2023 Subscriptions for Authors Industry Report

Here it is! The official Industry Report for the Top Fiction Authors in Subscriptions for 2023. If you want to check out the 2022 Top 500 Fiction Authors in Subscriptions list, you can do so here.

There are 3 goals for this report.

1. Share aggregated stats on the overall subscription market for fiction authors.
2. Share top takeaways that help seasoned and new subscription authors understand the market and how they can break in.
3. Celebrate the Top 100 Fiction Authors in Subscriptions for 2023. If you’d like to access the top fiction authors in subscriptions ranking you can do so by joining our Facebook Group here.

Let’s start with some aggregated stats on the subscription market.

• 300,000+ paid subscribers with well over $20 million in annual revenue. (Hint: to access the full database of 1,000+ fiction authors succeeding in subscriptions, you must be a member of the Six-Figure Subscription Author Accelerator. You can join the waitlist here).
• Paid subscriber count per author:
  • 382 fiction authors have between 100 and 499 paid subscribers
  • 87 fiction authors have between 500 and 1,000 paid subscribers
  • 40 fiction authors have 1,000 – 2,499 paid subscribers
  • 21 fiction authors have 2,500+ paid subscribers

Now let’s dive into some stats around the genre of successful subscription authors…

• What authors put in their “is creating” section:
  • “Romance” mentioned 164 times
  • “Sci-fi” mentioned 48 times
  • Fantasy mentioned 148 times
  • “Thriller” and “mystery” mentioned 13 times
  • “Serial” mentioned 30 times
  • “LitRPG” and “webnovel” mentioned 88 times
  • “Steamy” and “erotic” mentioned 99 times
  • NOTE: these tier taglines were indexed from the 1,000 fiction authors in our exclusive Subscriptions for Authors Industry Report. Since not everyone mentions the same tier tagline or categorizes their subscription by genre, these descriptors are not wholly representative of the subscription market.

And here’s what authors were offering in their subscriptions:

• Early access was the most common tier benefit across genres.
• There was little correlation between the number of chapters offered and the total paid subscriber count.
• Merchandise, signed books, bonus content, community events, and just pledging to support a creative person were common benefits/reasons authors listed readers to subscribe.

Now, I know what you’ve been waiting for :).

Here’s the official list of the Top 100 Fiction Authors in Subscriptions for 2023.

And if you’d like to join us inside the next cohort of the Six-Figure Subscription Author Accelerator…

P.S. If you or anyone you know is on this list, tell them to reach out to us at hello@storytellersruletheworld.com We’d love to send them an award for being one of our top authors. Also, this list is not comprehensive. We did our best to find every fiction author doing well in subscriptions, but if we missed someone, let us know. We will be doing another edition next year! And we hope to make 2024’s edition even bigger and better than 2023 :).

And one last thing.

If you are a fiction author looking to start and supercharge your subscription, you should check out the platform Ream. It’s the only subscription platform made by fiction authors for fiction authors. It saves you hours of management + admin work each month, has a social eReader to help you build relationships with your superfans, and gives you full control over pricing, refunds, and direct access to your readers. It’s easy to use, reader-friendly, and founded by the team behind Subscriptions for Authors that has helped authors make over $1 million annually in subscriptions.

And in case you missed it, here’s the link to view the Top 100 Fiction Authors in Subscriptions list for 2023 inside the Facebook Group.