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12 Days of Subscriptions

Posted on May 31, 2023. By Michael Evans and Emilia Rose.

It’s like Christmas… except it’s May. And instead of just once per year… your membership is the gift that keeps on giving every month 😆.

Yes, this is a 12-day workshop that originally took place in Subscriptions for Authors Facebook Group.

Below you can find all the insights from the 12 days of Subscriptions.

The Goal: In mini-blog posts break down what you need to know about the 12 Key Foundational Lessons for all Subscription Authors.

Each day will have a different theme and a different post along with resources (such as blogs and podcasts) linked to each post to help you dive deeper into any topics, if you want.

If you don’t know much about subscriptions or where to start as an author, then these 12 days are a great, simple way to get some insights on where to begin.

No matter the subscription platform you want to use and no matter your genre, there will be incredible insights here for you.

We can’t wait to kick it off.

12 Days of Subscriptions Day 1: Should You Start a Subscription? 

TLDR: If and how you should start your subscription depends on the alignment between the resources you have to give, what you want to give, and the expectations of your readers.

First, what is a subscription?

For readers, subscriptions provide an opportunity to get special access, privileges, and a better experience in exchange for recurring support (either monthly or annual) of an author’s work. I’ll link in the comments to a great article about why people support creators (#1).

For authors, subscriptions provide you with recurring revenue for the work you do, 

There are 3 key questions to ask yourself when looking to start a subscription.

  1. What is my bandwidth (aka resources) in time/money/energy that I have to give to my subscription? And what am I looking to get from it (aka what are my expectations)?
  2. What are my strengths as an author and what do I enjoy doing most?
  3. What are my readers expectations of me (or if I don’t have many readers yet… what expectations do readers have of similar authors)?

The beauty of these 3 questions is that they can be applied to any new project or initiative you begin in publishing. 

THE GOAL: you want alignment between your answers to these 3 questions. Getting perfect alignment is near impossible, but knowing that you can make what you want, what you are able to give, and what your readers want all work together is essential for making any publishing endeavor successful over the long term.

Too often we think about our readers want, and not about what we are able to give, or even willing to give them.

In other instances, we over index on what we want and don’t think enough about our readers and adopt a Readers First mindset.

And, then sometimes… we are so excited about something but put too much on our plates and are fueled partially by short-term highs and creative adrenaline rather than a sustainable process (trust me, we all have been running on story fuel before, but it can’t last us forever).

Of course, we will all have drastically different answers to these questions and these answers will change throughout time in our lives and careers as authors.

That’s okay! It’s important to reflect regularly — I recommend every 90 days, to do a little reset/check-in on the state of your overall publishing business.

When thinking about these questions in the context of subscriptions… does starting one seem right for you?

Note, this is just Day 1 of 12 Days of Subscriptions for Authors. We will have plenty more opportunities to learn about the HOW and WHAT you can do to start a successful subscription :).

P.S. If you haven’t read the Subscriptions for Authors book yet, you can read it here because it has a whole chapter about this topic of deciding whether to start a subscription or not.

12 Days of Subscriptions Day 2: Setting up your subscription.

TLDR: WHEN SETTING UP YOUR SUBSCRIPTION, START SMALL AND FOCUS ON COMMUNITY.

What model should I choose? How long will it take to grow? What should my benefits be? When you’re thinking about starting a subscription, you probably have a lot of questions. We’re here to break them down and hopefully give you a clear path on how to approach your subscription.

So here are ten tips for setting up your subscription:

  1. Developing real relationships with readers is often the best way to learn about them and what they want.
  2. Focus less on gaining new readers, and more on making your existing ones happier (even if you only have five readers).
  3. Rewards for your subscription depend on (1) what is best for you as a writer, (2) your reader’s relationship to you and your stories, (3) your readers’ relationship to reading in their life.
  4. Be wary of low pricing, which often can hurt engagement and churn for your subscription (leading to more reader cancellations).
  5. Make the tech simple and what works best for you and your readers.
  6. Your subscription is not something for cold audiences but instead a way to nurture existing readers and superfans. Promote accordingly!
  7. Underpromise and overdeliver. And don’t burn yourself out with extremely high expectations.
  8. Poll your readers consistently and add new tiers + tweak your offerings accordingly.
  9. Scale doesn’t have to come from more subscribers, but instead from deeper relationships. Upselling existing subscribers to higher-priced tiers is a way to scale your revenue without more readers.
  10. Subscriptions make you more accountable to the desires of your readers with halo effects across your author business.

Takeaway

When setting up your subscription, start small. You don’t need to do all the things right now. Many authors who have large subscriptions (in terms of tiers and rewards) have run a membership for a long period of time and / or they have a large team to help them run it.

Resources

If you want to learn more, you can check out this podcast episode: https://storytellersruletheworld.com/podcast/16-10-steps-to-100k-from-subscriptions-as-an-author/

12 Days of Subscriptions Day 3: Different subscription models.

TLDR: There are four main subscription models, which include early access, exclusive access, physical goods, and community-based.

There are four emerging subscriptions models, and we’re going to break them down for you.

Early Access: In an early access model, provide access to your rough drafts in a serialized format. This is one of the most successful models that requires the least amount of work. You’re already writing your book. Why not release it to your subscribers before you publish it on retailers?

Exclusive Access: In an exclusive access model, provide access to your books, bonus content, or digital content exclusively to your subscribers. This model requires a bit more time (to write those bonus scenes or hire artists for exclusive artwork).

Physical Goods: This model includes subscription boxes, art prints, or anything physical that you’re sending your readers. This model takes more time and more money to sustain. You have to package your physical goods as well as purchase shipping supplies and the physical goods.

Community-Based: Think of this model as hosting events, video calls, chatting with members, and more! This model requires socializing, so beware 💓

Takeaway

There are four main subscription models, which include early access, exclusive access, physical goods, and community-based. Each model is different in terms of time, money, and workload. Choose the model that best fits in your business.

Resources

If you want to learn more, you can check out these resources: 

12 Days of Subscriptions Day 4: The One Metric To Know for Your Subscription 

TLDR: Subscription marketing is all about serving your existing readers. Instead of sales or transactions, we focus on the retention of our readers over time.

The spoiler alert?

Publishing is not a launch business — even for authors who don’t have subscriptions.

We see a huge spike in income as authors when we launch books.

This can wrongly trick us into thinking that launching is what makes an author successful.

It is true that launching more books is often correlated with success — but we have to be careful not to draw a false causation between two variables.

MORE LAUNCHES ≠ More Money

Instead, more launches typically mean more successive rounds to hone your craft of marketing, sales, product development, and storytelling, and increase the cumulative effects of word of mouth and algorithmic discovery. For those who want to learn more about cumulative advantage, Joe Solari has an amazing book called Advantage.

In short, more launches don’t necessarily lead to more money.

Instead launches are the moment of reader purchasing (the metric we typically focus on) in a larger more complex system that has dozens of steps and variables in the process leading up to launch.

The thing with launching is that we don’t typically launch brand-new products and storylines to brand-new audiences.

Instead, we create a book that our existing readers will love and one that can hopefully bring more readers into the fold.

The metric we commonly refer to in this case is Read Through.

How many readers that purchase book 1 go on to purchase book 2 and book 3 etc.?

Or for serial fiction authors, how many readers go on to read the next chapter and the next season, and so on?

This is your retention as an author.

In effect, readers make a recurring commitment to your stories. To continue consuming, to continue paying for them, and to continue being a fan of your work.

Thus, publishing is much more similar to a membership economy business than most authors think.

All of our publishing businesses, even if we don’t actively have a subscription, are actively deploying the principles of subscription marketing and subscription-like behavior from our readers.

This means that even for readers who are not paid subscribers of yours on a platform like Ream or Patreon, they are still members of your world and readers that you want to retain as fans over time.

And this means that for the 60% – 70% of you who are reading this and don’t yet have a subscription (at least prior surveys in this group have shown us that roughly that number of you don’t yet have a paid subscription), this group and the principles in Subscriptions for Authors still have an impact throughout your publishing business whether you ever choose to start a subscription or not.

If you want to dive deeper into these topics, I recommend checking out our webinar with Anne Janzer, the author of Subscription Marketing: https://youtu.be/eQKjzB986eM

And I recommend reading a guide I made for her book that in 5 minutes summarizes some awesome insights about subscription marketing: https://storytellersruletheworld.com/subscription-marketing-by-anne-janzer-reading-guide/

12 Days of Subscriptions Day 5: The Reader Journey for Subscriptions

TLDR: The currency of subscriptions is trust. 

The Reader Journey is individualized for every reader and author, however, there are 5 general principles for the reader journey and subscriptions that can guide all of us.

  1. Subscriptions rely on a reader trusting you enough to support you regularly. This typically doesn’t happen when a reader is first familiar with your work. This is why running Facebook Ads to cold audiences to subscribe to your subscription is not usually a good idea. Instead, subscriptions are all about providing further value to casual readers and superfans who already trust your ability to deliver great stories to them.
  2. Subscriptions are about giving readers more of what they already love. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel to be successful in subscriptions. Readers got to your subscription because they want to continue their journey with you. It’s about getting more of what they love and deeper access to the stories they care about. Sometimes, just knowing their support of you will help you write more books in the future is enough :).
  3. Subscriptions take time to build trust — relationships with readers are not built over night. 
  4. Your fans will migrate between paid members and free members in your community. A paid subscriber isn’t a paid subscriber forever. Sometimes people will hit a rough spot financially, or they may be cycling in and out of supporting a group of authors they love. Whatever the reason, it’s normal for readers to pop in and out of your paid subscription. It’s important to make this switch between a free and paid member of your community easy for your readers.
  5. Different tiers will cater to different segments of your audience and different archetypal reader journeys. You can have an audio tier, a tier focused on eBook early access, and a tier focused on book boxes for your readers. Every new tier is an opportunity to cater to a different segment of your audience. 

Reflection Time:

How do you create and nurture trust in your readers? Do you fear you will ever lose the trust of your readers?

Continued Learning:

Listen to the podcast on Promoting Your Subscription: https://storytellersruletheworld.com/podcast/21-how-to-promote-your-subscription/

Listen to our podcast with Michael Chatfield, where the reader journey for subscriptions is discussed in detail: https://storytellersruletheworld.com/podcast/5-how-a-litrpg-author-makes-a-full-time-income-from-subscriptions/

12 Days of Subscriptions Day 6: Pricing your subscription.

TLDR: Your subscription is for your superfans. Don’t be afraid to have high-priced tiers.

So, you know what subscription model you’re going to use for your subscription. Now how do you price it?

We have two major pieces of advice when creating your prices:

  1. Don’t price too low. If you’re trying to make a profit, a $1 tier probably won’t do it because payment processing fees are high for low-priced tiers. It’s also difficult to move people out of a low-priced tier and potential superfans might think it’s low quality content because the price is low.
  2. Pricing high. You want your customers to have choices, so they can increase their pledge later. Even if you don’t think there will be, there are readers who pledge at a high-tier. Don’t be afraid of it.

We recommend pricing your lowest tier at $5 per month.

Takeaway

Don’t be afraid to have high-priced tiers. Your subscription is for your superfans. You’re not forcing anyone to purchase at a specific price and you are not selling a product. You’re providing them with access to your content.

Resources

If you want to learn more, you can check out this blog post: https://storytellersruletheworld.com/10-ideas-for-reader-subscription-rewards/

12 Days of Subscriptions Day 7: How to Promote Your Subscription.

TLDR: Promote where your fans already are. Don’t promote to a cold audience.

Your marketing strategies are going to depend on your author brand and your subscription model. But we’re going to break down the 10 mistakes authors make when marketing their subscriptions.

  1. Short-Term Marketing: Your readers are probably not going to convert on your first marketing post. Subscriptions are a long game, so you have to set your expectations that way.
  2. Pricing Your Book Like a Commodity: Your readers aren’t buying your book like they do on Amazon. They’re purchasing access to your content that they either can’t get anywhere else or that they’re getting early. Make sure your prices reflect this.
  3. Not Getting Readers Before You Release: Focus on building your community and not on marketing to a cold audience. A cold audience will probably not convert the way they do on Facebook ads for one-time Amazon purchases.
  4. Trying to Do Everything at Once: Focus on one model and become an expert in it. Having too many benefits and rewards, especially at first, may make your readers confused. And confused readers don’t convert.
  5. Not Taking Advantage of Network Effects: Let your readers promote your subscription for you. Encourage them to share pictures of your physical goods or digital products that they received.
  6. Jumping on Marketing Bandwagons: No need to run ads. Again, a cold audience will be less likely to convert, especially if they don’t know you!
  7. Not Hyper-focusing on Read-through Rate: If you’re running a serial fiction, early access model, you should focus on making your stories the best they can be! With subscriptions, it’s not about how much content that you’re releasing. It’s about your community and how your fans relate to your stories.
  8. Not Clearly Defining Your Brand for Readers: Brand your community, your tier names, your tier images, and everything so your readers know exactly what to expect from you.
  9. Not Nurturing Your Superfans: Your superfans will make your subscription. Don’t forget about them!
  10. Not Utilizing Multi-Media Marketing: You don’t have to just rely on social media posts to market your subscription. Find unique ways that will attract your superfans!

Takeaway

Promote where your fans already are. Don’t promote to a cold audience. Focus on the readers you already have.

Questions

We will be hanging out in the comments to follow up on any questions! But if you want to learn more, you can check out these resources: 

12 Days of Subscriptions Day 9: How to Nurture Trust in Your Readers.

TLDR: Underpromise and overdeliver.

Here are some tips for nurturing trust in your readers, whether they’re already in your subscription or not.

Underpromise. Overdeliver. Be consistent.

You’ve promised your readers content, so deliver it. Consistently.

And if you know you’re not good with deadlines, don’t tell your readers that you’ll give them a chapter every single day. Don’t even tell them that you’ll give them a couple a week. Set clear expectations that they will get a chapter a month, if that is what you can commit to. If you can commit to more, great!

But make sure that you’re delivering the content that you promise.

Most readers will understand if you need a couple weeks off for mental health or physical health or even family emergencies. Those happen to everyone. But if you’re consistently taking time off without any communication, they will lose trust in you.

Besides, your readers don’t want to feel like they’re money for you. Nobody does. They’re people with personalities who also happen to be superfans of your work. So treat them as if you’d treat a friend, not as if you only care about them for the money that they can give you.

Takeaway

Underpromise and overdeliver. Your readers will lose trust in you if you promise 20 chapters a month, but only deliver one. Set clear expectations and meet them every single time.

Resources

If you want to learn more, you can check out these resources: 

12 Days of Subscriptions Day 10: Building YOUR Creator Economy

TLDR: Your subscription is your reader amusement park.

*I tried to keep this short, but got excited, bear with me*

People often ask, what are the possible benefits I can offer in my subscription? The answer is… limitless (an actual practical list can be found in this free webinar on tier benefits that we produced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2Me8oIQ71M).

Creators are the next generation of SMBs (small-to-medium sized businesses).

Storytellers own the most valuable real estate in the world: the hearts, attention, and trust of consumers.

The subscription publishing mindset is all about cultivating trust in your readers (look at day 5 of 12 days of subscriptions for more on trust: https://www.facebook.com/groups/4829545823760825/posts/6114768945238500).

When we talk about building your community — you are effectively creating a digital version of the communities that exist in the real world.

Roads, bridges, malls, and farmer’s markets used to the places that tie us together. They still are. 

But the infrastructure we use to connect as a species has changed.

People spend more time each day in the digital world than we do in the real world.

Internet usage is up to 8 hours a day on average and 4.5 billion people are now connected online.

There are still many billions of people that need to be connected to the internet, but the rules have changed forever.

Let me say this again.

The rules have changed forever.

Most of you are still stuck in an old mindset.

The Wild West mindset where new attention and new users kept flooding into the internet, enabling a rush of opportunity for those who struck fast and aggressively.

What happened to all the cowboy and gold mining towns in the American West?

Many are abandoned. 

In my time roadtripping through Montana I visited many of them. They are beautiful, awesome places — but they were unable to build enduring communities. 

Internet usage grew exponentially in the last two decades.

It literally can’t grow exponentially in the next two decades.

In the Western world almost everyone is connected and spending the majority of their waking hours online.

Where does it go from here?

It’s now the age of the Creator Economy.

With the world connected, there needs to be no more fervid rush with the supply of content too low for the number of eyeballs willing to consume it.

The rise of generative AI has brought us into a permanent phase of content abundance.

But your readers are tired of living in the Wild West.

Tired of living in a sometimes ruthless environment that has made us feel lonely, disconnected us from our peers, and used by an ecosystem optimizing for retention.

Here’s where the opportunity is…

If the last 20 years was defined by settling the plains of the wild internet landscape (and if you go deep with this metaphor, the subjugation of voices and peoples not accepted by the majority also rings true during both these eras)…

The next 20 years will be about building a civilization on top of this new connected world.

The highways have been built and are being built by the platforms. The infrastructure and tools are getting better and easier-to-use everyday to create new and unique stories and experience for your readers.

Now it’s time for you to create.

To create your reader amusement park.

And I mean this almost literally.

Whether it’s beauty, fashion, ice cream, pizza, you name it… creators are building the next generation of small and medium sized companies.

For those curious: look up Airrack’s Pizzafy, Creator Camp started by my good friend Max Reisinger, Dylan Lemay’s Catch’n Ice Cream, Virtual Dining Concepts, and the list goes on and on (these examples are simply pulled from people I’ve collaborated with and met in real life). 

Internet storytellers are building the new malls and the new neighborhoods for people to identify with and find belonging in, not bound by the place you were born, 

Instead, just a shared passion for the stories and meaning embedded into them that bring us together.

And it’s changing everything.

For those that think the indie author wave is over… you couldn’t be more wrong.

It’s just beginning — and will continue evolve over the next 50+ years.

You are all early. And we are all the beginning of this incredible change.

But times have shifted.

We have entered a new era.

And we don’t have to be alone fighting each other in the Wild West anymore.

We can work together.

To build YOUR creator economy.

To build OUR future.

Let’s make it better than today.

And if you’re wondering… how do I do this? Well this new age of publishing is the foundation of everything we do in Subscriptions for Authors… you’re in just the right place.

Here are some great podcasts that touch on the above topics:

P.S. I wrote a book called Creator Economy for Authors: A Guide to the Future of Publishing, and you can download it here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C7R8SW7L. And after a lot of reflection… I think I have a new book in the works on this called The Sovereign Author: The New Mindset for Publishing Success. Stay tuned on updates for that — that will hopefully be a July project for me.

12 Days of Subscriptions Day 11: What I wish I knew before I started.

TLDR: Don’t try to do it all. Only do what you love.

The first subscription that I ever ran had an exclusive content model. I wrote bonus scenes that I didn’t want to write. Honestly, I hated writing them, and it probably showed. The bonus scenes were for my most popular book ever (one that has now hit 23+ million reads on Wattpad). And that subscription failed.

Deciding that I didn’t want to write more content, I tried a new pen name with a new model. I only wrote the books that I wanted to write and the scenes that really made me happy through an early access model. And it worked for me.

Now, you don’t have to do what I did. I encourage you to find what you love.

If you love writing bonus content, try an exclusive access model. If you love crafting, maybe a physical goods model is great for you. And if you’re an extrovert, try out a community-based model!

When I started, there weren’t many other authors that were publishing through subscriptions. It was all trial and error. And it still is for me, just as it probably will be for you too. Constantly pivot is some of the best advice I would give myself as a new subscription author. If something isn’t working for you, that’s okay. Put it to the side and try something new. Don’t be afraid to fail.

And my last note… the small, unscalable things (like sending a personalized message to a reader) really help you scale.

Takeaway

Don’t try to do it all. Only do what you love.

Resources

If you want to learn more, you can check out these resources: 

12 DAYS OF SUBSCRIPTIONS DAY 12: LAUNCHING YOUR SUBSCRIPTION

TLDR: Subscriptions are not about launching, they are about iteration.

This is the insight about subscriptions that changed everything for me.

Subscriptions are about monthly recurring revenue.

You need to get your fans to stay in your subscription, not just join for a month and then leave.

Thus, your subscription is about experimenting to see what your fans love most and making changes to fit your changing lifestyle and bandwidth.

You are not launching the perfect subscription with the perfect tier image and benefits that will be set in stone for years.

Instead, your goal is to get your first paid subscriber.

That’s right, make your first $10 per month from your subscription.

Then from there, get to $25, then $50, then $100… one reader, then another reader, then another reader at a time (in the infamous words of Christopher Hopper).

So how can you do that? How can you get your first readers in your subscription?

Here are 5 steps you can take when launching your subscription in order to do that:

  1. Put your subscription links in key places readers who are familiar with your work will visit such as your site, back of books, social media bios, and end of chapters on serial fiction sites/or in bios on serial fiction platforms.
  2. Create a founding bonus or early bird special. Maybe give an exclusive short story only to early subscribers or an exclusive art print in the mail of one of your main characters.
  3. Let your readers know more than once. You should develop a campaign over your first 30 days where you send several emails out to your list about your subscription.
  4. Clearly state the benefits for your readers and make your subscription links prominent in any promotion you do.
  5. Post on social media and/or your reader community where you have a following to tease the rewards/benefits inside your subscription.

These are just a few ideas to get you started on a great subscription launch, and the beginning of your journey iterating as a subscription author.

And what happens if your launch doesn’t go as planned?

Pivot your strategy! Luckily you can change your tier benefits any time, and it takes way less time to write new tier copy than it is to write a new book. Experimentation is your best friend 🙂.

Of course, there is so much more to launching your subscription, here are some resources we have created that may help with that:

And that’s the end of 12 days of Subscriptions for Authors. You can find the full list of posts in the Facebook Group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/subscriptionsforauthors/permalink/6100620156653379

This was a ton of fun! And we hope to make this a regular tradition inside the Facebook Group.

P.S. If you are looking to start, grow, and supercharge your subscription as an author, this Six-Figure Subscription Author Accelerator may be just for you. You can join here : https://academy.storytellersruletheworld.com/subscriptions-for-authors-accelerator