Posted on August 31, 2023
In 10 simple and actionable steps we learn how we can launch, grow, and supercharge our subscriptions… starting with one paid subscriber… then another… and another… you get the idea 🙂.
If you want to learn how to grow your subscription and take your subscription author career to the next level, join the next cohort of the Six-Figure Subscription Author Accelerator:
https://academy.storytellersruletheworld.com/subscriptions-for-authors-accelerator
#49 Episode Outline:
00:00:00 Introduction
00:00:56 Step #1: Knowing Your Readers
00:02:07 Step #2: Focus
00:05:09 Step #3: Funneling Readers Into Your Subscription
00:06:43 Step #4: Knowing When to Market Your Subscription
00:10:38 Step #5: Call to Action
00:12:49 Step #6: Retargeting
00:15:33 Step #7: How to Keep Fans in Your Subscription
00:18:29 Step #8: Upselling Readers to New or Higher Tiers
00:20:23 Step #9: Limited Time Subscription Launch
00:22:23 Step #10: Free Trials
00:23:57 Conclusion
#49 Transcript
[00:00:00]
Michael Evans: me and Amelia, we’re back. It’s a solo episode. It’s been a long time since we’ve recorded one of these.
Emilia Rose: It’s been a long time.
Michael Evans: It’s long overdue. And we have a very exciting topic today because we want to chat all about the 10 steps to marketing your subscription.
And by the end of this, I think everyone’s going to learn a lot about how to market your subscription and even about just how to market yourself as an author and your books outside of subscriptions. So I’m really excited for it. And without any further ado, we’re just going to get into that first step, which is, this is the core step for everyone, but it’s knowing your readers, basically your comp titles.
The first thing before you can figure out who you’re marketing to, before you can figure out what you’re marketing and where you’re doing it, you have to figure out who you’re marketing to. And this is something that I see some authors know. Like I, writing in this subgenre, these are the authors that I admire and my books are theirs.
And I, know my readers hang out here and it’s easy for some authors. For some authors. It’s a struggle. And I’m curious for you, Amelia, how you think about your readers and who you’re marketing to. Yeah
Emilia Rose: I think it comes down at least for me to the platform that I’m marketing to and the comp authors there [00:01:00] obviously I’ve done serial fiction on Wattpad so a lot of my comp authors from Amazon, I don’t really consider comp authors when I’m thinking about my subscription And honestly, I don’t know many comp authors from Amazon.
I’m looking more towards the people who are doing steamy romance, steamy paranormal romance on Wattpad and other serial fiction platforms when Looking into promoting my subscription to them. So it’s definitely platform related. And I would even go on to say it could even be like social media platform related as well.
If you’re looking to promote your specific subscription through a social media platform, instead of your newsletter, or instead of a serial fiction platform.
Michael Evans: That, that is really great advice. I think it ties into step two as well which is focus. And focusing on it doesn’t have to be one platform, but a strategy.
Cause what I’m hearing you say is you basically have to dive in to know your readers. You have to know basically on their phone screen, on their tablet, wherever they’re reading, what else are they consuming before they get to my story, my, my piece of [00:02:00] marketing content, and what are they going to be consuming after that?
And if you don’t know, What your readers are paying attention to, like literally what, like here’s 10 other examples of things they could be doing besides reading my book. But I want them to read my book. So knowing that’s important, it’s very tough to actually know your reader. But the flip side of that is if you do this deep research on every single platform at once, as can take a long time.
Yeah,
Emilia Rose: Very long. It was a lot of hard work, too. And it’s, I feel like it’s really hard for some authors, though, because I know me, I have shiny objects in From, so I want to do everything all at once, but it’s Especially with a subscription, you have to double down on what is which platform do you like using?
And which platform are your readers on? And which platform is bringing you the best convergent? Find that one platform stick with it and Keep going at it.
Michael Evans: Yeah, it way easier said than done because we always there’s this sort of fallacy that we think, oh there’s this promo strategy or this thing.
And whatever can get me more readers. I’ll get 100 readers there. I’ll get 10 readers here. I’ll get 5 readers here. And we just feel like we have to collect readers [00:03:00] from all these different places. But something I always like to remind just myself and other authors is like, This industry is top heavy.
We know that there’s a huge gap between people who are making a living and then the median income and then people who are just getting started and that is okay, but you do have to close that gap. And a lot of that gap is built on closing that building your own business. An author is becoming incredible at one marketing channel or one platform, and then expanding it to others.
Once you’ve done that and becoming incredible at one platform is not gaining 10 readers. That’s great start. That’s a great start, but you might want to double down on that before you start to find 10 readers on another platform. Just because I know when I always talk to others and I’m always asking them, okay, so how much time a week do you have to market?
That’s my, one of my first questions was someone asked me that they’re struggling marketing. They’ll be like, I have three hours. I’m like, Okay, good. You should be spending most of your time writing, eating, sleeping, doing other things in life, but you have three hours. Okay. In three hours a week, do you think you can master Facebook ads?
Amazon ads, Tik TOK and serial fiction platforms and three hours a week. Do you think that’s possible for [00:04:00] any human being? Very challenging, right? It’s very challenging to do that. So then it’s okay what can I do in three hours a week? Probably one, two, maybe three things really well.
And then it just comes down to that question of. the circle of what the market wants. Where are your readers? Like Royal Road, beautiful platform, but Emilia you’re probably not going to find readers in Royal Road that would like your stories. Probably not. There’s definitely some there, but they’re harder to find, right?
So you have to have the market work with you. Then you have to have yourself work with you. What do you like doing? What are you good at doing? If you don’t like making TikTok videos, if you don’t like putting yourself, voice on camera or songs or all the things required there, you don’t need to do that.
Yeah, that’s okay. Don’t do it. But you’ll find something when you look at the overlap between what you’re good at, what you want to do, what the market wants and what you have time for.
And when you put all that together, hopefully you can have good focus, which now brings us. To step three, which is where you can funnel these readers to, bring them to, once you have your subscription.
And this is following. This is one thing we recommend. Newsletters are another great thing to do, but let’s say you want to market your subscription, but when a fan first [00:05:00] discovers you, they might not have enough trust to subscribe monthly. They might not be at a stage where they’re ready for that yet, but they might be in the future.
What you can then do is if you’re using a platform like green. You can create a story, a chapter that’s only available to followers and you can send them the link, whether it’s in a social media post, whether it’s the end of a serial fiction chapter, whether it’s the end of a book, it depends on the platform you’re using.
You send them a link to that and then they’ll have to follow you to be able to read that chapter. Following’s free. You get all the emails of your followers so you can contact them directly and. Then, they’re literally inside of your platform, they can see your tiers, they can potentially see chapters that they can’t read yet, and they might just passively upgrade.
And if not, if they’re not ready to upgrade yet, they’ll get updates when you send out new chapters, when you make new community posts to followers, that can ultimately entice them over time to want to become paid members.
Emilia Rose: I love doing this, actually, and it’s so nice to be able to have your readers come over and follow you and have a really clean and easy way to upgrade when they want to upgrade and when they actually can upgrade as well.
Michael Evans: Yeah. No it’s huge. And it’s something that really, until very recently [00:06:00] was very hard to bundle together. What is the right funnel when you’re marketing your subscription and you can still send people directly to your newsletter, directly to another social media platform, welcome to do that.
Now you can send them directly to your subscription and it’s something that, is free for you as an author. It’s free for your readers and can really help be one of the crucial steps.
When marking your subscription, but then the fourth step right is knowing when to mark your subscription So we have this link that we can drive new followers to we have our subscription page Which this podcast is not about setting up tears.
We’re gonna be doing a future podcast Specifically focused on tears and tear rewards that’s coming probably launching in November. Okay. Sorry. It’s gonna be in some time, but Knowing when to market your subscription. Amelia, do you think if I am just getting started a social media platform let’s pretend I’m starting from zero in my first chapter on Wattpad, in my first post, should I come out and market my subscription or should I wait till my 10th post? Or does it even matter?
Emilia Rose: I think it depends on a lot of factors. I don’t know if it was my first post ever and I had zero audience if I would mention about my subscription, I would have definitely created one.
I don’t know if I would mention it in the [00:07:00] 1st post because I know at least for me, people don’t start converting in a story after until the 10th chapter I’ve posted on a serial platform. But I would start mentioning it maybe in the 3rd or 5th chapter that I post just to get people warmed up to it.
The idea of, hey, If I want to, I can read ahead now or I can wait,
Michael Evans: No, that’s, I think that’s great. And
Emilia Rose: kind of one more thing. Sorry. I think it also depends on the platform again, for something like a social media platform, it might. you may like social media is very you need to go viral sometimes and sometimes your first post might go viral and you need a place to drive people to and so it definitely depends on the platform you’re on what you’re promoting, how you’re promoting it and the size of your audience after before and after you release that chapter or that post.
Michael Evans: Yeah. No, that’s really important. One thing to keep in mind when going viral as well, we’re even gaining views on platforms. One thing I’ve been increasingly enticed by is this idea of average [00:08:00] revenue per unit of attention. And this is something that I don’t think we oftentimes think about as authors, but I want you to use this as a core determinative, potentially your success, meaning would you rather have a million views on your latest story?
But one sale for 1, she made 1 from a million views, or would you rather a thousand views, but 5% of them, 50 of them signed up to your 5 a month subscription? Yeah, I think, it depends. Some people might want the thing. Want more views and that is okay. There’s no shame in that you can go for that.
But if you want to increase your average revenue per unit of attention, then oftentimes that means creating focus content that maybe goes against the trends or against what that’s super, super hot because your niche and what you’re doing. It’s really about deeply connecting with a specific person.
And that’s what subscriptions are all about. instead of getting a thousand people to like you, it’s getting a hundred people to be like, I need this next chapter. Like I need it. And I’m willing to sign up for 5 a month. Yeah.
Emilia Rose: Yeah. It’s tough
Michael Evans: to do that though. Yeah. It’s way easier said than done, but sometimes we admire folks who have gained the most attention.
And instead I had to look at what authors have [00:09:00] the most. Average revenue per unit of attention. I’m going to give you an example. So to look at, there’s this incredible author, which Huge congrats on being the first author ever to be in the diamond tier on Ream. But this author is CJ Primer. I’ll link down to her subscription in the comments of this, but it, tremendous.
Like she, she has a big audience of readers, don’t get me wrong. But I think that she has an audience that has really grabbed onto her subscription, has really converted at a very high level. It’s super impressive. So she’s someone potentially to study and maybe just one example. Of what I’m talking about.
Emilia Rose: Hi yeah, her audience is awesome I think she funnels a lot of people from a serial fiction platform, and I looked at the number of subscribers she has compared to how many followers she has and reads she has on that platform, and it was like, crazy she has I would say last time I looked, it was like 30 to 50% of people who are following her for free are also subscribing to her.
That’s insane. I could be wrong. I don’t know. I could be wrong. But I looked at the numbers and I was like, oh my gosh, that’s crazy.
Michael Evans: [00:10:00] That’s incredible. That, that is it right there. That is something really working. And, obviously she’s reached a large audience, but at the same time She’s been able to get so many of them to join her subscription.
I love it. That’s amazing.
And how she gets people to enter subscription, right? This is step five. At some point, you have to have a call to action. We’ve talked about putting the link in, but we haven’t like actually talked about it. So let’s talk about that now. The call to action. I know this varies based on the platform you’re using and based on, even what your tiers are.
So it’s hard to give completely. Broad advice here but let’s try and dive into some best practices. What do you think would be some best practices when making a call to action to your subscription?
Emilia Rose: One, make sure you put the link to it. I know so many people don’t put the link to their subscription or don’t.
They’re just like, hey, follow me on this specific subscription platform and they don’t give like a link or anything. So that’s definitely one. Talking to your audience like they’re actual people and not just dollar signs is… That might be number one for me, actually. You don’t make people feel they need [00:11:00] to give you money or they’re only important for money or yeah.
Income for you. Like these are the people who are going to support you are going to be your biggest fans and their people. And everyone wants to feel like a person. They don’t want to feel like, Hey. She’s just talking to me and she’s just trying to market to me just so she can get some dollars So yeah, those are my two two biggest ones
Michael Evans: I think they’re awesome and I’ll just add a third one to it which is try out new things vary that call to action because Let’s say you have that call to action.
This is example in your newsletter list Hey, you know come here for early access or whatever that benefit is That’s beautiful, but people will start to go blind to it if it’s the same exact call to action that you’re copying and pasting. So maybe you just want to bury it up. Maybe you actually give them a sneak peek of that next chapter or something if it’s in your newsletter list It’s tougher to do that in a serial fiction platform, but if it’s on your newsletter list, give a sneak peek of that chapter that’s in your description and then tell them to join that tier. Maybe you end up pushing followers and a few call to actions and pushing your page subscription more and a few others.
[00:12:00] There’s Limitless ways to go about this, but the call to action piece is important. Once you bring someone into your subscription platform, I feel like the CTA is, it’s important, but it’s a little bit less so because the subscription platform itself can do a lot of the upselling from follower to paid for you.
So that’s why we mentioned in step three, that following can be a good way to bridge the gap.
So it’s all an ecosystem. I hope that made sense to folks, but let’s go on to step six here, which is retargeting and retooling, which is okay. You promote your description, put out newsletters, you put out in your social media.
You put it out on whatever the platform is beautiful stuff. You’re you already got some fans. If you’re listening to us in these steps, you’ve now know when to mark your description and you’ve started marketing it. But maybe it doesn’t go as planned or maybe it does go well, but you want it to go even better.
And this is where we have this concept that not everyone who clicks in your subscription and doesn’t buy on day one is not never going to buy, right? So a lot of people will click on your description, not to click on it five or six times over the course of weeks. A lot of people might [00:13:00] not be in a financial position to support you now, but they will be.
And three months. And one way that we can maximize this is by retargeting, which one thing that ream does is really powerful is actually gives you an insight into your abandoned cards. What abandoned cards are, I’ll be very brief is when someone goes to check out on your subscription, but doesn’t finish, they don’t complete that process.
You might be like, that sounds like it doesn’t happen often happens way more often than you’d think. 65% of all e commerce transactions results. And abandoned carts. This is why you see so many sites optimize their shopping cart process. And then for subscriptions, what we’ve seen typically is that number being around 50 to 55%, a little bit higher intent folks who are getting there because you have more of a relationship with them, but still, we’re talking about half your fans getting to the moment where they’re entering in their credit card information and then being like, not for me today.
But that doesn’t mean it won’t be for them in the future. So one thing you could do is take that list of people. And actually send a sequence to them that follows up with them and that kind of re engages them to potentially tastefully come back to your subscription. So that’s a lot. It’s very complicated.
And I just do want to say that for some of these more advanced subscription topics, we love [00:14:00] getting into them as much as we can on a podcast, but some of the stuff that’s good to see in action, what does a good retargeting sequence look like we actually have an accelerator. It’s called the Six Figure Description Author Accelerator and we’d love to have you part of it.
It’s going to be opening up from November 1st, November 27th. So got a couple months, but we’d love to see you there. Love to have you in the waitlist. You can join it. And if you join the waitlist you’ll see some special inside peak of the Accelerator. That’s all I’ll say. But another thing for Accelerator authors that we do is this retooling of their subscription, where they get to come together and there’s a live coaching session with them and a small group of authors, their genre.
They can share what they’ve been doing to market their subscription, what has worked, what hasn’t. I’ve seen beautiful things come out of these sessions. And it’s something I encourage you to do as well is reflect and think, what have I done so far in my marketing? What has worked? What hasn’t? And try and figure out why and double down on what’s working and change the things that aren’t.
Oftentimes we just throw a bunch of stuff at the walls, authors, and don’t track. Oh, this day was a good day for my subscription. I gained three subscribers. What did I do to make this happen? Maybe you went to an event. Maybe you made a post. But you have to line these things up so that you can [00:15:00] see, Oh, it looks like this is working really well to promote my subscription.
It looks like this isn’t. If you only have three hours a week, maybe cut out the thing that isn’t working. Anyways, there’s a lot there.
Don’t worry though. Step seven is a little bit more of a breather.
It’s a little bit more exciting because it’s about now you have fans in your subscription. Having a fan pay monthly isn’t. As fun. If it’s only for one month that’s not the goal. We wanna get people to keep coming back. How do you keep fans in your subscription? Amelia? It’s been years at this point, and now I remember last year in the podcast it was like, you’ve had your subscription for about three years.
We’re going on about four years now, right? I
Emilia Rose: think so. I know that’s wild, crazy. I know. I like go back sometimes and I look at how many months people have been part of the subscription and it’s. Nuts to me. But basically it is, I know I like always say this, but under promise and over deliver and be consistent.
Like those are the two three things that I have done consistently for the past three to four years now. And always shift. Your rewards and your benefits, if they’re not working for you and your audience, I get a lot of audience feedback just with my [00:16:00] subscription and with my business in general.
We do a lot of surveys and making sure everyone’s happy and asking for feedback and, taking the negative feedback and using it to shift my business shift my subscription in order for it to be a pleasant experience for everyone. And so those are the few things that I’ve done for the past three, four years that we’ve been doing
Michael Evans: That’s it’s so impressive and it’s so cool to see that people really do stick around for years. it’s very possible and the things that you can do to make that happen, the core of it really does go back to under promise to ever deliver. But I also want to shout out another podcast that we did with EJ Frost.
I’m going to link to it in the description. Why I mention it is because she has 90% year over year retention in her subscription. She just crossed her one year anniversary. She has a couple dozen subscribers. So it’s a relatively significant sample size and 90% of them have stuck around after a year.
That is awesome. Yeah. I heard that number and I was like, what? That is. That is a number that the best subscription companies in the world would drool over that’s how good it is So she had some amazing insights, but just to sum up one big takeaway that I had was [00:17:00] Giving her fans status in her community has worked really well to keep people at higher tiers So for people who are paying her 25 a month Consistently which might seem like that’s why you got someone to pay you 20 a month for a year straight She did and the biggest way EJ did this Was by giving her fans a literal role in her community where hers was based around the mistresses.
So she had a mistress of toys, a mistress of kink and mistress of, you can use your imagination, lots of fun stuff. And her readers love that they were literally the mistress of blank, right? That was their role. And they got to participate in the community and brainstorm new ideas, actually contribute in a valuable way to the ecosystem.
That. They fell in love with it. They had to stick around and one person was even charged of keeping the minutes of these conversations and moderating it, but she framed it in a way in which it was a fun role and that person got super serious about it. So then EJ just had to sit back and be like, I’m here and didn’t actually have to actively moderate.
So everything that she did was genius. It helped bring her fans together, make real friends. And now that she EJ gets to sit back, write her books, her fans have fun and [00:18:00] they keep sticking around.
Emilia Rose: That’s awesome.
Michael Evans: It’s wild. It’s wild. Which brings us to step eight, talking about these higher tiers, right?
Which is upselling readers to maybe new tiers or to existing tiers that you have. That might be higher than the one that they’re at. This is a part of subscription marketing, but I know it’s one that’s uncomfortable for a lot of people. And it’s, I feel you because fan’s already paying me 5 a month, but I just came out with a new tier with maybe paperbacks or maybe a virtual call or maybe a book club tier at a higher level.
And I want them, they might be interested in this. Like I want them to know about it, but I don’t want to feel like they’re forced into it. How do you approach that? Because I know you’ve over the years, a lot of different tiers, many at higher levels than what fans came in on. Yeah.
Emilia Rose: So the first time I did this was maybe not the first time, but the time I did this, the best was.
I usually release my stories at my 5 tier. But I wanted to start another story that was exclusive to a higher tier. So I basically had it. So it was set to my 10 tier and I told everyone it’s going to be released to 5. Not anytime soon, but it will be, and it will [00:19:00] be released to my free serial platform too at.
Whenever it is probably like a year or two years from now, but if you want to read it now, you definitely can. You can come over to my 10 tier. It’s 5 for a month. So double what you’re paying now. You don’t have to again. But if you want to read as I’m writing, then come over if you want to have a say in how the story goes, come over and leave your comments as I’m reading it.
And that converted a bunch of people to come over. I’ve also done this with. Bringing people to 25 and 50 tiers, which were physical goods, so it made more sense that they had to pay more I would be taking a huge cut. Yeah. I can’t buy 5, that would suck. But having those physical benefits made it a lot easier for me, because…
It was obvious that, yeah, of course you have to pay more for, if you want something physical.
Michael Evans: That’s amazing advice. And it’s very cool to see that you were able to do this for a higher price digital focused here and a physical tier as well.
So it’s lots of possibilities and. It brings me [00:20:00] to another unique kind of way that we can market a subscription, which we’re at the, we’re at the kind of, we’re at step nine now.
So we’re getting some more fun, advanced stuff. And this one I think is really fun, which is a limited time launch of your subscription. This is just one of many different advanced subscription marketing tactics. Another advanced step you could do is limiting tiers. So then you could launch and it’s a way you could upsell people.
Maybe you have a book box tier at 50, but I know you do this, Amelia, you limit it.
Emilia Rose: Yeah.
Michael Evans: So you can’t have unlimited people join. It is an extra nudge to get people to, upgrade. Another thing that I’ve seen folks do specifically Katie Thomas did this as a limited time launch. Now I’m doing everything I can to have Katie Thomas for a full interview on the podcast in this calendar year.
So I hope we can actually bring her on because she’s an incredible dark romance author and did an incredible thing in her subscription, which was open it up for only one week for people to join. And then she closed it down. She did that by, she specifically made the tier limit the same limit that the readers are already on, but she could have also archived her tiers to achieve the same effect.
But what it basically was, Hey, join my subscription now. And if you don’t, you’re not going to be able to [00:21:00] join again for another five months. Basically, it’s going to take a lot of time for me to, I want to be able to treat my initial fans really well, focus on keeping them there. And she wanted to focus on marketing.
In the beginning. So she focused on marketing and I know her story very well because she was part of the six year subscription author accelerator. And literally in the four weeks, the salary, she went from not having a subscription set up at all to them making 900 a month in gross revenue. By the end of it insane.
And this was during her limited tier launch. So now it’s closed and she’s focused on building her community. Their fans and retention. The step seven of subscription marketing, keeping hands there. And then she’ll do another limited tier launch sometime in late fall slash winter, and open it up again and grow her fan base more and more really interesting tactic because it takes some of the pressure off of us.
Feel like we have to constantly promote our subscription. And then it also gives her fans like a date, like you got to get in by then. So it was something interesting. I had actually really never seen it before, but she did it so successfully that it’s worth sharing.
Emilia Rose: Yeah. I’ve never seen it before either.
I thought it was so cool.
Michael Evans: It just made so much [00:22:00] sense. And. Kitty, you’re brilliant if you’re listening to this. And you’re brilliant regardless whether you’re listening to this. I thought it was a really cool idea. We wanted to share it.
And step 10 is another advanced idea. But another one that I think is really important to think about, which is free trials, which why are we mentioning this?
Because you might be thinking, can I even do a free trial for my subscription? Depends on the platform you use. We’re releasing this feature on Reem late fall. So you’ll be able to experience this yourself. But where free trial is useful is. You can basically give a fan the ability to subscribe to your subscription, but not pay up front.
It’s basically a little bit of extra friction. Normally, they’d have to enter in their credit card. So they’d have to still commit, but they’re not committing dollar wise up front. But at the end of the billing cycle, maybe it’s a seven day free trial, a month long free trial, then they’re going to be billed and pay in future months.
And it’s a way for them to get a taste of your early access, a taste of whatever the benefits are on your subscription. Obviously a free trial of a physical paperback book tier doesn’t make all that much sense so use it wisely. I’ve seen authors do this to great success because sometimes fans Just need to know what they’re getting and [00:23:00] they need to get a little taste of it.
And another way to do this is with following instead of, utilizing a free trial in a traditional sense, you could give your followers the same chapters that paid tiers get for a week or two weeks and say that as I mentioned in the end if you want more, you’re going to have to upgrade. So it’s ways to give and then hopefully be able to get more paid subscribers as a result.
Emilia Rose: Yes. I haven’t tried free trials, but I’ve done the following and I love it. So
Michael Evans: the following is a game changer and I think that free trials just add an extra level of power to it that takes it to the next level.
And. Hopefully with all this, there’s a lot of different steps. I think in about a half hour, just over half hour, we gave you all pretty much a masterclass on how to market your subscription.
Was it everything? No. I wish I could sit down with all of you personally and chat about it, but at the same time, I think this gives you an amazing framework to begin. And if you have further questions, if you want to see what other authors are doing to market their subscription, go to descriptions for authors, Facebook group, to ask a question, you can share what you’re doing to market your subscription.
We’d love to chime in. We’d love to share our ideas and help you any way we can. I think that’s it for this one.
Thank you everyone for [00:24:00] listening. We’ll be back next week with another episode. And in the meantime, everyone has a great time writing and don’t forget storytellers rule the world.