Email Times Best Seller List
Email Times Best Seller List
@midjourneybot: /imagine: all the emails flowing around the internet
Email Times Best Seller List
Today there are two billion websites competing for our Human Attention on the internet. Back in 1993, there were only 623 websites in the entire world. That was roughly 4 years after Tim Berners-Lee 🤩 invented the World Wide Web protocol.
But that wasn’t the start of the internet.
The URL Internet was built on the backbone of the Voice Internet. The Voice Internet (telephone network) was invented by Alexander Graham Bell 🤩 who strung the first permanent outdoor wire in 1877.
But that wasn’t the start of the internet.
Before humans could modulate sounds over copper wires, we could manually start and stop the connections between endpoints. The Telegraph Internet sent its first message in 1844 and by 1866 humans were laying cables across the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean from wooden ships.
But that wasn’t the start of the internet.
The Semaphore Internet began in the 1790’s as a series of hilltop stations with powerful telescopes and large, movable signs. They performed like smoke signals with a little encryption, but it only worked line-of-sight.
But that wasn’t the start of the internet.
In 1737, Benjamin Franklin opened the first post office in America. At the time, it took more than a month for a letter to travel from Philadelphia to New York on the Postal Internet. Franklin invested heavily in road cutting and overnight riders to reduce that delivery time to 24 hours. Benjamin Franklin 🤩 may have moved more information around the world than anyone before him. Alexis de Tocqueville said our Postal Internet was “the only entity capable of circulating the information essential to sustain America’s bold experiment with democracy.” 🇺🇸
But that wasn’t the start of the internet.
Since before English was invented, before Latin, or even Cuneiform tablets, we’ve had the Aural Internet. This is literally the sound of words traveling between two people from mouth to ear. The most important messages are passed from person to person to person, slowly oozing their way across vast distances. The start of the internet was between the first two humans who could communicate. The internet has been here as long as we have been here. The internet will be here as long as we will be here. Like beta-GPT-3 said, “Mankind in both its slumbering and awakened state is an enormous machine.”
@reader: This story is part of my book, “Human Attention”. If you want to learn more ways humans behave like artificial intelligence, start “Chapter 1 - I Doubt Therefore I Am” in a second window.
In this last story of “Chapter 5 - The War For Human Attention”, I want to explain why I published this book in an unusual way. Instead of selling my words through a book publisher on Amazon, I’m publishing them on a private social network that I finance. There are several pros and cons to this strategy, which are important for understanding the future of the internet.
Pro #1 - Authors get 570% pay raise
We have previously discussed how bad the payment system is for book authors. When you buy a book on Amazon for $15, Jeff Bezos and the book publisher only send $2.50 to the authors. Look at J.K. Rowling. She should actually be much richer. She’s not even a billionaire despite selling a billion Harry Potter books.
So if you bought my book on Amazon, I would only keep 16.6% of the money. That’s a big tax. When you buy a digital license directly from me, I keep 95% of the money. When you use the links below to pay me $15, your name will show up in my bank account history—the most important newsfeed in my life. 🥳
Venmo in America (pay in 3 seconds):
Stripe (easiest credit cards in EU and USA):
PayPal from 200 countries:
Con #1 - People cheat
The biggest question I get about releasing a book this way is…will people be honest enough to pay me? If people pay me $15 at the same rate the Christians in America give to their church, I can only expect about $3 per reader. Christians give 2% instead of 10% and 20% of $15 is $3). That’s still more money than I would get from selling the same book on Amazon. So please license these middle chapters and help me get above $5 per reader.
Pro #2 - I still own my copyright
In the age of artificial intelligence, this may be more important than ever. After I publish, I can use artificial intelligence to transform the content in my copyright into thousands of short video clip for distribution on YouTube, TikTok, Weibo, and Instagram. These short highlights drive new readers to funfreq.com to hear more. Similarly, I can use ai to transform my content into millions of automated blogposts for Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and whatever social media people are consuming 1000 years from now.
Con #2 - No publicity
Not having a book publisher creates the biggest challenge for me. If I want to distribute enough copies of this book to qualify as a “New York Times Best Seller” without the help of the New York Times, Amazon, or book publishers …then I need your help. You are my book publisher.
As you read the stories in Human Attention, share them with as many people as you can, preferably by text or email. If you share one of my stories on your Facebook, only 4.5% of your total audience will even see YOUR message. That’s the average organic reach on Facebook. Even with normal click through rates, only about 2% of your 4.5% will investigate further (so 0.09% of your Facebook friends). Conversely, when you share a story to an individual friend via text message, almost all of those links get opened. Even in business marketing, links in SMS get opened 20-35% of the time. Email is second best. Emailed links get opened about 2-10% of the time.
Social Media: 0.09% open rates
Email: 2-10% open rates
Text: 10-30% open rates
Pro #3 - High informational liquidity
Publishing my book on my own private social network gives me an informational liquidity that physical books, audible books, and kindle books just can’t match. Book publishers are only interested in distribution channels they can tightly control because they want to ensure that each reader pays for the product. By distributing my story in Word, people who can’t afford to buy my book still get to read it. Even if they don’t buy it, they can still afford to share it.
I’d rather make less money and help more people.
I also publish this book in Microsoft Word and ePub, which are files small enough to email. Remember how the medium is the message? Well, the likelihood that any person will start reading the book is most strongly influenced by their relationship with the person who sent it. An email between friends is the medium, but it’s also the message. Traditional books and Audible files can’t do that because their sharing friction is too high.
“High informational liquidity” is the reason I published this book as a series of essays that can be read in any order. Many people don’t have time to read an entire book, so these 20-min essays reach a wider total audience. On public social media, like Instagram, 𝕏, and LinkedIn; I publish 2-3 min stories to drive comments and traffic to these essays. My ultimate goal is to draw as much human attention as possible from 𝕏.
Today, almost all news starts on 𝕏 (the artist formerly known as Twitter). 𝕏 has the lowest “status update friction” on social media because of its low character limit, which allows news to unfold much faster. Here are a few recent stats that demonstrate just how important 𝕏 is to the news industry:
More than 80% of young journalists rely on Twitter for their job.
94% of people on Twitter express interest in current events
85% of people on Twitter watch, read, or listen to the news at least once a day
83% of people on Twitter Tweet about news
3 in 4 people who come to Twitter for news do so at least once a day
75% of people who come to Twitter for news follow news about politics and current events on Twitter
In the first 6.5 months of 2022, there were 4.6B Tweets about news in the US (#1) and 10.4B Tweets about news globally (#2)
Pro #4 - Segment the audience
One of the biggest benefits of the higher information liquidity is that it allows me to segment my audience in a way books never will. Segmenting the audience is a major problem, even on social media. For example, Kim Kardashian has 350M+ followers on Instagram. I bet she pulls more human attention from all her platforms each week than CNN. Some of her followers are there because of the reality show, some are there for fashion, some are there because she’s a smoking hot mom. The problem for Kim is that she has to send the exact same Instagram post to responsible moms in Europe, young girls in Australia, and horny teenage boys in America. Those people are all interested in different messages from her, but Instagram chooses the specific reach into her audience for every post. So Kim Kardashian has to say the same message to everyone and that sucks.
To combat this problem, I use @mentions all throughout my stories. I think of them like “Cubist Literature” where there is more than one perspective for each idea. @mentions are the easiest way for me to talk “inside baseball” to a group of experts. In the future, the artificial intelligence that runs funfreq news will translate my original content into a better story for each reader based on everything it knows about their age, education level, personality, mood, and past funfreq interactions.
The future of “segmentation” is “individualization” and you can only deliver that through the web. Pro #5 - Know my audience
Amazon computers know everything about the people who buy books on their website, but they don’t share that information with authors. For example, author Robert Greene has a best seller on Amazon right now called “The 48 Laws of Power”. Amazon knows the email addresses of everyone who bought that book, but would never share them with Robert Greene. By publishing on my own private social network, I capture the email of readers. I convert a large percentage of them into weekly newsfeed subscribers who I can talk to for free. This way, when I publish new books and essays in the future, I already have a core audience of readers.
On Kindle and Audible, Amazon even knows how fast and how far each person is reading each book. By publishing my book on Substack, I get to know how many pages each person has read, how many videos they watched, how many times they shared them, and how many new subscribers they generated.
Pro #6 - Hear my audience
Authors who distribute their content in physical books, Kindle, and Audible don’t have an integrated forum for readers to discuss their reactions. Hosting a book on my own private social network invites readers to comment and ask questions while they read. I use this incredibly important feedback to improve the most boring parts of my book for future readers.
@bestsellingbookpublishers: I have a few more books to write. I have been publishing 400-word essays for my friends in real life for years. I’ve covered everything from guns to racism to parenting to all things internet. I want to turn the best essays into several thousand-word pieces for another anthology. I’m thinking way less science and religion and more like “Arguably” by Christopher Hitchens. I also have enough hilarious stories to write a few David Sedaris style books. If you want to publish any of those books, email me here:
@influencers: If human attention is the world’s most valuable commodity, then you guys are the future of our economy. You harvest the most attention. If you have more than 1 million followers for your Podcast, Substack, Radio show, TV show, Facebook, Weibo, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, or YouTube…then I want to be a guest on your show. “Influencers” to me could mean politicians, athletes, chefs, boy bands, I really don’t care as long as you have a million followers. I don’t care if you live in Hollywood, Bollywood, Dollywood, or live stream from your parents’ basement like the movie, “Pump Up the Volume” 🤘. Let’s share some stories.
Continue reading
➡️: Chapter 6 - The BioLogical Robot
Receive months of free VIP access by referring friends to this story:
@influencerswith100kfollowers: Tell your audience what I said, just make sure to mention funfreq.com. Also, I want to give away (100) free years of VIP access to your (100) favorite fans. Just email me* a spreadsheet containing only their email addresses without identities to ihave100kfollowers@funfreq.com
*spam is attention theft. If I think you’re spamming me, I will ban your email address from my life.
@influencerswith1Mfollowers: I want to be a guest on your podcast, radio show, tv show, Facebook, Weibo, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, or YouTube. Email me* at ihaveonemillionfollowers@funfreq.com
@sponsors: I don’t supply ad networks, but I will create sponsored mentions for people and products I like. If you want me to drive traffic to you, email me* at wewanttosponsor@funfreq.com
As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. All intellectual property rights, including copyright, relating to the funfreq.com domain shall remain vested in John Stuart Kime, unless otherwise stated. Any extraction, translation, reproduction, and distribution, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, requires the explicit prior written permission of John Stuart Kime. (That means if the page has a share button then humans can share it, but ai can’t train on it).
I reserve the right to disagree with everything I’ve said.