This article is part of a series on the leadership behind the companies shaping the independent publishing industry. To find other articles in the series, click here.
When Evan Gow asked authors how to get started in publishing, he received what sounded like a shopping list. One service would help him build a mailing list. Another would find reviewers. He would need universal book links, spreadsheets, Facebook Groups for newsletter swaps, and more systems for beta readers and audiobook promotions.
“You’re doing all this context switching between all the different things,” he recalls. “You’ve just got too much to do.”
Gow saw a software problem. The business he built around it, StoryOrigin, is his solution—one platform to manage all the marketing tools an author uses to strengthen their relationship with readers. The platform helps authors deliver reader magnets, organize beta and review copies, manage their newsletters, coordinate promotions with other authors, “plus some things that I didn’t even get into in that overview,” he says.
And as a team of one, Gow serves as the engineering department, customer support, and the CEO managing it all.
A Writing Plan That Became a Software Business
Gow had written short stories in high school, developed an interest in technology and entrepreneurship in college, and spent several years working before leaving his job in July 2017. His plan going forward combined returning to writing with building tools for authors. Those conversations with writers about how best to kick-start his author career soon made the second project large enough to consume the first.
He is careful about that history. During our interview, when described as an indie author himself, he clarified that he had written short fiction but had never published anything. Programming took over the time he had expected to spend writing.
His familiarity with authors’ businesses therefore came through listening to the people doing the work. The fragmented systems they described suggested an opportunity to build something more connected.
“I do think about a lot of this from the perspective of, ‘I want to build the system that I want to use when I get around to being able to actually write something worth publishing,’” he says.
“I’ve thought so many times about hiring someone, and honestly, handing this off wouldn’t save me that much time. And I could hand off programming stuff as well, but that’s like the part that I love.”
—Evan Gow
StoryOrigin’s initial release, in April 2018, was much narrower than that ambition. The platform started as a place for authors to create a landing page for a reader magnet. The service handled the delivery of the file and readers’ technical questions. Soon after, he added tools to organize group promotions, and more functions—including universal book links, newsletter swaps, and review copies—followed.
Gow kept the service entirely free until he introduced paid plans in April 2021. However, he kept a pricing link visible from the beginning, even while there was nothing to buy, to make the intended business model clear.
“I was always very transparent about this, like, ‘Hey, I have this vision for this thing that I’m building. I’m not there yet. [But] I’ve got a whole lot of ideas,’” he says.
Even in the three-year free period, Gow made support a priority, responding to customers’ emails and questions within a day and generally maintaining the standard he expected to offer once it did.
His approach, he says, was not unlike how authors view the stories they distribute using his platform. “I think that authors have to apply that same logic to their reader magnets, which they’re giving away for free, right?” he says. “They still need to be super polished because readers are going to expect the same level of polish out of your paid works.”
The Author’s Most Important Tool
Some authors approach marketing with an immediate and simple objective: Sell more books. Gow has built StoryOrigin with the mindset that it’s more important to focus on the relationship that might make later sales, review requests, and new releases easier to introduce.
Asking a stranger to read and review a book carries a different burden from inviting someone who already enjoys an author’s work. An author’s mailing list offers a way to build stronger connections with readers, with the possibility of finding future beta readers or review team members among the people who have chosen to stay in touch.
Maintaining that connection takes communication. Gow recommends regular newsletters because, he says, “if you’re only sending a newsletter every three months or every six months or once a year, people are just going to forget why they signed up to your mailing list in the first place.”
He also suggests including material that lets subscribers know the person behind the work and gives them a reason to keep opening.
“In my newsletter, because I send newsletters out for StoryOrigin, that usually looks like building rapport with my audience. Really, you’re just trying to show people that you’re human. So it usually comes down to, ‘Here’s a picture of me walking my dog,’ or ‘Here’s me at the playground with my kids,’ … or ‘Look at the way too many bottles of soy sauce that I bought because I messed up my Walmart order,’” he says.
In the second half of the newsletter, Gow says authors should provide value for their readers—for him, that means talking about new developments and upcoming features to StoryOrigin, but authors may want to give updates about their next release.
Maintaining a newsletter following requires building rapport, but growing a newsletter following can require the same. Reader magnets are some of the easiest ways to invite people to build a relationship with an author, Gow says. For fiction, Gow generally favors a short prequel as a reader magnet. It can interest people who have already read the first book and want more of its world while also giving newcomers an entry point. A link in the first book’s front or back matter can also reach the readers who have already encountered the author’s storytelling.
Despite all Gow’s advice for authors about growing and developing an author’s newsletter, StoryOrigin is not a service that can manage them. Instead, the platform supports activities meant to grow those newsletters, by providing authors with landing pages, file delivery options, and cross-promotion opportunities. Gow’s aim is for the platform to help authors manage their businesses more easily and efficiently, no matter which platforms they start with.
“StoryOrigin sort of handles a lot of the tedious processes that authors have [so they’re] getting more time to write,” he says.
Making Author Collaboration Easier
The reader magnet gives authors something to offer. Cross-promotion provides a way for new readers to encounter it. Each marketing tactic, Gow says, requires authors to make decisions about which readers will connect best with their work.
In a group promotion, authors gather their reader magnets on one landing page and share that page with their audiences. A newsletter swap is a more direct agreement: One author features another’s book in exchange for a feature in return. Before building StoryOrigin’s version, Gow saw authors organizing both sets of exchanges through Facebook Groups and spreadsheets. Finding suitable partners meant searching across groups, then coordinating through messages and comments. He said some authors told him they had stopped arranging swaps despite finding them useful because the administration took too much time.
“Going and searching ten different Facebook groups and then trying to email or message or comment back and forth with other people was just a huge headache,” he says.
The workflow he created with StoryOrigin brings prospective partners, available dates, and genre information into the same place. Authors can fill out a form to request a newsletter swap with other users, and historical information about previous swaps allows users to assess whether a prospective partner would be a good fit.
“I do think about a lot of this from the perspective of, ‘I want to build the system that I want to use when I get around to being able to actually write something worth publishing.’”
—Evan Gow
StoryOrigin can only help with making collaboration easier to organize and evaluate, Gow reiterates. Authors retain responsibility for the recommendation and ensuring it makes sense in the newsletter a reader signed up to receive. But the platform’s ability to collect and display stats about an author’s previous swaps gives partners another layer of reassurance that their marketing efforts will benefit everyone—their swap partner, their readers, and themselves.
Just as it helps authors, collaboration also helped StoryOrigin grow into the platform it is today. When the swap feature launched, an author setting up a group promotion through StoryOrigin had a reason to invite other authors to participate. Gow said that pattern contributed to the company’s growth by word of mouth. The activity that made the service useful also introduced it to prospective users, linking product development closely to customer acquisition.
It was yet another example of the platform, designed to help authors develop their businesses, putting the same strategies into practice for its own growth and seeing them work firsthand.
Identifying the Pain Points in Indie Publishing
StoryOrigin has brought many authors’ newsletter marketing needs under one roof, but more recently, Gow has turned his focus to other corners of the publishing business. Gow had heard authors describe sending out a manuscript to beta readers and receiving enthusiastic responses but little help with revision. Readers liked the story—but what had worked, and what needed attention?
Some authors were already solving that problem manually. They would send a few chapters, ask readers to complete a form with more critical questions about the draft, and release the next section after the feedback arrived. That method created a more specific conversation about the draft, alongside a considerable amount of tracking and follow-up. But “it’s such a manual and time-consuming process,” Gow says. “You’re tracking all these readers, you’re waiting for them to email you, you’re following up, all this stuff.”
StoryOrigin’s beta-copy feature took the strategy and automated the exchange. Authors upload the beta document and can provide prompts about matters such as whether a character feels believable or whether a plot point is unclear. Once approved as beta readers, readers proceed through the book at their own pace. The author can see where each reader has reached and review the feedback attached to individual chapters. “Readers have to leave feedback on each chapter to unlock the next chapter,” Gow says.
On the other side of the publishing finish line, the platform has also streamlined the process for delivering review copies to ARC readers. Readers can request access to a book available as a review copy and identify where they intend to post a review; authors can assess those requests after reviewing readers’ completion histories and links to reviewer profiles. Once approved, StoryOrigin handles any follow-up messages connected to approval, publication, and reminders, taking over work an author would have done manually otherwise.
“You can never strictly require a reader to leave a review,” Gow says, but the platform gives authors the best assurance possible that the readers receiving review copies will follow through.
Gow says conversations in author groups about implementing direct ebook sales have highlighted the same fundamental challenges that authors faced with receiving beta feedback or soliciting reviews. He described writers becoming excited by successful direct-sales case studies, then discovering the time and recurring expenses involved in building and maintaining a storefront.
“There was a rush of authors to build Shopify stores, and I think a lot of those authors have probably shut down their Shopify stores by now because they’re like, ‘I’m paying $30 a month for the Shopify subscription. I’m paying another $50 for this additional plugin. I’m paying another $50 for this other plugin.’ It’s getting out of hand, and I’ve driven three sales to it. There’s no ROI here,’” he says. “I do think that direct sales are great, to be clear, but I think that method is a method that you can only really do when you’re at a substantially higher level than a lot of authors currently are.”
His concern, he continues, is the sequence: An author could commit considerable effort to the store before learning whether they wanted to do the work of bringing buyers to it. “If you don’t drive traffic, you don’t make the sales,” he says.
For Gow, that requirement is central to evaluating whether direct sales are right for an author. One of StoryOrigin’s latest ventures offers authors facing this question an opportunity to create direct-sale ebook pages with file delivery and reader support. The sales pages integrate with Lemon Squeezy to handle payments and international tax requirements on authors’ behalf. Gow presented them as a way to test the activity before committing to a more elaborate storefront.
“It’s a relatively cookie-cutter template,” he says. “It works well for readers and authors. You’re not going to be able to customize it to your brand a ton, but it’s an MVP. It’s a minimum viable product for you to test the direct sales waters to be sure that it is something that you can invest in more if that is a success.”
The same level of infrastructure isn’t the right answer for every stage of a business, Gow acknowledges. But the platform gives authors a place to start building, and eventually, it can provide the evidence an author needs to support investing in the next stage of the process.
Staying Close to the Work That Needs Fixing
Gow describes himself as both StoryOrigin’s developer and its customer support department. That arrangement gives him a direct view of the places where authors become confused or stuck. Repeated questions can point toward a change that would make the product easier to use or a new feature to consider in future updates.
He estimated that support occupies about an hour of his day; the rest he spends programming, though he doesn’t mind that balance. “I’ve thought so many times about hiring someone, and honestly, handing this off wouldn’t save me that much time,” he says. “And I could hand off programming stuff as well, but that’s like the part that I love. That’s like going up to an author and telling them, ‘Okay, you’re a great author. You do great at marketing. Just do the marketing and stop writing, and pay other people to do the writing for you.’”
Even while handling customer support tickets personally, Gow’s closeness to his customers does not mean every request becomes an immediate feature. Gow said his roadmap had seemed roughly two years long at any given point in the company’s life. When deciding on a feature to implement, he weighs how useful a change would be, how many authors it would affect, and how much time it would take. When asked about upcoming releases, he declined to promise specifics because priorities could change.
“It’s probably relatively easy for anyone to be like, ‘Oh, StoryOrigin does this, this, and this. Here’s the gaps. Evan’s going to build something there,’” he says. “Yeah, you’re probably right. But I don’t want to make any promises about when that’s going to happen.” At the moment, he says he is concentrating on making existing parts of the service more convenient for authors and readers.
That is a fitting return to the problem he first heard in those conversations with writers. Much of publishing’s administrative burden sits in the handoffs: getting the next chapter to a beta reader, confirming a promotion, delivering a file, or finding the information needed to choose a collaborator. Gow has built his business around making those handoffs easier.
The relationship on either side still belongs to people. An author decides which book to recommend, listens to feedback, and gives subscribers a reason to remain interested. Gow wants to make more room for that work—and leave authors with an audience connection that lasts beyond the tool.
