve never heard that on Story Origin. So again, it’s a nice place. Also with your promos, there’s like a ranking, right? So the other question would be how am I sure that if I’m doing all this work to put it in my newsletter and put it on social media? Are all the other 20 people doing their work too? I never really care about that, but some people do. But I do think that ranking that you have, what do you call it? I’m calling it ranking.
Evan
So when you go and you request a newsletter swap with someone or they’re going to request a newsletter swap with you, you can go into their past campaigns that they’ve arranged on Story Origin and you can see their click stats for how many clicks that they’ve sent to group promos or to past newsletter swaps that they’ve arranged through Story Origin. So you know, hey, is this person actually sending a decent number of clicks to the group promos or newsletter swaps that they’re participating in? Like are they upholding their end of the bargain? Because there is that trust issue that if all this were invisible, you wouldn’t know whether or not you can sort of trust people necessarily, right? And that’s how it was before Story Origin was around for the most part, right. Like all these people who are arranging newsletter swaps through Facebook groups and Google forms and all that stuff, there was no community transparency. You didn’t know whether or not someone was chronically not sharing the books that they said they were going to share, et cetera, right? With Story Origin and all that. Super transparent. So you can always just go to their past campaign history and look at how many clicks they sent to each one of those promos.
Kat
Yeah. And I think it helps keep us accountable, right? I am conscious not to sign up for too many. I don’t want my click rate to be below. And it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t take people with lower click rates. They might have a smaller list or whatever, but it’s like, oh, have they participated in 25 and gotten two clicks? That means that they keep forgetting to share, I would assume. Okay, so we’ve gone over just like the transparency and the newsletters and the reader magnet. So you have so many things here. So Kickstarter has become a big thing and I’ve noticed that you guys have like direct downloads, you guys have beta copies, you have review copies, you have all these things. Okay, let me see what question I’m going to ask you. So direct downloads, do people usually use that for things like Kickstarter or like mass here, now that you’ve got this, go download it here.
Evan
So, yeah, I mean direct downloads are super versatile, right? It’s simply a landing page where a reader can download your free book. They don’t have to sign up to your mailing list or anything to get that download, right?
Kat
Perfect. Okay.
Evan
And if you want, you can integrate that direct download page with a mailing list so that someone does have to enter their email address. But all that entering that email address on that page does is checks to see if that email address already exists on your list. Which can be helpful for things like if you have a review team and you want to provide a direct download to them, but you want to make sure that they are on your review team mailing list. You can say here’s the download link, and they’d have to enter their email address and Story Origin and doesn’t record their email address. In that case, it just checks if the email address they entered is on your review team mailing list. Nice. But you could also do this for something like a Kickstarter where you could create a mailing list for people who have signed up to a certain pledge level for you on Kickstarter or something like that, in Story Origin. You could then check to make sure that their email address is on that pledge level mailing list or something like that.
Kat
Yeah, that’d be very helpful.
Evan
They can get that download.
Kat
Otherwise it’s a lot of follow up all the time. Yeah, and there’s always that like, wait, there’s 21, but I only have 19 on my list. Like where are they two? So that would be nice. And just like the deliverability of that.
Evan
You don’t have to handle the tech support Story Origin and does that for you. And the other common place that people use that direct downloads feature as well is just in their welcome sequence for their mailing list, right. A lot of times people are building their mailing lists through Story Origin and so Story Origin already handles the automatic file delivery for them. But if you’re building a mailing list like through your website or something, or you have just like a form on MailerLite or MailChimp that someone somehow signs up to because you promote that link somewhere and you just want to be able to make sure that they get that download. You can put that direct download link in your welcome sequence so you can make sure that they’ve gotten that book.
Kat
Right, so they don’t have to refill out a form like, I already do this, it’s already filled out, they go and they get it. Nice.
Evan
Exactly.
Kat
That’s awesome.
Evan
Yeah. And even if they’ve already signed up to your mailing list through Story Origin getting a reader magnet, it’s still nice to provide them that direct download link in your welcome sequence. Not even so much because they need the download because they already probably have it at that point, but more just as a nudge like, hey, get started reading that book, right? Because people, their to be read list can sometimes be extremely long, right?
Kat
Yes.
Evan
And providing those little nudges like, oh, here’s the summary of that book that you got and here’s the download link again, just provides them a reminder, oh yeah, I really wanted to read that book. Let me go get started on that today.
Kat
That’s a good idea because also if you get the email and you’re on your phone and you’re waiting for your kids soccer game, you could get it on another format, right? And you could say, well why don’t I start reading it now? That’s a good idea that sometimes we just don’t think of like, oh, they already have it. Just providing it in several places is always helpful for people. Yeah, that’s awesome. So then we have the beta copies if somebody’s newer to the indie world, what is a beta copy?
Evan
So a beta copy is usually an early version of your manuscript that is not ready to be published. It’s something where you want people to look for, read through this manuscript and tell me, were there any boring scenes in here? What did you think of the characters? All those sorts of things that you might want maybe out of a developmental editor or something like that, but you can’t pay for a developmental editor necessarily. Or you really just want to understand someone who reads in a genre. You want to understand, hey, does this actually fit to your tastes? Right? Because you might think you’ve written a I read a lot of lit RPG. You might have think you’ve written a fantastic lit RPG, and someone else is like, no. I mean, you slapped some game mechanics on a fantasy novel, but this is not lit RPG. You’re missing all these different separate tropes or something. Those beta readers give you feedback about your book.
Kat
And are those beta readers in Story Origin, or do I bring the beta readers.
Evan
You bring the beta readers to Story Origin. They would just be able to apply for access for your book, and then you can approve or decline those requests for access to that beta copy. And a lot of authors are like, they’re like, Why would I do this? I can just send them, like, a Word Doc or a Google Doc, right? But the complaint that I’ve heard from many authors and this is why I built the features a lot of times you just send a Word Doc or Google Doc to someone, and then their feedback is, it was great. I loved it. And you’re like, I need more.
Kat
Unless it becomes a New York Times bestseller, I need some more.
Evan
Anything, please give me a little bit more feedback. With Story Origin, the beta copies feature, they only unlock each chapter after providing feedback on the previous chapter. So they have to provide you feedback on each chapter individually before they can read the next one.
Kat
Wow, that’s a great idea, because, in fact, life is busy, right? And you might have a thought for chapter seven that you lose by chapter 37. And then you’re like, I liked it.
Evan
Yeah, right? Exactly. Yeah.
Kat
Very nice. Okay, so you upload it there, they get it there. You give permission as well, which is a nice way to control who has opened it. I assume that you can see has anyone not opened it yet? Are they actually reading it or not?
Evan
Yeah, you can see how far they’ve gotten into the book. Origin lists all of your readers that are readers for your beta copy and then shows you what the last chapter is that they’ve left feedback on. So you know whether or not they’ve read through chapter five or six or seven or eight or whatever, because you can see, okay, they’re down to chapter eight on their feedback or what?
Kat
Oh, that’s so much better than Google Forms.
Evan
Yeah.
Kat
Oh my gosh, it’s funny, I’ve seen that beta copy for a while. I’m not ready yet for beta copies, but this year I will be. So I’m glad we’ve talked. I got to create a Google Form with questions that they’ll actually answer. Yeah, okay, awesome.
Evan
And with the beta copies feature on Story Origin, you can provide questions to them at three different levels, so you can provide questions that they will answer on a specific chapter, like chapter two, what did you think of the scene between these two characters? You can provide questions at the overall book level, so those questions will be at the end of every single chapter. Like, did you find any scenes in this chapter boring? Right? And so that question would appear on every single chapter. And then you can also insert questionnaires between chapters for more overarching feedback. So you can say, okay, I’m going to put questionnaire after chapter four, and I’m going to ask them, what did you think about the first four chapters? What did you think about the arc and the development of this relationship over the past four chapters? Or something like that? Right?
Kat
Right. Yeah.
Evan
So you can make those questions and you can solicit feedback in Story Origin, calls it critique guidance in sort of whatever level you want. You don’t have to put any of those questions if you don’t want to at all. You can leave the critique guidance off and they can just free form it, right, the readers can. But the other thing that is valuable to note there, because you mentioned Google Docs, have you done beta copies through Google Docs previously?
Kat
Yeah, I would have them fill out a questionnaire and then I would make it a direct download and then I would send them the questionnaire.
Evan
Send them the questionnaire.
Kat
But it’s been since 2021 that I published, so then it was before that that I did beta, so I haven’t done it yet.
Evan
So you were providing like the full EPUB or Moby or PDF or whatever, right? Yeah. So with this feature, they only access a chapter at a time, so they’re not getting the full file download. So that’s another thing for people who are afraid of giving out a full manuscript, you don’t have to worry that someone’s just going to take that file and then share it around, right? They can only access it when they’re logged into their Story Origin account.
Kat
Nice.
Evan
And then for authors that have done it, done their beta copies through just like, people leaving comments on a Google Doc or something like that, I’ve had authors say, oh, I had my readers fighting, arguing in my manuscript on Google Docs about some point.
Kat
Because they can see each other’s comments.
Evan
They can see each other’s comments in Google Docs, right? So they’re like biasing each other’s feedback, number one. And then number two, they might not. Bias each other’s feedback, but they might actually disagree. Oh, yeah, that’s like, guys, please, this is my workspace and I’m getting all these comment notifications.
Kat
Well, that’s very confusing for especially a new writer as well, of like, who do I listen to? And then it probably spins off into something completely different.
Evan
Yeah. So, Story Origin, you as the author can see all the comments. They all live in one document for you as the author. But each reader only sees their comments. They don’t see the other reader’s comments.
Kat
That’s much better. Yeah. I especially think just the biasing of it like, oh, I guess well, if they thought it was good, then I guess it’s good. No, I want your opinion as your own entity and your own reader. Yeah, that’s nice. Because I don’t want my readers biased. I want the brutal truth.
Evan
Yeah, right. And it’s the other thing is, like, if two people who have not seen each other’s comments say the same particular thing they didn’t like, or they thought this was weird, then that is a much greater signal to you that, oh, this is a part that I need to fix, versus someone commenting, this is weird. And then someone else seeing that comment and being like, you know what? Yeah, I see that person’s point. I think it’s weird too, right? Versus they might not have ever noticed it had they not seen that other person’s comment. Right.
Kat
Yes. Who knows what psychology is happening, right?
Evan
Exactly.
Kat
I want you sound smarter. I want to argue or whatever. Awesome. Okay, so you bring in your beta. So I would assume I send out a newsletter to my list and I say, anybody want to sign up for beta? This is where you go. And then I have it all in one spot. I don’t have to do any Google Docs or forms.
Evan
Right, exactly.
Kat
And then also forget about the forms. Like, oh, yeah, that’s right.
Evan
All this feedback that I have not used.
Kat
But like you said, it’s so many different things. So having it right in one Story Origin. I’m going to check my group promos. Oh, yeah, I should check my beta copy. Right, as well. And then you guys got into audio…
Evan
Promo code distribution.
Kat
I feel like that was during the pandemic as well. Is that newer?
Evan
That’s not too new. I think Story Origins has had that as a feature maybe for maybe three or four years now.
Kat
I don’t have audiobooks.
Evan
I also have a hard time remembering when I released each individual feature.
Kat
What year is this?
Evan
Shouldn’t we have jetpacks by now or something? Right. I feel like it should be in the future.
Kat
I feel like there shouldn’t be viruses. I mean, what are they doing?
Evan
Yeah, I know, right?
Kat
They should just be eradicated.
Evan
What weirds me out. A thing about being in the future that I can build software that makes getting feedback on a piece of text easier, substantially. For authors. I’m like, shouldn’t someone else have done this so long ago? How am I?
Kat
How am I the guy that nobody cared about it until you came around? Well, the indie author world wasn’t supposed to be a thing, remember?
Evan
Right, exactly.
Kat
Hard not to make it a thing. So if people are getting into audiobooks, and especially with AI these days, and that argument will get figured out, but AI audio is probably going to make it a little bit easier, possibly cheaper. Although I have my doubts on making an audiobook. So what do you guys offer for those who have audiobooks?
Evan
So if you produce your audiobook or distribute it, like through ACX or find a way or through a different audiobook distributor that maybe goes through Audiobooks.com or through Kobo, you get these codes. You might get like 25 or 30 or 100, depends on the different distributors. You get these promo codes so that readers can download that audiobook for free and listen to it on Audible or well, AuthorsDirect/Findaway got acquired by Spotify, so now they would redeem that promo codes for them through Spotify. Or you might have Kobo or audiobooks.com promo codes. So you get these promo codes where someone can download that book and listen to it for free through those various platforms. And those promo codes are really meant to be given to people who might potentially leave a review on the audiobook, right? And so you only have a handful of them. You want to make sure you get them into the hands of people who are actually going to listen and leave reviews on those books. So Story Origin has a way where you can collect interest in that review, copy in those audiobook promo codes, people will essentially request a code, they’ll say where they are planning on leaving a review on Amazon or Goodreads or BookBub or whatever other retailers. And then if you want to approve someone, you just enter the code that you want to give out to them. And then Story Origin, the reader will be asked to leave their review on Story Origin and then leave their review on whatever other retailers as well. And so that review on Story Origin just makes it easy for them to copy and paste their review across the various places that they said that they would leave a review.
Kat
Yes, that makes it easier.
Evan
And it makes it easy for you, the author, to also, just at a glance, see all the reviews, see the text for all the reviews that people wrote for those audiobook codes. And the great thing there is that when someone applies or requests a promo code from you, you can see their reviewer stats. So if someone’s requested and been approved for ten audiobook promo codes through Story Origin, and before you can see, oh, they’ve been approved and said they were going to leave reviews for these books on Audible and Goodreads and they completed zero of those processes. I’m not going to give this person a promo code because they haven’t completed that review process for these other ten books. So I’m not going to give the promo code to that person nice. Or someone else applies and they’ve got their stats are like ten out of ten for Goodreads or Amazon or whatever else and say, okay, I can be relatively confident if I give this person a promo code that they’re actually going to go and leave a review. And again, that’s especially important with the case of audiobook promo codes because you’re only limited to a certain number of them. You have a handful of them. So you really want to get them in the hands of people who are actually going to leave reviews. And if you’re doing this by yourself, you’re just using like a spreadsheet or something to distribute those promo codes. You don’t know from the community who is actually going to leave reviews and who’s not.
Kat
Yeah, you would not be able to see that. Tell me how many you’ve completed. And getting reviews, as most indie authors know, is very difficult. So being able to choose the people wisely is nice. Do I have to bring the reviewers or do they sign up through Story Origin?
Evan
Either, or. They would request the audio promo code from you through Story Origin. But you can either send them to Story Origin like you might send out a newsletter to your own mailing list saying, hey guys, I have promo codes for my new audiobook, come and request them here. And then people from your newsletter could go and request it on Story Origin or you can set up cross promotions for those audiobook promo codes through Story Origin. So you could join a group promo for those audiobook promo codes or you could do newsletter swaps to promote that audiobook promo code request page. And then Story Origin also has a public directory of audiobook promo request page that you can optionally choose to opt into. So you can have your audiobook promo code request page listed there. Regardless of how you end up promoting it, whether it’s to your own mailing list, through group promos, through newsletter swaps, through putting it into the public directory, you still always remain in the driver’s seat about who to approve to give those promo codes to.
Kat
Okay, so they have to sign up for like a Story Origin reviewer sign up.
Evan
Many readers already have Story Origin accounts. Setting up an account on Story Origin is literally a matter of they enter their name and their email address and then hit submit. And then Story Origin just emails them a login link. So they don’t even need to set up a password if they don’t okay, cool. So they’ll just get a login link sent to their email address and then they would go through that process to say where they’re going to leave a review for that book, right, and hit the request button. But yeah, it’s totally free for all. The features on Story Origin are free for readers. And the account creation process is incredibly simple for getting those promo codes. It does require an extra couple of steps for them because they are going to say where they plan to leave a review. And if they say that they’re planning on leaving a review on Amazon or Goodreads or BookBub, they’d also be prompted to add the link to their reviewer profile from those platforms as well. Okay, so if they say they’re going to leave a review on Amazon, they would give you the link to their Amazon reviewer profile.
Evan
And so you can not only see how many of the review processes have they completed on Story Origin before, let’s say they had never requested an audiobook promo code on Story Origin before. If they say they’re going to leave a review on Amazon, you can still always just go and check their Amazon reviewer profile and see do they leave reviews in general. If this person has never left a review for anything on Amazon, if I give them a promo code, it’s maybe more unlikely that they’re actually going to leave a review because they’ve never reviewed anything on Amazon before. Or you can also just check to see what books have they reviewed in the past, right? So if I see, hey, all these books that you’ve reviewed in the past on Amazon before, they’re all cozy romance and I write steamy romance and you’re requesting a steamy romance book from me, I might not accept your application for review copy because you might think you’re going to be getting something that you’re not, right? And I don’t want you to feel like you should leave a review if it’s going to be something that you’re not going to like.
Kat
Yeah, there’s too much sex in this, right?
Evan
Yeah, exactly.
Kat
There do tend to be people who sign up for reviews and then you’re like, I’ve read reviews. I was going to do a newsletter of funny reviews because there are some hilarious ones out there where it’s very clear that the person just doesn’t like the genre. So I’m just not sure why they bothered.
Evan
And then they’ve also reviewed book two and book three and book four in the series, and you’re like, why did you keep reading this series?
Kat
Just going to torturing yourself.
Evan
You’ve given every single book in this series a one star. Why are you still reading it?
Kat
Like it’s vengeance at this point. You’re just like, really mad at yourself.
Evan
Yeah.
Kat
Or like people who just I really love the people who this happens on Goodreads who will preface with, by the way, my rating goes like this. You’re like, but that’s not how ratings work. Three means good. You’re like, okay, I might not choose you because I don’t know what’s going on.
Evan
Right? Yeah. The other thing. When they request that review copy from you and you’re looking at their Amazon reviewer profile or Goodreads or BookBub reviewer profile, you can see how many books are they usually, what are the ratings. They’re usually giving the books. If you see that they’re giving every book that they read like one star and they’ve given out maybe a couple of three stars or something like that, you’re like, okay, this person’s highly, highly critical. Like, I don’t want me to give this person a review copy. And you as an author should not in any way feel obligated to give someone a review copy if you think that they’re not going to like the.
Kat
Book, they’re just grumpy.
Evan
Yeah, right, exactly.
Kat
I do talk about this. Your book is a piece of work that you’ve spent a lot of time on writing, formatting, doing all this and then the marketing, like just using all these little things that you can use on Story Origin. That’s your time. So like you said, you do not ever have to feel obligated to give anyone, especially a coveted review promo for your audiobook. You can choose. You don’t have to feel bad about that.
Evan
Yeah, by the way, all the stuff that we’ve been talking about with the audiobook promo code distribution is basically how the ebook review copies works on Story Origin as well. So when someone requests a review copy of your ebook from you on Story Origin, and you can see their reviewer stats and links to their reviewer profiles, you get to individually approve or decline them. You can cross promote those through newsletter swaps or group promos. There’s a public directory for ebook review copies that you can optionally list it in. You can also just promote it to your own newsletter. Everything we’ve just been talking about also applies to ebook distribution of review copies. All the tracking that you can see, like when they’ve left a review on Story Origin, what retailers they’re going to leave their reviews at. The other thing to mention with the ebook review copies though, is that there are two distribution methods there. You can choose to distribute it as just a file download through Story Origin, so you just be getting the file through Story Origin, or you can distribute it as an Amazon prepaid book link. So if your book is in Kindle Unlimited, you have this exclusivity clause with Amazon that you won’t distribute that file through any other means essentially, right? What you can do is you can purchase a gift copy of that book on Amazon and you can get that redemption link from Amazon and then you would put it in on Story Origin. So when someone requests a review copy from you, you would just enter in that redemption link for where they can redeem that gift copy.
Kat
Okay? That’s like the only way to get around that.
Evan
Yeah. So even if you’re on Kindle Unlimited, you can still use that review copies feature. And some authors might be thinking like, why would I use the review copies feature on Story Origin if I’m just giving out the Kindle Unlimited? Like, if I’m giving out a prepaid book link again because you want to be able to see have they actually completed reviews for other authors, what are the links to their reviewer profiles? You want the tracking and automatic follow up that Story Origin does for those reviewers, et cetera. So those are reasons to still like, even if you’ve got your book in KU and you’re going to be giving out Amazon prepaid book links, that’s another good reason to still use that review copies feature.
Kat
Yeah, I mean, just for anyone who knows how difficult it is to get follow up on reviews, I just checked one of my books and there’s two out of five, and I feel like that’s a good average for two people to have completed it. I guess it’s possible that they didn’t come back and tell Story Origin that they did it, but pretty sure that the other three didn’t. So that is why just handing out reviews or like copies and hoping that they will follow through with what they promised to do, humans, you have no control over that. So it’s nice to be able to see it. It’s nice to not have higher expectations than necessary or to stress out about it or all these things. It’s just nice to have that sort of everything in one place.
Evan
Yeah. For that reason, some authors ask me like, okay, what percentage of people should I expect to actually complete my reviews for review copies? And I truly cannot answer that because it’s entirely up to how strict you are about who you’re going to approve for review copy. If you’re only going to approve people who have previously reviewed like, 30 books on Story Origin and they have all their links for all those provided and et cetera, if that’s your criteria for who you’re going to approve, you’ll probably have 100% review rate, but you’re going to decline a whole lot of apps, right?
Kat
Yeah. It’ll get hard. You just have a smaller pool to choose from. Yeah. It does depend on what your goals are if you’re going to cast a wide net or a narrow net. But it’s just difficult for every book launch, for everything like that. This will help you just keep everything in one place and to know, even for your book launch, to know who you don’t want on the next one because they didn’t finish, they didn’t do it, because this is like, you’re going to do all this work to get your book out there. If that person isn’t going to pull the weight for the free book that you gave them, then you might not want them. Just kindly say no.
Evan
Yeah. And Story Origin also acts if you have multiple review copies on Story Origin. Let’s say you put up book 1, 2, 3, 4, whatever in a series on Story Origin, and they’ve requested book one and two. And you can see when they request book two, you can see whether or not when you’re viewing their reviewer profile, whether or not they’ve already completed book one. So Story Origin and shows you what other review copies they’ve requested from you and have they completed those when you’re checking their reviewer profile to see whether or not you want to approve them. So it also just sort of acts as like a customer relationship management CRM, sort of a tool where it’s like, okay, I know that they’ve reviewed my other books in this series as well, so I’m going to approve them for this one. Or, hey, they still haven’t actually left a review on book one or book two or something like that. I’m going to email them or something.
Kat
Yeah, can you email them and just say nicely, hey, I can release book two. Could you just finish up and right, can I email them or do I click something for Story Origin?
Evan
So it depends. Right, so if they’re coming through your own mailing list, like if they’ve come through your own mailing list, then you could always just email them because you already have their email address. If they’ve come to you on Story Origin through a group promo or newsletter swap or through the public directory, you only gain access to their email when they’ve completed the review copy process because Story Origin already automatically sends reviewers reminders. And so we don’t want to reviewers to feel like they’re being spammed. Right, exactly, right?
Kat
Are you done yet? Like the five year old in the back of the car?
Evan
Yeah, Story Origin already does that to readers, saying like, hey, it’s been a couple of weeks since you were approved for this review copy. Please don’t forget to go complete the review process. This is important to your reviewer stats. If you want to get more review copies on Story Origin, like, here’s the impetus for completing the review. Reviewers are not technically required to complete reviews that would be breaking terms of service on multiple services. So reviewers are encouraged to complete their reviews, and they understand that’s important if they want to get more review copies through Story Origin and because authors can see their reviewer stats. Right, and so Story Origin and sends those reminders to them. But yeah, so you would only gain access to those email addresses after they’ve completed the review copy process. If they’ve come to you through your own mailing list, you could always just reach out to them individually because you already know their email address.
Kat
Hey, man, finish up. So the big news that you’ve had in 2023, or at least in the last two months maybe you’ve had more, is the custom links, which is what I wanted to bring you in especially to talk about. So custom links, I think especially with authors. A lot of indie authors are moving to their own storefront or trying to figure that out. I know bigger name authors are doing shopify and then as I talk to sort of us mid list and lower lists or just starting out authors it’s like shopify is a lot but how can I brand? And I think that what I tell people especially just starting out is how can you train your readers to come to you, right? And so this custom link I think especially is like a step forward in getting those readers to come to me. Like I am the brand, I have this bookstore and I would really appreciate it if you would buy it from me from Amazon. I appreciate all sales. So that’s what I really like, the custom links first. So could you talk about the custom links and then we’ll sort of get into how authors would use it.
Evan
Yeah, the custom links feature is basically several features. In one, because it’s a custom links, you can create custom links and then you can also build a website with that feature as well. So a very simple website with probably the use case that you’re talking about more closely lines with the ability to create custom redirect links like you would on Bitly, right? So many people are familiar with Bitly. You create like a little short link so that people can, you can put that link at the back of your book or you put it on social media wherever. And when someone clicks that link you can see account of how many times that link has been clicked and then it will just redirect them to whatever page that you want to, whether that’s to your Amazon author profile or redirect them to your landing page on your own website for where they might buy the book or something like that, right?
Kat
Yeah. But if you’re just using free Bitly, I’ve had Bitly break on me so I’m sure at least at some point they’re not obligated to keep your Bitly working like five years later. No your Bitly is probably not working right.
Evan
And the other thing with those Bitly links as well is they’re just Bitly links. They’re ugly, they’re not your links, right? And so with the custom link feature on Story Origin you can create essentially short links that are customized for your domain. So I could create one at www.evangow.com/bookone, right? And then that would direct them to let’s say the Amazon purchase page for book one in my series or something like that.
Kat
For anyone listening, I’m going to show as you talk, I’m going to show people what this looks like.
Evan
Awesome.
Kat
So this is my page. So yeah, this is your custom place. So I guess you made mine as books.KatCaldwell.com.
Evan
Well you did that.
Kat
I did that. I did this.
Evan
Story Origin recommends if you already have a website built. Kat Caldwell.com then you would set up a new subdomain. And Story Orgin generally recommends using books. whatever your domain is.com.
Kat
Okay. So if you write in several genres, you could do like, Mystery.KatCaldwell.com or I could have in my memory is very short. Okay. We talked like a month ago. I guess I just chose books. But I think it’s very nice. Like books.KatCaldwell.com. And so then my first link here would be books.KatCaldwell.com/SteppingAcrosstheDesert, correct?
Evan
That’s right. Yeah.
Kat
I think it’s amazing. Like a I can remember it. It’s not bit.ly/whatever. And it’s very nice to see, especially on social media, when they see the actual link, like on your newsletter, you can put it behind a button. But I know Facebook hates Bitly. They really don’t like pushing your post if it has a Bitly link. And people have tried to get around that by putting in the comments or whatever. I mean, this is just nice. I can put a link. It’s nice looking. This is my brand, right? And this is where you can go to find my stuff.
Evan
Yeah. Or if you’re like posting it on Twitter or something, like books.KatCaldwell.com/SteppingAcrosstheDesert. It’s also just easy to remember to type in. You don’t have to go somewhere to remember what was that link, or if you’re putting the link in the back of your book, right? Because if someone’s reading a book on a Kindle or something like that, like the Kindle web browser not good. So a lot of times people might be reading their book on the Kindle, but then they want to open the link on their desktop or on their phone or something like that. It’s much easier for them to type that than just like some random string of letters or something like that. The other thing is, like, retailers like Apple do not like it when you include just like an Amazon link in your book, right?
Kat
That’s true. Yes.
Evan
So if you have books.KatCaldwell.com/bookone or something in your book and you’re selling that on Apple, and that link might go to Amazon or Apple. So the universal Booklinks feature on Story Origin.
Kat
Yeah, this is my universal book link.
Evan
Shows all the retailers where your book is listed. And so, yeah, you can put that at the back of book one.
Kat
That’s so obvious that I didn’t think because if people don’t know when you upload your ebook to Kobo, and they find out that you have a link that only goes to Amazon, they will spit it back to you. And so you used to have to have two different copies of your ebook.
Evan
So that now you don’t.
Kat
I think it’s especially Apple is like, no, you can’t have a link that only goes to Amazon. So if I put in my universal link so it would be books.KatCaldwell.com/SteppingAcrosstheDesert, that goes to my UVL. And people can easily buy whatever they want. Buy from whatever store they want.
Evan
Okay, exactly. And it’s not going to get kicked off. Yeah. So you don’t need to worry about okay, this is the manuscript version. This is like the ebook version. I’m uploading to Kobo. This is the ebook version. I’m uploading apple. This is the ebook version. I’m uploading Amazon, et cetera. Like that. You don’t need to worry about it.
Kat
Right. And then I could add this, I guess. This probably wouldn’t get kicked off either though, would it? Like books.KatCaldwell.com/Amazon. So I have it I don’t know, I haven’t checked it yet.
Evan
Yeah, I don’t know whether or not because it has the word Amazon. Even though it’s not the domain of the URL, it’s in the path in the URL. They might be more finicky about allowing something like that. What you could do is instead just link to books.KatCaldwell.com at the end of all of your books, and then that would just take the readers to your profile page, your website that you built on Story Origin, where you can have all of your books listed. If you click books.KatCaldwell.com on your Storyorgin dashboard, you can see that shows all of the books where they could request like your reader magnets, or they could request your review copies, or they could click on the universal book links to go to the retailer for whichever book you want. You might just want to send them to that more generalized sort of spot where they see all the books that you have and then they can click on whichever one that they want, depending on whether or not you’ve got books in a series or what have you.
Kat
Okay. And so when you’re talking about the website builder from Story Origin, is that what you’re talking about?
Evan
Yeah, that’s the website builder part, is that page that we were just looking at that showed all of your books in that one place that’s just on books.KatCaldwell.com without anything at the end of that link.
Kat
So I had already had a domain purchase. But if somebody’s just starting out, what would they need to start with this page here?
Evan
They would just need to buy a domain.
Kat
Okay.
Evan
I recommend NameCheap. They’ve got good docs that help authors for people that aren’t super technically savvy and maybe don’t recognize some of the words, they have pretty good docs that help you understand, oh, go here, do this, do that, and then your thing is set up. Yeah. Essentially you would just need to buy a domain. Usually it’s about like $10 a year. I had one author who had emailed me back after I released this feature. Like, buying my own domain is extremely expensive. I can’t do that. I’m like, oh, it’s like $10 a year. And they’re like, oh, I thought I had to pay Wix like $250 a year for a custom domain, which, if you want. To build a website on domain. It’s something like that. I don’t know what their pricing is, but it’s very expensive, right? Yeah. But buying a domain is actually just quite cheap. It’s like $10 a year. So you don’t need to sign up for whatever extra premium packages or whatever they have, right. You can just build that website on Story Origin and just buy your domain through, like, namecheap, right?
Kat
Yeah. And for people starting out, unless you’re really if you want the blog and you want all that, you might have to do the Wix or the WordPress. But there are a lot of traditionally published authors that have very simple websites. Like, they have a presence online and that’s about it. It’s like, here are their books, here’s their author bio, and you can’t find much else. And so you don’t have to have this huge website as an author. What you want is for people to buy your books, right, and to know who you are.
Evan
Yeah. I had a lot of authors test this feature out. 95% of them already had an author website, right? And they looked at the website that they generated with Story Origin that’s just basically got all their books listed, has their free reader magnets to entice people to sign up to their mailing list, and they’re looking at this going, I pay $X00 for this website, which took me hours to build, and I’m honestly afraid of till the amateur. Yeah, right? It took me hours to build. It doesn’t look good. I’m afraid to touch it because I’m afraid I’m going to break something, so I never am going to update it.
Kat
Which will break it.
Evan
Yeah. Or I’m like paying someone else to touch it because, like, I and so, like, there’s the extra cost of doing that, and they’re like, this is just yeah. And then they look at what they build with Story Origin and they go, this takes me 15 seconds to add a new book to this landing page, right? I’m going to drop my website. I don’t need this complicated pain in my neck to manage deal with whatever thing Story Origin does it all for me right here. And the Universal Book Links feature automatically localizes the Amazon links to the reader’s country. So if they click on the Amazon link from the Universal Book link on Story Origin and they’re in the UK, it’ll take them to Amazon co UK. If they’re in Australia, it’ll take them to Au, et cetera. Amazon has all these different storefronts, most authors websites, they just have, like, here’s the Amazon.com link. And if you live in the rest of the world, sorry, figure it out.
Kat
Because you’re asking authors to be more tech savvy and it’s just things you don’t think of. You don’t think of, oh, it’s a .co.uk, for better or worse. We don’t think of other countries.
Evan
Right? Yeah. Also, even if you could, it’s like, okay, now I have to list like here’s the Amazon.com link, here’s the Amazon.co.uk link, here’s the Amazon.com.au link. It’s like, okay, number one, it just makes the landing page look more complicated to readers, right, and you want things to look as simple as possible. So with Story Origin, there’s just like an Amazon button and then Story Origin automatically localizes it to their geography for them they don’t need to think about it. So it can keep the landing pages for your UBLs really simple. And then being able to create redirect links so that books.KatCaldwell.com/Amazon takes them to we’ll just redirect them from your website to your Amazon Author profile or something like that. Being able to set those kinds of things up on WordPress or Wix or whatever, it’s not straightforward or easy. Story Origin makes that process take like 30 seconds.
Kat
Yeah. And it really helps with certain things. I know now that Amazon is allowing you to see your number of followers. There are promotions now specifically for your author page on Amazon. So just having that link is nice where it’s not that giant Amazon link because if you’ve ever copied and pasted a giant Amazon link it’s like, is that even real? Does it take anyone, anywhere?
Evan
/store/author/e01x8, yeah.
Kat
And it just keeps going. Right, but I was telling authors this is a great thing, this is what I’m using it for so I can’t get I don’t have a store set up yet. It’s like that is down the line, right, like on my list maybe I got to get my books out first. But what I want is to continue the branding. So I was trying before you sent out the email to think of what could I do to get people to me and to have that branding there of .books.KatCaldwell.com it’s easy to say on podcasts, right, if you’re going out and talking to people or on YouTube or just on social media so you can say it very easily, but you’re also just branding it. And so if one day I were to put up an actual storefront where I want people to buy from me, I feel like my fans would already be ready for that. It might still be a step of like, here, buy from me or buy from Amazon maybe like easing people in. But the getting them to that link rather than sending them to Amazon, that has erased this logistical step that I couldn’t come up with except for making another page on my website.
Evan
Right? And the nice thing about those two is that with like a redirect link with those links on Story Origin in general, you can change them anytime down the line, right? So let’s say at the end of book one of your series, you put a link in there that says books.KatCaldwell.com/bookone, you can leave that link as the link at the end of your book one forever and then you can just change. If you ever want to change where that link goes, you can do that anytime without republishing that book. So you could change. Okay, /bookone goes to my UBL. Oh, you know what? I changed my own mind. I’ve now written a reader magnet, like an extended epilogue, reader magnet, to get people in my mailing list. Now instead of sending them to the buy link for book two at the end of book one. Now I want to send them to this extended epilogue to get them into my newsletter. So now book one goes to my reader magnet without changing the link at the back of your book. The link at the back of your book stays the same forever.
Evan
You can just change where that link goes to over time, depending on what you think might be best. Right, or, like, maybe you say, oh, you know what? I used to direct them to buy book two, but now I actually want to send them to my own storefront. So instead of it taking them directly to the Amazon store for book two, now it takes them to my storefront for book two. Right, or it takes them to just like the books.KatCaldwell.com homepage, right? So now they’ll see all of my books listed there or something like that. The point being, again, you can leave that link as books.KatCaldwell.com/bookone. And you can always just change where it goes to because you might decide you want to be doing something different with that link. And you don’t have to worry about generating a new EPUB file and then uploading that to Kobo and Amazon.
Kat
Making sure to delete the old one. Especially for people who are wide. You have to remember, I forgot that I saw Google Docs. I was like, oh my gosh, I have to remember how to upload it to Google Docs. So, yeah, especially for people who are wide. There’s a lot. So maybe a KU person doesn’t understand. But making sure that you change that link, if you can just leave your pristine, hopefully formatted book alone, that would be great. Okay, so if we just change the back end of where it goes to, but every time they’re clicking it, they’re still getting sent somewhere that we’ve decided they want to go. That’s very nice. Very nice. I like this. This is why I like talking to you, Evan. So I have even more ideas on how to use these things. And what’s amazing is I can just keep creating a new one. If you have a series, you can do, like, a certain promo for a series. Again, I think it’s great for branding. I think we are all small businesses, and that’s what we should be doing, right? It kind of helps that marketing piece just be easier. The last thing we got to talk about is what does it cost to get onto Story Origin and how do people get there to sign up and start using it?
Evan
Yeah, so storyorginapp.com the standard plan, which includes all the features on Story Origin is $10 per month or $100 per year.
Kat
Yeah. Nice.
Evan
So I think most authors who have probably been listening to this conversation is like, this is like the equivalent of five different services and ten spreadsheets I’ve been managing. Is this going to be $100 a month for me? Yeah. No, it’s $10 a month or $100 per year. So extremely affordable. And I’ll always keep it affordable for authors because I want to make sure that authors, at every stage, it’s accessible to them, right? If you have any questions or run into any issues, like I said, my email address is like on the home page of Story Origin or you click the contact link on Story Origin, you’ll see my face, you’ll see my name, you’ll get a welcome email from me. When you sign up to Story Origin, that comes from my email address. You can always shoot me a question. My inbox is always open. Yes.
Kat
I can’t believe you don’t have a VA. You should get a VA. Yeah. But you also have lots of video tutorials. It’s very easy to do. I know. Every time I send people to a new thing, I sort of preface like, this one’s harder to learn to use. But Story Origin is really, I think, one of the easier ones to figure out. It’s very well organized. There’s a video tutorial if you need it, but it’s just one of those places that it’s pretty straightforward.
Evan
I do my best to avoid getting emails. So creating video tutorials and having those accessible right next to the features, the video tutorials are inlaid with the feature, right. Like, oh, I need to use the reader magnets feature. How do I do that? The link to the video tutorial is right there. It’s not like on some separate support docs website or something like that that you have to then search through a knowledge base. And how do I navigate this other different website? That’s how a lot of people do it. I don’t think that’s great.
Kat
Yes. People need to follow you. Exactly. It’s very well organized.
Evan
Yes. Because I tried to avoid getting emails, I don’t want people emailing me with questions. But you are more than welcome to because that is also how I get feedback about, oh, five people sent me an email about how do I do this? Obviously there’s something here that I need to change so that people don’t keep running into the same issue. I’m both the customer support and the engineering department. So if I’m getting a bunch of emails about, hey, how does this work? Then I can put my engineering hat on and say, oh, let me go make this easier, simpler, faster, more intuitive, so that authors don’t run into this set of questions, right?
Kat
Nice. Yes. And the good thing is that there are always forward thinking authors out there, so they’ll ask the questions and then I’ll just benefit from them having asked. Look at that, we can do business. Well, that’s awesome. So I will send people in the show notes below, otherwise it’s storyorginapp.com. Otherwise we’ll have the links in the show notes below and in the transcript. But thank you so much Evan, for coming and guiding us back through Story Origin.
Evan
Yeah, thanks again for having me on.