Posted on December 7, 2023
In this episode, Michael and Emilia take turns breaking down 10 essential steps to help you secure your first paid subscriber. Whether you’re a new creator or looking to expand your existing audience, these tried-and-true methods will guide you through the process.
Join the Six-Figure Subscription Author Accelerator: https://academy.storytellersruletheworld.com/subscriptions-for-authors-accelerator
Attend the 2024 Subscriptions for Authors Summit: https://summit.subscriptionsforauthors.com/
Join our community of subscription authors: https://www.facebook.com/groups/subscriptionsforauthors
#60 Episode Outline:
00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:17 Step #1: Set Your Goal
00:02:27 Step #2: Finding Your Target Audience
00:03:10 Step #3: Picking Your Platform
00:05:23 Step #4: Picking Your Benefits
00:06:44 Step #5: Pricing Your Tier
00:08:16 Step #6: Setting Up Your Page
00:09:21 Step #7: Load Content
00:10:26 Step #8: Advertising Your Subscription
00:11:12 Step #9: Making a Call To Action
00:12:50 Step #10: Getting Your First Subscriber
00:14:26 Conclusion
#60 Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00]
Michael Evans: Hello. We’re here. Yes. Back with another podcast. Submissions for authors. Me and Emelia are here. In November, we’re doing some solo sessions because we wanted to kind of talk about some of the things that we know you all are curious about. And every time we do this, I get like five new ideas for solo episodes, which is fun.
This one is going to be all about the 10 steps to getting your first paid subscriber. Yes. We’re going to go through them one by one. Me and Amelia will trade off. Share advice. And if, if one of us has something to add, we can add something to it and then we’re going to hopefully watch you all do these steps, launch your descriptions and get your first paid subscribers.
And if you already have a subscription, you’re listening to this, you can use these 10 steps to get your first pay subscriber for a new tier or maybe a new [00:01:00] subscription for a pen name. So this is just kind of a framework you could use. Anytime you’re creating a tier, anytime you’re looking to. do something that you want to get new subscribers from.
Michael Evans: So I’ll kick it off number one, which is to set your goal. And I think it’s really important to define what success looks like for you. And actually last night I got some really good advice at a meeting that was To set goals with a 90 percent confidence interval, so basically set a minimum goal that you think you have a 5 percent chance of not achieving.
So, like, you’re most likely going to achieve it and then set, like, a stretch goal, kind of like, we’re, we’re, we’re familiar with stretch goals, the author that you have a 5 percent chance of surpassing and that you really want to go for, but that doesn’t have to be subscriber count, right? Maybe your goal is I want to be more consistent with writing my chapters.
Okay. So, you know that you want to write anywhere between 5 and 10, 000 words a week. 10, 000 is going to be [00:02:00] tough, 5, 000 is hopefully really doable. Then we’ll get to it, but you’ll probably promise your readers under promise closer to the 5, 000 and you’ll try and meet your stretch goal and continue over delivering to them.
That’s one way to look at it. You can look at it in the context of how many followers do I want to have, which are free people who are, you know, not yet subscribed to your subscription. If you’re just getting started, it’s good to try and recruit followers. Maybe instead of that, it’s paid members, which is beautiful.
So set your goal. Is important. Why are you doing this? What benefit is going to have it for you and your writing career?
Emilia Rose: It’s a good one. Step 2 is finding your target audience. So, especially if you’re wide, you probably have an audience, a little bit of everywhere. You’re on social media.
You’re on the retailers. Maybe you’re just K you and you also have your newsletter, but you want to find a target audience that are your super fans. And not only your superfans, but your superfans who want the specific type of content that you’re going to provide in your subscription. So if you have a subscription that is audio based, you might not want to target your audience who only reads [00:03:00] books, only reads like novels, and doesn’t like audio at all.
So really finding those people who… Are interested in the content that you’re going to provide and interested in you as an author.
Michael Evans: 1000%. I love it. That’s a great step. And step three is all about picking your platform. So where do you actually want to do this? And there’s a lot of different subscription platforms that you can use, a lot of different plugins and things of that nature.
And we always recommend you looking into things, checking things out. At this point, I think it’s pretty safe to say that if you’re a fiction author, your best options, right now, full disclosure, me and Amelia are both co founders of frame, but that also means that we love it. And it puts so much time and energy into creating it.
And we know it’s going to be an amazing home for you. It basically allows you to have. Free followers and paid members in your description, which is really cool. So you can offer different levels of access and benefits to your free followers, which you get their emails, kind of like a newsletter or your paid members, who’s a social e reader, you can actually publish chapters in the site, super easy for your readers to actually [00:04:00] experience your books.
Then they can also comment inside of your chapters, which is so much fun. You can make community posts. So it’s kind of like if you combined like Facebook group meets subscription platform meets maybe like, you know, a social e reader and it’s all about helping you build close relationships, your fans all about helping you build a home for your super fans.
I mean, you can do book boxes and merchandise by accepting physical addresses. You’re able to do any post where you make. Art and all other images that you want to share with your readers. You can do so many different things. You, we have the ability for you to have multiple pages, head names, right? So you can manage multiple pages from one account, which is amazing.
And really no other description platform has that. And then we’re coming out with audio for the end of the year and discovery, which specifically will be searching by genres on Ream and the beginning of helping readers discover new authors they’ll love on the site. So it’s the best time to join Ream.
It’s the best time to join Ream. And we also came out with a concierge migration program, where we actually migrate authors content and members to Ream for free. There is right now 100 [00:05:00] paid member minimum. And the program’s completely free to join between now and the year. So, if you want to make the switch, now’s the time.
So it’s a little plugged by Ream, but there’s other, there’s other platforms you can use. This podcast, the principles we teach you will work at any platform. That’s the beauty of it. And with Reem, it doesn’t cost anything out of pocket to use. You set up, it’s totally free to join, and we only make money when you do, specifically 10 percent of the revenue you make.
Emilia Rose: Great. Next step is picking your benefits. So, This is going to vary a lot on your experience, your audience, and what you can physically and mentally do every single month or every single week depending on your cadence. There’s a lot of benefits that Michael mentioned a little bit earlier that you can choose from.
Some are stories. Which we’re all used to, we all write. But these can be early access stories, exclusive stories, serialized stories. We also have some physical goods that you can do. You can do book boxes, delivery of a paperback or hardcover or merch. evEry month or [00:06:00] every quarter. yOu can also.
There’s just a bunch of little stuff. You can do audio, comics anything you can think of. But I would suggest, if you’re just starting with a subscription, start with writing only or something digital. Anything physical goods, you want to have not only the time, but the money, and be able to actually Package the goods every single month and send them out.
It’s a lot of work. So if you don’t have a team, or if you don’t have time to do physical goods, I would wait on that. And I would really start with digital goods, whether that’s writing a story, serialized, or providing some other digital goodies to your audience, but definitely start with picking that benefit that’s going to work for you and your fans and the community that you want to build.
Michael Evans: Love it. And once you do that, we’re on to step five, which is actually pricing your tier, which if you followed Amelia’s advice and you’re doing mostly digital content, we recommend pricing like a starting to your price at 5. It could vary in terms of, you might actually charge, should and possibly will [00:07:00] charge more for sort of digital based tiers.
Like if you’re going to have your backlist in the tier and you have lots of books published, you might want to do that 10 a month, right? Kind of like your own mini KU. You think about it like that. And I’m all about simplifying pricing. Like we said, 5 is the minimum tier price that we recommend. We really don’t recommend going below 3.
Highly, highly do not recommend it. Why? You might be thinking, well, what if I get like, Sony, one dollar a month is actually a lot of friction. Yeah. It’s a subscription. It’s different from a 99 cent ebook. So you’re not going to get five times more subscribers at 1 a month. You’re just not, you might get a few more subscribers, but you’re going to have higher churn because there’s.
Lower intent, lower barrier to entry, and you’re going to have a lower percentage of revenue that you make that you actually get to keep because of payment processing fees, which are 30 cents per transaction. And when you’re paying 5, 10, it’s not too bad when you’re paying 1. Yeah, yeah. That adds up pretty fast.
So that’s what we recommend for pricing. If you’re getting into book boxes and sign books, more advanced things, which we love, it’s amazing. You want to think about how often you’re delivering that benefit, the cadence of it, and then [00:08:00] back into giving yourself some hefty profit margin of 60, 70 percent plus which if you want a pricing calculator for subscriptions, go to the link in the description, we have a free pricing calculator online that you can use.
to see what price you should set your tiers at if you’re involving physical goods.
Emilia Rose: Next one is setting up your page. So after you figure out your tiers, what you want to price them, you’re going to set up your page where people can come in and join your subscription. So you really want to brand your page based off of your brand and your community.
So if you write spicy romance. You might not want something that looks sweet, because you want your readers to come in knowing exactly what they’re going to get when they join. Also, you’re going to have tiers that you have to set up, and in those tiers you want to make sure your benefits are as clear as possible.
A lot of times people just like bullet points, maybe some bolded, but don’t do, like, Super long paragraphs that nobody is going to read. If you want your readers to figure out the tier they want to join as soon as possible, click that join [00:09:00] button and subscribe to you. And then there’s also some things you can do to spice up your page, like tier images make sure those are branded, maybe name each tier that’s not like tier 1, tier 2.
Maybe you have houses in your, one of your worlds and you name each tier a house name or Anything like that. Just to kind of make it more immersive and more community based.
Michael Evans: Love it. And once you do that, the only thing you’re going to need to do now, before you’re ready to actually launch it, is to load any content in, welcome message, etc.
So that when someone subscribes, they don’t just see a completely blank experience outside of the front page. Now, less is more here. You don’t need like 10 books for them to read or 100, 000 words loaded in. No, no, no, no. What we first recommend doing is making a sort of welcome post in your community section and just kind of saying thank you for being here and linking out to anything that is important that they might need access to.
So, for instance, if your benefit is early access to. Maybe three chapters that you’re publishing a month or three, three chapters a week, whatever your cadence is you might want to link [00:10:00] out to that book that you’re publishing it. Now you don’t have to have 50 chapters in the book yet. Maybe you just have the first chapter, maybe you have the first three chapters available to them, but that would be a good introductions that they build trust because one of the core things once you get your first subscriber, which we’re going to get to is keeping them, which that’s a whole other podcast about, but we want to set you up for success from that first impression, which is super important.
And that’s where making a short little welcome post, loading a few chapters in could be helpful. You don’t need to do anything more than that, but doing that will go a long way.
Emilia Rose: Once you do that, I feel like you’re ready to launch. And once you do, you’re going to decide where you’re going to share this launch or where you’re going to share your subscription.
And again, this is going to go back to who your target audience is. If your target audience, if you’re sharing maybe artwork, you might have Target audience on Instagram, where artwork is really prevalent or in a specific Facebook group or on TikTok because it’s more visual, but really finding where the target audience is and then promoting it to them and trying to create that 1st [00:11:00] funnel into bringing people not only from your audience.
Your free world, maybe your newsletter, your social media, but bringing them into your community as a first step and then offering them into you to your subscription.
Michael Evans: I love it to me, except nice, making the actual call to action, which is important. You have to make the call to action, which I’m a really bad example of because earlier I didn’t make a call to action to actually join ring.
If you actually want to join Ream, my call to action is it’s totally free to join. There’s a link in the description called authors. reamstories. com and you can go there, learn more about the platform, create your account, get your free starter kit about how to set up. So that’s my call to action. What should your call to action be?
Well, there’s a few things I recommend burying it up every once in a while. And it does depend on your benefit, but you don’t, I, these things can get stale. This is why you see companies change up their ads and things like that. It’s the same thing. You may be have experienced this as well. The second thing is that some authors I’ve seen, and we could do a whole hour on call to actions, but there’s ways that you can make it palatable for your readers.
So like maybe you shout out some of your paid [00:12:00] members. If You make that clear to them. You can say, hey, thank you to blank, blank, and blank for supporting me. If you also want to come in and get these early chapters, join me here. So having some social proof can be a good thing. Mentioning what they’re getting.
Do you want to read 10 chapters ahead? Do you want to get early access to the next book? Want to get exclusive access to this novel you can’t find anywhere else? Want to get the entire backlist, right? Leading with that value is important. And the last thing, and this is a Reem exclusive feature so if you’re a Reem author, shout out to you you can contact us at support at reemstories.
com and we can actually create, like, custom campaigns for you that can, like, make a call to action around Halloween that’s, like, maybe you have a special deal. Like a discount to join your subscription where you get one month 50 percent off and then the rest of the month’s the normal amount. There’s lots of fun things we could do with promotions, but if you want to run a promotion on ream, you can do that.
And it’s a really cool feature by the platform. You just contact us and we’ll set it up for you. So that’s making the CTA.
Emilia Rose: And then last step, I feel like it’s going to be everyone’s favorite step is getting that first subscriber. You, after you set up your entire page and launched it you get that first [00:13:00] subscriber and it feels so good.
You have proof that what you, what you’re offering is working your set, your, your price is at a good price for people to come in. And yeah, and you get to celebrate. You can say, Hey, I have my first subscriber in my community. It’s only going to grow from here.
Michael Evans: it’s, yeah, that’s the best moment. And when you all get to that point, we’d love to hear about it.
You know, send us an email put it in the Facebook group and we’ll celebrate with you. The Facebook group is descriptions for authors. It’s also down in the description. I feel like a lot of you already in it. If you’re not, you should join and we’d love to see it and celebrate with you. And before we go, cause we wanted to keep this one quick, actionable, giving you all the good stuff.
I want to give you two last things. One is. The Ream Starter Kit that I mentioned we created recently, so if you already have an account, you might not have seen it because we’re sending it out to new accounts, and we might send it out to everyone at some point that hasn’t started a page, but regardless, if you want to, like, look at it right now there’s a link in the description to a Ream Starter Kit that walks you through the five steps to setting up your page, which can be really helpful for step six priceless for step six.
You should check that out. And if you want to [00:14:00] get personalized advice, ultimate educational experience on actually diving into all these steps, you might want to join us in the six figure subscription author cohort 2. 0. So until November 30th, you can find link description to me. Awesome. It’s only available for a limited time and it’s not gonna be open again.
Until the summer. So now’s your chance to join and hopefully we can help you accelerate not only to one base subscriber, but far beyond that. So that is what the accelerator is all about. Helping you start grow and scale your subscription. You can find the link in the description. It’s awesome. Awesome time.
There’s tons of information on that page about the experience and how you can join us. Inside. But we hope you enjoyed this episode of Descriptions for Authors podcast. Let us know any like individual Mean Amelia episodes you want to see. We always want to get advice on that. And we also love guest recommendations, although we have a lot of guests coming up, but still we want to hear from you what you want to see here.
And we’re just so grateful for you listening. We’ll be back soon with another episode. But in the meantime, don’t forget storytellers rule the world.
[00:15:00]
ABOUT SUBSCRIPTIONS FOR AUTHORS
We are the premier community to learn about making money from subscriptions as an author. We have this weekly podcast, our Facebook Group with hundreds of fellow authors, and a newsletter where we are committed to having the best free educational resources and networking for authors looking to break into this exciting new publishing model. We are led by Emilia Rose (six figures a year on subscriptions and steamy romance author) and Michael Evans (sci-fi thriller author and newbie to subscriptions, but excited to learn). Subscriptions are hard for authors, we hope this community makes it easier for you. But we also know how tough it can be using technology platforms that always feel like they are working against you. That’s why we are building Ream… oh… and about that…
ABOUT REAM
Ream is a platform that helps authors make money with subscriptions. Think of us like Patreon built for fiction authors by fiction authors. And our mission is simple: to help more authors pursue their storytelling dreams full-time (and for those full-time to make even more money and have more control while doing so). The platform allows writers to build communities around their stories and charge a monthly fee that rewards their super fans with connection and access. You can join Ream and start making money from subscriptions on the only platform built by authors for authors: https://reamstories.com